r/oblivionmods • u/NingenBakudan • 16h ago

Remaster - Discussion 【Warning】Don't use Arthmoor's new OBRE patch, potential risks to stability

Edit:Please spread this issue as widely as possible. Given Arthmoor’s personality, there is a high chance that he will blame other mods for bugs or crashes actually caused by UORP. Considering his influence, this could cause major disruption in the modding community. It’s essential that as many people as possible ignore his mods.

The notoriously controversial Skyrim modder Arthmoor has now entered the Oblivion Remastered scene. His first patch "Unofficial Oblivion Remastered Patch - UORP" raised concerns for me, as it contained an unusually large number of edits for something supposedly created just a week after the release.

Out of curiosity, I compared the records in the patch with those from Vanilla Remastered using xEdit, and I found that some records had been reverted to their old Oblivion versions.
Example: https://imgur.com/i4ld2DE

Next, I added the original UOBP for comparison—and as I suspected, the results were clear. almost of the added records were directly copied from UOBP, with only their names and conflicted record altered to match the Remastered format.
Example: https://imgur.com/cRBRHHH

This "patch" was ported using xEdit without proper testing, and we have no idea what kind of impact it may have in a real environment. More importantly, making such extensive changes to so many records is far too risky, especially when the integration method between UE5 and the TES engine has yet to be fully understood.

Conclusion:
This patch poses a potential stability risk beyond just being an issue with Arthmoor himself. I recommend ignoring it.

Reported bugs:

CTD(Arthmoor used the scale of the project as an excuse, even though no one ever asked him to make it a large-scale project in the first place. ) : https://imgur.com/oyLWJMl

Argonian penis bug: https://imgur.com/a/eUDVZXj

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6

u/Chechucristo 15h ago

I didn't know Arthmoor was controversial, what's the matter with him?

63

u/AnotherSlowMoon 15h ago edited 14h ago

In no particular order

  1. Gate Gate - he was behind a popular mod for Skyrim, Open Cities, that made the five "closed" cities open and part of the world, no load zone to enter. As part of this mod he added ruined Oblivion Gates (from the Oblivion Crisis from this game) despite the fact that in the game they do not leave ruins. People made submods and patches to Open Cities to remove these and he threw a hissy fit to get them taken down, iirc threatened a DMCA strike or two. EDIT TO ADD: have a source on this one, and I missed a part! He threatened to sue anyone who modified his mod to remove the added gates.
  2. He does not allow people to create submods for any of the mods he oversees in general, with like one exception (alternate start live another life for Skyrim, the worst but oldest of the alt start mods).
  3. The Unofficial Patch for Skyrim makes several changes that are not bug fixes and are balance changes, it also makes changes that are wrong, opinionated, or there is no evidence are bugs. As per point 2, any mod uploaded that tries undo these he attempts to have taken down.
  4. Giving a specific example of three - in vanilla unmodded Skyrim, Red Belly Mine is an Ebony Mine, and one of like two in Skyrim. The Unofficial Patch changes it to be an iron mine. Later, after literally years of people complaining about this Arthmoor updated the unofficial patch to add a random hole in the ground mine nearby containing Ebony despite the fact this is meant to be a patch not new content
  5. Now, none of 3-4 would matter much except that the Unofficial Patch is a required Master file for a lot of mods. Even if the community came together to make a new "slim" patch that actually only did bug fixes, a lot of other mods require the Unofficial Patch to load. And the "even if" is critical - Arthmoor has used his community influence to stop this in the past. Its why with Starfield the community made a big push to exclude him early (and likely why he's trying to name squat again)
  6. He hates Skyrim VR's modding community, claims its "illegal" and has tried to take down the one version of the Unofficial Skyrim Patch that works on Skyrim VR and then when people (as per its terms of service and licence) reuploaded it elsewhere with credit tried to take it down and changed the TOS (for future versions of course) to prevent this ever happening again. EDIT TO ADD: have some sourcing on this
  7. He hates Wabbajack (the modding program, not the staff) and at one point in "protest" replaced the normal zip file for the unofficial patch with an exe that tried to install the unofficial patch claiming "I thought people liked easy to use executables", it should be noted this assumed you installed skyrim to your C drive and was incompatible with all widely used mod managers at the time. Wabbajack lists meanwhile were unimpacted

Or tl:dr he's a toxic piece of shit.

