While I understand that these people are really envious of Improved Anvil's quality and popularity, I really didn't expect them to go so far to write such disgusting lies:

He writes:
Hilarious!

All of the people who have sent praising post about IA are known people who have used the same nicknames in all forums for years (see Sorcerer's place for example).

He continues:


Well, that's because:

1- Improved Anvil is the only bugfree big mod.
2- Improved Anvil adds so many new quests and new content to the game.
3- Improved Anvil has high quality (= no bugs, no CTDs, good tactical challenges, new encounters, new monsters, expanded strongholds, Item randomizer and so on)

Instead of deducing the natural consequence that players really like IA, the envious modder has decided to conclude that these posters are not real (i.e. it is me who is posting here with different nicknames to praise my own mod!!)

He also claims that we delete criticisms which is another lie. We have only deleted insulting or trolling posts in the past. Constructive and polite criticisms have never been deleted; some of the topics (a minority of them not all of them) have been closed after a while but none of them have been deleted (even a degree of rudeness has been tolerated and even though some posts have been tactless and insulting enough to deserve being deleted, we kept them).

Where is the modding community going to?

My suggestion to them is to make a better mod than IA if they can. In that case, players will send praising posts to their forums. No more disgusting lies and accusations please. I am fed up with such lies.

Agree Sikret. I am a hungarian player, not your another nick, that is out of question. I like IA (there are some points where I disagree with you, but this is the life, we are not the same), and I very appreciate if I have a problem I can get answer, help here from you or from other players.

All in all, you and all testers do great job! I wish if there could be similar modder team to another semiold RPGs, like wizardry 8., Icewind Dale 2., NWN etc.

TBH I am uncomfortable with this kind of inter-forum bitchiness. I have posted in the G3 thread with my opinions. I have to say that for similar reasons I didn't particularly like the thread on the "dreaded" G3 fixpack in this forum, where some criticisms went beyond the actual changes made by the mod and began discussing modders' attitudes.

I enjoy both G3 and BWL mods. If you don't like a mod don't play it, instead of flaming it. If mod A is incompatible with mod B, then don't install mod A/B. It's not rocket science.

I'm a german player and im real. I havent completely finished IA yet, still waiting for v4.3 for a full walkthrough. but so far i can say i really like IA. I can understand if some users dont like this mod, but everyone can make his own decision. You can always uninstall IA, but to say there are fake users, who praise IA without a proof is really an impudence. It tells it owns tale.
You do a great job and i hope u arent affected by such stupid comments and continue your work on this project with the existing quality.

Greetings
Spike

For what it's worth, nobody's flaming IA. Not everyone enjoys it, but every player is different. The original poster requested an assessment. Assessments were provided. Most were neutral in tone. All things considered, I would view the discussion taking place as just that, discussion.

That's the point, Spike! Thanks.

Rest assured. Such "lies" are not new to us. They kept doing this since long time ago. I ignore them 99% of the times, because as you mentioned, what they write tells its own tale. Most of the times they don't need any reply from us. Intelligent players know how to interpret them.

@brelinde



You are also one of the players who has sent praising comments about IA. Are you a fake poster? Was it me who was using your nickname at that time?!

Perhaps you have changed your mind about IA since that time, but this is not my point. The point is that it was you. It was not me using your nickname.

Discussion is all right, but spreading lies is different.

Apart from that particular post, even the other posts in that thread at G3 do not provide players (including the original poster) with any valid assessment of the mod. One of the guest-posters has admitted that he has not played IA v4.x at all and his memory of the mod is quite outdated and goes back to IA v3 (which was much different than v4.2 which is the current version and not comparable with the forthcoming v4.3 in the least) and has also admitted that he has not played even the v3 long enough. So, the entire thread (which includes some lies and some outdated information) can hardly provide any good assessment or advice for players.

Most of the criticisms are already replied to either in the mod's F.A.Q. or in various threads in this forum. All this said, I am the first person who has repeatedly said that those who don't like my methods can simply ignore my mod and don't play it. But writing lies such as IA players are fake is something quite different.

Oh, come on! You are ALL so very unreal! I'm the only one who's real here! Ha! (/irony)

...

Well, actually I like this thread. It's kinda funny to see what sort of pathetic "ideas" come up when it's about ranting time (again). Of course it's that much easier to simply make up some things instead of relying on real facts. And of course it's easier to write how you know or checked something... without proving it.

