Nine Breeds of Modmaker

Nine Breeds of Modmaker

Description: by Brother Laz

Categories: Humor


- The battle.net player





This one suffers from a serious case of elite unique envy. After
spending half a year on the ladder trying to find a Windforce or trade
his Cloudcrack for one and failing, he decides to take up modmaking and
be the biggest fish in a one fish lake.




This type of modder is instantly recognisable by the fact that he
considers the damage to be an integral part of a skill. He will likely
remove lightning bolt, but not fireball because fireball can do 10K
damage per shot if you max meteor. He will replace poison nova, but not
bone spirit because bone spirit is so much better.




When it comes to items, he will attempt to cram as many overpowered
modifiers as possible on his unique items, without regard for
storyline, balance or common sense. One of his brainchildren will very
likely be a unique balrog blade called 'Dscnbslkb's Fury', featuring
life steal, fanaticism aura, an oskill amplify damage, static field on
striking, enormous magic find and a dash of enhanced maximum damage
during nighttime, all this in a fancy black colour.





His mod is an integral part of his self-esteem, so he is bound to release at least something

and start a cheery thread in Member Announcements, then disappear off
the face of the earth when he notices he has about 3 downloads after
two weeks and two feedback posts stating that the mod crashes on
character creation, a direct result of his failure to actually test
anything.





- The seven year old




Another excrement of battle.net, this semi-sentient bacteria
considers Diablo 2 teh uber sux because it doesn't have a unique with
his name on it. The tutorials have big nasty blocks of text, no
pictures and are generally way above his head, so he asks politely, 14
times in a row, how 2 put in unik add inchanced damage.





Usually this approaching comet of doom will miss the Phrozen Planet by
a hair and disappear into space, thank all gods of the Shinto pantheon.
Sometimes, however, they crash into the forums head on, spewing fiery
death everywhere and leaving a permanent crater. In this case, the
idiot posts stupid question after stupid question, for years, and
refuses to go away despite the fact that eighty percent of the six
thousand Keep members have him on auto-ignore and the other twenty
percent deletes his incessant PMs on sight.






- The Cow




This modder joined the scene to fix the obvious errors and balance
issues in the game, such as the fact that nova sorcs cannot clear cows
as fast as meteor sorcs anymore. Unable to look outside the shallow
picture of battle.net experience runs, his main concerns lie in
removing any challenge left in act 5, further overpowering already
overpowered skills and making it a lot easier to find the godly uniques
and proceed to what he calls the real game, endless worldstone runs.
After all, everyone knows that Diablo 2 is no fun whatsoever until you
are level 80+ and powerful enough to kill the monsters in one hit.




Scared of anything that might undermine his cathedral of battle.net
Diablo 2 knowledge, he will never attempt to put +200 regenerate life
or +100 mana after each kill on an item to see what would happen.
Modifications to look for in his mod are a damage bonus to frozen orb,
a new whirlwind synergy from battle orders and built-in pierce on
multishot to aid the poor fools with a Windforce in getting 100% pierce
without having to invest the points into that scary pierce skill.




He may increase the damage bonus on fanaticism to match the damage
a whirlwind barb can put out and add more IAS to werewolf to make it
easier for druids to reach the next breakpoint with a BotD and
Goldwrap, but will never do something about cleansing or spirit of
barbs, deathly afraid of the chaos and pandemonium that might ensue and
the terrible dilemmas he might impose on himself if he were to make
those other two spirits as good as the one he is used to maxing brainlessly.





He will never change anything about those deliciously overpowered
uniques he built this virtual shrine for in the first place, but
considers it way too hard

to actually get them, so chances are he will implement a cube recipe
that accepts a white item and two healing potions and returns the
unique version.





- The egotripper





This modder's main concern is how cool
his modifications look. After successfully completing his first new
skill, a nova of DiabLight bolts, he will post a screenshot of his
glorious brainchild on the forums and brag about his mod in countless
replies unrelated to the topics at hand. Then he will post about his
new and uberleet idea, a nova of frozen orbs.






