Posts from Creating a fund to support modders and creators of new maps.

Large-scale mods cost millions, even tens of millions of rubles (if many people are involved), when calculated based on labor costs. On the other hand, payment for work creates obligations (and deadlines) to those who are paying, with all the resulting problems. Any activity is motivated either by obtaining a resource or by its intrinsic value. So, money is a resource (but not a value), and joy is a value (but not a resource). Resource-based and value-based motivation are fundamentally different concepts. If a mod is created for money, it does not bring joy. And vice versa. In short, you can't reduce everything to money; money is nothing more than an exchangeable resource, and its role is exaggerated (while the importance of joy is underestimated, but its influence is enormous). Creating mods is primarily a creative process, not a solution to specific problems and tasks with a predetermined price. The "mods on demand" model can work when it comes specifically to tasks (like repainting a dragon or making specific changes to characteristics). That is, when it requires a minimum of time (and is relatively inexpensive). Voluntary donations and contributions (for an already finished mod) are a different mechanism. This is not the same as an order, deadlines, requirements, responsibility, expectations, seriousness, and importance. In this case, money acts as a form of gratitude, increasing the value of the work already done. People only make voluntary contributions when they experience joy from it, which is why the value of the work increases, and money then acts as a real, value-based motivation for work that was done for its own sake, rather than for a resource.

I created this thread not for myself, but to encourage modders, mapmakers, and fans of the game. But if no one is interested, then I wash my hands of it. At least I tried.

Thank you anyway; not every idea finds unanimous support and acceptance. Perhaps something else will emerge from it: it won't be in vain, you can be sure of that. No one will give a definitive answer to the question of what the community needs.
The soul is a dark place.

For me, free modding has always been an axiom, and I strongly oppose any form of payment, even in the form of voluntary donations.
Moreover, I am fundamentally against the commercial creative industry.
Creation is something people do for their own enjoyment, realizing their own dreams and desires. If it (a book, a mod, a song, a YouTube video) is released publicly and becomes popular, then a pleasant bonus is the gratitude from those who also liked it, and in special cases - fame.
Money has no place here, unless the project itself requires material investment (such as films, which require huge funds for sets, costumes, etc.).

Yes, modding can sometimes be a pain (finding and fixing bugs, for example), and you can also burn out if you work on the same game for too long and get tired of it.
But in that case, the best solution is to simply step away and do something else. Rather than torturing yourself, while begging for money, trying to artificially motivate yourself.

There will always be someone else to take your place. Someone who has recently become interested in the game and enjoys it.

Turning creation into work is a perversion, in my opinion.

I agree with every word!

Added 1 hour 6 minutes ago
By the way, there is a super-duper map in Heroes 4 called "The Legacy of Zanphas"... it would be great to implement it in Heroes 5
The idea is that there is only one main hero - a light/elf/elf - and you cannot hire other heroes... but there are as many enemies as possible - each enemy is unique in race and, of course, cannot be a light/elf/elf!
I have the music (somewhere)... in the style of Heroes 5!
I also have an idea for a historical map/campaign for orcs... the idea is that orcs are attacked from all sides by enemies, and to raise their morale, a certain orc visits an old shaman, who tells him that the Sky and the Earth told her that he must find two ancient artifacts - the weapon of the Great Chieftain Kashar, a glorious ancestor of the famous Sharka (Sharka... I don't know if the name declines in Orcish), because after the last meeting with the necromancer Anastasia, the fate of the legendary weapon is unknown!
I have the music... in the style of Heroes 5!
If anyone wants to take on the implementation, write to me in a private message... I'll send you the orc music!

Periodically, these discussions about some kind of fundraising for modders pop up. But there are no noticeable results. On the other hand, I see people who, with varying degrees of success, earn something from this endeavor. This genuinely makes me happy, because I understand that thanks to this, modding for the fifth installment won't die out completely. As a person who has more or less stepped away from modding, I want to and can honestly express my opinion about monetization. Firstly, donations are good, but there is little faith that it will work, and even less that it will work well. Regarding commissioned work, comrade Nargott correctly noted that this entails responsibility. Speaking for myself, it turns out that you take a small amount of money, feel bad about it, work a lot, and in the end, you don't really earn money and don't enjoy the mod. But, my sample size is limited, essentially 1.5 commissions. So, it might be different for someone else. In short, this scheme is not interesting to me as a modder. Begging, for example, for 5k per month of work, and still feeling like the worst scoundrel, plus then living under the pressure of the obligations you have taken on. No, thank you, that's not for me. Maybe it works for small mods that are easy to make and where the author doesn't bother with the details. For example, Hunnick. I have a very good opinion of him as a person, and I am impressed by the number of mods he has managed to create. But what doesn't impress me is their quality. I like to do everything as well as possible, as much as I can, and to fuss over the details. With Hunnick's mods, I see at least three or four things in each one that need to be fixed or repaired. And that's extra hours, or even days of work. The fact that Hunnick makes mods superficially and with flaws allows him to release them in such large quantities. And I will reiterate, I am not judging him. I'm just saying that we have different approaches, and these approaches have different advantages and disadvantages. So, Hunnick's approach is still quite suitable for monetization. A mod every one or two weeks. But my approach – a long, tedious creation of a large, high-quality mod with attention to detail – is very, very poorly suited for monetization. Because, frankly, it simply costs a lot of money and requires a lot of time. Here are some things that I would like to do. Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3 A normal, well-made city of Nagas, with normal units and heroes. How much time will it take? Objectively? Probably 6-8 months. Most likely, even more. I have a job, and only 3-4 hours of free time after it, after all. And in that time, I also need to eat and wash. How much will such a mod cost? You can imagine. Would you be interested in spending half a year working until late at night, sacrificing sleep and social life, and a lot more, in reality, for... well, 10 thousand? Screenshot with Kreg Hack Then, I've seen a lot of hero models from new mobile games in the Might and Magic universe. I would like to add them to the fifth installment. But the devil, as always, is in the details. I won't go into them too much. I'll just say that if you take the skeleton from the original models from those games, it turns out very bad, and a normal export/import of the hero skeleton from the fifth installment is not possible now. And this skeleton needs to be rebuilt from scratch. This is actually good, because you can create a universal skeleton for a hero, under which you can conveniently create a large number of different animations and adapt different animations from the game. This is the right approach, with attention to detail and with an eye to the future. I think the disadvantages of this approach are clear? It's long and expensive. As a result, I spent 3-4 weeks with the hero models and the Naga city. I realized that I hate myself, the world, people, I want to sleep and die, and if I don't stop this, it will stop me. So all the work was deleted. And I won't just return to this task. By the way, I was a little offended for this. Once again, I heard "you should have released it in open access." And I try to explain that what I am showing is not a finished, raw work. It looks finished, but it takes a lot of time to appear in the game. In this form, these developments are already in open access. Take archivers, open the games, get the files. I have always written which programs to use for what and have not hidden anything from anyone.

