ProMods

Few posts ago, I expressed my amazement at your version of Andorra. In fact, most of the time, I express my amazement for the most amazing mod available for this game, that kept me driving for 45 levels and almost 400 hours. Few months back, you had the developers support.

But when I hear that you had to cancel Barcelona, it is a huge letdown, all down to the elitist attitude of senior members of the team. Don't get me wrong (you obviously will; happy with another warning!), but over the past year, I've seen you complain about mappers having bad attitude (understandable in certain circumstances, but surely it's about mapping quality? You can always work on communication...), and now you make a scene about how "toxic" is the environment around which without you wouldn't ever exist.

Found this Reddit randomly over Google, and I'm not the only unhappy person about this:

Now you're seeing the effects of your drama queen act; you're letting yourself down by your elitist behaviour, as SCS are clearly firing back, by not letting you use their assets (your "ATS is not released yet" argument doesn't resonate with me). I guess they don't trust you lot now, after labelling them "toxic" after they made you a game you can mod, and presumably have fun modding. You blew it.

But then again, it is childish of them to behave that way. If the reason is that ATS is not released yet, how can they tell you not to release something, if the assets haven't been made available in a game? Surely it's intellectual property they can't claim rights to, or have I missed something?

Whatever it is, I wish you'd speak out less aggressively, and focused more on mapping. Maybe we'd get the releases sooner that way?

Sorry but please stop this pointless argument as you clearly know nothing
We are NOT allowed to release content with ATS assets before ATS is released
It was the deal from the start as a consequence no Barcelona
We are all truly sorry about that but nothing can be done about it

I'll stop, to avoid further spam. But it just seems to give quite a bad impression, when a post like the one about the community comes out from the Promods team, and then SCS refuse them the right to release content with their assets (something that hasn't been a problem in the past).

HighFlyerPL185 wrote:...and now you make a scene about how "toxic" is the environment around which without you wouldn't ever exist.

It's not the SCS employees who're toxic. It is the cadre of "Moderators" who by and large seem unable to keep the forums from being "toxic." That is the primary reason why I've given up going there except to look for updates to specific mods that I've grown to like and use.

I have been a moderator for several flight simulator websites for over well over a decade. I know just how hard it is to maintain a balance of neutrality and how to accomplish "moderate" moderation. Far too often I've seen the mods at the SCS forum "fanning the flames" rather than trying to keep them extinguished.

In which case, I apologize for coming off hot-headed in my post above, but I will still upkeep what I said in my follow up post, that it gives a bad impression. I just vaguely remember when they made a huge death skull picture, and a massive writeup about how we should avoid the forum, as they promote piracy.

I'm not on anyone's side but wouldn't that shout "attention seeking" to you? Childish behaviour on both sides.

Let's end this here.

Can please stop this discussion? This is a part of Development updates, not a part of Offtopic. Thanks

But we don't want that people release work with our content too without permission? I can perfectly see where SCS is coming from with this one.

And to set a few things straight: the message from SCS that we shouldn't use ATS assets in our released version of ProMods was sent to us two or three months ago, way before the whole Unlocker-discussion exploded. It gets quite confusing that the SCS forums is mainly not managed by SCS itself. We have a good relation with SCS, but not with their forum team.

The notorious blog post was set up by ScuL right after our whole topic at the SCS Forums was deleted because of this Unlocker-discussion. However, it was taken down the next day after the rest of the team thought that this blog post was not a good idea. It brought another shitstorm right here at our forums and I had to lock that discussion in order to calm everybody down before anyone there would say something they really regret. Following on that, I went to approach this problem diplomatically to calm down the discussion. Think about it, there is a lot going on behind the scenes trying to close this can of worms once it has been opened. And think about that I have to do this besides my modding work, and more importantly, my real life work on my MSc. Thesis. (I sometimes wonder how I can keep sane with this kind of workload)

Another thing is that I'm getting quite mad about is that people are calling us "elitists" in a negative fashion. It's like having two artists showing their work to the public in the following way:

Artist #1: "Look, I've picked this drawing of Mickey Mouse and made his pants blue!"
Public: "Ooh, great work!"
Artist #2: "Look, I've spent two months on this panoramic oil painting of the Swiss Alps."
Public: "Let me change the sky color and publish this as a new sequel to your work under my name."
Artist #2: "No, sorry I can't allow you to do that. All I ask is a bit of respect for my work."
Public: "You elitist cunt! You should be ashamed!"

