Giskard and False Accusations

[Vorians]

Oh I've been missing out on some fun chatter here! I hadn't realised the necromancers had revived this thread. Thank you dallen, Ismelda and I appreciate your comments with regards to Better Cities. Thomas, I recommend that you keep an eye out for further attempts of sabotage on the wiki page, I warned Samson of the possibility yesterday after reading the latest post in this [url=http://www.theengineeringguild.co.uk/showthread.php?644-Beware-of-BOSS!&p=5538&viewfull=1#post5538]thread[/url], and as we now know, he did indeed discover that they had removed accurate information from the wiki (swiftly restored). Further attempts of sabotage may occur on that and other publicly-editable web pages.

[Thomas Kaira]

Samson sent me a PM regarding that yesterday morning, so I am well aware that Giskard's minions are attempting to make life difficult for us (but is that news, really?). Not that they can do any real damage. They can never destroy the lists now thanks to the mirrors, which they can't edit without hacking the websites they are hosted on. Hopefully, they'll soon figure out that they are wasting their time. Probably wishful thinking, though, Giskard was unwilling to let things go for two years, so he's not about to start. I'll just sit back and watch his lackies make ever bigger fools of themselves. :cool:

[Arthmoor]

You're welcome to mirror those lists over at the AFKMods site as well. In the unlikely event that BGS knocks them out and TESA follows suit, you can be certain that won't happen on my site. The information is far too valuable to the community. I never have figured out why mod cleaning got such a stigma in Oblivion when it was (and almost certainly still is) a huge issue in the Morrowind community. I don't ever recall anyone getting insulted by having the information pointed out with MW mods. Strangely enough that stigma didn't migrate to Fallout 3, and as far as I can tell, it didn't migrate to New Vegas either.

[Thomas Kaira]

So I just went through Giskard's entire mod collection (there were some in there that were not on the lists, so it was at least partially an info-grab), and these were the results: [code]CUO_Bravil.esp [v1.2] 42 ITM, 729 UDR] CUO_Bruma.esp [v1.0] 11 ITM, 5 UDR CUO_Chorrol.esp [v1.7] 29 ITM, 468 UDR CUO_Leyawiin [v1.4] 47 ITM, 417 (estimated) UDR [Gives error on undelete, still saves OK] FightersGuildContracts.esp [v1.2] 28 ITM, 9 UDR kingdonofAlmar.esp [v1.4] 177 ITM, 31 UDR KvatchAftermath [v7.8] 5240 ITM, 390 UDR KvatchRising.esp [v1.9] 220 ITM, 3 UDR Origin of the Mages Guild.esp [v7.3] 173 ITM, 383 UDR Sheogoraths_Accords_Of_Madness.esp [v1.4.1] 98 ITM, 71 UDR Tales From the Tomb.esp [v1.1] 1 ITM, 24 UDR TheElderCouncil.esp [v2.5] 274 ITM, 192 UDR TheElderCouncil_TempleOfTheOne.esp [v1.5] 17 ITM, 0 UDR TheNecromancer.esp [v1.7] 108 ITM, 178 UDR[/code] Yup, I actually went and downloaded that entire 1Gb mod package from Filefront just to put them through TES4Edit and delete them afterwards. I waste my time so you don't have to, after all. :innocent:

[Vorians]

Well, since you're talking about such things here... Version 1.5 of Kingdom of Almar is the same as v1.4: 177 ITM, 31 UDR

[Arthmoor]

[quote]KvatchAftermath [v7.8] 5240 ITM, 390 UDR[/quote] And he wonders why this one gets singled out the most :P

[Dwip]

I was actually going to make one of my rare posts to this thread to comment on that very thing. 5,240 is a really big number. As is 390. That takes some dedication. Also, 607 comments in this thread once I post. I'm a little sad the biggest comment thread on the blog is about this particular subject. Shouldn't we all be discussing invisible tanks or something? :P ...woo, numbers.

[Arthmoor]

His mods all have unnecessarily high UDR counts because he goes out of his way to delete vanilla objects only to replace them with duplicates that are effectively sitting in the same locations.

[prettyfly]

Why does he do that? Mentioning deleted records though, when I first cleaned The Easter Peaks I had about two thousand five hundred or so deleted records.. Top that Giskard!

