Most of you are familiar with ACE, the Authorized Community Expansion project. This project is a modding endavour which aims to make an officially dev-supported second half to the game. It has access to many volunteers with different skills, which will allow them to make what would be every modders unreachable dream.
Now, I’m sure some of you (and especially those volunteering for ACE) may have similar expansion ideas, or just smaller modding ideas that you’ll never be skilled enough for to make real. We as a community also want great mods to play with, as mods are awesome, and as it will keep the game alive for a few more years now the devs are gone.
So what if we, as a community, can set something up to gather and use the skills we have to make good mods, similarly to how ACE can. Not only do we then have a pool of skilled people to to draw from to make big projects happen, we also have people who can lend a helping hand to modders with cool ideas and without any skill in one particular area that is necessary.
I attend college, and here in the netherlands (and I presume, pretty much everywhere else), there are entities known as student associations. These associations can hold many different groups (commissions and “disputen”, for example), but also guilds. Guilds are groups of people who are (or want to be) skilled in a skill that is useful for the association. The graphical Guild, for instance, makes many of the posters for events, as well as commision logo’s. In short, a guild collects skill among the associations members, and shares that skill with the rest of the association to make awesome things happen.
Now, change “skills” to “modding skills” , “members” to “volunteers” and “association” to “community”, and you are left with my idea. What if we had modding guilds. We could have a coders guild, a artists guild, a modelers guild and a designers guild, or many more.
The idea in a nutshell
My suggestion is to make modding guilds (artists guild, designers guild, lcoders guild, lore or historians guild, etc.), which are groups who are (or want to be) skilled in one modding aspect. Guilds are groups of volunteers, and anyone can just make themselves a member if they want. I see guilds in the future making the following things possible:
- Modders who lack a certain modding skill can make their mods with help of the necessary guild
- Modders who specialise in, say, art, can work on all kinds of mods whose modders ask for help, without being set back by lacking another skill.
- Guilds could do their own projects, like imagining the coders guild try to implement a fire system (which I’ve heard is very hard to do performance-friendly)
- (Members of) Guilds can work together to make big projects such as ACE happen in the future. Or small projects,really.
- We’ll probably see more collaboration mods out there, that might (!!) be more integrated then now. (Because the guilds know about how other mods work, and have the skills to accomodate for it)
- Meanwhile, individual modders can decide for themselves how much time they spend modding, because all of us modders know that you always have less time then ideas. That will still be the case, but a little less.
