When will we be getting a mod forum?

[Strager]

Ah. Understandable.

IMO the AAR forums are actually even more of a "seller" of games for Paradox than the mod forums -- though I don't belittle the value of those either. I do, however, understand the reasoning behind making them restricted to registered users.

Piracy is rampant in the games industry and as many people have correctly pointed out, there's really not much you can do to prevent it. You can, of course, implement protection schemes which eventually (usually quickly) get broken, but almost all of these end up inconveniencing legitimate customers at least as much as they inconvenience the pirates. As such, Paradox is approaching it from a "value added" sort of viewpoint where easy access to such things as tech support, patches, etc is only available if you register the game.

Registration takes all of 10-20 seconds to achieve and after that you have no further hassles for the entire lifetime of the game. No need to carry a CD around with you or enter a pass code to play, or anything like that. It's a tiny requirement that is also a very useful one (to Paradox) because it's *very* hard for a pirate to bypass. Sure...pirates will manage to do so anyway, but it will be much harder and far less convenient because the burden of after sales support (patches, etc.) falls on them to deal with.

I guess there may be no perfect solution, but I'll certainly be interested to see how this approach ends up panning out.

Perfect Solution: End all Piracy on the internet --- likelihood of it happening: 0.000000000000000000000000000001%

On the plus side I just checked for ____ and giggles... So far no EU3 on the net! Good work paradox...usually a game hits the net a week or so before getting into stores...and we already have players with the game

So whatever you guys are doing in that department... KEEP IT UP!

 

[unmerged(64314)]

To reference Stardock (whom I greatly respect for their approach to piracy) again, I would like to point out that the mod forum is not hidden from prospective players. I can tell honestly that I purchased Crusader Kings only after looking through the mod forum and seeing the Leaders of the Roman Empire scenario. Sure, it may not bring a massive amount of customers in but mods do sell games for some people. I think restricting patches and tech support is a great customer friendly option, but the mod forum is overdoing it. Imagine if Oblivion had hidden their forum so you had to blindly purchase the game and then hope there were mods that interested you. (This is of course for the sake of argument discounting that ES mods are mostly located on third party databases to equate it with Paradox's being on the forums.)

 

[unmerged(16181)]

I just realized that they probably just don't want pirates to benefit from the added content of the mod and mp communities. Don't I feel silly now.

That actually makes me feel better...if that's the rationale, maybe they could let people who don't have EU3 post if they have a high enough post count? That would at least lessen the risk of piracy, because people who have been posting on the forum for a long time probably aren't pirates.

All this discussion about a public Mod Forum attracting potential customers is useless.
People who don't know the game (i.e. people who didn't know Paradox until they heard of EU3) won't make their decision (to buy the game) based the visiblility of a mod forum (and thus on what mods are available). I know nobody who has bought a game "because it was moddable and a lot of mods exist".

That's exactly why I bought EU2 and Victoria.

 

[Dspencer]

Wow, i can't believe this thread has survived so long.

After reading all the posts, i think i understand the point of view of PI, and why they chose to block access. However, as a compromise, it might be a good idea to atleast SHOW that the forums exist, and an explanation page as to why people are blocked.

I will say this as well, the reason i bought eu2 was because i found out how much modding could be done, and how active the community was. This is the same reason i'm buying eu3. For regular users of this forum, the blocked sub-forums don't really matter(if we know about them), because most of us are going to buy the game sooner or later. However, for people that are curious about eu3, but aren't very sure about whether or not they would buy it, or don't know much about it, the lack of a mod forum might completely turn them off of the game.

As far as the big P word goes, it's a real shame that a few dorks ruin things for the rest of us.

 

[unmerged(16181)]

For regular users of this forum, the blocked sub-forums don't really matter(if we know about them), because most of us are going to buy the game sooner or later.

Unless we can't run the game on our computers....

 

[Brasidas]

That actually makes me feel better...if that's the rationale, maybe they could let people who don't have EU3 post if they have a high enough post count? That would at least lessen the risk of piracy, because people who have been posting on the forum for a long time probably aren't pirates.

Except that newbies are a large part of those who could be drawn in by the mod forum.

It was the AARs and mods that drew me into the Paradox community in the first place, and I read the forums for months before I registered.

 

[unmerged(16181)]

Except that newbies are a large part of those who could be drawn in by the mod forum.

It was the AARs and mods that drew me into the Paradox community in the first place, and I read the forums for months before I registered.

Oh, I agree. But my original purpose for posting in this thread was to see if I could see and post in the mod forum, because I'm selfish.