This is how it feels for us, and it hurts when people saying this. You may have played this mod for hundreds of hours, but we have put many thousands of man-hours in the mod, all done purely on motivation and love for the game. We don't mod to be elitist, we do it out of passion! If we didn't, we would've quit a long time ago.

The team started out with just two persons, when there was not much content and you could still co-ordinate between each other quite easily. But the team did grow, and the size of the team demanded more organisation. Suddenly, sharing WIP files on Dropbox became more and more of a problem for certain team members, so we needed a new file host. Suddenly, the group grew so large that some discussions and notifications within the team needed a more permanent place. Suddenly, we needed good communication about who works where in other not to get in the way of each other. Suddenly, one Skype chat was not enough to organise all the important things. And the new devs are out-classing some of the older devs with their work, so the older devs try to keep up with that, while in the mean time the map grows quite exponentially. And oh, we may have to re-think our marketing strategies. Do you see where this is going? The way our team has grown has made us become the elite, because otherwise the team would have fallen apart into chaos. But again, it was never our main goal to become the elite.

But calling us "elitists" parctically insults our stance of being very passionate about the thing we do. That this is a bad thing. And think for yourself: if someone said that about something you love to do, you would feel bad about it too and think it's a ridiculous way of thinking. Or am I thinking in odd ways?

To conclude, this whole discussion started with what? An exclusion of two cities in Spain to make sure the other 66 cities are released soon? Come on! This is one of our biggest releases ever and all you worry about is that you can't drive 3% of the new content? As if the addition of Romania was nothing! And again, many of you overlook the main reason why we postpone this area:

This area is simply too far from being ready and it would delay the rest of the release!

So this would make the whole ATS asset discussion moot.

EDIT: Read that reddit topic. All the hate I read there just makes me so sad

Sorry to hear about that Barcelona and Manresa has been postponed. As many i was looking forward to Barcelona in 2.0, but i fully understand your reasons to postpone the release of the area. I didn't know that you have access to ATS assets even before it's release, but that shows that there are indeed good contact between ProMods and SCS

I don't understand those who insult ProMods. I'm sure that PM developers do their best to make as much ready as soon as they can. They in other words do their best. So keep up the good work PM-team. I still very much look forward to the awesome 2.0 release

I have a question: Now that Barcelona and Manresa won't be ready for 2.0, what about Andorra la Vella and the development in the Basque area? Are Andorra la Vella and some Basque citities to be released in 2.0, or will they also wait to a later version?

I just looked at the list of the Blue Team members and I counted 24 total members who are working hard to create a new and wonderful experience while playing ETS 2. That's 24 volunteers who are giving up their free time to give us a better gaming experience. All they ask of us is to respect their hard work. I can except and appreciate that request.
I find it very amazing that 24 people ( each with their on ideas and skill sets/levels ) can get together and create such a wonderful and diverse map. I would not want to attempt to try to organize such an undertaking especially considering how many different countries and languages are represented by this group of talented individuals. The Blue Team has my up most respect and I say "Thank You Very Much".
If you need to wait until the next release to give us more of the Iberian Peninsula then so be it. At the rate this mod is growing I figure it will coverall of Europe by this time next year anyway. So only getting 67 new cities instead of 69 is not that big of a deal to me.


Thank You,
Robert

Well said smith121363. Couldn't have said that better myself.

By the time 2.1 comes out hopefully ATS will be released (I don't see why it shouldn't be). Then in 2.1 we will get lots of the Iberian Peninsula. So much content in 2.0 as it is and i'm still curious if there's content they haven't told us about.

Also unfortunate seeing MandelSoft having to write such a long post as it takes away from mapping and bug fixing