Category: opinion

  • Modders Who Host Their Mods on Discord

    Versus Players Who Want Those Mods Without Joining Discord

    For clymax’s projects, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube or Twitter.

    The following exhange occurred in an older thread on the r/romhacking subreddit.

    Let’s have a look at one of the replies first, which also summarizes the OP:

    There is some real irony to you linking this out to a wordpress blog instead of just posting the discussion on reddit.

    That said, I read it, and reading the words “r&t@rds,” “discuck” and “r&tardati0n” make it immediately clear you aren’t upset about anything real or relevant – like discords not being archived or easily backed up and not being a good replacement for forums or other types of more centralized repos but just your very weird distaste for discord. You then phrase it in a heavy iamthemaincharacter way when you state “It’s amazing how these mf do everything in their power to piss me off!” and honestly I think that’s enough of a summary of your bad take. You don’t even address it as a community problem – which it absolutely could be – but only as a personal slight to you. No one makes romhacks for you. No one who makes romhacks cares about you. And if anything, you being this obnoxious is only likely to make someone want to piss you off.

    You are a vulgar twit with a worthless perspective and I’m glad these people piss you off, as you deserve to be pissed off.

    Now for some excerpts from OP’s linked blog post (the highlighting is from the blog post):

    LET’S TALK ABOUT THE R&T@RDS IN THE MODDING COMMUNITY THAT ONLY USE DISCORD AS THEIR ONLY SOURCE OF THEIR WORK

    …

    In the BHDN forum, there was a user by the name of “hikikomori” that was working on a romhack of pokemon red called “Plaguemon”.

    I actually really enjoyed watching his progress, the dude has talent, not only he redesigned all the pokemons to make they look like some lovercraft creatures, he also implemented a lot of new features in the rthe game. But for some reason, hikikomori never posted back in bhdn, he didnt even posted his romhack in there. Actually, he didnt posted his romhack in any romhack site for what I know. So where did he uploaded his romhack then?

    IN HIS FUCKING DISCORD SERVER OF COURSE!!!!!

    It’s amazing how these mf do everything in their power to piss me off! Why can’t you guys just upload your hacks on some romhack site or make your own site like a normal person? I don’t want to join your discord server. I dont want to make part of your community. I dont want to read your retards takes. I dont want obey your stupids rules. I just want to play your mod until I get bored and move on to my day.

    …

    I shouldn’t be surprised at this point. This is the future of the romhacking/modding community.

    “Join in your centralized honeypot server for the mediafire/mega/dropbox link of our mods.”

    Well, I don’t know about you, but I gonna show those mf how to do a good work! I went in their discord server and grabbed all the mods shared in there and uploaded on archive.org.

    The blogger apparently thinks grabbing Discord-hosted mods and reposting them on the web without mod-author permission is showing the modders how things should be done.

    For some reason, the blogger didn’t even: try to actually show the modders how things should be done, by making his own mods and sharing them on the web and not on his Discord server.

    Maybe it’s because in this day and age, by the time the blogger actually finished a mod, he wouldn’t want to put it on the web anymore. He’d also want his mod put on Discord instead.

    It’s a case of the blogger seeing things from the player perspective but refusing to acknowledge that the perspective of the modder should matter. At all.

    So, what’s the bigger problem for the hacking scene, if any? Modders who want players to join Discord? Players who want the mods without joining? Or preservation of the mod knowhow for the scene in general?

    Bonus: Related Video – Fire Emblem 8 Machinima

    What do you think? What’s your take on mods being hosted on Discord? Comment below, or come check us out on Discord, where many (but not all) or our mods are hosted.

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  • PSA: Discord Opts Users In to Being Pinged

    With No Way Out Except Tediously Doing So for Each Individual Server

    Disclaimer: the opinions contained in this post are personal opinions of clymax and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone else in or outside of the FFV Central community.

    1. Case Study

    Unidentified Final Fantasy Modding Discord of ~2,400 Members

    September 10, 2025

    [Server Admin A pings everyone asking everyone in advance to please refrain from discussing irl topic X.]

    [User backlash ensues. More pings occur from other moderators.]

    User A: pinging everyone was a mistake tbh, it’s going to have the exact opposite of the intended effect

    I’m in over 100 servers all about totally different things and yet only one of them did ” HEY @ EVERYONE DONT TALK ABOUT THIS ONE THING!!! “

    i dont care about being pinged I’m trying to tell you that your idea of pinging everyone is horribly backfiring which surely you’ve already realized by now

    Server Admin B: i have a hot take………. why does everyone in ANY way care about being pinged

    like…….. literally who cares

    clymax: Imho it’s Discord that dropped the ball bigtime, allowing no way for a user to opt into or opt out of all notifications across all servers [including future servers].

    This means that pinging a user can amount to forcing them to [immediately] reassess whether to block notifications on this Discord specifically.

    Game-Modification Team Member: You can set your ping settings on a server as soon as you join it. I always recommend doing this so you don’t get hit by pings you don’t want.

    clymax: Many of us have 100 or 200 Discords. No one wants to go through and manually block each one, esp. when that list changes continually.

    [Editor’s note: Not flexing here, as what is there to flex? But because I’ve been in Discords large and small, I’ve observed how users have responded to being pinged in Discords both much larger than and much smaller than FFV Central.

    Also, images added for context.]

    2. Another Case Study

    Unidentified Retro Gaming Server of ~600 Members

    [Server Admin pings everyone continually on various updates to the server. Presumably, an exodus of members ensued, and the Server Admin found out why.]

