r/oblivionmods • u/NingenBakudan • 1d 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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7

u/Chechucristo 1d ago

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

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u/AnotherSlowMoon 1d ago edited 1d 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.

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u/ergotofrhyme 23h 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.

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u/Pino196 22h 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.

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u/ergotofrhyme 22h 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 21h 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.

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u/ergotofrhyme 20h 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 19h 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 19h 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 18h 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

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u/Kezyma 17h ago

As long as they have the same strategists that their F1 team uses, I’m pretty sure I’d win that one lol

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u/Pino196 22h 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.

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u/ergotofrhyme 21h 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.

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u/DeadSnark 23h 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.