I just remembered my own thread, which started with a simple question and turned into a "fixpack-and-G3-fanboys vs. BWL-guys" thingy. This thread is just the opposite, with the main difference that the "IA-fanboys" post something one might call their own opinion. The "G3-guys" on the other hand seem to prefer writing something... else, wich is almost off topic. Again.

There are two possible reasons why someone loves to enter such "discussions" (I refer to the one in G3) with idiot posts. Note: I'm not talking about those who told their opinion -- positive or negative, doesn't matter -- in a respectful form.

1. Primitive, bored ppl who need/enjoy the strain, the fight, the "drama". I just call them "empty".

2. Envious to IA. For its success and because IA doesn't meet their "standards". Because they are so self-confident in the perfectness of their "standards". Just see the Bioware forum post of CamDawg, where he calls IA's SoA HLA abilities "silliness". Why is it silliness that high-level enemies have HLAs in SoA too? High level is high level. Do enemies have a label on their forehead "I'm SoA villain" or "I'm ToB badguy"? CamDawg probably has a counter-argument, but does this give right to anyone to call the other side "silliness"? Silliness? Why not a matter of approach? If you call something "silliness" instead of "IMO...", it just reflects that you are limited. Limited in imagination, and unable to respect others' work.

Fortunately, there is nothing to worry about. And that's the important. There is a saying in Hungarian, I don't know its correct counterpart in English but it sounds like: "Let them boil in their own soup."

Hi Baronious!



I also had some difficaulties towards this subject, and I think the silliness stands for CDs own that is his own opinion. That being said I also took and after all easily accepted Sikrets reasons for giving HLAs in SoA.

I don't want to hijack this topic, but I'm not entirely sure I get what you mean. Of course it's his opinion that it's "silliness" (though only the word "unwelcome" was prefixed with "IMHO", not silliness itself, but everyone speaks in his or her own name, obviously), but telling it so confidently, and telling it at all -- is it a civilized, polite form of expressing our thoughts? Maybe it's just me. Anyway, I used that example to illustrate the giant confidence they have. In everything. They (i.e. certain modders) can't accept that their methods and customs aren't standards for everyone. This is a hobby, and thus author freedom has big role here.

I know you intend to do good Baronius, and I tend to agree with you. I can't really discuss semantics in english as you know it isn't my language. I just tried to express, that a statement like silliness IMO also is someones own opinion, meaning that when Sikret says the mod is green the mod is green to Sikret and perhaps CD thinks it's red. Got my nonsense point?

Wow, whoever made the comment about an "artificial" fanbase was really stretching. The comment about the number of praises IA gets seems pretty clear to me. IA is an extreme mod, therefore, players have extreme reactions to it. They either love it or they hate it. Those who love it tend to be vocal-- as do those who hate it.

The burglary of the bookkeeper (questpack, I think) as an example just doesn't do enough to the game to evoke big reactions. IA, on the other hand, changes the entire gameplay experience. Some love it. Some hate it. Just about everyone has an opinion.

Heh. I'm sorry my quest is too small for you.

And yes, as I posted in the other thread, I think "your players are not real" may be a stretch too. I suspect it may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek from Mr. Bigg. (Quest Pack as a whole actually receives a sizeable proportion of "Ding0, you are the Don" feedback, but it's mostly drowned out in unsolved bug reports these days.)

Burglary o t Bookkeeper actually becomes long with IA as RoHI is replaced.

CONCEPTUALLY INCOMPATIBLE!

Is that what I said? Is that what you think I was saying? Do you really think my point was such a stretch?

It's no wonder why so many of you modders are seemingly incapable of having a productive dialogue with one another (and I'm not just talking about G3 modders here). Your interactions have degenerated to the "freakshow" level.

I don't mean to offend anyone, but that sure makes me laugh Sim.

Wanna see real freakshow? Then read last pages of this thread

At first glance I read that as something slightly different. With a few enhancements I'm sure you'd have something to offer the RE mod.

No, but clearly my sense of humour is.

Gee... they took it far. I guess bad PR is still PR.

