Let's Talk about Mods in Competitive Games

weeeeeeeeeeeeell... the intergrating part actually might. At one point Eco efficiency would have been a mod brought up in this thread for it's unfairness and now look!

Well yea, there are the two categories of mods.

1. The automation ones which generally people seem to accept should be frowned upon

2. The ui enhancements and feature additions like uber map which everyone agrees is good for the game. Just some of us think the problem of accessibility does not guarantee everyone playing ladder knows or uses the mod, which creates an environment of unfairness depending on how much competitive advantage the mod gives you.

Yes competitively you should use everything to win, but there will also be rule boundaries on that depending on the context. For example you would not murder your opponent right (extreme and not comparable to uber map, but just as illustration of ruleset boundaries existing that are not necessarily evidenced by the code implementation). An opinion voiced has also been that uber providing clarification of the ruleset they think is acceptable for the 1v1 ladder would be greatly helpful in this matter. Are mods that add new features like minimaps acceptable or not, and do they simply need work with us to provide greater exposure and accessibility to pamm.

*I get that they added in api's and hooks to allow awesome people like colin to do this kind of stuff. But i don't think uber did a good job yet of defining which context these things can/should be used in. i mean, no-one has a problem with minimap mod in custom games or galactic war etc.

My stance is not "disable mods and force Uber to do it". My stance is that the default UI of PA should be on par with the quality and power of everyone's modded UI. This makes games fairer and improves the new player experience. It ensures that more people care that these mods work for everyone. Personally I advocate for a powerful UI but my post did not talk about my UI preference.

On Spring and Zero-K; you can mod the ZK UI as much as you like. It is probably easier to mod than the PA UI. Some really easy 'modding' can be done to remove the UI panels which you dislike. It is harder to add your own panels, but modding has never been easy anywhere. So your issue with modding and the ZK UI is that you dislike the starting point provided to modders.

PA modding seems to be going through the same phase that Spring UI modding passed through 5-8 years ago (about a year after lua was introduced, I think). This was the most active period of UI modding and many of the powerful, basic features of current games come from this time (eg line move, area mex, auto skirm, metalmaker manager). A lot of non-useful mods were also produced, many people were experimenting with how to improve their UI.

There were a lot of similarities between Spring at the time and PA. Mods were released directly to players via the forums. People had arguments about whether automation is cheating. Players were somewhat expected to create their own UI, although many games did include a set of mods which the game developer liked. Most of the included mods were disabled (to be enabled through an ingame list) and the default UI of the games tended to be haphazard. There are some important difference though. Spring had (and has) independent teams of developers working on their own games. We also told ourselves that free games do not need to focus so much on a good default UI. The user-targeting of the UI mods sped up the transfer of UI ideas between games.

At some point (about 5 years ago) the ZK devs started working on a good default UI. This was made much easier by the explosion of UI development and experimentation that occurred a few years earlier. It was still hard work to make something useful and coherent out of all the disparate mods. I integrated some automation features to remove the latency problem. Other games (Evolution RTS, maybe others?) decided that they were not about automation so picked a bunch of UI mods to integrate and blocked everything else. This is fine, games should be distinct from each other and have different goals. Early UI modding was really important for innovation but eventually the games each decided what they wanted to do and developed/cherrypicked their own UI to fit that goal.

A coherent default UI of the maximum power that the devs want to allow makes it clear to everyone the level of UI fighting which the game is intended to include. If every player starts from the most powerful UI then they can compete fairly and new players have an accurate representation of gameplay. If someone dislikes a bit of the UI they should have the option to disable or ignore it. Personally I would want PA to have the "maximum power allowed" of ZK because it allows for lots of UI modding. If someone comes with a useful bit of UI modding I integrate it into ZK (usually with a bit of polishing). The temporary slight unfairness is worth the free development and innovation.

Uber are running the ladder so, while I would not like them to remove mods, I think it is up to them to determine the allowed mod power and try to ensure that players on the ladder have that power. Otherwise the ladder is unfair.

Please check out our article, The Ethics Of Mods In Competitive Play. Thanks to Elodea and Cola_Colin for their contributions.

It's simple: Good UI is good. If automation gives a competitive advantage, the stock UI or the game design are at fault, not the mod. Ideally, PA would have the perfect UI immediately, such that no mod gave an advantage. Because that is not realistic, the best short-term solution is to make sure everyone can easily get the mods.

i don't want the mods i rather want vanila ui to be improved ...

also how can be the game at fault for a clear designdecision? such as streaming economy which is rather mandatory for a game like this .. this speaks against the use of mods

What mod changes streaming eco?!