Added 8 minutes ago
Here, you can also add that for the end consumer, the player, paying tens of thousands for a mod is complete nonsense, and I naturally understand this. And that fundraising, attracting donations, community management, advertising, all this is a separate complex job that would have to be done on top of modding and the main job that allows you not to starve. But I won't go into this too much. So, a huge wall of text turned out.

Added 5 minutes ago
Just for the record, if there is a son of an oligarch here who, for some reason, plays the fifth Heroes in 2022, and who really dreams of seeing a really well-made Naga city in this game, or something else made with meticulous attention to detail, then I am open to offers from this person. I won't be upset if he wants to give me "a lot of money".))

During my early years I wanted to become game developer. I did not. Later I found out that was the better choice.

Being a game developer you should always leverage quality for the sake of performance. You get paid X to get Y of production until specific date, so it is a trade off.
Being a modder - that is one of the most joyful things I have done, as I am not dependent on any restrictions beyond my own vision.

Real art is just art, nothing else involved.

Now on the other hand if money is really involved i think the donation model is really what is best. It does not fill your family dinner plate but it is the best tradeoff in order not to sacrifice quality.
In order to work the developer of the mod should have a place to advertise his work - Twitch, Youtube, social media etc.. 

Popularity is what brings the money. Unfortunately the Might and Magic universe is underdog franchize as a whole.

Not to finish with negative - I want to say I believe that despite the narrow popularity of the game I do foresee a bright future for it. 

As long as my fate is benevolent, I will be here for many years to come.

As some speakers mentioned above, if you want to thank someone for their mods and/or maps, send resources directly to them using their payment details. Otherwise, you're reinventing the wheel when you can solve the problem more simply, quickly, and with less risk by sending your money directly to the person.

KillAndAction, your position is clear, but if we choose the option proposed by L'Garold and Leonion, then a number of difficulties arise, related to the organization of the process itself. The mechanism for running contests for modders is not clear.

I was just talking about the idea of a fund.

Perhaps, esteemed KillAndAction will agree to this role. Besides, this person has extensive experience in organizing and running tournaments and contests. And that is exactly what is needed. You couldn't find a better candidate.

Thank you for your trust, but I will immediately decline.

I was talking to MasteR about motivation and monetary rewards. He said that

The only real driving force is genuine interest from a large number of people in the content being created, positive feedback, support, and people's tolerance for mistakes and unconventional ideas. Everything else, including money, which is used to create "drive" and motivation, is just an attempt to poke a stick at a corpse that has long since cooled. This is no longer the case. Some stars flare up, but they fade away quite quickly, because a couple of dozen reviews, half of which are something like "I saw 6 heroes at the start, how awful, how can you play this, I quit," is not enough to morally replenish the strength after a month of hard work on a map. And money? Well, even if someone pays me 5K for a map that I worked on for a month, what's the point if I earn more in a few hours of my regular job?

I once talked to MasteR about motivation and monetary rewards. He said that...

Exactly... golden words!

The idea is interesting.

A noble idea, but unrealistic due to the sheer number of "BUTs."

Custom mods = evil: they are exhausting, the benefit is 0.001%, or you need to make them so well that you won't suffer morally and psychologically xD

My personal advice: if you like a mod/map and want to support it, use Qiwi or Donation Alerts (a very easy way to directly transfer money to the recipient's pocket).

I agree with those who say that this is payment for work. We are not paying for models, gameplay, or music – these are just details that the map editor uses to create content. We are paying a person for the work they do, sacrificing their time, which they could have spent resting or earning the same money. Because, besides their favorite games, people have lives, and they need to pay attention to them as well. In general, Ubisoft should be grateful, because it is thanks to mods, and not their buggy seventh installment, that there is still interest in the game. And when they want to reboot Heroes or release an eighth part, it will be better to do so with a fan base ready to buy the product, rather than a mass audience that doesn't know what Heroes is.
Regarding proposals, I received a few a while ago in the style of "I can make good maps, but I don't know how to write scripts, so let me make a map, and you come up with a plot and add something to it." I think this should be included here as well. It's like players, for free or for money, are looking for companions who will help them refine their work. Someone is good at writing stories, someone knows how to write scripts, and someone can only create beautiful landscapes, but a good map without a plot or a story on a flat piece of grass won't be appealing. In fact, the Heroes games themselves were made by a team, not by one person. Something tells me that no one will do scripts for free, leaving the design to someone else. So, the map editor will decide for himself whether his map is good enough to spend money on and turn it into a scenario.