Ok, this is getting quite annoying. I have my game set, everything is working perfectly, and Steam decides to update something and the game goes haywire.

-At the moment, I can't use the script extender becuase it doesn't recognize the newly-unnecessarily-updated .exe in my folder. So no playing the game with any mods that use SKSE for now.

-The other day, I lost internet, and couldn't play Skryim, an offline, single-player game, all day, because I couldn't get into "offline" mode, without first being online. Does that make sense?

-Downloading mods from the workshop is annoying, because if you decide not to use the mod, you can't just untick it in Wrye Bash, because the workshop will reinstall the esp and activate it. So you have to untick it in Wrye Bash, then
hunt the mod down in the workshop so you can "unsubscribe".

Give me a break. I fail to see how this is helpful to us, and an improvement over how we used to do things. Seems like it may be more helpful to the people on the other end, but not to us, or the modding community.

Just my two-cents...how bout yours?

I don't like the EULA

Something about if you upload your mod to the Workshop it becomes the property of Valve

Unless shown otherwise I'll stay away for that reason alone

Unnecessary to whom? It's in Bethesda's interest to fix bugs. You can uncheck automatic updating in Steam to prevent this in the future.

This is a long-standing general complaint about the Steam platform, and isn't specific to Skyrim (or modding).

It follows that you should uninstall things the same way you installed them. From Steam's perspective, your mod installation is corrupt and needs to be fixed. It can't know you're managing your mods with another utility. And there is no "hunting", there is a link to your subscribed items on the sidebar.

Steam Workshop has been beneficial because it has made modding accessible to everyone. I would say that that's also the primary source of its problems.

Not really, the Skyrim workshop page has links on the right, one of which says Subscribed Items. Pretty straight forward.

The control is for our benefit as well I think (like to look at the positives). If you lost your HDD data, steam would not only let you download the game again to your new HDD, but automatically download all your subscribed mods for you.

I think Steam and the Workshop are great concepts and going the right direction, they just have issues like everything else has at some point.

Not for us folks who purchased the disk version of Skyrim, but are still obligated to install and run Steam in order to run the game.

Well, you're right. I should have unchecked auto-update, which I usually do. I forgot to this time, and now I can't really play the game. That doesn't seem quite right to me. Maybe there's a way to roll back this version of the .exe? IDK, if there is I haven't found it. The modding community did a better job of fixing bugs in Oblivion and Morrowind anyway, and it was a simple download that you chose when to implement. Seems like a better system to me.

On the second point, I realize that has been a steam-specific complaint, not specific to Skyrim. That's why I started a thread complaining about Steam. The whole system worked better without it, for modders and players, in my opinion.

Lastly, modding was accessible to everybody before Steam as well, wasn't it? My point is, the system of the Steam Workshop is inferior to the one already-developed by the modding community, ie Wrye Bash, and other mod-managers. I hadn't noticed the link to the subscribed items yet, so thank you, that does help. I still just feel it's a vastly-inferior system to the ones the community has already developed and been using for years.

...my two-more cents

Some games require things like that. That's life. I'm not thrilled myself, but look at Battlefield 3, Mass Effect 3, Orange Box... great games that require software in the background. Don't get me started on Ubisoft, they don't even let you play some games unless you're online. Atleast steam has an offline option.

eh the workshop is working in the right direction. As far as being easier accessible, I believe it is seeing the workshops right there and for people new to modding, its easier and dont fully need to to know the installation and what not of mods and also some people dont have to search the internet and also theres people that never thought about modding their game or knew u could.

Yes it has problems but also its at its infant stage. Weither there good or crappy mods, I cant find fault in something that actively promotes mods and modding. I can look bad at how the site functions but I cant look down or critize whats its trying to do.

You seem to be complaining about Steam not being a good mod-management platform compared to others. But remember, Steam was not built as a mod-management utility such as Wrye Bash. Steam is a content delivery system, and at this, it excels better than any other system that I know of. I think you are making a general judgement about the value of Steam through the very small and limited lens of how it relates to Skyrim mods, and not as a content delivery platform in general. I am not aware of any other content delivery platform that is as well loved by both consumers and publishers/developers as Steam is.

As far as mod-management is concerned, try and extend a bit of patience. Remember, they've only been doing this for a few months. The modding communities have had over a decade of tools and experience to rely on.

Also, SKSE is *not* how Bethesda intended Skyrim to be modded. Millions upon millions of people play Skyrim and complain to Bethesda if it doesn't work correctly. There is no way that you can expect Bethesda to support add-ons like SKSE, which use DLL injection techniques to overwrite portions of the games memory space. Bethesda has to have some reasonable level of control over the code that users are running in order to be expected to support it. The minute you start hacking it up - even if you are a good hacker - you forfeit any reasonable expectation of support and rightly so.

Then don't opt-in for beta releases and this won't be an issue. There is no public release yet for 1.6.

Of course not. It's one of the things that I utterly despise about this "service" since it doesn't EVER respect my decisions to keep it locked away in offline mode anyway.

I don't have anything currently subscribed, but I'm 99.9% positive you can use the official Skyrim launcher to highlight the mod, then hit the "Steam Workshop" button and go right to the mod in question so you can unsubscribe. I hate Steam as much as the next person, but what Wrye Bash does with the game isn't something Valve or Bethesda have any control over and so they can't be blamed if deactivating a mod using a mod manager isn't telling Steam to stop updating it.

That would be a more solid argument if he was complaining about support as opposed to the transfer of agency.

For the most part - yes, I like Steam. But as a mod author, I use Steam more for the sake of reaching more people. It is the VHS. I use Nexus for the Laserdisk Director's Cut.