General Kunos shuts down modding section of official forums

[DaVeX↯]

Okido here you go http://www.racedepartment.com/forums/assetto-corsa-modding-discussions.414/

Hope we can have it for other games too ( like Automobilista)
How to move an AC thread here?Just ctrl+c and ctrl+v?
I found the RD download page very clean, every mod update there is a log and a direct link to forum thread to discuss it, you can subscribe to a mod and be updated at every release...so...for me is a win!

 

[Chris]

Hope we can have it for other games too ( like Automobilista)

We'll evaluate it based on the relative modding community size. For the moment Assetto Corsa will get it because the size of the modding community is substantially bigger than any other game. So for the meantime the general WIP threads for other games will suffice .

 

[Deleted member 130869]

If anybody wants to make tracks and cars, we still have GPL, NR2003, GTR2, rF1, and SCE.

 

[Chris]

Huh?
Kunos aren't shutting down mod support. They're just closing their forums from people posting their mods.

 

[Phantomaniak]

Huh?
Kunos aren't shutting down mod support. They're just closing their forums from people posting their mods.

Yeah, people are overdramatising the whole situation. The only sad part is that they should've done it this way from the beginning. Nothing we can do about it though except for accepting that this has happened.

 

[mister dog]

It's not as much the decision that bothers me, but the reasons they give for doing so. It's all a bit dubious and as others have said, they let the modding community grow whilst they could reap the benefits, but now that it's ready to be pressed on a gold disk they shut it down.

I just don't believe that both people taking advantage (rips), or a lot of moderation work is a valid excuse when there are solutions for that which are a lot less drastic, and it wasn't even an issue to begin with...

 

[fortyfivekev]

Seems an odd decision after all this time that's for sure. There always seemed like plenty of people super eager to call out any rips so I can't imagine it was that much work to close those threads. I only ever went to the AC forums to check the mod sections so I guess that is one less thing I need to do. Can't see how less people on the forums benefits the sim but hey ho.

 

[formulaHEINE]

@Chris Stacey
Thanks for the afforts of RD to integrate all the modders from the AC forums!

Will there be a 'Livery' thread prefix in the near future?

Will it be allowed for the livery designers to have thier 'own' paintbooth/skin thread, to collect all thier progress in one thread and not a thread per skin?

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

Will it be allowed for the livery designers to have thier 'own' paintbooth/skin thread, to collect all thier progress in one thread and not a thread per skin?

Click on the author name and you can see all their uploaded content:

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Will there be a 'Livery' thread prefix in the near future?

It's there already, but it's called "skins" Didnt want to rename it as it would affect the entire board.

 

[A3DR]

This is great news!, specially after eating for breakfast yesterday that there's no more room for artists like myself on the official AC forum (that was all it was good for, anyway).

Time to move on, will be building a new thread for my latest project (Honda S800) soon, and more to come!

 

[formulaHEINE]

Click on the author name and you can see all their uploaded content:

It's there already, but it's called "skins" Didnt want to rename it as it would affect the entire board.

I meat this as a prefix in the 'Assetto Corsa Modding Discussions' subforum only for unreleased / wip liveries, like a collective thread / showroom-like for a skin desinger.
The actual system is good, but it is linked to downloads.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Sorry @formulaHEINE seems we made a tiny mistake there and it wasn't showing correctly. Can you check again and let me know what else is missing?

 

[paracletus]

Does sound like this is because of console game being released.
Playstation version on amazon for £30 - quite cheap. Then again, it's a couple of years old now technically.

 

[formulaHEINE]

Sorry @formulaHEINE seems we made a tiny mistake there and it wasn't showing correctly. Can you check again and let me know what else is missing?

No problem , now the 'Skins' prefix is there. Thanks RD!

 

[Mr Whippy]

It's all a bit dubious and as others have said, they let the modding community grow whilst they could reap the benefits

It does feel like it's been built on modders/modding, and now it's got momentum it's moving to consoles + DLC.
That could be good and bad but I think 6-12 months down the line will tell how that will work out better.


But I can imagine having 100+ great modded cars/tracks on the same forums (probably) that console users will frequent won't go down so well when console users can't access them or use them for free, while the PC users can.
So shunting all the free eye-candy elsewhere does seem a sensible thing to do so console buyers don't suddenly get a case of the green eyed monster and rate AC badly.


I'm remaining positive for now that KS devs want AC to be a modding paradise, they have to make money and a console port seems a good move for that to work.
I just hope money doesn't become too important down the line, or appealing to the console market too much and forgetting their roots in simulation in subsequent updates, DLC or AC2 etc.

 

[JeffL]

Not a critique of Kunos but food for thought: The age old meme of corporations saying "support us in our effort to enrich the company because it will result in better product for our customers" almost never works in the consumers favor. They just buy more guitars.

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

From @Aristotelis in the official forums:
As I said above, even though KS is still a very small company, we are very proud to have created a world wide brand with AC. AC has sold hundreds of thousands of copies on Steam and consoles version will bring even more. AC is mentioned on big magazines and websites articles together with historic names as Gran Turismo and Forza motorsport... this for us is something that still amaze us and makes us very proud.

Unfortunately with great powers come great responsibilities (I always dreamed to say that, yay!). Italian laws specify that on a moderated and private (i.e. need registration) forum, the owners of the forum are co-responsible for the content of the post of the forum users. We live and have our base on an amazing country, famous for its culture, art, nature and... food. But at the same time also famous for it's bureaucracy, complex law system and confusing law decisions. So when we get complains from other big titles about converted material in our forums, or when we see illegal mods in our forums, or when we are asked to make the referee between mod teams wars, stolen material, personal issues and such, then as you can see it is time for us to take action.

As you can see, it's not a matter to simply moderate, because even if we had the time to do it (we don't), we're still in a very grey area and can't deal always with it. So because of some community members behaviour and because of legal uncertainty and because of the need to do something about it, we decided to do the "bad guys".

Is our decision bad timed? Probably yes
Did we knew it would be unpopular? Certainly yes
Was it really necessary? Absolutely yes.
Could we have done it differently? Probably yes, we are not perfect, we do errors and this is something to learn from.
It is a very painful decision (your passion on this thread shows it clearly) that we had to take. I hope you can now understand better why.

Will we stop encouraging or supporting mods? ABSOLUTELY NO!

Thank you for all these years of great mod material and supporting AC. We try really REALLY hard to bring you the best and hope that our future news will alleviate a bit your frustration.

 

[Amir Vodokotlic]

Aris posted long post on main forums.

Summery: They don't want any legal trouble.

Apparently even thought they don't host the mods only wip is shown at ac forums, in Italy they are still considered responsible for it.


edit: look above.
goodness hornbuckle must have 20 hands he is literately in every single website that even mentions ac

 

[Jempy]

Finally a straight forward explanation !
It would have avoided more than 20 pages passionate discussion on their forum.