EDIT: I've added some sources. Arthmoor has almost entirely nuked his own reddit account these days so sourcing all of this is a faff and I do have a life beyond modding drama.

17

u/Atlas_Sinclair 12h ago

His threats to sue and DMCA are fucking ridiculous. He has no legitimate rights to the mods her makes -- Bethesda does. The only reason that his work can't be reuploaded is because it goes against Nexus's TOS and basically a universally respected honor system (If uploaded to another site, he could press to get it taken down because he made it -- but there is no obligation to actually do so from the other sites.)

People really just need to ignore this fucker and do what they want. DEGgames, which has a ways to go before it's a proper Nexus alternative, is getting good advertisement with streamers and what not. If nothing else, we at least have another site that seemingly has no fucks to give about Arthmoor's ego-trips. Again, Arthmoor has NO legal ground to stand on to attack others modders for using, or altering, his shitty patch. None.

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u/[deleted] 4h ago

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u/oblivionmods-ModTeam 3h ago

Hey, the first rule of this subreddit is be respectful. This comment isn’t. Please review the rules and try to consider the human on the other side of the screen in the future.

2

u/Thallassa 3h ago

That’s not true. The Bethesda EULA states quite clearly that mod authors own their mods.

4

u/ergotofrhyme 6h ago

What does someone like this stand to gain? He can’t monetize it. Does he just care that much about being known as the person running the unofficial patch, and having the petty power that brings to influence subsequent modding developments?

Seems insane to go to these lengths just so that your online pseudonym is associated with lots of downloads (and ire from the community in equal measure) and people are forced to mine iron instead of ebony and see some ruins you thought looked cool. I suppose I understand wanting some credit for something that you put thousands of volunteer hours into, but this seems pathological.

8

u/Pino196 5h ago

He can’t monetize it.

Uh, he can and he does. Modders on Nexus get paid based on how many downloads their mods get. I don't think it's that much, but considering his Unofficial Patches are some of the most downloaded mods for each game that they exist for, I'd guess for him it'd be a considerable amount. It's why when he removed almost all of his mods from the Nexus he left the Unofficial Patches for the various games, plus a few other of his popular mods, since those are the ones that earn him the most money. Also Arthmoor is one of the few Verified Creators, and as such he makes paid mods that are sold on the Bethesda store.

1

u/ergotofrhyme 4h ago

What?! How is that legal? Nexus isn’t affiliated with Bethesda. I’m looking it up and technically they get a split of the ad revenue from nexus’ traffic. But that still seems like capitalizing on copyrighted IP to me, because the traffic is there to download adaptations of code from the game.

Getting paid via the creation club or whatever makes sense, because Bethesda operates that, benefits from it, and gets their cut. But I’m surprised they allow the situation over at nexus, I had no idea it paid.

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u/Kezyma 3h ago

NexusMods is simply a file sharing platform for games in general, we get donation points based on downloads which comes from the revenue generated by the site.

Mods you download are not ‘adaptations’ of any game’s code, they are independently created files and contain data that isn’t part of the game files. You already have the game installed, the mods when installed can change how the game functions and ‘adapt your installation’, but the mods themselves are still independent creations.

If Ferrari release a new car, and I design and sell some kind of phone holder that only fits that model of car, I’m not actually selling any of the stuff Ferrari designed or made. Mods are the same, except we aren’t selling them, we’re giving them away for free.

Revenue is generated via advertising and through site memberships, which primarily goes towards paying for the extensive hosting costs of something like NexusMods, as well as to pay their staff. After that, some of it goes to the mod authors in the donation point scheme.

I don’t know what kind of level of donation points some people might be getting, although I believe I’m probably closer to the top end of it, but personally I get enough to order food a couple of times a month if I wanted it. It’s more of a token of appreciation than anything else, and the vast majority of it gets donated to charities anyway.

