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[Vendayn]

It's highly unlikely there will ever be a legitimate non-Steam, PC version of Skyrim. Workshop integration is simply too important for allowing easy use of mods for them to ever separate from it.

Steam workshop sucks for mods. Much better to do it manually or better for most people, use mod organizer (not the crappy nexus mod manager).

With that, Skyrim won't ever legit be not on Steam. You'll have to wait for Steam to close down, and that isn't going to happen any time soon.

[KingofstarrySkies]

b-buht

buht i love nexus

[Vendayn]

b-buht

buht i love nexus

Well, nexus is a good site for downloading mods. I got perma banned though cause I gave CONSTRUCTIVE feedback (even said good things about it) and the modder reported me, who is good friends with a mod on the site and got banned lol. It was that civil war overhaul guy, he reports a lot of comments on his mod. Even says he will on his mod page. IP change and I just download stuff now. But in any case, mod organizer is vastly superior to the nexus mod manager. For one, uninstalling stuff barely works, if at all on nexus mod manager. Mod organizer you can safely uninstall things and have different profiles and stuff. It is a really good program.

[Nighthawk]

Uninstalling stuff doesn't work on Nexus? Tell that to the dozen mods I've uninstalled without a hitch.

Never used mod manager, but the convenience of Nexus means I won't be switching any time soon. I'll keep my easy-download, easy-installation, thank you very much.

[Reudh]

Uninstalling stuff doesn't work on Nexus? Tell that to the dozen mods I've uninstalled without a hitch.

Never used mod manager, but the convenience of Nexus means I won't be switching any time soon. I'll keep my easy-download, easy-installation, thank you very much.

Same here. Never had a hitch with NMM, and Nexus is very easy to download from. I used to use OBMM back in the days of Oblivion, but NMM works for a tonne of different games.

[KingofstarrySkies]

Aye. I prefer Nexus massively, although I cringe when I check out a mod page and see no DL with Nexus button.

[Reudh]

Aye. I prefer Nexus massively, although I cringe when I check out a mod page and see no DL with Nexus button.

You can still download it with NMM, it's just you have to go into the Files list instead of just hittin' the button. It's usually when a mod is split into multiple parts or has other mods as requirements.

[Zangi]

Uninstalling stuff doesn't work on Nexus? Tell that to the dozen mods I've uninstalled without a hitch.

Never used mod manager, but the convenience of Nexus means I won't be switching any time soon. I'll keep my easy-download, easy-installation, thank you very much.

I think I've used both, NMM on a previous cpu and Mod Manager on this one.  The Mod Manager is pretty awesome. 
Mainly cause all the mods are kept within its own little place, so you can have multiple mod profiles.  Cause I've had occasions where the Nexus did not properly uninstall mods... which means having to wade into the mess that is my mod folder.  At least that is my memory of NMM.

[Metalax]

I tend to do manual installs and keep a note of which loose files belong to which mod. Then again I tend not to go for the massive overhaul type mods or those with large numbers of loose files so it's not too hard to sort out a good load order.

[Taffer]

I tend to do manual installs and keep a note of which loose files belong to which mod. Then again I tend not to go for the massive overhaul type mods or those with large numbers of loose files so it's not too hard to sort out a good load order.

I used to do that as well, but it started driving me insane. I kept it up for a year until I got fed up with random bugs seeping into my saved games of unexplained origin, despite following best practices and checking for conflicts myself.

I found that I could never "remember" what loose files belonged to which mod, so it forced me to keep a folder with every archive I'd installed: I'd then use intuition to guess what archive to search in for a particular file. It got unwieldy quickly, however, and it wasn't uncommon to end up with partial installs - remnants of texture packs and mods I'd installed a long time ago but lost track of - and end up with scripts of unknown origins conflicting with each other and doing weird things. This was especially noticeable when upgrading mods: who has time to manually compare the contents of each archive to see what has been deleted? I'd upgrade a mod, forgetting to check manually whether it had deleted any files, only to have my saved games go pear shaped a few hours later because the mod author had rearranged (or deleted) scripts, and the old ones were still there (happily conflicting with the new ones). If I was lucky I'd kept a copy of the old archive (or could re-download it), and I'd remember to check. If I was unlucky I'd just have to either ascertain the origins of all of my scripts from scratch, delete the scripts folder and reinstall everything (hoping that none of the "texture only" mods I'd skipped over to save time didn't have any scripts I was missing), or go through all of my upgrades sequentially to try to identify where something went wrong. Not an easy task if you've updated 10 or more mods at once.