While that thread certainly is a complete circus at this stage, in the interests of averting World War III, I feel compelled to point out that it's just a forum thread, not some sort of G3 policy summit, and the various people administering liberal doses of the f-word are probably not terribly representative of the G3 modders. If you look back, it's mostly "CamDawg asks everyone to play nice in the sandbox and everyone else continues swearing unaccountably" rather than "CamDawg demonstrates his inability to have productive dialogue with anybody". (On which note, I'm not really a G3 modder either, so if you are of the opinion that God kills a kitten every time I post, then that's not entirely his fault either.)

...and breathe out, Ding0!

Er, Marceror, you are going a bit far, here. SimDingO displays his usual sense of irony, and you launch an attack on G3 modders? While he does contribute to some G3 projects, Quest Pack is actually hosted at PPG. (And it isn't the size of the quest, it's the entertainment value. My favorite component of Quest Pack is "Saving Sanik," and that whole sequence takes what? 30 seconds? But that is glaringly off topic, so I'm letting it drop.)

But this is about IA players, not about Quest Pack. I do not think that the majority of the folks who read that thread honestly believe that folks at IA aren't real.

Now that we have established that IA players are living, breathing, *thinking* human beings, maybe you can read what SimDingO *actually wrote.* He isn't attacking you. He isn't attacking IA. He isn't saying you aren't real. So what has that got do with communication between modders?

Acutally, SimDingO has a point in the thread above. G3 modders have generally stayed out of the discussion once the original poster's questions were answered, and have certainly not indulged in any of the swearing. Those were folks from elsewhere. Some of them were even from here! Anyway, CD closed the sandbox until the kids can play nice.

@SimDing0

Hey, it's not that I lack a sense of humor. It's just that this situation stopped being funny a long time ago.

I never stop being funny.

In your own mind, at least! Oops, I didn't say that out loud did I??


@berelinde

First off, I don’t feel that I launched an attack against anyone. And if I did, it certainly wasn’t directed at the “G3 modders.” Rather, my comments were directed at a vocal core of BG2 modders, who as far as I know represent a variety of different modding communities, and who have been involved in this same kind of bickering for several years.

My comment about Questpack wasn’t meant to tear that mod down. I don’t believe that mod tries to be an absolute game changer, like IA clearly does. From what I recall, Questpack attempts to blend in with the vanilla game as much as possible. So my comment that it doesn’t have a dramatic impact on gameplay is not an insult at all. It’s probably something more akin to a compliment. I just made a matter of fact observation as to why IA is likely a greater source of attention (positive and negative) than one of Questpack’s features. No attack. No insult. Just making a point to address “the bigg’s” amazement that IA receives such an abundance of positive feedback (there’s plenty of negative to go with it). I typically play BG2 with Questpack installed, so I’m certainly not bashing.



While I’ve played through IA 4.2, and enjoyed it, I haven’t joined any special club or secret society related to this mod. Sure, you can call me an IA player, based on the fact that I’ve played it. But I don’t declare that I’m on anyone’s “side” in these kinds of discussions. I’m just a BG2 fan who never ceases to be amazed at how incapable much of the BG2 modding community seems to be at working out their differences. The road to diplomacy is there. But no one seems to care or be interested.

I don’t feel that I’m being attacked in the slightest by SimDing0. I “get” his sarcasm. Again, my comments aren’t prompted only by this particular discussion. I’m commenting on the years of bickering that has gone on between a lot these individuals, which has everything to do with communication between modders.

Guys like SimDing0 contribute by putting the bait out there, because he knows others will be compelled to chomp on that bait, as they always do. I’m sure he gets an absolute rise out of that. And before you know it, there’s a multi-thousand word response out there picking his post apart. And it just goes downhill from there. Rinse and repeat every couple of months, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.



Again, I’m not at all attacking G3 modders, or necessarily making a statement about one BG2 modding community over another. My comments are directed toward the individuals who’ve been keeping the freak show going for years, regardless of what modding community(ies) they claim to belong to.

This stuff is entertaining, I will give you that.

I don't know what bait you think I'm putting out, but any posts I make certainly aren't to justify bulk purchasing of man-sized tissues. I'm very much a publicity machine, and any time I show up and talk about Improved Anvil, it's usually to stem the widespread uninstalling of mods by terrified users because threads have been started with quotes like:

I have noticed that some people (either deliberately or unwillingly) drop the word "big" from the abovementioned sentence (or just don't pay the required attention to it) when they want to quote from my initial post in this thread.

