Tinker Mods Blog | General

The Wrong ideas.

Modding is a subculture, a part of the underground for gamers who still see themselves as rebels. We make game consoles and games do things they weren't intended to. We make games and consoles better and more functional than the developers did. In some cases games have been released so broken, that it was only because of modders and their patches that we got to enjoy them. But during the PS3 and Xbox 360 era something started to happen. Thanks to new more competitive online gaming, a shift came about that changed how we game, and why. I'm talking about cheating.

The art of the mod

Modders use to mod games to add new features, make them more advanced, and give new life to old ones. Modders have modded vintage games to make them work on newer consoles via emulation and patches. In my own case I mod game consoles to look insane and do things they were never intended to do like run custom firmware or any number of things, just take a look at Some of the best mods for the original Xbox if you don't know what I'm talking about. Everyone looks at modding differently but one thing was true, modding was an art. It took a lot of work without much to show for it. It was for the love of gaming more than anything else. So when did that change? Why did it change?

Online Competition

I could honestly leave the header to this section and say nothing else. Take some time to think and you'll realize you know this for yourself. Online gaming was a thing way before the Xbox 360 and PS3 but something changed. Online play was pushed harder in games than ever, some developers ditching single player experiences for online only games that could be monetized further with DLC packs and add-ons. But to keep us hooked the game had to be competitive, the game had to make us want to be the best. They had to make sure we kept playing so we kept buying additional content. What happens , though, when it succeeds?

Greed

Greed is the answer, and when does greed ever help? Make the games more competitive make them harder to master or take longer to level up, make people want to commit to playing longer or paying more to bypass the grind. It leads to yet another issue. This isn't a realistic ask of most people. We have lives to live we have things to do and we don't all make 6 figure salaries to put up the cash needed to get the items we want. So, instead, modders went from creating and programming works of art to figuring out ways to beat out the system. Which still held true to the philosophy of modding, but it also led to ruining what modding was really about.

All about the work around

Now modding was just about finding ways to get around all the bullshit and still be the best at the game. Mod chips disappeared and out came the rapid fire mods. Mods installed directly to your controller strictly to give advantages in online shooters. Giving you the ability to turn sniper rifles into fully automatic, high damage, weapons. Making it possible to empty entire clips out of your gun with one pull of a trigger.

Then came mod menus where you can host and mod custom lobbies to unlock hundreds of advantages in online games. Allowing you glitch off the map and shoot players that can't shoot back. Auto-locking to get only headshots and even shoot everyone on the map without having to move your player out of the spawn area. Give your bullets super powers that will shoot through any surfaces and no matter how far away. These are just some of the more prominent modding options we started to see in 2007 and all the way up to now.

It ruins everything about everything

I am a little torn, game developers started making games in sleazy ways that forced this to happen. People wanted to be good and unlock the best stuff but didn't have the thousands of hours needed to get good enough or at least power through to the rewards. So I get why this happened. On the other hand, it ruined it for anyone else. Most people just want to get on and have fun, play some games online and just relax. Then you get sniped through 20 buildings by a player who isn't even on the map. Or by the one guy in the lobby who always seems to shoot faster and more accurate and finish the game with zero deaths. All while most of us didn't even know what was going on. We just got tired of sucking and stopped playing the game. The cheating ruined the game for most of us because of this, and at the same time so many of us didn't even know what was happening, we just got tired of being last and quit.

The other players, the legit ones who put in hundreds and hundreds of hours who were top of their game and should be extremely difficult to beat were getting cheap shotted by a 12 year old who got his parents to buy him a rapid fire controller on eBay. Pioneers of e-sports were practicing their craft to become the best of the best only to have players pop up out of thin air and shoot them through the edge of the map.

What a waste. For the masses it took the fun out of the game, even at times without us knowing why we weren't having fun. For the dedicated and hardcore, it made it impossible not to feel discouraged and want to give up. But what were we do to? Everyone wanted to be the best and now that it was online it was less pretend than it use to be. We are winning and losing against real people. Many of those people were taking shortcuts and helped contribute to the state modern online shooters have become.

This effected everyone but what did I think the worst part of this was? Modding was given a bad name. Modding was no longer creating amazing things it was associated with someone too lazy to get good at a game. Modding wasn't about adding entire new fan made levels to our favorite games. It was just about being the best for a single match of an online shooter.

I'm not mad, just disappointed.

Like I mentioned before, I get why people do this. Hell, many times I thought about taking this company and moving in that direction, selling modded consoles strictly used for cheating, selling rapid fire kits and controllers. So I'm not really here to hate anyone that did. I just think it's a shame that it gave modding a bad name. I think it's disappointing that we went from making cool Custom made Xbox One consoles like this one, to finding ways to cheat just to think we were better at online shooters. I'm disappointed that most people don't even know you can make a Fully modded original Xbox console that can do everything this one can.

Progress halted

I think another big problem with cheat mods are that it halted progress on modding in general. We see less mods available for games. We see fewer companies supporting mods on their games. We see smaller communities with less experienced programmers that make little to no progress with new mods and features.

It's hard to be all that mad given the circumstances. But modding shouldn't be about cheating. Finding ways to cheat and thus ruin other peoples experience online should not be the driving force that's pushing the limits on what mods can be. Let's all take a moment to remember what modding use to be, and still can be!