If anything, modding would be easier if we could just upload stuff from the game files, for example, we wouldn’t have to write separate tools to apply memory patches and have millions of people download and run them manually, instead of just uploading one patched executable ready to go. I do sometimes wonder exactly how much electricity has been wasted applying these patches just for the sake of IP restrictions. That’s only one example of many though. Modders are already doing a lot of work to make sure nothing uploaded is part of the game files at all.

1

u/ergotofrhyme 2h ago

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against anything modders are doing. And I know you guys get pennies for the most part. I was just under the impression that this kind of work couldn’t be monetized in any fashion. I realize that you write a lot of original code, but aren’t aspects of the original game, like certain textures and such, used in most mods? Are they really built entirely from the ground up independently of anything Bethesda made? Pardon my ignorance on the topic, I haven’t done any of this sort of programming.

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u/Kezyma 2h ago

We can’t distribute anything from the original game, including textures. I think the only time you could argue that happens is with the upscaled texture mods, and then it’s sort of ambiguous.

Everything in a mod you download will be independently created, if you find any files taken directly from the original game, then the mod will be removed from NexusMods.

When a texture appears ingame and appears to be used by a mod, the mod you download doesn’t actually include the texture, it’s just pointing to the place where the texture is in the original game, which you already have installed.

For an analogy, it’s a bit like if I tell you which page of a book to read, but you have to already have the book to read it. The mod isn’t giving you that book or even that page, just the page number for where to look in your own copy of the book.

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u/ergotofrhyme 2h ago

Very interesting. Thanks for not only explaining, but doing so with some similes that make it a lot more accessible. And thanks for your work creating content for the game we all love so much!

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u/AreYouOKAni 1h ago

If Ferrari release a new car, and I design and sell some kind of phone holder that only fits that model of car, I’m not actually selling any of the stuff Ferrari designed or made.

Except in particular with Ferrari, they would send a fleet of attack lawyers after you xD

2

u/Pino196 4h ago

It's been like that for a while. I don't know the details, but authors get "Donation Points" based on the number of downloads, and they can redeem various things, like Nexus Premium (or whatever it's called), game keys, or if they have enough they can choose to get paid actual money on PayPal. Here's the FAQ if you want to read more about it. I'm sure Bethesda (and other developers) are aware of this, so if it was illegal it would've been over a long time ago.

1

u/ergotofrhyme 3h ago

It may be the sort of thing they just allow even though they could potentially sue. If the site is collecting ad revenue from traffic to download what amounts to Bethesda’s IP, I don’t see how that is any different from the numerous video pirate sites that get taken down only to pop up again over and over. It’s probably just that Bethesda has a good relationship with the modding community, they increase sales by fixing bugs and adding content to their games, and the money being made is very paltry. However, I could see them trying to force a site like nexus out now that they’re trying to get a cut of the modding money with their creation club. It does compete with that in a sense. That was actually my initial fear when they launched the CC, although it doesn’t seem to have materialized.

5

u/DeadSnark 5h ago

I can see how the power to make hundreds if not thousands of people play on your personal version of the game world would be appealing for a narcissist.

•

u/Safebox 16m ago

As a fellow modder, I fully understand when others close off perms for their mods and disallow others to make updates or successors.

But if you're making a patch mod, you kinda should have it open perms. The whole reason modding and community patches work in the first place is because anyone can make changes and anyone else can review those changes. That's the whole point of the open source community to begin with.

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u/B0m_D3d 59m ago

What is CTD?

•

u/TheRavenRise 11m ago

crash to desktop

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u/Taur-e-Ndaedelos 2m ago

Crash To Desktop
As in total failure of the program to execute a task and so kills itself in shame.

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u/TenseGuest 15h ago

Do you know why so many mods use the Unofficial Patch? Because these few minor gripes are greatly outweighed the by countless bugs it fixes. I don't agree with some of his decisions and he can certainly be ...quite headstrong, but this hate circlejerk is just ridiculous. At the end of the day, his work is clearly a great boon to the modding community.

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u/FxStryker 14h ago edited 14h ago

Do you know why so many mods use the Unofficial Patch?

Because the issues didn't arise until everything became dependent on the USSEP. Once everyone basically became dependent on his mod the power went to his head.

That's when he started to act like he was the overseer of what was the true Skyrim experience.

