Superuser Christian Posted August 28, 2022 Superuser Share Posted August 28, 2022 ModdingCommunity.com Status - In Development YouTube Series - Watch! Google Doc - Read! * This information will be listed on separate pages in the future on the website. Short Summary TMC is exactly what it sounds like. Our goal is to encourage modding support & content creation. We focus on the gaming & media communities. Our partners vary from content creators with a larger audience to users who make a positive impact to the modding community, and to game/media companies/communities. That said, this document will show what our product will include once released. However, the product itself is still in development. Additionally, feedback is highly appreciated from content creators, modders, and standard users. We want to make sure we’re making this project correctly from the start! We would recommend reading the bottom of this document for more details. We have a marketplace where any user may sell or submit free/open-source mods with a big focus on free/open-source mods. We also take a small % of payments, put it back into the community (ex: paying partners), and pay the mod’s game company. If there’s disapproval for paid mods from the game’s company, we’ll only support free mods on that specific game. We pay some of our partners to create games with full modding, F2P, cross-platform, and console support via single or salary based payments. We host events in the community. In return, more content will be introduced to partners & content creators. We have great branding and own moddingcommunity.com along with many great social media pages which may be found at the bottom of this document. Our end goal is to make modding the norm in gaming & media along with continuously improving the modding community overall. Long Summary Hello there! This document will go over TMC and why it positively impacts gaming, entertainment, and media! We explain our goals, features, and vision along with why this will benefit you, other content creators, and gaming communities/companies if you become our partner any time in the future. If you’re not interested in a partnership, at least for the time being, we would still appreciate any feedback on our community and product. We have a great vision and we do believe we can change gaming, modding, and content creation/creators positively on a large scale. However, we do want to make sure we’re doing things correctly and would appreciate any advice, concerns, and feedback submitted to us! Partner Proposal How A Partnership Will Benefit You & Others We positively change gaming, media entertainment, and hope to one day do it to a large degree. We try to use tactics that are considered selfless to benefit as many content creators, modders, and users as possible. That said, the only thing we ask in return in a partnership is for an advertisement either on the content creator’s website or main platform for The Modding Community. Otherwise, we encourage the partner to shine a spotlight on the modding community, but they take credit for their contribution and work unless they want to give credit specifically to TMC. We will be using a referral system for large content creators to indicate how much additional revenue they make for referring others to TMC. The more popularity and revenue this community receives, the more our partners will benefit while making a positive change to the gaming and media worlds. You will receive the following benefits as we expand. Advertisements and shoutouts of new content you create on your platforms. We’ll post these to our network and social media platforms including our Discord server. The more revenue we receive, the more we will pay you (single or salary based). Modding will lead to more custom content and entertainment. In return, content creators such as yourself will have more content to share to your platforms. Especially with community events and collaborations. Have the opportunity to change a trend that many agree needs to be changed in the gaming and media creation communities (more modding support/popularity). We have great branding including the moddingcommunity.com domain name and social media platforms which may be found towards the bottom of this document. As a result, we have a lot of potential to show up first from search engine results. Additionally, we’ve talked to others who agree that The Modding Community will catch the public’s eye a lot easier than other modding communities. On the flipside however, we’d like to also discuss ideas/collaborate with other modding communities because we believe many of us share the same goals for modding from a bigger picture standpoint while benefiting each other (we’d offer partnerships to those communities who want to help out). Finally, we have many potential partners interested including multiple other content creators/gaming communities, such as the Discord-partnered Rust Admins community and other large gaming communities/content creators. The community will receive increasing popularity with the more partners that are added leading to all partners mutually benefiting together. This gives us opportunities to collaborate with a variety of modders and content creators and host community events of the best content creations within the modding community. Bringing all of the modding, gaming, and content creation communities together will only bring on good