Luckily, this breed of modder will never release any of his detritus to
the public, except for the odd spirits-to-succubus or
mega-monster-density 'mod' which Phrozen quickly puts into the
Non-Hosted waste dump before anyone sees it.




The egotripper is most often dyslectic, or maybe it is just hard
for him to type coherently while masturbating over his amazing new
Frozen Orb Of Guided Multishots skill that uberally kills the thousands
of Duriel clones crammed on every square of the blood moor.





- The drop modder




A subspecies of the egotripper, this modder has only two goals:
uniques all over the blood moor, and level 99 in five minutes. To this
end, he increases the unique column in treasureclassex.txt to 1024,
heads out onto the blood moor and discovers to his dismay that all that
drops are Biggin's Bonnets and Greyforms.




Unable to get the desired Windforces to drop, he gives up on the
item drop part and proceeds with the level-99-fast part by subtly
changing experience.txt and putting 1 in every cell.




This fella usually quits modding forever soon afterwards and
continues to play Warcraft 3 hero arenas, never finding out exactly why
his drops were all wrong, why he could not become level 99 by killing
level 1 quill rats, or why his precious characters are now corrupted
and his Diablo 2 installation is ruined because he forgot to backup
patch_d2.mpq.






- The just-because-I-can modder





This modder is not really sure of what he wants to do, other than the fact that it must be big
and make him famous. He will download every available plugin off the
Phrozen Keep without checking or caring what they do, change as many
monster graphics as possible to ugly miscolored atrocities extracted
from Space Invaders, fill his cubemain.txt with random cube recipes




While generally a pretty skilled individual, he lacks the
creativity to actually do something constructive with his skillz, but
rather adds hundreds of cube reagents, clue scrolls, money gems and
mystery bottles that convert into aura charms when right-clicked, which
in turn can be cubed with 'holy sacred mithril whatevers of the ancient
forgotten gods' to generate a book with 36 different charged skills,
which when clicked on a thousand times while chanting Open Sesame turns
into a unique potion of life.




To play such a mod, you need a laser printer to print out the 957
pages of cube recipes, divine luck at guessing the hidden 850
rune/gem/jewelwords out of a possible 48 billion combinations, and the
patience to find Radament in the 106-floor maze of stairs and
labyrinths under the palace cellar where the modder chose to hide him.





Every monster drops at least 5 rares, superuniques about 50, and
the halls of the dead is impossible to clear without crashing out of
the game due to the thousands of rares spewing out of any skeleton you
touch. On the flip side, runes, clue scrolls and everything else you
actually need are grievously rare.




Building a character, or killing monsters for that matter is the
easy part, partly because the only thing that has been changed about
the skills is the graphics of a couple of very select necromancer and
sorceress skills, partly because every level 5 character has level 20
fanaticism, oak sage and battle orders on oskill charms.




There is always a Super Death Mega Extreme level on Hell
difficulty, stuffed with Diablo and Summoner clones and hundreds upon
hundreds of cursed extra strong auto-kill bosses. This is considered
the ultimate challenge, because you die in one hit from any of the
pathetically slow or stationary melee monsters as soon as they manage
to kill your level 84 valkyrie with 290K hit points. If you are a melee
character, though, you will need the items that only drop from the
monsters which you can only kill with said items.





Mods like these tend to acquire a cult following.





- The coding divinity






Not strictly a Diablo 2 player,
this person lives inside his computer, sleeps with the Diablo 2 code on
the hard disk, and releases wonderful code hacks that seemed impossible
two months earlier for all to enjoy. The Keep would not be the same
without them. Remember, just like in Starcraft, they are neither
organic nor mechanical, but very vulnerable to emp shockwave.




Coding divinities are easy to recognise on the forums. They speak
through their avatars, consistently have five times your post count
despite your best efforts to spam the GMM forum, they use the word shock field
instead of shock web, don't know what a skilldesc is or where it lives,
and are out of touch with anything txt-related. You might catch one
trying to write a dll to change magic modifiers or character starting
stats.




