Moddbtards

Moddbtards are ModDB users who engage in stupid dramas on ModDB, usually related to reviews, scores and criticism. Whether they’re a modder is irrelevant; in some cases non-modders have even shittier takes because they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Note: This article is about general behavior on ModDB. To see behavior exclusive to modders, click here.

Alt accounts

As usual when criticism is involved, alt accounts are a plague on ModDB.

The website has poor spam detection, inconsistent moderation policies and a lack of automation in certain areas. As such, alt account incidents are often left only partially resolved. Alt account reviews are frequently not being deleted along with the account.

Additionally, account bans are handled arbitrarily. Usually people get all their accounts banned, including the main one. However, there have been instances of people getting away with using alts and still retaining their main account.

Probably the worst case of this was when someone review bombed the hell out of many mods using 10 alts, but was never identified. Perhaps they used Tor and ModDB’s logs weren’t good enough to ban the main account or the moderators just didn’t pursue it hard enough. Of course the perpetrator could have had good enough operational security that they never left a trace of their IP on these accounts.

Popular arguments

Some of the shitty argumentation often used by moddbtards.

• The mod is good because the creator worked hard on it¹
• The mod is good because it’s not utterly awful (commonly seen in reviews)
• The mod is bad because I encountered a bug from the main game
• Giving a mod a higher score “for encouragement”

Further reading: Critischism

Mod ratings

In a perfect world, there would be a 5-point rating system with an explicit rating:

• 1 - awful
• 2 - bad
• 3 - average (“ok”)
• 4 - good
• 5 - amazing

But this is not a perfect world. ModDB has a 10-point rating system which makes ratings ambiguous.

Like most gamers, moddbtards absolutely don’t understand the bell curve. They don’t accept that 6/10 should mean “average”. If a moddbtard likes a mod, anything below 7/10 is considered an insult. If a moddbtard doesn’t like a mod, they will likely give it a score below 3. As such, scores between 4 and 6 are rare and the system devolved into a retarded version of the “would recommend” / “would not recommend” system from Steam.

The total scores of the mods are made even more useless by the fact that people often boost or lower their ratings based on drama revolving around the creators. Furthermore, people engage in the following, both on main and alt accounts:

• Review bombing
• Reverse review bombing (boosting someone’s mod rating)
• Boosting own mod ratings with alt accounts

As a result, mod ratings are seldom an indicator of anything.

Footnotes