As someone who is basically illiterate with respect to modding and whatever coding language
weidu mods use, who is barely competent enough to use Shadowkeeper and sometimes
NI, who has very little time to spend digging through tons of forum posts, but who loves
BG2's tactical combat and balance, I think the lack of cohesion in the modding community is its main problem.
I've posted this before, but I think a significant (and in my purely subjective opinion, a very important core) segment of the playerbase is underserved by all the current methods of modding
BG2 right now. If you're playing with <5 mods, even <10, installing manually is the best way to do it. There's not going to be that many compatibility concerns, you can read through them quickly, and then just decide (in cases of "if you choose A in mod 1, don't pick B in mod 2") what you want. If you're installing with
BGT and another megamod, then
BWP is the way to do it. But what if you're like me, and you're in the middle, and want to install something like this:
Honestly, although my "30 mods" sounds like a lot, it's really not if you break it down:
-3 Fixes (Fixpack, BGTTweakpack, Tweakpack)
-6 Game balance/tactical mods (Item & Spell Revisions, SCS, aTweaks & Rogue Revisions, Refinements)
-3 Restored content mods (UB x 2, Ascension)
-10 NPC mods (2 banter mods, 6 of the highest-quality community NPCs, BG1 NPC Project and music pack)
-Level 1 NPCs so I can play with any NPCs for the content and banter rather than being restricted in my party makeup (Fighter-Thief Minsc!)
-2 support mods that make the rest work (BGT and TobEx)
-2 Graphics mods (Widescreen, Enkida's portrait mod).
BWP doesn't allow for customization UNLESS you go into the BiG World Install.bat and cross reference with the PDF and figure out more or less what the coding language means, and delete/add/change the component numbers yourself. Scrolling through that is a huge pain. I like my game somewhere between Tactical and Expert probably, and my component choices matter to me. Who knows what option
BWP picks for "percentage of potions that break when enemies die"? But that has a non-trivial effect on gameplay, so of course I have to go look up the one I want, then check it against the .BAT file, and change it if I have to.
In the end I manually installed everything, but the last time I did this (spending days and days staring at the PDF) I fucked up my installation so bad half the spells didn't work right, leading me to quit the game in frustration for a year. This time it looks like the only bugs in the game are legitimate bugs, and not my poor install order/choices. But even so, it took me a LOT of time to read over everything. And I know when I finish this playthrough, and put the game away for another 6 months or a year, the next time I come back, I'll have to do it AGAIN, days and days of poring over readmes and blah blah with
SR v4 and
SCS v30 and aTweaks v5 or whatever.
I don't want to come off as ungrateful, because the modding community's work is nothing short of amazing, and its existence is keeping vibrant the second best computer game ever made (Civ 4 is untouchable). But I really wonder how many people there are like me, who just want an enhanced
BG(2) experience, with fixes, quality-of-life tweaks, more tactical combat, and well-thought out game balance changes, without having to do a ton of research and learn this coding language just to customize my install.
If I were still in school and had the time to do it, I'd like to think I would try to make a "Medium-Sized World Project" and put in the above high-quality mods and some more optional ones (NPCs etc), ensure compatibility and encourage cooperation and planning between the authors, and create an install that asks the player one question per issue, regardless of whether more than one mod affects it. For example, how does the player want to to handle antimagic spells? The player's answer would decide which "package" of components with
SR and
SCS get picked. How does the player want to handle Fiends? Because
SR,
SCS, aTweaks all do different things, but one answer would decide it all. How many items can go into a Bag of Holding? More than one mod affects that too.
I guess basically the idea would be, take someone who has played the
BG series a couple times, then, without having him do a bunch of research and reading stuff ahead of time (maybe an hour?) he can start the install process, and it would give him the required information as the install proceeds. No needing to make sure before you even start the install process that even though option A in mod 1 sounds good, you actually have to choose option B because later, when you're at mod 16, you'll want to pick blah blah blah and so on and so forth.
Edited by ancalimohtar, 21 September 2013 - 10:30 AM.
when I'm usually around 
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