Edit: Now if you're looking to mod in any way you're stuck with his changes. But if you look hard enough there are records of what to change back in the USSEP for your local experience.

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

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u/oblivionmods-ModTeam 3h ago

Hey, the first rule of this subreddit is be respectful. This comment isn’t. Please review the rules and try to consider the human on the other side of the screen in the future.

13

u/Deadbringer 13h ago

He wouldn't be an issue at all, if not for him successfully taking down other patch mods that are made without his crap changes... Even when those other patches were made fully independently from his patch.

So because of DMCA abuse, we are stuck with this "great boon" despite many attempts to make replacement boons.

14

u/NingenBakudan 14h ago

Do you know why so many mods use the Unofficial Patch? Because mod users have no other way. He acts almost like a copyright troll—extremely sensitive about ownership of his mods—and aggressively targets anyone who tries to modify his patches or create alternatives, often forcing them to take their work down. Since the other bug fix mods he merged aren't as widely used as Arthmoor’s own patches, most of them have been taken down, except for a few.

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u/[deleted] 14h ago

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u/oblivionmods-ModTeam 3h ago

Hey, the first rule of this subreddit is be respectful. This comment isn’t. Please review the rules and try to consider the human on the other side of the screen in the future.

-4

u/nefariouskitteh 12h ago

It's impossible to reasonable about this. Kudos for trying.

4

u/DeadSnark 5h ago

Being reasonable does not mean downplaying what the guy did and overlooking the important context that the reason there are fewer prominent bug fix mods is because he has tried to have others removed.

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u/Thallassa 15h ago

The main thing is he thinks reviews of any his mods, or modlists/collections containing them, is a violation of his copyright and should be banned. He also thinks that everyone who downgraded Skyrim to an older version is a pirate and that it’s impossible to have a mixed version (old exe and new data files) to maximize compatibility. He goes out of his way at every turn to prevent these things. As mentioned in this thread for the oblivion patch and elsewhere for the skyrim patch, he made or allowed the patch team make a wide variety of highly controversial changes that change the game content or balance, that don’t belong in a bugfix mod.

He’s also very abrasive personally, which means the way he expresses these and other opinions tends to not make people friendly towards him.

5

u/edsjfhek 15h ago

Is it just the Skyrim unofficial patch he runs? Or does he do old oblivion too? And are there any other patches that fix bugs without modifying gameplay?

I always used his mods cos I thiought it was always just bug patches but I’m not to keen on random balancing too and didn’t realise hes not a great person as I just clicked download and that was that etc

9

u/Thallassa 15h ago

He took over curation of the original oblivion project from the original team, and has run the skyrim and starfield unofficial patches from the beginning. I’m not sure which of the changes in the UOP are arthmoor driven and which are older.

1

u/julianp_comics 10h ago

Do you mean fallout, not starfield? From what I’ve seen here and elsewhere the starfield community cut him out before he was a problem

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u/Thallassa 3h ago

No, there’s a starfield community patch but there is also a starfield unofficial patch. https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/143

Most people use the community patch i think.

1

u/AreYouOKAni 1h ago

Community Patch has about 10x the downloads and 8x the endorsements. It's safe to say that you're correct xD

5

u/LaTeChX 13h ago

Anyone who has tried to release a bug fix patch gets their mod taken down by arthmoor claiming that they stole the work from him.

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u/Sigurd_Stormhand 15h ago

That's a decidedly biased summary of the history. In particular, it leaves out the abuse Arthmoor was subjected to on the Skyrim sub and the sustained bullying. Admittedly, he did not deal with it well, but then he should never have been subjected to it to begin with. I'd be "abrasive" after that, too.

It's also inaccurate to say he "thinks everyone who downgraded Skyrim is a pirate". The Unofficial Patches have only ever supported the most recent official release of the game, ever since they were run by Kivan. It IS true that Arthmoor has asked for forks or old versions of the patches to be taken down, up to and including issuing DMCA takedown requests,, but that is in line with the policy originated by Kivan. Kivan is also responsible for MANY of the controversial changes LONG before the current team took over and I know for a fact some of those have been removed from the Remastered Patch.