[Arthmoor]

The only logical conclusion is that he's doing it deliberately to break compatibility with other peoples' mods. Not just city mods either. He does this to break EVERYONE'S mods. That 5,000+ dirty edits? He once described how he makes a landscape change and then deliberately makes the CS surround it with landscape change records by dragging things around. He knows about dirty edits and he's using them on purpose to "protect" his work from "interference" from other modders. You won't find the posts with this information in it anymore though because people in the know found the forums he was spewing this crap in, joined up, and started proving what he was up to. He's scrapped at least 4 sites over the years because of it, and my prediction is the current one he has now will eventually fall once enough knowledgeable people join it and start proving their cases again. I've seen a lot of mods filled with crap edits, and most of them are all over the map with the dirt following a random enough pattern to dismiss as someone who genuinely doesn't understand the problem. Giskard's CS dirt follows too much of a deliberate pattern to be an accident.

[Dallen68]

He does it because he thinks you have to delete the original object in order to place the re-textured original object there. Plus, he knows that a lot of mods rely on the original record being there; so if he deletes it, it makes the other mod pear shaped-and since someone playing the game is going to assume something is wrong with the other mod-they'll be posting in the forums for that mod asking for help. Then he can go on about how there's "thousands of threads asking for help...". Sniped by Samson. I'll get you yet. Watch.

[Arthmoor]

Dallen, that would require that he isn't aware of the search & replace function in the CS. Logic dictates that mods as complex as his, he's fully aware of it and is choosing the method he uses to have maximum disruptive impact on other peoples' work. Fortunately the Open Cities mods are immune to his shenanigans inside the cities since he can't delete my forms without undertaking the making of a patch. Since he's so dead set against using tools, he can't make one. Worst he could do to me is pull his games with the city walls, at which point I'd respond with a patch to remove his sabotage.

[Thomas Kaira]

I discovered a recent post by him so ignorant I really have to call him out on it (topic is the Mystic Emporium bug when you have Frostcrag and Battlehorn installed at the same time). Normally I don't go for beating a dead horse, but this one is still twitching: [quote]I know its Frostcrag that causes it but I have never heard of battlehorn causing it and theres no way both mods could combine to lock that door. Thats not how oblivion modding works. I think the NPC frost crag places in that shop has a back package that locks the door after you enter frost crag for the first time.[/quote] Umm... :surprised: They kinda did do just that, Giskard. Frostcrag changed the ownership of the shop slightly, and then Battlehorn came along and wiped out all ownership of that cell unintentionally. I'd say that that constitutes "two mods combining together to lock that door."

[Arthmoor]

Since he's religiously opposed to patches, he probably doesn't use the UOMP which documents that bug pretty clearly. It's also mentioned on UESP, so we can assume he never reads that site either. The guy is a lot more insular than I thought.

[Dallen68]

:facepalm: Already covered. Recently, too. :embarrassed:

[Arthmoor]

[quote=[url=http://www.iguanadons.net/Giskard-and-False-Accusations-372.html&c=7376#comment-7376]Samson[/url]]I'm laying odds that he'll be back and involved in Oblivion modding in about 6 months on a new website with a new forum, and it'll probably be even more "advanced" than what he's got now. Every time he's done this he's returned with a website more technically capable than the last. Maybe this is all nothing more than a cycle of development for him, who knows. It's an odd way of doing things if that's the case.[/quote] I am a prophet. The current iteration of TEG is built on much newer and far more advanced software than the last. He's back into Oblivion modding again. It may have been 8 months instead of 6, but it happened just as it was predicted :)

[Dallen68]

Before the stuff about quitting modding for Oblivion players ever came up, he was talking about how he was trying to find someone to temporarily host his files while he bought more equipment. He even said that he might not be as productive while that happened; stating that he'd mostly do fallout mods-if he had the time. This was months before the so-called "stab in the back" that forced him to "quit modding for Oblivion, costing us all his brilliant mods." So remember, Samson, Dwip, Pretty, Vorians, and Ismelda-if you want to stop making mods-plan of action first; fake blame it on everyone else excuse later. Oddly, if you just take a hiatus and get the money together for better software and servers and such you don't look like as big an ass when you come back. Come to think of it, it's actually a testament to the awesomeness that is Oblivion that people are still playing it; let alone modding for it. Now, let's all get a wild hair up our ass and play "Mech Warriors".

