In my opinion, making the tools the devs used for game creation available to the modding community is the single biggest factor in the longevity of games today.
AMEN TO THAT.
some of my fondest memories of games like CoD:UO, CoD2, CoD:Mw was the mods and custom maps running on the servers.
I after MW1 was released, I didnt sleep for 2weeks because i was constantly playing it. after that initial 2 weeks i dropped the game entirely because I just got sick of stock maps. I even stopped joining in with my clan and doing scrims because I just couldnt stand the sight or thought of playing on a map that ive spent the last 24hrs marathoning.
then custom mods, maps and weapons came in, and i found a server that was dedicated to running custom maps and they had some greatest maps ever! they even modded the killstreak artillery strike into a massive meteor shower then later on a massive laser cannon which was just hilarious. It totally re-new'd my love for the game and i carried on playing it until World at war was released.
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Im guessing Activision just dislikes that the community can come up with better content then they can so they deliberately lock us out of the game then charge us $10 for a shoddy map pack thats 80% made up of rehashed material albeit with a reskin and a few minor tweaks and changes here and there.
So in a sense the community is being punished for being too successful in their endeavour to make a game a better game.
devs shouldnt think negatively of modders and should show a huge interested and excitement about what sort of direction that community can take their game in and what cool things they can bring to the game. Devs should challenge the modding community instead of punishing us.
Most modders i know of just modded maps as a hobby and have no indepth or prior knowledge of making stuff with dev tools. unlike most of the dev team who are probably educated to quite a high degree in what their doing
but hey, If we dont get bored of their games within a year. no-ones gonna wanna buy the next edition right??? (Im refering to Activision knocking out 1 Cod game every year)