ancalimohtar

I'm really skeptical that giving an outlet for players to provide feedback on mods will create some kind of cesspool of youtube comments and verbal abuse. The community is way too small for that, and people willing to put work in to mod their 13 year old game are not going to shit on everybody. Honestly, if people are afraid of negative feedback, why not just create a system with only positive or neutral feedback? For example, it could have a complete list of all mods BWP can handle, and then I can click a box next to the ones I've played with, and then put a second check mark out of those that I'd recommend. Super barebones, super functional.

Maybe a slightly more complex but nuanced version would have different categories, like "Feels seamlessly integrated with vanilla," "Introduces fun combat," "High quality writing," "High quality voice acting," "Any introduced items/character options feel balanced," "Bug-free," "Introduces a lot of new content," and others. If you recommend a mod for any of those reasons, you would check the "recommended" box under each category. This way, players can look for what's important to them personally, and mod authors would actually get quantitative feedback on what people are less satisfied with. I would personally care a great deal about making sure all mods on my install list have a high percentage recommendation for the categories "Bug free," "Feels seemlessly integrated with vanilla," and "Any introduced items/character options feel balanced," but people who are looking for a big new adventure that maybe doesn't have to feel like it could have been coded by Bioware will look for "Introduces a lot of new content" and disregard "Feels seamless" instead.

So for example, I would personally check all of those buttons for the Xan mod except for "High quality voice acting." Maybe the Xan author gets to see that 95% of the people who have played Xan recommended it for "Feels seamlessly integrated with vanilla" but only 40% recommend it for "High quality voice acting." That's good feedback without anyone being nasty.

Or you could introduce a 1-3 star system for each category instead. But at the very least, a simple recommended/not check box would be useful, no?

I got good news for you...

As someone ...
BWP doesn't allow for customization UNLESS you go into ...

Use the right tool, and that would be the latest recreation of BWS.

It has a full customization option in the main screen, after you have picked the compilation, you push the "..." right next to the compilation choosing button:

BWS was dead for a long time, and now it's back as of a week ago. Updated by someone who seems to be new to modding. How long is it going to be updated for? I'm cautious, but hopeful.

It still doesn't address the overall concern I had: that a certain (core) constituency of the playerbase seems to be underserved.

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.

I have a request, any chance for a console option to disallow etherealness and plane shift? I generally love the component but fighting enemies using these skills is imo mostly tedious, not challenging. 
 
It also seems error prone with full hp enemies sometimes showing no inclination to leave the ethereal plane and attacking. Don't really know if they never leave but after exhausting all my invisibility detection magic while waiting for the glabrezu in the planar sphere quest to pop out I simply left it. 

Yeah I've had not-so-great experiences with Glabrezu just chillin in the other plane or whatever. How exactly do we bring them back, other than waiting them out?

I don't have a huge install, I quit them after being exposed to NTotSC items and the ones from Tristan and Izolde  . But thanks anyway.
Even ancalimohtar has <30 mods installed.
This fellow has almost 1200 installed.  Incredible.

I feel like there are about 3 major "stages" of modding BG(2).

The first is what I would (and do) recommend to friends interesting in playing for the very first time: BG2 Fixpack, BG2 Tweakpack, Widescreen mod. The second would be what I'm doing (nominally ~30 mods), and the last would be anything with true megamods like BP or NTOSC etc, which I don't honestly have much interest in personally.

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).

What can I really cut out from the above? I feel like this, more or less, should be the "standard' setup if you're replaying the game for the 5th+ time. Ideally, I would like to create a solid, consistent, 99.99% bug-free install with these mods (and 1PP once IR 3.1 is out) that I could just recreate in the future anytime I get the itch to replay BG2--about every 6 months to a year. Try out a new NPC or two per playthrough, and I'm good. So far everything's been good except for the SCS beta and BG2 UB, which was MUCH rougher around the edges than I expected (though Kulyok is being awesome and fixing everyting for v20!)

I do wish that BG2 UB, Ascension, and Refinements would get some love and get updated, especially with the Revisions series and SCS in mind. But I'll be content if these bugs get knocked out.