Vanilla Mods to Community Mods-The *CML*

[HoneyBadger]

There are a *lot* of excellent mods being made right now. People enjoy them, the quality is high, and they fill gaps in the game that are welcome to be filled-at least by most.

Why should they be "second-class citizens", doomed to be scorned in Multi-Player and heckled by purist/elitists as "non-canon"?

The community put their money down and the community put a lot of hard work into making mods, so why shouldn't the community have a means of making the transition between what is an "official" nation, accepted in multi-player, and what is not.
So. A format, a medium, is needed to facilitate the transition from what is *not* accepted by the greater community, to what *is*.
It also adds a bit of prestige to creating mods, which isn't a bad thing, considered the time and effort involved, and the benefits to all.

What the primary purpose of this thread is, is to allow everyone to vote to include a given mod in the prestigious 'Community Mod List'. This is a list of mods that has been voted on and accepted by the Dominions 3 Community at-large as a standard of quality, balancing (for vanilla or within the confines of a given particular "mod universe" incase anyone wants to mod a whole collection of nations and balance them against each other), and finally, relevance for multi-play. The Devs are free to vote, but the 'Community Mod List'-the "CML" is separate from, and has no connection to, Illwinter, Shrapnel Games, or any other affiliate, company, or institution.

The secondary purpose of this thread is to help define what the "Vanilla Standard" is, what "quality" in a mod should represent and aspire to, and finally, to outline some community multi-player "house rules" for a community multi-player game.

Tertiarily, I'm hoping it will help strengthen the game as a whole, as old and new ideas are accepted or rejected as more or less "thematic" or "canon" in the game, and as current Official Dev-Nations are 'held up to the light' of community mods, as it were.

The way the voting will work is thus. If you wish to propose a Mod for OUML status, just post it in the thread. If some else seconds it, it will go on to the vote. To be accepted as CML, it has to have atleast 30 votes, and the permission of the person who created the mod-unless that person is unavailable. If permission isn't denied after 30 days by the creator, the mod becomes CML. It's atleast kinda-sorta canon from that point on, and can not be excluded from any sort of CML multi-player game-hopefully, people will start hosting these-unless the rules of that particular CML multi-player game explicitely deny that particular CML mod.

Anyone can submit a mod for voting, and, ofcourse, anyone can create a mod, but in order to vote, you have to be atleast a "Corporal" in Dominions Forum ranking. Sorry, that's just the way it works. I think it takes somewhere around 50 posts to achieve the rank of "Corporal". It just cuts down on spam-voting and that sort of nefarious business, and assures that the people voting have atleast some idea of the issues at hand.

If it's found out that anyone's engaging in any sort of shady voting business, then steps to prevent them screwing things up for the rest of us will be taken. I'm not sure what those steps will be, but I'm sure I can think of something nasty.

If a mod is voted in, it can still be vetoed from the CML status. This requires 50 negative votes, and each negative vote must come with a good reason to deny the mod. A mod under the same name can then be resubmitted to the CML by the creator of the mod, after 30 days.

Hopefully, this will end up expanding greatly the options and then fun of creating mods and playing mods, especially in multi-player games.