Back in May we told you we were changing the way mod author rewards work. We're fast approaching the launch of the new algorithm so we wanted to give a little more detail on what's changing, why it's changing and what it means for you. A TL:DR is at the end of the post

As we mentioned in the previous post, the Donation Points system has been a massive success with tens of thousands of mod authors receiving a bonus reward on top of the donations they'd have normally received directly from the community. However, some of the behaviours this system encouraged have led to a degraded experience for the end-user. 


Problem 1: Content optimised to maximise Donation Points

With the old Donation Points algorithm it became apparent that there was a correlation between how many mod pages you posted and how many points you earned each month - this was especially true for our most popular games. As a result, some authors would break their content down into lots and lots of individual mod pages to maximise the rewards they would receive. This resulted in a heavily degraded user experience - a user previously could get all variants of a mod (or parts of a set) on one page, but they now had to go to multiple different pages to get the "complete" mod. Uploading multiple mods will still be rewarded but authors will start to see diminishing returns from having more interactions with the same user(s). 

We've also updated the system to use a non-public algorithm to allocate Donation Points. While we understand this isn't great for transparency, it means that we remove the problem of authors min-maxing their Donation Points rather than creating content that's great for the community.

As part of these changes, it will no longer be possible to view a per-mod breakdown of Donation Points earned on the monthly reports. This is because the calculation works by measuring interactions between users over the month rather than solely counting downloads. To replace this functionality, we plan to give mod authors a dashboard displaying downloads per month outside of the rewards system. We aim to make this dashboard available to authors soon and may expand the stats available to include more than just unique downloads in the future.  


Problem 2: Abuse of the system through fraudulent downloads

A further exploit of the system that came to light was the ability for malicious users to earn significant amounts of Donation Points by creating thousands of fake accounts and using them to download their own content. This could potentially take significant sums of money away from genuine users, which is not acceptable. Given the accessibility of throw-away email addresses and VPNs this kind of abuse requires significant resources to track down and we decided that the best approach was to make this activity pointless by factoring it into the new algorithm. 


Problem 3: Mod list makers earn disproportionate rewards by including lots of their mods

Mod list curators do a great job supporting the community around their content and we feel they should be rewarded for this. The problem we identified was a trend whereby curators would upload resources for their list split across several mod pages. When a user downloads the collection/Wabbajack list/etc this would mean a unique download for each page and therefore generate a substantial amount of points. To be clear, we have no issue with mod authors creating collections that include groups of their mods to allow for easy downloading, but this trend was targeted towards mod files that had almost no value outside the use in the mod list. This is similar to the first problem but is very specific to mod lists. Uploading mods in this way will no longer generate excessive Donation Points.


Problem 4: Posting updated versions of mods on new mod pages

Some mod authors had taken to releasing updates to their mods by creating a new mod page for each version (and, often, deleting the original). This is a horrible experience for your fans as they are no longer able to easily track the mods they're interested in or be notified of new versions. It also breaks the "update" chain so that modding tools can't easily help users to update to the latest version.

This has always been against our Donation Points System Rules and we will be taking stronger action against users who do this, up to and including blocking them from earning any Donation Points. 

We know that some of this behaviour is driven by wanting to increase visibility of updates too, so we are looking into ways to better surface the updated content to users.

We've introduced the changes to not only address these problems but also to redistribute the rewards in a way that enables more authors to benefit from the system. Overall we're expecting ~60% of mod authors to see some kind of increase in their mod rewards. The remaining users are expected to see similar amounts, with some of the current "top earners" seeing a drop in Donation Points where distribution is flattened out a bit.

To be clear, if you receive less DP each month going forward this doesn't necessarily mean your upload behaviours are a problem, it just means that the way you've shared your content is valued differently in the new interaction-based algorithm. We still plan to put the same amount of money (or more) into the system each month. 

On reviewing the results of the simulated DP payouts we ran during this project we've noticed there are some cases where tool creators or other "high impact" authors in the community are not as well rewarded in the new system. We highly value tool creators who either enable modding or otherwise extend or amplify the mods that are available for games and we think that these individuals should be strongly rewarded for their efforts. As a result of this, we are now planning to create a separate pool of DP to distribute specifically to selected creators. This may be users who create modding tools that are invaluable to the modding scene (e.g. SMAPI for Stardew Valley) or create tools and frameworks which empower others to create great mods. This scheme is in the planning phases now and we aim to have more information on this later in the year. This will not impact the current DP system or how much money we put into the DP system.


Finally, we've also updated our Donation Points System Rules and empowered our Community Managers with new tools to disqualify specific mods or users from participating in the Mod Rewards program. This will allow us to better handle any exploitation of the system and be confident that content which shouldn't earn DP, won't.


TL;DR - If you'd like to join the discussion we strongly recommend reading the whole post!

• The first Donation Points report using the new algorithm will be available in early August 2024 - this is for Donation Points earned in April 2024. The reports for May and June 2024 will also be available to view and the points will be added to your wallets in September and October respectively.
• The inner workings of the new algorithm will not be made public to prevent abuse or exploitation of the system.
• Donation Points are now shared more fairly and our stats show that ~60% of mod authors see an increase in their monthly rewards.
• The new report will no longer include a per-mod breakdown of allocated points, but you will still see the splits with other authors. The per-mod download breakdowns will be moved to a new dashboard outside of the Donation Points system soon.
• We've empowered our Community Team with better tools to tackle abuse of the system.
• Check out our new Best Practices page for advice on creating great mod pages.
• We're looking at setting up a new, separate rewards program to provide better awards for key tool/framework creators in the community using a separate pool of money. More on this later in the year! 
• The total amount we're paying into the Donation Points system each month will remain the same or continue to increase. 
  

Overall, this new system will ensure that the Donation Points system rewards modders for producing high-quality content that the community loves and prevent exploitation of the system. We will be closely monitoring the distribution of DP each month and can make tweaks to the algorithm to make sure it's working as we would like it to. If you're a mod author and you have concerns or questions about these changes, please speak to one of our Community Managers using the forums, Discord or leave a comment below.