Monday, January 15, 2018

The No-Mod Rebuttal

My opinion on no-mod content is no secret. I will almost never buy no-mod and neither should you if you value your money, your land or your avatar.

 Okay, okay, there are exceptions. Scripts totally need to be no-mod or they are effectively full perm.  When I talk about no-mod I'm referring to objects. The prims and mesh.  I'm not suggesting scripts need to be full perm. Another possible exception would be items for closed gaming systems where modding could open them up to abuse and cheating. I'm not 100% sold on this as a simple examination of items in a game would reveal if they'd been tampered with but I'm generally willing to give this a pass as such items typically aren't used outside their game context. As for the rest...

When you buy no-mod you are giving up the right to personalize the object beyond whatever meager concessions the creator allows.


 You give up all of this and more when you buy no-mod and get nothing in place of it. Oddly enough, the seller gets nothing by selling you no-mod items either so why, then, is so much content sold no-mod? Well, there's been a few reasons given over the years and we're going to look at each of these reasons one by one and see if they hold any water.

"It protects my work against content thieves/copybot!"

 For over a decade this was not only the most common reason given, but the only reason given. There's one major flaw in this argument however: It is entirely, 100% false. It is simply not true. At no point was it ever true. The people who cling to this justification for no-mod simply do not understand how SL or "copybot" works. Some of those still clinging to this justification today know it's not true but are unwilling to admit they were wrong.

"I don't want my customers ruining my artistic vision!"

This isn't an argument. It isn't a justification. All it is is a declaration of the sellers own professional immaturity. If you're trying to sell anyone on the idea that no-mod somehow benefits the product this is certainly not going to change any minds.

"It cuts down on customer support I have to deal with from customers who break their purchases!"

Or, you know, you could box the content so that your customer always has a backup copy. You can also put in nice big letters "If you broke something, get a fresh copy from the box it came in." at the top of your customer support page. This achieves the exact same goal without crippling the item you're selling.

 And that's pretty much it. These are the only three justifications I've ever seen for selling content no-mod and I always point out the fallacies in these attempts at justification but the person I'm trying to discuss the issue with either doesn't reply at all, or simply restates their original argument as if repeating themselves will somehow lessen my rebuttal.

 How about you? Have you heard other justifications? Do you have some of your own that I might have overlooked? As no-mod becomes more and more prevalent (just try to buy a modifiable mesh body that isn't furry/anime these days, not to mention some of the frightening conversations on the topic over in Sansar discussion boards) I think it's more important than ever to make this a public discussion.

6 comments:

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  3. Sadly for not paying very much attention I got some feet that had the no-mod thing to them. I tried to talk with the creator about it and they said pretty much excuse number 3. Another thing that seems to be going on is some creators trying to make stuff no-mod so they can resell the same item over and over again with just a slight recolor/texture modification. Another excuse I heard is cause they are using Omega so that wouldn't break the product.

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  4. Do you have any tips on how to approach a creator about making their content moddable and/or less Super High Poly Mesh?

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    1. Unfortunately, all you can really do is approach the seller politely and ask, possibly explaining why having mod perms is important to you. In my experience, most will ignore the request, some will decline, but rarely you'll get a creator who is happy to sell a mod version. I know a few who sell no-mod but will provide mod versions if you contact them directly. Always ask before buying the item.

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  5. Now seems there a new thing around this nomod madness some hair stores started to pull out... few hair creator noticed their demo script can be used in the modify hairs with the fatpack hud from the demos... they started to release their newest hairs as no mod and called it a day instead of fix their demo hair script and make it unusable in modify items... *epic facepalm*

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