Hopefully I'd remembered to delete the entire contents of a mod I'd installed "just to test it out", and hopefully I was able to recover the scripts and textures it had overwritten. If it overwrote something that I couldn't find in my archives I'd be left wondering where the file came from and how I could get it back.

None of the above addresses the "texture leftovers" I had, where the author decided to remove some textures from their mod because they were of poor quality or for some other reason, but I'd failed to notice during an upgrade, deleted the original archive, and now had textures installed with no way of knowing where they came from or whether they were necessary.

Realistically, there's just too many things that can go wrong. Somewhat ironically, I found I always lost track of what scripts and textures had been installed -- precisely the kind of control I assumed installing manually would help with. I finally gave up on the nightmare and installed Mod Organizer. I never looked back.

Nowadays I keep Skyrim uninstalled, though. My free time thanks me.

[KingofstarrySkies]

...To be clear, when DLing something manually, I can still click Download With Manager, correct?

[Zangi]

...To be clear, when DLing something manually, I can still click Download With Manager, correct?

With NMM?  You mean downloading it twice? 
Can't you just do the add mod to NMM thing and it'll work fine?

[Taffer]

Well, nexus is a good site for downloading mods. I got perma banned though cause I gave CONSTRUCTIVE feedback (even said good things about it) and the modder reported me, who is good friends with a mod on the site and got banned lol. It was that civil war overhaul guy, he reports a lot of comments on his mod. Even says he will on his mod page. IP change and I just download stuff now. But in any case, mod organizer is vastly superior to the nexus mod manager. For one, uninstalling stuff barely works, if at all on nexus mod manager. Mod organizer you can safely uninstall things and have different profiles and stuff. It is a really good program.

I'm not trying to comment on your case in particular, but I understand the frustration many mod authors experience. Bugs in the Skyrim engine, poorly installed mods (perhaps due to the manual installation nightmare I detailed a few posts ago), conflicting unreported mods, blaming the wrong mod for problems...there's far too many things that can go wrong that the mod author has no control over, and yet they're expected to provide free support regardless. Often to users that are incapable of properly identifying or even adequately explaining the problem they're experiencing. Or perhaps the user checked for conflicts themselves, have a working knowledge of how Skyrim modding works, and conclude their issue is the fault of the new mod they downloaded: when in fact the actual problem is a mod they uninstalled a week ago that still has scripts kicking around in their saved game. I sympathize a little with ApolloDown. Even if its constructive criticism and you're wonderfully polite, it still results in wasted time as the mod author tries to track down an issue that isn't actually their mods fault (but they don't know it).

Again, I really don't know why you were banned, but in general there's a reason the Nexus can be a little tough on users. Especially if your mod uses scripts, you're often forced into either accepting a certain amount of wasted time chasing after non-existent issues, appearing callous and indifferent, or to just stop responding to comments entirely.

[KingofstarrySkies]

...To be clear, when DLing something manually, I can still click Download With Manager, correct?

With NMM?  You mean downloading it twice? 
Can't you just do the add mod to NMM thing and it'll work fine?

Nevermind, nevermind, it works fine.

[Astral]

Well, nexus is a good site for downloading mods. I got perma banned though cause I gave CONSTRUCTIVE feedback (even said good things about it) and the modder reported me, who is good friends with a mod on the site and got banned lol.

The Civil War Overhaul mod, while decent overall, is a huge performance sink for not much gain. I have a fairly beefy gaming rig, and that's one of the few mods I've tried that has had it choking on Skyrim more than a little bit. His descriptions could be cleaned up a bit more, too... they're too full of LoLI'mSoRandumb crap, with distracting, unrelated pictures and YouTube videos.

The guy has talent, but the potential for modders to become godmodders is way too prevalent in way too many games (see: Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Minecraft [Heh, GregTech, I knew thee well]... the list goes on), especially when they have friends in the admins. They're a fickle sort, and occasionally far too ban-happy if you tell them that they are wrong, even constructively.

On the other hand, I can see it getting very frustrating having to work inside someone else's (often limited) framework of a game. Some things you can't do gracefully, and have to use script extenders, or dirty, hacky methods to get things to work the way they should, or cover for limitations and lack of foresight implemented by the original programmers. Then you have to answer the same questions, over and over, that could easily be found via Google searching, or as mentioned above, have to try and troubleshoot some unintended interaction that may well be the fault of another modder's sloppy coding.

It's not something everyone can, or should, attempt to take up. Personality factors a lot into that.