So many great mods GONE!

I notice that WHoward69's mods have been deleted from both here and the Steam Workshop. Has he been banned or worse...and if the decision was his, did he ever explain why all the mods had to go? It's a terrible shame to lose so much great work!

Yes, I don't understand why the mods had to be deleted.

What happened to him? did he just quit (wich sounds weird)? did he get hacked?

I used his mods on my savegames, now I can't load them anymore =/

What - are all his Mods gone? They were the best.

Gone from Steam Workshop yes (NEVER to return), coming to a (temporary) home in the CfC database soon (like when I've finished typing replies here!)

What did you do?

Gort said:

What did you do?

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Or better, what's the deal with steam Workshop? why not host the mods there? what happened?

Gort said:

What did you do?

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Not what I did, but what Firaxis did in patch 1.0.2.12 (broke it) and then totally failed to do in patch 1.0.2.21 (repair it)

Is this just down to the way mods are put out via the Workshop, or something more fundemental to making producing/maintaining mods?

I've started running into issues since the Steam client update today, but annoyances aside, was ok post patch and hotfix. Then again, whether I would realise or not...

daviiadams said:

Is this just down to the way mods are put out via the Workshop, or something more fundemental to making producing/maintaining mods?

I've started running into issues since the Steam client update today, but annoyances aside, was ok post patch and hotfix. Then again, whether I would realise or not...

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The whole Steam Workshop integration is just shockingly badly coded - players "don't get it" (most click Back after enabling mods, believing the Single Player menu option is a heading above the list of mods they have enabled to play with) and then blame the mod for being "broken".

For others, the game - whether in off-line mode or on a "dodgy" intenet connection - will intermittently delete mods; code should NEVER do that without some form of user confirmation. Imagine the outcry there would be if IE/FireFox deleted cached files (including cookies) everytime it went into offline mode! For some, the download will happen but the install won't - the state/event system gets out-of-sync when the network disconnects and just can't recover. The latest patches were supposed to fix the connection issues (the first just made them significantly worse) - but they don't.

It's a lot less stress for me to walk away from the Workshop (and remove over 10% of the mods on there - which Firaxis probably won't notice and/or care about) than it is to continue taking the flak for Firaxis poor code.

W

whoward69 said:

The whole Steam Workshop integration is just shockingly badly coded - players "don't get it" (most click Back after enabling mods, believing the Single Player menu option is a heading above the list of mods they have enabled to play with) and then blame the mod for being "broken".

For others, the game - whether in off-line mode or on a "dodgy" intenet connection - will intermittently delete mods; code should NEVER do that without some form of user confirmation. Imagine the outcry there would be if IE/FireFox deleted cached files (including cookies) everytime it went into offline mode! For some, the download will happen but the install won't - the state/event system gets out-of-sync when the network disconnects and just can't recover. The latest patches were supposed to fix the connection issues (the first just made them significantly worse) - but they don't.

It's a lot less stress for me to walk away from the Workshop (and remove over 10% of the mods on there - which Firaxis probably won't notice and/or care about) than it is to continue taking the flak for Firaxis poor code.

W

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Ag, not so good!

I'm quite naive to a lot of things on this side of the fence, with it being something I've only begun as of this version of the game (I'd not used mods at all beforehand), so can only nod on that score.

than it is to continue taking the flak for Firaxis poor code.

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Could not agree more.

I have a question. If I download the zip files from here and extract them to my mods folder in CiV, won't they also be deleted next time I go offline, or is that only valid for files downloaded from the workshop?

Don't place the .civ5mod file in there, but use WinRar or 7Zip to unpack them.

Mods manually unpacked into the "C:\Users\{username}\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\Mods" sub-directory are unknown to the download code and therefore ignored - otherwise anything built with ModBuddy would also be deleted when you go off-line (and they arn't)

whoward -

I hear you on the customer support side of modding. I've been in software for a long time, and it's pretty awful a lot of the time. They have no idea which problems are whose fault so much of the time (and half the time it's their fault, but you can't tell them that!).

Sorry to hear that you're giving it up - in addition to an amazing suite of mods, your posts on these forums are an incredible resource for newer modders. Hopefully firaxis will fix their code, and hopefully a break from the action will persuade you that you really do want to spend your time doing this again.

Ok, maybe I'm being daft here, but I have a lot of your mods on my computer and currently Steam is set to offline mode.
1) Will they be deleted if I open game in offline mode?
2) Will they be deleted if I go online?
3) Or is the deleting thing something that only happens sometimes, and I'm just lucky it hasn't happened to me?
4) And if 3) is the case, might it happen at some random later time?

Drawmeus said:

They have no idea which problems are whose fault so much of the time (and half the time it's their fault, but you can't tell them that!).

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Oh the number of support calls I've closed with just the comment of "PICNIC"

Drawmeus said:

Sorry to hear that you're giving it up

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Didn't say that ... just that I'll never use the Steam Workshop ever again ... it's quite a significant difference!

kaspergm said:

Ok, maybe I'm being daft here, but I have a lot of your mods on my computer and currently Steam is set to offline mode.
1) Will they be deleted if I open game in offline mode?
2) Will they be deleted if I go online?
3) Or is the deleting thing something that only happens sometimes, and I'm just lucky it hasn't happened to me?
4) And if 3) is the case, might it happen at some random later time?

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No idea, may as well roll a dice and if it comes up 7 you'll be OK.

So ...

Take a complete copy of "C:\Users\{username}\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\Mods" (or whereever the game downloads and unpacks your mods to) and keep it safe.

Go online, and watch the game (illegally IMHO) delete all your mods without asking you - this will also remove its "knowledge" of what you have subscribed to / downloaded from the Workshop.

Copy everything it deleted back from the copy you made above.

whoward69 said:

Didn't say that ... just that I'll never use the Steam Workshop ever again ... it's quite a significant difference!

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Well, that's better news!

kasper -

Presumably the safest thing you could do would be to copy all the mods to a backup location, unsubscribe from them, then copy them from the backup location back into your My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization V/Mods/ folder and re-enable them. That way Steam has no knowledge of them, but the game can still find them just fine. Exactly as Whoward just recommended, except instead of waiting for Steam to screw you over, you can be proactive in managing them separately from Steam.

Keep the backup folder, though, just in case.

Thanx both of you, I've made a backup. I guess I'll keep them in Steam because so far I haven't experienced any problems, and that way it will also check for updates, but if things change, now I know how to get around it.

@Whoward.

<peptalk style="bold, energetic">I have played a lot of your mods. I know that a lot of them have made there way in one way shape or form into a lot of the other mods that I use as well.

I'm not a modder but I do some programming and I love reading the forums to see who is doing what and who is coming up with the great ideas. I see consistently that you help other modders and are pretty unselfish with your "property". Your vast catalog of great mods shows how much you care about this game and the modding community.

I sell Ice Cream. I own a store and I make Ice Cream then customers come in and I give them the Ice Cream. I can't imagine not having the store or trying to sell it out of my living room. It seems to me Steam is your store front, quite frankly I can't imagine why you would want to get rid of that?

I understand that the general public is stupid and that they can be a royal pain in the a$$... but afterall aren't they the reason why we/you do this in the first place? I couldn't imagine giving up my shop to sell my wares from my home or online. (But if you can create me a mod that will get Ice Creamacross the country without melting I'll pay you for it!)

So hopefully saying that you will "Never ever" means that you are currently angry with Firaxis and the public in general and that ultimately you will take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves and go back at it... you owe it to yourself to keep your wonderful mods in a location that the greatest majority of people can share them with you, even if the nonvocal majority doesn't tell you enough how happy they really are.</peptalk>