    August 20, 2024

    Server Admin: Sorry everyone for all
    The notifications I was in the process of of building the server I will not @-everyone like that ag[a]in. Sorry for the inconvenience

    August 21, 2024

    clymax: No worries bro, the problem is with Discord tbh. Not only is the following option not available, but it’s also the opposite setting by default
    (see: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/23790790573207-Disable-everyone-Notifications-Across-All-Servers )

    You’re doing a great job btw. Seems Discord just really wants ppl to ping each other more 🤣

    Server Admin: Yea it’s garbage but it is also my fault I just wanted to make sure everyone could see what they needed and could navigate the server I got carried away lol

    I appreciate it and yes lol seems that way. I have this server more set up so I shouldn’t need to tag everyone there is a directory we have channels for everything but will have a couple more for another project ppl can see what they need to and or want to leveling system entertainment channels the works lol

    clymax: Bro I get where you’re coming from. I have a project thread in RHDN forums for my FFV hack. Every time I update my post I have to resist the urge to bump my own thread 🤣 Otherwise it’s buried—rn it’s not even listed on page one anymore.

    Server Admin: 😂exactly I just feel like it’s more important than it really is I guess because of the time I put into it it’s my baby lol but @ is a bad habit

    clymax: Could even have a self-managed role to get news about latest Discord-server updates, but the updates will probably be less frequent as the server grows tbh

    Server Admin: We have that to[o]

    Yup the roll[role] selection there are a few to choose from or all of you want

    clymax: Nice

    Server Admin: Yea that way
    You can see what you want and hopefully not get notifications from what you don’t

    3. From Around the Web

    If I need to be the one showing you these memes, maybe you don’t use Discord as much as you think you did. Just maybe.

    Memes aside, even a cursory web search can let you gauge how Discord users feel about this subject.

    4. A Workaround for Server Admins

    Did you just send, or allow some user to send, an everyone or here ping?

    Congratulations, this is how I respond as a user, as Discord prevents users from opting out once across all and future servers. And I assure you it’s not just me.

    Before and after screenshots below.

    Yes, allowing pings to happen only ensures fewer and fewer will actually get the pings over time.

    Solution for Discord owners? Disable pings for all roles, including everyone and here, with the lone exception of possibly the moderation role.

    Create new self-managed roles of different types, with “alerts” clearly in the role name. Do not opt users in to any of these roles by default.

    Enjoy not exacerbating a problem that Discord created.

    So, what do you think? Agree or disagree? Comment below, or come check us out on our Discord (where role pings are disabled, I might add).

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  • The “Stop Making Games” Initiative Must Be Stopped—and Here’s Why

    Love Him or Hate Him, Pirate Software’s Jason “Thor” Hall was Right All Along

    This is an opinion piece by clymax. It does not represent the opinions of FFV Central or of any other contributor or player of the FFVC community.

    clymax is a romhacker and aspiring indie dev who has familiarity with IP in the realm of gaming. His flagship hacks include the Whirlwind mod for FFV and the Item Randomizer for The Battle of Olympus. You can follow clymax’s projects via FFVC or YouTube.

    The “Stop Making Games” initiative has put forth a proposal that is highly destructive to prospects of future live service games being made.

    Significantly, the proposal does not allow any off-ramp for live service games to exist in their current form.

    Developers (and publishers) should have the right to design and honestly advertise a game as one that they can sunset at will for any reason or no reason.

    Players should have the right to fully knowingly choose to play such games. That is, players should have the right to fully knowingly rent or license a game if they so choose.

    Players should not have the right to deprive other players from types of games they willingly and fully knowingly play if they so choose.

    That is, players should not have the right to stand in the way of other players when such players wish to rent or license a game.

    Neither do they have the right to deprive developers from the right to design and honestly advertise a type of game they choose to make.

    Just because certain players will not be paying customers should not mean that a game should be banned from the marketplace altogether.

    The proposal, which effectively requires server binaries to be relinquished on sunsetting a game, with no off-ramp for a developer not to do so, deprives the live-service game developer of private property rights over the server binaries, such as copyright and trade secret, regardless of how the game is advertised.

    As a result, developers ranging from indie to AAA would—and frankly, should—conceivably in many cases cancel or refrain from starting a live service project altogether.

    What will this mean for consumer choice?

    In the case of indie devs, one can imagine that in today’s competitive markerplace, in many cases they are sustained only by a passion for what they set out to make.

    Having bureaucrats boss devs around in telling them what games they can make and how they must make such games: what do you think it does to that passion?

    Do you think it would lead to more or better games being made?

    Do you think it would lead to more people wanting to become devs?

    As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

    It is a grave mistake to evaluate a campaign based on its intent rather than its logical outcome.

    Hence, this post names the campaign based on the latter and not the former.

    If players want to see live service games with post-sunset plans for staying operational, the solution is to lower barriers to entry so that more of such games can be made and outcompete their sunsetting counterparts.

    The solution is not to raise barriers to entry through more regulation, which also hurts indie devs disproportionately compared to AAA studios.

    For a vibrant gaming landscape tomorrow with honestly advertised games that cater to the broadest range of gaming tastes, oppose the “Stop Making Games” initiative—at least in its current form as of this writing—until an off-ramp is put in place.

    Otherwise, it will replace what we have today with an even bigger problem: certain games many of us would have loved, no longer being made.

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