Traditionally modders made their own way, wrote their own docs, discovered things our selves and shared those discoveries on the forums. Frogboy is from the generation of modders that worked that way. From a period in time when editors where rare or restricted to basic map editors. Modding was frowned up on and modders battled hard for acceptance.

Devs that wanted their games to be modded left the files editable directly or indirectly. Those that didnt left us having to hack the files to get access to them and edit them. Staying clear of the exe with the DRM was and still is requirement if you want to mod a game.

What todays generation of modders are asking for is fully functional middleware to be thrown in with the game and fully documented. Attractive though that is, it is never going to happen. You have to pay £100s if not £1000s for that, so your not going to get it for free just because you paid £25 for a game. 

What happens from here on in is down to us modders, we make our own future. Stardock has given us a good start, but they have games to make and if we are honest, would not we prefer them to focus on that ?

Long story short, we will figure it out our selves, that is where the fun in modding starts. All we have to do is keep posting what we figure out as Heavenfall has been doing. In the end we will master it and have the docs we need.

I agree with Heavenfall, despite all the talk about supporting modding, I see very little evidence of it actually happening. Has there ever been a dev comment in a modder's request thread, either for WoM or FE? Never mind having one of those requests fulfilled.

Maybe they'll get to it after the first expansion (is that really being released in January? Seems awfully fast, 3 months after FE's release), but I'll believe it when I see it..

I will wait to see what happens after the expansion. The official position and comments by the devs have promised stuff and then not delivered. That is true. But they had some pretty good reasons for not delivering for WoM. No money. Then FE came out and we got stickies as "mod support" or perhaps they count the thread detailing the modding tools too. I think for me, I have been using all that stuff since WoM, so it's not new or support. Really, there are only a handful and serious modders and we have all been expecting them to deliver on some promises for a long time. Perhaps the problem is that the devs see the scope of modding to just be adding content in simple forms. I would be fine with that if the game was perfect and didn't need to be heavily redesigned to appeal to me. But it does. There are things the game still needs that the devs don't care to add. I am happy to add them myself, but we are extremely limited in our ability to do it due to the scope of modding the devs have planned for. It's a problematic situation. 

I still have to believe that the official position in the OP is their overall intention and that the lack of follow through is due to budget constraints. If that is so, after the expansion they have one last opportunity to invest in modding for the game as much as they have claimed to want to. Selling a more moddable FE is going to be more profitable than selling two Kumquat games with the current modding scope. That seems pretty obvious to me.

I think we should recognize the efforts made. They have done these things that were specifically aimed at modding with no impact on the main game:

- Added a no-object-spawn switch to player-made maps (used extensively by cephalo for Elementerra2)

- Changed the place where we put our mods, originally placed in /mods/ in the installation directory they got their own folder in the "my documents" folder

- Added Wincustomize FE site

- Released the Sovereign Modding Pack

If there's something more I can't bring it to mind. Everything else, as far as I can tell, was just making sure /mods/ could accept new content made by players.

I am pretty sure the IsWorthy calcs are working now. The last two updates had changes in the changelog for those tags. And with AI priority, we can mod much of the AI. We can even create strategies for specific kinds of factions. I don't recall any game that has done more than this.

Well said.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

that is why i have not been complaining about things - because i know that solutions are underway.

Once i have a better idea of what to do and how to do it, i hope to make good contributions like you have.

Maybe if they wanted to show their commitment by addressing a mod bug or two or perhaps answering some requests in the requests thread?

To be just completly honest the most painful thing right now is having to CONSTANTLY reload the client anytime you save an asset in order to see that asset. They desperatly need to have some way to reload assets that are created by the tools, or manually modded outside the tools, without exiting and restarting the client. It is a massive time sink. From a versioning standpoint its really crazy. Also I think this is what causes all the start position and other tile modifiers to stop working after the first save in cartographer. This is a huge problem.

On top of that possibly just a way to start the tools without starting the client.

As someone who has used tools for modding it is getting pretty untolerable for me and I can just imagine someone who just wants to create an object going into those tools hitting save and not seeing their creation, then restarting once they figure it out and making a change and saving then restarting .. ad nauseum there going to give up pretty quick.

In light of a problem like this we really need to differentiate between asking for features and asking for something to not cause us all to throw away an extra 30 minutes per hour of actual modding just from fighting the lack of refresh/reload of assets thats standard functionality in almost any app.

The fact that it can be modded without third party tools says they delivered on that promise.

But speaking as a modder I know we always ask for more than devs give us. Modders are like bucket full of wild ideas, we all read what the devs say, think wow my idea is possible and then the game appears and the idea does not work, we assume the devs broke their promise but the reality usually is that they did not even consider that idea or had something else in mind.

For example Frogboy says you could make a Baldurs gate style game out of it, first thought I had was of a real Baldurs gate style game. Then I sat back and remembered the FE campaign and worked out what he meant by that. Yes we could make a Baldurs game STYLE game out of it, but it would be EXACTLY what you might consider to be Balduers gate style. If I made plans based on it being exactly like Baldurs gate, I may be very disappointed. But if I adapt the idea to FE, I think Frogboy would be right and the idea would be possible.

When Frogboy said he fears what modders will do with the system, I laughed my head off because I know exactly what he means. 
It is a question of expectations and interpretation

Anyway, these things just take time to get going and it will be down to us modders to do it.

Modding attracts a lot of wanna bees, people who need their hands holding, I like to promote modding as a fun creative hobby but 30 years modding stuff has taught me the hand holders will never make anything. Only those that dive right in ever produce anything worth while.

Mark my words, the doers are the people you should be watching.

Speaking for my self, all I ask is that the devs answer the odd techy question from time to time but I do not expect it, I just hope they will.

I'm more than glad to offer a helping hand if anyone has any questions, but sometimes I see follow-up questions that really give me pause as to who I'm actually helping. They  just make me go "why didn't you just try it yourself?". Instead of asking a question and waiting half a day for a response, just plug it in and see what works and what doesn't.

Out of curiosity what game was more accessibly modable in your mind?  

Warcraft 3, StarCraft 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Never Winter Nights 2  All of which included editors published or released by the same company that released the game, with either lots of documentation or at least lots of examples.