About Steam Workshop (Spoke on Twitch about this)

I'm not a modder. I'm a mod user. I've used several mods for a few Steam Games. Most notably Prison Architecht and Civ: BE., Never had a problem from the user end aside from mod support being dropped away slowly by the modders. There may be merit to your arguments, I'm not qualified to comment on that. Just thought I'd mention the user side of things from my perspective.

While I tend to agree in principle, hopefully neither of these issues will be huge ones for GCIII. 

I'm under the impression that the majority of mods will be achievable with just XML files, which aren't generally huge in size. (If I'm wrong about that, my apologies for my lack of understanding.)

Modders have these boards to talk about their mods as much as they like, without any interference from Steam.

There are already is a sub-forum for modding on the Galactic Civilizations III Steam forums.

I know, I got moderated using the Skyrim one to talk about my own mods. Steam moderators considered it spam and explained it all to me when I asked why I had been moderated for talking about mods. Apparently its because they do not want modders talking about mods on a gaming forum.

BigBadB:

I have over 2 gigs worth of mods right now sat on my drive, all made by me, some used to be on workshop. If there on workshop today, i would taken some down to mod Galciv3. Anybody that does make a grand Galciv mod, could easily use up half that space.

Imagine having a favorite mod on Workshop, then one day it is gone because the Author had to remove it to make room for a new mod he was working on.

Steam Workshop is not very supportive of modders....

As someone who like's gal civ games and stardock in general i have to agree with OP about steam being the wrong place for mods hell i like steam its where my gal civ 3 is from BUT i hate the workshop.. Lets see i have 75 Mods for skyrim and NOT a single one of them is from the workshop they are all from places like the nexus and LL purely because they have better? support from the makers and i can contact them on the forums and talk about the mod..also steam refuses certain mods because of adult content(swear words,nudity,etc)which seems ridiculous when the game in question(skyrim)is ADULT oriented... 

I still play Gal civ 2 and like the way the site hosts the mods if some thing like the Gal civ 2 site could be made possible for gal civ 3 that would be incredible..

To the Modders themselves THANK YOU for all your hard work and countless hours Creating outstanding content to make games more enjoyable interesting and diverse.. 

As an end user, I cannot discuss sensibly some of the technical details from the point of view of the modders.   But I can say how my mod use has evolved over the past few years.  i speak mainly of Skyrim.   At first I just grabbed Workshop items, it seemed convenient.    But then I found some mods were not available on Steam, and that these sites supported mod managing better than the Workshop, among other issues.   And very quickly I went to not using the Workshop at all. I removed the few mods I had from there and reinstalled from other sites.   I came eventually to the  Nexus, the Nexus Mod Manager and BOSS->LOOT (for load order/compatibility checking).   Now this involved more work on my part, but I found that having more control over what I was doing was easily worth it.   The Workshop may well be the only way to go for anyone not ready for the extra work involved in not using it, but I am not one of those people...yet.

I should add that my experience with Steam as a whole is almost the opposite.   I held off for years using Steam beccause I just didn't feel very comfortable about it.  Then some game came up that was only available through Steam and I decided to try it.   I now have 60 games in my library and I can recall only once that some problem with Steam caused an issue with game-playing.  And I liked the no disc business so much I bought a few games on Steam for which  I already had discs!   No  hunting up a disc and hoping it worked.   So I like Steam for the most part.   But I don't use the Workshop.

When it comes to moderators on Steam, isn't it dependant on what moderators are there?  By that I mean, each forum has its own moderators, I thought.  If the GC III team are mod-friendly, it doesn't matter what Steam in general thinks.  Unless they override whatever Brad and co set up.

Bam:

Steam Workshop is a massive improvement for mod users, there is no denying that but it also causes problems for mod users too and it is just not very modder friendly.

We still cannot post our full mod docs for example, there is no way to warn the player of updates or tell them to check the docs. The first they know of update is when their game starts to crash or an unexpected feature pops up out of no where.  Steam goes out of its way to deny modders a chance to warn users of these things. Prefering to moderate modders that try and keep users informed of mod changes or new mod releases.

It is not a good situation for modders or mod users, mostly because they are just not available when modders need to talk to them or send them feedback. We are literally talking to our selves.

Devs sometimes listen, but never steam.

Buck:

Some do yes, others do not. Steam lets some devs run their steam forums as they see fit, that is not bad. It means the steam forums for a developers game are moderated as well or as badly as their own forums. Friendly dev forums and friendly steam forums, or bad dev forums and bad steam forums.

If Stardock moderate the Galciv forum it would be an improvement but would not fix the over all problem of steam seeing modders as spammers.

2 way communication between mod makers/users and steam needs to exist and it does not currently.

What about using this community: http://www.nexusmods.com/games/? for mods?  It seems to work well for Skyrim.  The Total War series have their own forum, TWcenter.net, so I think it's the best way to go?

From a MOD users perspective Steam workshop can be great it gives you a lot of search options when looking for mods and you will know when the Modder updates the mod. It makes it much easier for the average user to download and use mods since you don’t have to do a lot of fiddling about putting files in the right locations.

On the downside when a mod gets updated you tend to get the updated version even if you don’t want to update it at that time which can break save games worst case scenario, though I seldom had this issue with Skyrim mods.

From a Mod maker’s point of view, I do thing the 1gig limit is an issue if you are a prolific mod maker or your mod requires a lot of graphical assets.

On the advertising side I can see why valve don’t want the steam forums constantly spammed by people bumping their mods and given workshop has good search tools, people tend to find good mods anyway. Also nothing prevents you posting info about the mods on nexus or here if you want to advertise.

I don’t really have an issue with the paid mod thing; I think it’s an interesting way to allow modders to transition towards getting into the industry however I do think it was very wrong to introduce it to a game that already had a lot of free mods in the steam workshop, I also think that the division of the money was wrong and the Modder should get the lion’s share. That said it would not mean any mods I did would take advantage of this if they reintroduced it, I’d probably reserve it for very large and complex mods that took a lot of time and effort to produce if I decided to do it at all; generally I think I’d keep on producing free mods to simplify my tax returns. 

On the whole I think steam workshop integration is a very good thing but should not be the only way to mod the game, and I know it won’t be in this case. Oh and I'm mpore likely to see mods advertised on the forum here than on the steam forum as I find hanging out there depressing anyway.