» Sat May 19, 2012 4:40 am
Just to provide anecdotal evidence, I made a needs mod that applied penalties via actor effect when you became hungry, tired, or thirsty (which is pretty standard, it ended up being the way New Vegas applied its hardcoe mode penalties.) The way actor effects work though, if you alter or remove the changes they make in an update, it will permanently alter the players stats if they are under any of those effects at the time of updating. At one point enough of my users had requested a rebalancing of penalties that I decided to edit those effects. That update needed a big disclaimer telling users to first click the "disable and dispell all effects for update or uninstall" button that was built into the mod before uninstalling and updating. Even so I'm sure a lot of users ignored the instructions and messed up their games unknowingly. An auto-update feature would be completely oblivious to such instructions. In order to work, all mod authors would need to write their updates in such a way as to be compatible with a simple replacement of .esp files, which in that case would have been a major headache. Most mod authors are not going to go to the trouble.