I'm confused. How does hosting mods on the paradox forums prevent major mods?
Providing the option harms nothing. The problem is that the option is not very good, because it greatly hinders pushing updates and because it's impossible for multi-person teams to contribute equally. It simply isn't a possible feature to use for every workflow.
Or are you, you? Or one of our normal bay12ers under a different name? You seem familiar...
I don't often come to the lower forums, but I've been around bay12 for the better part of the decade. You may have seen me elsewhere too, under the same name.
And all it takes is a single guy who leaks the link to wherever the pirates hang around.
All it takes is a single guy who takes the mod from the Paradox download and uploads to mediafire. The only functional difference is for a pirate is like three minutes of someone's time. Someone who bought the game, incidentally, but wants to share content with people who didn't. The only people effected here are people who bought the game, because the users of the forums and of mods are all legitimate users anyway. This is an attempt to keep good content only to those people, I guess, but not only will it not work, it was never possible for this to work. The internet isn't actually a series of tubes, you can leave Paradox's domain easily and find stuff like that if you want to. Hindering mods, one of the biggest selling points for Paradox games and for CK2 in particular, damages the brand quite a bit. Damaging the brand means less people are likely to buy the game, because the fact of the matter is that people only buy because they want to. Piracy is easy enough that nobody buys a game because the devs have tricked or bullied them into it. Even if you ignore the fact that some potential customers will just plain not play the game due to lack of positive publicity, hiding resources that allow piracy would only be effective if Paradox had monopoly over the internet. Hiding resources that are used to build mods, which add publicity, purely because they might theoretically have some relation to piracy, is possibly the most foolish business decision I've heard of since McDonalds decided to undercut themselves with the all day breakfast menu.