You'd be surprised. Fame isn't the right way to put it either way - people just want proper recognition for their hard work. Its very disheartening to have people attribute something you did to someone else, or hell, even think Meph made everything in the pack. Noone seems to actually care about that besides the modders themselves, though.
Well, big red letters in the launcher would be nice, but from what I have seen yours work is credited on further pages.
For me, if someone took stuff I modded for some other games, packed it together nicely with other stuff and made sure it is working well together, I wouldn't mind them accepting donations.
Because it would keep me free from all those compatibility issues and having to help all those people who wanted to run my mod alongside something else entirely.
It's a work I would not have to do, because somebody done that instead
A lot of people dont share your sentiment, since to them its shitty that someone gets all recognition and on top of that money for the work that they did and released for free. Also, "working well together", lol - part of the issue I and a lot of others have with MW gameplay-wise is that a lot of the additions just dont fit together, either in terms of tone/theme, or gameplay purpose. You can't make a great meal out of mashing together 15 different other meals that are already great on their own - you just end up with a mess, and that much was shown recently.
I recommend trying to mod a game with much larger user base. Just churning through bug reports can give you a headache. Discovering what causes your mod to fail (quite often, other mods being incompatible) is such a pain in the ass that you would not believe it.
Or what about a bug, like the last one I had, in tiny Skyrim mod based only on vanilla files, where scripts simply did not work for one guy. Just so, they didn't. They did for me, so how can I debug that?
You see, DF community is tiny in comparison. Your mod, your work, is maybe used by few hundred people at maximum. That is pretty... small audience, to put it nicely.
If you had 10x as many users, and suddenly many wanted to know how to make it compatible with other mods or just having bugs - sometimes, just dealing with those can be a full-time job. Of course, in such a case you could create a donations page, but it would be better to have someone else deal with such nuances, as the time spending at making your "Big Fire" mod compatible with "Moar Bread" and "Cute Kittens" simply takes that time away from improving and creating content.
From many years in gaming communities, one thing I have learned that people, seemingly creative people with good ideas and modding skills have a lot of issues with each other, instead of coming together and working together. Now I know why that is.
But I still find that sentiment to be a dead end - from my point of view, the more work I put into something, the more I would like people to actually enjoy it, rather to have it be available to selected few.
But that's just me, I don't like elitist approach, regardless if it concerns modding or limited music album distribution.
I find it a miracle moreso that people still work on mods despite not getting any sort of feedback or recognition for their work, because of one mods monopoly on the community. You do know the modding community used to be a lot more active but people left because of the chokehold MW has, right?
I didn't know that about community in the past. Coming to DF fresh from ADOM, I was put off by vanilla for few years.
I found interface design to be absolutely atrocious piece of crap, which in my opinion greatly contributes to DF learning curve.
What brought me back was MDF. DFHack included, graphics, easier navigation and control. Plenty of stuff that is in MDF should be part of vanilla by default.
But we get hundreds of new plants instead of bugfixes. Trees drop leaves and shite , but there is no way to designate d -> f to furrow soil and remove them en masse and save FPS, for example, without
clean map item. Still no kindergarden location, suddenly items in traps wear off causing crashes, animal people [meander] and all that.
Of course, DF is one man's life work, but still, some strictly bug fixing work and improving on what is already present would be more than welcome.
But to answer your question about why people still make mods.
To put it simply, because we can and want to. Some have their vision of what should be in the game and want it badly enough to work for it.
Others, like me, simply start tweaking stuff and end up with something different.
In other words - having a working mod that others can enjoy is quite often rewarding enough for a lot of people.
And it's also what jaded a lot of past, extremely talented modders or even made them outright leave, killing this part of the community.
This is possibly most ridiculous reason to leave community or modding I have ever heard. Just because some other mod/compilation is more popular does not mean absolutely anything. Again, modding can feel like work sometimes, but if it feels like a labor and makes people envious/angry, they are doing it wrong.
Also, more content for the sake of more content is not neccessarily a good thing, as is shown by the most recent, buggy version Meph released - I'm impressed Amost had the patience to go through all those files, written in completely different styles and ways by completely different people, just to bugfix it.
Yup, he deserves big one for all his work. Even more so in recent light of Meph's sudden and unexplained absence and visible ignorance of messages people sent him.
Again perhaps, maybe a new collaborative work by a group of modders would be in order. Something akin to MDF, with launcher and configuration and shit, but not a one man job.