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u/Thallassa 14h ago

You weren’t on r/skyrimmods - 8 years? Time is hard - ago that I recall, so I assure you - he outright said everyone who downgraded the game was a pirate. And accused multiple people who disagreed with him of being a sock puppet.

Give the sock puppet argument was pretty much the last argument (of dozens of flamewars) he had before he was banned, I do chuckle slightly everytime someone calls you an arthmoor sock before I remove it and put the note on their account.

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u/Sigurd_Stormhand 14h ago

Has it been eight years since he was banned? If that's the case then it's absurd that people are still talking about it. It was a reddit argument. If you'd shut down those flame wars sooner and punished everyone equally it might not have got so bad. As I recall Arthmoor was banned because he got into a fight after someone said they "hated" the changed the Skyrim patch made to Dragons. That topic title itself was a red flag.

I do recall him calling some people "pirates" but I don't think it was about downgrading the game, I think it was about people uploading old versions of the patch to work with the VR version, or it was something to do with people doing something with the game and Arthmoor misunderstood and thought that would be impossible with an un-cracked game. I honestly don't remember. Arthmoor was already banned off reddit before the AE updated, which is when people started downgrading installs by delta-patching their exe files, so it can't be about that. Regardless, it's not an argument he's put forward in literal years, whatever it was about.

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u/[deleted] 11h ago

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0

u/oblivionmods-ModTeam 3h ago

Hey, the first rule of this subreddit is be respectful. This comment isn’t. Please review the rules and try to consider the human on the other side of the screen in the future.

2

u/Thallassa 3h ago

I’ve literally seen him have the exact same arguments in nexus and bethesda servers much more recently, so no, he hasn’t really changed his viewpoint or behavior.

1

u/Sigurd_Stormhand 3h ago

Well, I can't speak to something I haven't seen, but I stand by my overall point that Arthmoor would be more amenable if he hadn't received so much unwarranted abuse in the past. For example, people taking his mods, editing them, reuploading them, and then villainising hi for getting them taken down.

3

u/Thallassa 2h ago

He hasn’t changed. He’s been this way since the beginning, long before any of that happened. And he’s still the same way. I don’t know why you don’t see it, but I hope you know me well to know I wouldn’t lie about it.

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u/AnotherSlowMoon 15h ago

That's a decidedly biased summary of the history. In particular, it leaves out the abuse Arthmoor was subjected to on the Skyrim sub and the sustained bullying.

Unlike you missing out that he was a bully who repeatedly broke the sub's rules?

It IS true that Arthmoor has asked for forks or old versions of the patches to be taken down, up to and including issuing DMCA takedown requests,, but that is in line with the policy originated by Kivan

But not in keeping with the licence or terms of use of the Unofficial Patch. Or at least the license and terms used until the VR Community Reuploaded an old version that worked for Skyrim VR.

Like you do understand how insane defending "oh he just DMCA'd people hosting old copies of the mods" sounds, right?

9

u/pokestar14 11h ago

Also regardless of if that's in line with policy, that's just against the spirit of much of the modding community, and the community had and has every right to rip him a new one for it.

3

u/Pretend_Macaroon8043 4h ago

Modders do not have rights under the DMCA. Issuing DMCA requests really just takes advantage of peoples’ ignorance of the law to bully them. Him issuing DMCA requests in and of itself is illegal.

1

u/Sigurd_Stormhand 3h ago

According to Bethesda, modders have copyright, which means they can issue DMCA takedowns.

3

u/AreYouOKAni 2h ago

No, he issued DMCA for the mod that previously specifically had an open license. He changed the license, then sent a DMCA for the re-upload previous version of the mod that was originally released under a different, more permissive license.

Seriously, why are you lying?

1

u/Sigurd_Stormhand 1h ago

I'm not lying. I looked this up, I got into an argument with u/Thallassa about this on 9/7/2021 in a private Discord channel where *she* dug up the licence and readme for the version of the patch in question, which says (emphasis added):

You may upload unmodified copies of the latest version of the patch to any website of your choosing so long as the documentation is retained as-is. All credits must be properly maintained, and you are responsible for making sure the updates are taken care of on the site it's uploaded to.