Of course, there are many small or medium size mods out there which have critical bugs as well (Unfinished Business comes to mind), but my sentence didn't imply that I was claiming that IA is the only bugfree mod. It's just a comparison between truly big mods. Maintaining a bugfree big mod is a difficult task and IA has been successfully maintained. (I also admit that my information about the degree of bugfreeness of NEJ2 is very limited. So, it's probable that NEJ2 also satisfies the bugfreeness criteria if its installation instructions are followed precisely by the player.)

I'm sure that others can also give us a list of mods which are not bugged in their opinions, but note that I'm just talking about very big mods in the scales of IA or NEJ2. So, please don't mention any small or medium size mods here (and by size, I'm not referring to the Mega Bytes of the download package, but to the volume and nature of changes the mod applies to the game.) Just check IA's forum for bug reports and you will be amazed to see that despite the huge content of the mod, there are very few bug reports and most of the reports are either about spelling typos or are not related to IA at all. Now compare it with the many bug reports you see on some other mods' forums (even mods which are much smaller than IA) and you will see my point.

Also, it's not a healthy argumentation style to say whatever false things you want and then when you are refuted or disproved you just reply that you were joking or you were funny. Such false information may do their harm despite your later comments of being funny.

For example, SimDing writes:
As you see, he is even emphasizing that he is not joking (link).

Baronius disproved the claim (link):


Now, just read SimDing's reply after being refuted (link):


I have many similar examples to offer, but I don't think that it is worth the time. I prefer to spend my time preparing the mod's next release instead. The main point in all of them is the same: You misinform readers with something which was not initially supposed to be a joke. Later, when you are refuted, you claim that you were joking. These sort of unhealthy methods are not approved by any reasonable person.

I'm not sure I'd really consider IA a big mod. (Incidentally, I think it's very much a nature-of-content thing. Experience dictates that there is nothing harder in this sort of game development that debugging non-linear quests on a platform of somebody else's code (BG2), while it's relatively hard to work game-breaking bugs into AI. I'm not trying to take anything away from your testing process--I'm sure you do a very thorough job--I'm just saying.)

And I'm fairly sure "EVERY" was exaggeration for effect, because I wrote it.

Let's give it a rest, everyone. I allowed SimDing to be the last one who posts in this thread. I'll close the topic if noone has any objections.

I don't want to revive the topic or make any strain, but I've just noticed this:


A lie again! None of the posts of swearing style imply there that their authors are modders/members of BWL.

It isn't our problem that if certain G3 and PPG modders (such as berelinde or CamDawg) never seem to distance themselves from troublemaker morons and swearing trolls, then some people will believe they support such an attitude -- no matter how they wash their hands and keep saying "I stayed out of it". Topic closed.

Well, if every time we notice a new lie we re-open this topic, we will probably need to re-open it almost everyday!

For example, berelinde has claimed that some of her posts to IA forum have been deleted in the past, which is plain falsehood. None of her posts have ever been deleted by me. (Of ocurse, if she sends trolling/insulting/inappropriate posts in the future, I will delete them; but this has never happened in the past)

As for why some people deliberately say false things (things which are not true and they know that they are not true), it can be an interesting topic of discussion for psychologists (but this board is not a psychology discussion forum)

This thread was originally about the hilarious claim that players of IA are not real! I think the best and the most on-topic reply sent to this topic was Spike's post.

As for other questions people may have in mind, I invite them to check the mod's F.A.Q. thread frequently. So, let's close this topic and let it remain closed. Thank you very much.

*Edited for a typo in the last paragraph (the term 'closed' was typed 'close')

That's very true, Sikret! Fortunately, IA's players aren't misled by these statements (lies) any longer.

(By the way, I can easily reply in these topics, because I don't have to reopen them: the CLOSED icon appears as a button for me, and functions as REPLY. )


I remember she had one or more posts in a topic which was beset by trolls, and IA was attacked excessively. I decided to remove that topic, and any topics which were opened by the attackers who were saying "the other topic disappeared". I clearly asked them to stop their trolling, swearing and harassment, yet they kept reopening topics. Some of the user accounts even were blocked for a few hours, as there was no other way (except closing whole BWL forum, which would have been very unpleasant.) So it's possible that one or more of her posts were deleted by me, because she refused to complete the request about taking a break in posting until trolls are gone.

Nonetheless, I think your FAQ summarizes everything very well, and there is no need to discuss this issue any longer.