Okay, I'm not quite sure where to begin with this post, but I'll just start.

One staple in many Elder Scrolls games that garners huge support is modding, and Zenimax and Bethesda know that people mod the hell out of their games. That's why they're going to allow UI mod support.

But what about altering how our character or clothes look?

It doesn't affect others, and it only enhances our gameplay to make it more enjoyable. nvde mods, character beautification mods, generally just mods to make characters look better or more realistic would be in high demand. So, since it gives no advantage whatsoever and it would only need to be on the players computer, think that they'll allow these mods too?

Nope. Its an Online game. You open the door to exploits. If you're able to change models than you could technically make it so stealthed players appear bright red so you can see them. or make a mod that shows a players hit box or any number of things that would cause unfair advantage.

...Mmm, no. I don't think you could exploit it like that. I'm talking about altering skins for RP. Nothing major.

Mods were discussed many times on this forums. Everytime it ends with: Nope, doesn't work online.
If it's possible, somebody will definitely, without any doubt, use it for exploits, i.e. invisible clothes, alerting colors, looking through walls etc...

Well, it is possible. Absolutely. If you have access to the game-data and you can manipulate it, you open the seven gates of exploit-hell.
Zenimax knows that.

"Skins" means textures. Textures means transparency i.e...to be able to change transparency...well there it is: an exploit.
The only way to stop people from doing it is to extensively test mods...and zenimax doesn't have hundreds of people to do that.
And still: People would try to sneek around it and the war between modders and testers would begin.
Eventuelly they would stop the modding-posibilities. So they are clever and don't even start it


Although I have to admit: Changing the textures of your own character and only for yourself (so nobody can see it) may work.
But who wants that many restrictions?

If you allow people to mod textures you do open up the chance for exploits. You might not think that altering skins isn't major but it really is.

No. Never.

Just because you can't think of a way it can be exploited, doesn't mean someone smarter than you can't.

This kind of modding existed in SWG. You could basically retexture anything you wanted or replace any model for your client but it was only for your client.

The way they stopped any potential exploits like making textures invisible and seeing through walls was to lock out the player's manipulation of the alpha layer. That would be a lot harder to do in a game with normal, diffuse, spec and parallax mapping.

There WERE however mods that completely removed lore-breaking elements like certain mini-pets, certain decorative apparel like angel wings and devil tails which were, frankly, dumb as hell.

What stops people from creating giant glowing skins for enemy players to mark them on the battlefield?

Easy solution to the lore breaking stuff is don't have a bunch of dumb freemium vanity crap like that in the game in the first place. lol

Lol modding an online game. Sounds like a good idea.