things for our future! Our Vision One Goal We are a community with a goal to shine spotlight and support onto the modding community to the point where it is the norm in gaming/media creation. We want to introduce as many people to the modding community as possible which in return will improve content/media creation, gaming, careers, talent, and more along with making things generally more enjoyable in gaming and media as a whole. There are many talented individuals within the modding community who deserve more recognition/spotlight and that’s what we’re here for. The modding community is truly the real definition of hidden talent. Our Major Push For Better Modding Support We push for better modding support. The following are a few of the ways we do so. Coordinate plans with the community and our partners to improve modding support. Afterwards, we will write up emails, threads, and more to game developers regarding our plans in hopes they’ll consider implementing more modding support or contribute to our discussions regarding improving modding support. Create open-source tools to improve/simplify modding and publish our tool’s source code onto our GitHub organization for others to use/learn from. Create guides, tutorials, and more on how to mod games and media content to help newcomers or modders who want to improve/learn new things. Pay developers in our community or third-party game companies a salary to create and maintain games with full modding, free-to-play, and cross-platform support (cross platform refers to being able to have users play and interact together from more than one gaming platform such as PC, Xbox, and Playstation). Encourage our partners to spread the word and shine light on the modding community using their platforms via advertising TMC or addressing issues directly within the modding community. For example, we’re planning to reach out to gaming companies such as Valve to address the decline in modding support and popularity that has been occurring within the last ten - twelve years. In regards to Valve’s modding support, one thing that is leading to so many issues with modded/community servers is Valve's Master Server. Their Master Server is responsible for retrieving the community/modded server list for games that support it. Therefore, we plan to come up with tactics to eliminate A2S_INFO caching which results in servers not being able to manipulate their latency in the server browser due to an Anycast network using A2S_INFO caching (players receive the A2S_INFO response from the closest PoP/edge server they route to via BGP which is used to determine the latency of the game server) and server listing performance (as of right now, it takes a minute to load 3000 - 4000 servers; with modern technology, you should be able to list 20,000+ servers within a couple seconds). Other larger companies we’d like to try reaching out to are EA/DICE and Activision along with other Call of Duty companies. We believe the gaming community would really enjoy custom content made by the community hosted on modded servers for Battlefield and Call of Duty games. Full modding support would give any user the ability to create custom maps, weapons, game modes, models, audio, and so much more! This would add more flavor, entertainment, and content to gaming! Expanding The Modding Community While there are communities such as NexusMods (who we also support) with a large following (over 36 million registered users), we strive to introduce many more users to modding. The estimated number of gamers overall is over two billion, not to mention we are targeting many users in media/entertainment. We push for cross-platform support. This means players on consoles such as the Xbox and Playstation have the ability to play on community/modded servers with PC players. A majority of gamers use consoles, but consoles generally have poor modding support. This is more than likely the reason why PC gaming has many more modders than console gaming. We try to encourage game companies to make games free (game developers may make a lot of money from their free-to-play games using other methods that other companies such as Valve use in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2). Our Mod Marketplace We have a unique market for mods in gaming. Free and paid submissions are both supported. However, we highly encourage and support free mods by providing benefits and shoutouts which in return increases the chance of potential partnership with said users. Free mods also will have a donation link setting for modders who are accepting donations. Paid mods will only be supported in games where the mod’s game company approves. A certain percentage of all payments to paid mods will go to our community and the mod’s game developer/company (6 - 8% maximum for the sum of revenue going to our community and the game’s company). This will result in more partnerships and pay for current partners which leads to more exposure/support to the modding community. The game mod marketplace is integrated into GitHub, the most popular open-source platform, and requires an account there for both free and paid mods. Paid mods must have their mod’s repository private. Needless to say, this means all free mods will be open-source. Paid mods must also require moderation approval to make sure the mod’s price is acceptable. We also require an inspection of the mod’s source code. As for general