One Of Cities Skylines 2 Biggest Moders Removes Mods From Public Due To “Toxicity”

Now I love all games that Paradox makes, as their games may be punishing and nearly impossible to figure out what the hell you’re doing, but the feeling of achievement you get from actually figuring out what you’re doing creates the highest of highs. This rather unsurprisingly creates an air of superiority in paradox game communities or a more simple way of putting it is many of them are so egotistical every discussion feels like a duel to defend their honour.

Cities Skylines 2 Mod

As a result of the mess that was the launch of Cities Skylines 2, it has left the community with a rather big dependency on the mods to give them a functioning game. Between traffic AI, road-building tools, economic overhauls, and sweeping changes to services, CS2 has already been revolutionised by its modders and that still feels like an understatement.

But it seems like this toxicity has left modder “Deranged Teddy” feeling very disheartened and caused him to remove all of his work from Thunderstore and Github. He encouraged people to obtain the mods and edit them stating that “I will enforce no licenses or copyrights, and am releasing it to the public domain,”

What Deranged Teddy Had to Say

Deranged Teddy left this post on r/citiesskylines and 4 days later it sits at 4k upvotes with many of the comments being very supportive of Teddy and his decision.

“While I have appreciated the love and support from many of you in the community, I am sorry to say that I am pulling my mods (Cim Behavior Improvements and Unemployment Monitor) from Thunderstore and GitHub, effective 5:00 PM Eastern US Time on Friday, December 15th. In the meantime you are more than welcome to download copies of the mods/source code and use/modify them as you wish, but I will no longer be supporting them going forward. I will enforce no licenses or copyrights, and am releasing it to the public domain.

I am doing this for my mental health and well-being, as being involved in modding means also being heavily involved in this community, because I have a duty to stay updated about the state of the game and how my mods fit (or don’t fit) into that picture. I have been playing city builders for 30 years. During that time I have made some lifelong friends in this community, the relationships with whom I cherish very much. However, during the course of the past several months, I have watched this formerly peaceful, wholesome corner of the internet become overrun with anger and hatred for the very same developers who revolutionized and revitalized this genre with Cities Skylines.

I do not believe Cities Skylines II is perfect. If I believed that, I would not be spending hundreds of hours of my personal time writing mods to change it to suit my preferences. However, I do believe that Colossal Order is doing their absolute best in good faith to bring us updates to the game that fix the issues we’re bringing to their attention. It has been saddening to watch so many people spit venom in the faces of people who have made simple, honest mistakes, accusing CO of laziness, lying, scam-artistry, and any other form of malfeasance that helps explain their inability to sit with bad feelings and accept the humanity of developers.

We are not robots. We are human beings who design incredibly complicated things, and increasing that complexity will often introduce the high likelihood of us making mistakes. Those mistakes do need to be pointed out for the benefit of the game, but many have resorted to attaching their own feelings about the broader games industry to their complaints, turning what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill bug report into a scathing rebuke of everything CO stands for.

I just can’t do it anymore, and the behavior of this community makes me wonder what happens to me down the line if I write a popular mod and it breaks. Will those same people be blowing up my inbox with hatemail? I’ve already been cussed out once in the two weeks since posting Cim Behavior Improvements for something that wasn’t even my fault. I look at the state of the community as it exists now and fear that the tide may one day turn against me, too.

So, I feel that a decision must be made to stand up for my fellow developers, as well as myself, and withdraw from the community until things settle down. If you guys want developers to continue doing this work so you can enjoy the games you love, you need to treat developers with respect. Paying money for a product does not give you the right to bully, harass, and mistreat the people who made it, just as it doesn’t give Karen the right to throw her latte in the barista’s face because they made it wrong. Please rethink your behaviour, because modders aren’t going to stick around in a community that is this toxic and hostile to developers.”

What do you think about his decision? Let us know in the comments section below!