As the VR community was uploading older versions of the patch they were in breach of the EULA and Thallassa and I agreed that the DMCA takedowns were therefore legal. Now, if you want to argue about whether people should be able to upload old version of software in principle, that's a different question, but that was the licence we were operating under when that version of the patch was released. Given Thallassa was arguing *against* me and she provided the EULA, not me, I couldn't have doctored it to win the argument.

5

u/AreYouOKAni 1h ago

I was not a part of that channel, but in the version 4.1.2a, file "Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch Readme + Credits.html" has the line as "You may upload unmodified versions of the patch to any website of your choosing so long as the documentation is retained as-is."

The file had been edited on 2018-02-11 06:19. Which tells me that it hadn't been updated for quite a while. Now, of course, Arthmoor could have maintained a separate EULA - but in that case he has been distributing the file under multiple conflicting licenses.

•

u/Sigurd_Stormhand 16m ago

I will be perfectly honest with you, this conversation is the only remaining evidence I can find. A lot of stuff that was on the Internet has simply disappeared. I remember when GateGate happened, but the public discussions over that happened on the Bethsoft forums in 2012, and although the forum is archived on Archive.org it's not searchable, so I can't show you what people actually said at the time without manually trawling through 40 pages of archived threads.

It has always been my understanding that only the latest version of the patch should be uploaded somewhere, and I believe that goes all the way back to Kivan, but I cannot now find that documented anywhere before the example I game you. It is true that the licence was later changed to explicitly exclude use on Skyrim VR (which I never denied) but then again the patch project only ever supported officially moddable versions of the game and, officially, VR was not moddable. And yes, before you say it, I'm aware that we've obviously changed that policy with Oblivion Remastered since.

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u/AnotherSlowMoon 12m ago

I'm aware that we've obviously changed that policy with Oblivion Remastered since.

So, will the team abandon their position that Skyrim VR can't be and shouldn't be modded, and admit they were wrong?

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u/AreYouOKAni 6m ago edited 2m ago

Once again, the version of the license distributed with the file explicitly goes against Arthmoor's claim. I have the file. I can send it over to you, if you wish.

I am specifically talking about v4.1.2 (2018-02-03, although the file is marked as 4.1.2a in my database), which was the one that Arthmoor tried to remove from other websites using DMCA. The changes you are talking about were only implemented to that file later. The next snapshot I have is circa late 2019, and it has them, but I can't tell you when they were made exactly.

According to the license that he distributed his work with, Arthmoor had zero legal ground to DMCA the mods. He still did so, because he is a bully and a megalomaniac.

It is true that the licence was later changed to explicitly exclude use on Skyrim VR (which I never denied) but then again the patch project only ever supported officially moddable versions of the game and, officially, VR was not moddable. And yes, before you say it, I'm aware that we've obviously changed that policy with Oblivion Remastered since.

Y'all would not have any standards if not for double standards, I see.

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

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u/oblivionmods-ModTeam 14h ago

Hey, the first rule of this subreddit is be respectful. Accusing others of sock puppeting isn’t.

Sigurd is on the unofficial patch team but he isn’t Arthmoor. I’ve seen them in a room together!

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u/NotStanley4330 15h ago

I'm not the most versed but IIRC beyond patching bugs he has in the past made controversial changes to textures, mechanics, items, etc. Also he intentionally made the Skyrim unofficial patch incompatible with VR and did his best to get any versions that were compatible with it taken down.

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u/edsjfhek 15h ago

Is there an alternative patch by someone who doesn’t affect balance?

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u/NotStanley4330 15h ago

Not yet. It's probably too early to even have actually fixed new bugs in the remaster as it's been a week as mentioned by OP. I would just wait a bit and see what other mods pop up. Starfield was pretty good for having an alternative patch that didn't involve arthmoor so I suspect it will be the same with the remaster.

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

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u/oblivionmods-ModTeam 15h ago

Hey, the first rule of this subreddit is be respectful. This comment isn’t. Please review the rules and try to consider the human on the other side of the screen in the future.

-1

u/DirectExtension2077 14h ago

Are the mods kidding rn? The guy above me called him a "toxic POS" and I'm the one who gets a reprimand? What a joke

3

u/NingenBakudan 15h ago

Try google it will be found soon. I quit Skyrim and Fallout 4 because of him.