media modding (e.g. altering existing video media), we have another application on our website that’ll allow for submissions that link to their content on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and other platforms. We use an upvote (and downvote) system to determine what content shows up higher in the list which we integrate into our r/modcommunity Reddit community. Additionally, if applicable, we have a donation button (linking to the creator’s donation page) and partner flair on submissions which allows others to show support We offer a child-friendly environment by enforcing NSFW flairs/tags and spoilers (to media content) to mods that contain explicit content. We allow for parental controls after the parent(s) confirm both accounts. We also integrate tools to automatically compile mods depending on the type of programming language/game along with including functionality to simplify the mod installation process where possible. For paid mods, this helps with preventing leaking of source code. Speaking of preventing paid mod leaks, for mods that require users to have the source code (e.g. JIT compilation), we have security measures in place to prevent leaking. For example, if applicable, we randomize all variable, function, and class names. If also applicable, we try to put all code on one single line. If encryption is supported, we perform those actions as well. Paid Mods Controversy One thing we address is the controversy with offering paid mods on our market. There are many large modding communities that only offer free mods and we really respect that. However, we are trying to target the entire modding audience and there are modding communities/platforms that do sell mods for certain games. The team that started our community consisted of all open-source supporters and contributors. In fact, many have only submitted mods on open-source platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, and more. Our team definitely understands the concern regarding this and it was a tough decision to make. However, in regards to the bigger picture, we believe paid mods need to be supported. That said, this also leads to more potential partners due to the increase of revenue the community would be generating which is very important to our end-goal. We have modders who release paid mods agree that the open-source community can make projects of their own aiming towards the same features and such as long as they aren’t directly stealing the source code of paid mods. This is because we primarily support the open-source community. To conclude, we do understand why modders are upset with this, but we believe this decision will make our chances of reaching our end-goal higher. Bounty Board We support bounty mods. This allows a modder to submit a mod with a bounty price and requires the same moderation approval as a standard paid mod would. Users may contribute via payment(s) to the mod and once the bounty price is met, the mod is automatically set to free and open-source by making the GitHub repository public. Additionally, we support a setting where if a user reaches a certain contribution amount before the bounty price is met, they gain access from a paid mod view until the bounty price is met. Content Creation/Job Requests We allow content creators, modders, and users to submit requests for others to create/help contribute to mods for pay. We have a modder rating system which will allow users to see what others have thought about their work previously. This will allow the owners of these submissions to hire somebody who has a higher reputation in the community or perhaps to give somebody a chance to redeem themselves. This will be extremely useful for content creators that need to spice up their content with something custom! Modding Tools And Guides We have a GitHub organization via github.com/modcommunity. This is used to create open-source tools for game and media modding (e.g. video editing). One thing we strive for is setting an example to other modders on how mods should be created, maintained, and organized. If the community ever sees anything that should be improved on with these tools, we encourage them to speak out or submit pull requests on GitHub! That said, we encourage the community to make in-depth and straight-forward guides on our forum for game and media modding. This will help many newcomers and result in more content which will lead to more entertainment! Community Events, Donations, And Giveaways We’ve mentioned the use of community events to bring content creators and modders together along with the general gaming/media communities. However, in addition to this, we are also planning to launch campaigns where we donate money to poorer countries, improve technology (e.g. network equipment), and provide TMC-branded (high-spec) gaming laptops for people who haven’t used the Internet/technology. We also introduce them to the modding community via a paper we send with them along with describing why the modding community can benefit them. TMC’s Founder Introduction My name is Christian Deacon and I’m currently 24 years old. I was born on December 10th, 1997. I live in San Antonio, Texas, US and I’m from Mullica Hill, New Jersey, US which is where I grew up until 2018. I’ve had a huge interest in gaming/modding communities starting from when I was ten years old. I’ve managed multiple gaming communities in the past and present. One