In today's world, there is a large and growing gap between the
lucky few coding divinities and the proletarian masses. The gods will
never directly address mortals, but prefer to speak in hushed, mystic
tongues which only the wisest sages can decipher, and any mortal
foolish enough to attempt to draw upon the power of the shining
chrysalis will be struck with holy insanity. (Diablo II Assertion
Error)




Not to mention the fact that any modder wanting to speak with God
and using modified or new dll files will be struck down by holy
lightning upon opening his mailbox and finding out the hard way that
half of the player base totally ignores them and the other half copies
them to their windows folder, forgets to delete them afterwards or
overwrites the originals without making a backup.





- Generic Modder Five-of-Nine




The fact that there are already about 22,000 mods similar to his
own does not discourage him. In fact, his mod is definitely unique
because it uses the latest plugins and the mighty Tomatoid Slayer
monster he extracted all by himself from Pokemon vs Predator. Also,
unlike in every other mod out there, the Diablo Clone does not spawn in the blood moor, but in the den of evil!





Many of these mods never make it out of early alpha stage, because the
modder did the uniques first, followed by the runewords, then sort of
lost interest at the tricky parts such as moving his favourite skill to
level 30 and increasing its damage tenfold. But as any Starcraft player
knows, when enough come your way, some will make it through and
possibly destroy your tech and reduce your base to a heap of slimy goo.




If the modmaker has mercy on the Keep and sends it as a Non-Hosted
mod, it disappears into the download section and is never heard from
again. Even if he does have a website and a forum, the name of the mod
is typically too generic for anyone to notice until about three months
after the forum first appeared in the list, and two months and a half
after the modmaker disappears without releasing anything.




This breed of 'modder' particularly likes progress percentages,
using them to draw the clueless to his name like flies to an
ultraviolet shock lamp. Chances are it will never go higher than 25%
though, and the actual progress is more like 2% when the modmaker quits
and installs Half-Life 2.





- The specialist





Once in a great while, a modder rises from the swamp of mundane like a virtual Pygmalion to craft a mod and bring it to life.




When such a modder first makes his appearance, he is young and
unnoticeable. But before long, his ideas and visions come together in a
swirling cloud, until they ignite and a newborn star flares up in the
night sky.




The Keep being the center of the galaxy, the new star is surrounded
by other stars and clouds of players not yet absorbed by a star modder.
If the star is large and bright, it may attract and absorb the clouds
of wandering players and even strip hot crowds from other modding
stars, leaving only a small but dense core that slowly fades out.




But the larger a star, the sooner it burns out. Before long, the
star has burned up its supply of screenshots and collapses under its
own gravity. The collapsing star creates an ever increasing gravity
field that warps the fabric of space-time around it. An interesting
phenomenon at this point is that time seems to slow down around the
dying star for distant observers, causing updates to be delayed more
and more, while in the time frame of the star modder himself, the
updates are still being posted every week.




This continues until the escape velocity exceeds the speed of
light. The star modder may still regularly update after that point, but
nothing ever emerges from the event horizon anymore. The newly formed
black hole may still continue to attract players from nearby star mods,
accumulate them in an accretion disk around himself, heat them up until
they emit deadly gamma rays at other modmakers, and finally suck them
into oblivion.




To the layperson, the star will stay in this black hole state for
all eternity. However, according to some scientists he may actually
still leak a minuscule amount of radiation, causing him to gradually
lose energy and shrink, faster and faster until it finally
disintegrates in a disastrous explosion of energy, usually accompanied
by the worlds 'real life' or 'other obligations'.





And then... silence.

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[url=https://www.d2mods.info/forum/kb/viewarticle?a=316&sid=0a329144fca442dbb4cd23a593296f88]Knowledge Base - Nine Breeds of Modmaker[/url]