On the Subject of Mods

There used to be a picture of Teresa Moore in her knickers here, and then 4 years after posting it I received a DMCA notice. True story.

On this occasion I'm referring to MMO mods, as opposed to mods like Counter-Strike. Mods that, typically, modify the user interface and don't really affect the gameplay (and not including hacks, I'm talking about mods that are effectively sanctioned by the devs who expose an API to mod authors that offers more low-level control of the interface than you might get by simply editing GUI configuration files.


There are only 2 real reasons to want to be able to mod an MMO:

1. You want some feature that the devs have been too closed-minded or lazy to implement themselves.
2. You want a competitive advantage over all the players who don't have the same mod(s) as you.

In reality it's generally more to do with (2). Mods often include more verbose feedback on damage dealt to or by the group, as well as offering shortcuts for healing or otherwise interacting with your group. I dismiss (2) as a valid reason for mods. Trying to fabricate an advantage over other players through mods is no better than "proper" hacking and just indicates a lack of skill on the part of players using them.
Which leaves (1). It's true enough that both Vanguard and AoC have pretty worthless interfaces. It was interesting to see that there's be been absolutely no improvement in Vanguard's in the last 18 months. And I admit I have been using the MirageUI for AoC, just because it offers more convenient, smaller and more numerous skill bars. That's not a competitive advantage, even if I was a competitive player, it's a simple interface improvement. But really improvements like that should be implemented globally by the developers. Rather than treating the GUI as something that it set in stone and must never be changed, as seems to be the attitude of current MMO developers, they should be more open to the notion of ongoing refinement and improvement.
In which case mods would be unnecessary. But of course we're stuck with a vocal community of players who demand to be able to run realtime log parsers or whatever other shit they used to run in EQ because they're unable to achieve anything without their precious mod training wheels.