Like these things on the workshop tend to go I will first thank the ones who have been and still are thankful and supportive of what modders are doing to keep this game alive. The rare nuggets of positivity you see in a flood of other comments are what gets us through the day. We do the things we do for you and appreciate it if you take the time to go out of your way and comment something positive. You are the people who make modding worth it!


And now we continue with the bad part, as is customary too. Many good and engaged modders have stopped modding recently. This mostly has to do with comment sections quickly becoming an echo chamber of negativity, an "us vs them" mentality going on - community vs. modder. Server owners are so used to feeling important and being catered to that they forget that modders are humans too and that they provide everything they do - in their hobby no less - for free, no strings attached.

Don't let the kofi links on my or any mods out there fool you. In all the time I have modded I received a grand total of about 50 bucks from around 15 random people (outside of PA and server owners I did not have previous ties to and / or work with). People tend to have that "modders are only doing it for the money" notion in their head as soon as they place a donation link there. I am not one of these and I doubt anybody is pulling good cash from random workshop donations. It has never been about money with me, I always wanted to help the community by providing all i create to them for free, and then PZ MP was dropped and it became ugly for modders really quick.

Speaking of it - I am not feeling good about the workshop at the moment. I wake up in the morning, see the green envelope and already know it is not going to be something positive because positivity is rarely if ever shared. I used to browse the most recent mod updates and additions out here because I was excited what the community cooks up. The mod scene for PZ is alive and healthy. After a while however I could not bear seeing reupload, "tweak" and modpack after modpack anymore, stretched over multiple pages, so I stopped opening it altogether. I have not checked for new mods for months by now. Every comment section I see is filled with demands, insults and "foot in mouth" reports like "doesn't work" without ever elaborating or even answering to follow-up questions. There's also the regular "my question is answered in description / FAQ / one comment above mine but i will ask regardless" stuff to look forward to. Rarely you see anything positive anymore.

There are top 10 servers out there who instead of being a proper example of how things should be done rely on modpacks (which of course cause conflicts with the properly used mods when people join other servers) and they perceive the mods to be their property because the code within has readable source code, as it happens to be with Lua being a script language. The vanilla game also uses tons of Lua code and it is also not free to redistribute. How that is different is beyond me. If a piece of software has legible source code it does not mean you are the owner of it or it has a licence for you to reuse and redistribute as you see fit. You perceive it as your right to deprive the ones whose work you advertise in your server ads of the smallest measurable metric of success - the subscription count, as well as the right to their own code which rarely anybody seems to acknowledge.

If you, after over a year of PZ multiplayer, still do not have an auto reboot script or mod running you are the only one at fault for your downtimes, not modders updating their work. Why not try an auto reboot solution?

Here's a mod doing it - yes, a mod checking for mod updates! https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2844315442

Here's a professional server tools suite with that feature which we on PA also use and which co` has developed for us in the first month of PZ MP!
https://github.com/quarantin/pz-server-tools

Where there is a will, there is a way but sadly there does not seem to be a will to do things properly that often.


This is a quote from another PZ discord named "Sunday Drivers" where the friend of a well known map modder spoke a few choice words about the current state of the PZ community.

Originally posted by RockAndStone:

You will find conflict always with modders and server owners because server owners have arbitrary expectations from modders and it creates a strange dynamic where modders are shamed for updating their stuff. This is not the only game that has the problem, I think what would be good is if servers owners took caution when adding stuff to their server. There is no obligation for modders to bend backwards for servers and I think that is why you find many modders quitting. They get constant abuse and it ruins them mentally.

I know i am taking a side here but I have been friends with D for a while and I have seen the stuff he has dealt with. It's just another example and constant reminder that modders are massively disrespected although they pour 1000's of hours into free content. I can't really disagree with his reasons for being upset but I do not think he should have brought it up. I think it is mostly a cry for understanding because modders get very little of that.

Is this how things are supposed to be? Is this how content creators should be treated?