c'mon, who gives a shit about "most mods"? the only mods that matter are the best mods. Interesting NPCs has thousands of lines of high quality voice acting and some of the most creative writing i've personally ever seen. some of those NPCs are genuinely creepy, or funny as hell, or even ones you get emotionally attached to.
then what about the hundreds of broken or incomplete quests bethesda sold us? guess who fixes that shit for free and no, it's not bethesda. moonpath to elsweyr was an enjoyable mini expansion. i didn't love the khajiit voice acting in some cases, but i can't stand the queer black farmer nazeem's voice acting either. more of a preference than quality thing.
as for animations, ever animation mod i've seen adds a high quality animation that bethesda left out. everything from the ability to dual wield parry to jumping while sprinting to the way a chick's ass moves while she walks. they're all high quality and will be downloaded and used for years. even made a dance mod that added all those animations.
as for the mod houses, the one hearthfire straight up copied is
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/18480 (build your own home). they took his great ideas and added orphans and a few locations and made tens of thousands of dollars on it.
i know what you're saying, you're saying the shitty mods are shitty mods. well no shit. hot water is hot too. i know you WON'T try to tell me that there aren't great mods out there though. that's why you've already resorted to what you did. you want to argue, your argument is shitty and we both know you won't change your mind.
hell there are 3 skyrim devs who release shit on the nexus. i'm sure you'd put it down because it's a free mod even though the same guys make the shit bethesda charges you for
your argument is the same stupid ass immature shit people say when they think the $100 jeans are superior to the $40 jeans. or that paying $15 a month for an mmo means you get more for your money. it's what people who haven't had to pay for their own shit usually say. it's inexperience, stupidity and youth that makes you say shit like that.
if not for the modding community they wouldn't have succeeded with morrowind, much less oblivion and skyrim.
if you haven't played the console version with no mods, try it. it's fucking pathetic and it's bethesda's work that makes it pathetic.
they sell us a skeleton that modders flesh out
---------- Post added 2012-12-16 at 07:15 PM ----------
1) it's 100% legal already. if you can do it, do it. if someone went through and optimized skyrim's code, they'd end up creating the #1 mod of all time by a large margin.
2) here is some info on this based on what alexander (skyboost, scriptdragon) told someone:
According to Alexander Blade, developer of the Skyrim performance enhancing tools SkyBoost, and his anonymous source, Bethesda have no interest in boosting the PC version of Skyrim with patches.
First, let’s get up to speed with the state of Skyrim on the PC because, other than patch updates, we’ve not talked a great deal about Skyrim performance mods (instead focusing on a different sort of update). A great many of the flaws in in Skyrim have begun to be addressed by the modding community: graphics capabilities, the UI, and most importantly, the game’s performance. Modders quickly found whilst diving into Skyrim’s code that parts of it were missing vital optimisation.
One modder, Arisu, managed to improve the frame rate in CPU intensive areas of the game by up to 20 fps simply by optimising the code (his mod can be found here). Alexander Blade then built on the work of Arisu, further improving the game’s performance in a mod called SkyBoost (you can get his mod here).
It is important to note that these mods are optimising Bethesda’s work, they aren’t adding completely new extensions. So it begins to pose the question, are Bethesda going to implement these changes in a patch, applying the benefits to all Skyrim players instead of just those who are comfortable with modding?
Well according to Blade, no. Instead, he claims they have no plans of implementing these changes. Whether this is because they are working intently on DLC and only patching the game-breaking bugs we don’t yet know.
3) it's bad. really, really, really bad. you will not find a game that is worse. bethesda knows that modders will fix that shit for free. they know that competition in that market isn't bigger than the TES brand can overcome.
---------- Post added 2012-12-16 at 07:17 PM ----------
yeah. pm t3nd0 and he'll send it to you or i can send it via pm if you want it now. lets you get rid of a bunch of patches and even modify some stuff via .xml and he's got it set up to be very simple.