in which, for over ten years starting in 2011 which hosted many popular modded servers in games such as Counter-Strike: Source/Global Offensive, Rust, Garry’s Mod, Team Fortress 2, and really any games that supported modding/community servers. I’ve gained all my technical knowledge from modding and my gaming communities. Something very crucial to this community and its end-goal is content creators and partners gaining trust in me since I’m the founder. While I know my intentions are good, it’s understandable for others to feel uncomfortable with this community until they can trust me. This is why I encourage others to reach out to me and get to know me via Discord for example. I also constantly try to receive input on ideas and how the community is run from others so we can improve where we can. I have a lot of experience in trying to improve the modding community in the past. For example, I’ve helped game companies like Valve fix issues with community servers along with a couple shoutouts within the update notes which may be found below (under my old username, “Gamemann”). I’ve submitted a couple Reddit threads addressing the current modding/community support in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as well. Both posts were at the top of the first page on the reddit.com/r/globalOffensive Reddit community. Unfortunately, I never received any replies from Valve. March 25th, 2016 - Valve's Poor Support For Community Servers And Lack Of Communication August, 26th, 2016 - Valve's Poor Support For Community Servers & Lack Of Communication (2nd Attempt) December 11th, 2014 - CS:GO Update That Fixed Very Few Community Servers In Browser July 7th, 2016 - CS:GO Update That Fixed A Server Exploit Crash Additionally, I also have a portfolio of my previous work (including many open-source projects on GitHub for example). Please feel free to check it out below! https://deaconn.net/ Our Social Media Platforms Discord - dsc.gg/modcommunity Steam - steamcommunity.com/groups/moddingcommunity TikTok - tiktok.com/@modcommunity Twitter - twitter.com/modcommunitysup Reddit - reddit.com/r/modcommunity YouTube - youtube.com/channel/UCR1cNRhEiTtu8-9V-Lt9sHw (youtube.com/modcommunity reserved for when our YouTube channel supports a custom URL) Instagram - instagram.com/the_modding_community Twitch - twitch.tv/modcomm GitHub - github.com/modcommunity FaceBook - facebook.com/modcommunity MySpace - myspace.com/modcommunity Linkedin - linkedin.com/company/modcommunity Note - We will have mailing lists in the future as well! Is Our Product Ready? Unfortunately, our product is still in development. This entire document represents our final product when published. Though, obviously additional features/changes will be made as time goes on and we encourage feedback from current/future partners and the community! We understand we have nothing major to offer our partners or others right now since we’re in the early stages of development. However, if you’d like, you may join our Discord server which may be found under the “Our Social Media Platforms” section above or you may reach out to TMC’s founder, Christian, for updates and/or give feedback/advice on decisions made within the community! The easiest way to contact Christian would be through Discord or on the website (@Christian). Their Discord tag is christiano#1190. Additionally, we are still accepting partnerships while in development. In return we will advertise you and once the final product is finished, offer you the following additional benefits. A flair or tag indicating you were an early supporter/partner. Occasional bonus payments for helping build the community and supporting us early on. If you help in any way financially, you have the option to add stake to it. In return, once we start gaining revenue, we can pay you the amount you sent us during early stages and potentially a lot more! This also applies to giving us support via developers and others such as marketing/graphic designer experts. Unfortunately, partner payments will not be available to start until we generate enough revenue to support it. If you do help out, we would highly appreciate it! Thank you for your time! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbs Posted August 28, 2022 Share Posted August 28, 2022 lovely written like always and cant wait for this to take off ;D 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaylode Posted August 30, 2022 Share Posted August 30, 2022 amazing 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GalacticPrism Posted August 31, 2022 Share Posted August 31, 2022 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Superuser Christian Posted August 31, 2022 Author Superuser Share Posted August 31, 2022 56 minutes ago, GalacticPrism said: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ☞ ͜ʖ ☞ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GalacticPrism Posted August 31, 2022 Share Posted August 31, 2022 1 hour ago, Christian said: ☞ ͜ʖ ☞ ( ͡° ͜ ʖ ͡°) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atomicheadphonez Posted September 6, 2022 Share Posted September 6, 2022 They do modding here 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbs Posted September 7, 2022 Share Posted September 7, 2022 On 9/5/2022 at 9:07 PM, atomicheadphonez said: They do modding here Ong Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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