Free energy doesn't, it just saves energy where it's otherwise wasted. The economy is still streaming.

does't change but makes use of it
autobuild for instance if you have inactive factories and overflowing metal income ..

Improving the stock UI will not stop modding.

Even if PA's UI was vastly improved and integrated the best of the current UI mods, there would still be some people who wanted <option X> or <feature Y> due to their preferred play style. Since PA was designed to support UI mods, eventually someone who has the skills and / or desire to implement the option or feature that they want, is going to create a mod for it.

And what happens when someone does that and the mod that they create is really useful, do you expect Uber to keep updating the stock UI every time someone comes out with a useful new UI mod?

who is talking about stopping modding?

weither uber updates the ui or not
doesn't change anything weither or not it is ok to mods in competitive play

if uber for instance would stop to update pa in a similar fasion as it happened to supcom fa and people create their own client in the form of FAF .. i doubt it would be ok to use mods there that give a clear advantage either ..
whatever platform competitive multiplayer is played on what you want is that that platform provides you the ui you need ... without needing to use mods

Your doubt is not warranted, FAF itself allows you to even manage your UI mods:

I think some of my mods there are not even in FAFs mod vault and FAF does not care.

i take it that this is a corepart of the platform ..

answer me this: is PAMM a corepart of PA?

We all probably want it to be at least I'd say.
The underlying mod hooks for UI mods are a core concept of PA. But those hooks are so extremely user unfriendly nobody likes to install mods by hand with them.

in that case you may aswell go and try to/create a PAFclient or turn PAMM into it

also just happened to run into this interview regarding FAF if you are interested ..

What I should have said was "Improving the stock UI will not stop people from using UI mods."

I was under the impression you wanted the default UI improved rather than having to rely on UI mods, that way everyone would have the same UI and not be using mods. The problem with this is as long as PA supports UI mods someone (or a group of people) are likely to use UI mods, even if Uber improves the stock UI.

i simply have no interest in using mods due to grouppressure ..
i say the use of ui mods depends on how sufficient the baseclient is .. IF it ever reaches the neccesary sufficience those mods arguebly cease to be neccessary other than idk personal preferance ..
again it´s all about mods NOT providing a clear advantage over players that don´t use/don´t know of these mods ..
other than that i agree with @elodea that there should be a clear ruleset for competitive play that assures fair and even matches that are all down to playerskill and knowledge of the basegame ..

just because you can use mods/ mod the the game doesn´t mean you should
similar to just because you can cheat, steal .. .. kill .. be a butthole .. etc ..

great initiative ! : D I do want this since before PA kickstarter even finished!

I'm wasn't arguing for or against the use of UI mods, I'm was simply pointing out that as long as the game supports them, they will be used, even if the stock UI is improved.

This isn't a valid comparison at all.

Your list is full of things that aren't allowed (well maybe not being a butthole) you aren't allowed to cheat, you aren't allowed to steal you aren't allowed to kill. I'm not saying people don't do these things, but they are clearly against the rules (be it the rules of the game or the rules of society) These acts are immoral and there is consensus on them being wrong.

Using UI mods is currently allowed by design of the game. Maybe in the future that will change, maybe it won't but at this time there is no reason to suspect that a player is not allowed to use UI mods. There is no consensus on the use of UI mods being immoral or wrong, this very thread is evidence of the lack of consensus.

In your own view using UI mods may be comparable to those things but it is not a comparison based on fact, it's a comparison based on opinion.

thing is however FAF is no longer vanilla FA they are two different programms even if the former makes use of the latter ... even the admin in the interview says that ... as such what the consequence would be that people will go away from vanilla titans and eventualy go to whatever PAMM/PAF may turn out to become .. for better or worse ..

i personaly stopped playing FAF and FA entirely ...

says who?

... it´s simply POSSIBLE .. and that´s it ...


there was NO official statement from the devs to weither we can or can not use mods in competitive play


there however WAS a statement regarding mods that use existing KS commandermodels
that the devs don´t want to be used ..
so you can take that as example of limited use of mods ..


subjektive moral says you shouldn´t use mods in competitive play
unless stated so in a ruleset the community agrees on ..