[Dallen68]

[quote]Dallen, that would require that he isn't aware of the search & replace function in the CS. Logic dictates that mods as complex as his, he's fully aware of it and is choosing the method he uses to have maximum disruptive impact on other peoples' work. [/quote] That just means he's counting on the player A) not having the construction set [true about half the time] and B) assuming that which ever mod he broke by removing the reference is what's broken. Then he can rant about the help threads for that mod; whilst knowing the whole time it's his mod that's the problem. It's rather ingenious if you think about it. As an added bonus, if someone in the greater community figures out what the problem is, and offers any sort of assistance he gets to rant about how the big bad Ismelda's are out to sabotage his brilliant masterpiece. If he would participate in the community this *would* actually create buzz for his mods; but since he's in isolation land....

[Thomas Kaira]

That's the thing, Dallen. Giskard has effectively been kicked out of the modding community. He's been banned at BGS and at the Nexus, which is the kiss of death for any modder. If you are not on one of those sites, you are going to suffer, and if you are not on both... well, you can forget about anyone noticing you. The only reason people still know about Giskard is because of the infamous Kvatch Aftermath fiasco (and the world record 5240 ITM records in the plugin). Other than that his name has essentially faded into obscurity in the modding community at large. I was a fairly new introduction, as I came in after the mess Giskard caused, but I've seen enough on his private forums to know that Samson is right. Short story: he was thrown out by the Oblivion modding community and is not welcome within it while he continues to be the self-righteous twit he is being. I'm not sure he can ever repair the damage to his reputation he's done even if he wanted to.

[Dallen68]

I came to it long after the fiasco, myself. In fact, it was getting a bad copy of Kvatch Aftermath that someone had mislabled as an update to Kvatch rebuilt (the first mod I ever downloaded) that made me seek Giskard out. Then I was a member of TEG for a long ass time. Then he started ranting about how bad BC and AN were, and how Arthmoor and Vorians couldn't mod a hole into a wet paper sac. So, me being me, I had to see if they were really as bad as all that. So, I tracked down a random Arthmoor file (in this case roads and bridges), and while it's not *the* most stupendous mod ever-it's not *bad* by any stretch of the imagination. Then, he started ranting about how the world was sabotaging his work, and how making patches was a violation of the Holy See...er, his work. Then, he brilliantly posted a link to here on his blog-and here I've been annoying Samson ever since. And I have lots and lots of beautiful, cleaned,bashed, patched, and merged mods all working relatively harmoniously on a computer that *should* just barely be able to play vanilla oblivion. Yay me! In there somewhere, he started going off about how people were publishing mods based on other peoples work. (Pointed mostly at Vorians and Wrye [although, as far as I can tell Wrye makes utilities, not mods]). About a month after this, he redid all his mods to require CURP and CUO something-or-another-which is primarily a compilation of other peoples work. He also did a different Kvatch mod at this time, although I can't recall the name of it. Even if he was to stop being a twit; I don't see how he'd get back in the community. Oh, wait: he does have a TES Alliance account, but he lays low there. I guess he could sign up here...but I wonder how that shoe would taste?

[Arthmoor]

Yep. Get banned from BGS and Nexus, you're effectively a ghost. Although TESA is growing enough to lessen that effect if you're active there. Which he's not (just found his profile) so that's exile. He could be a member of 50 other sites now and it wouldn't matter. Easily 80% of players get their mods from Nexus with the other 20% using TESA and PES. PES has a dismal forum setup and a terrible file interface so not a lot of Oblivion modders took root there. It would take a pretty big act of contrition on his part to repair the damage he's done to his reputation. People only loosely remember him by way of what few of his mods made their way into BOSS and got popular. Even today, mere mention of his name draws the moderators in. So shall we start a countdown on how long it takes for Giskard to root out Thomas and ban him? :P

[Dallen68]

3 days. Then it will take another 2 for Doombuggie to ban him. 2 days have passed, so by Wednesday.

[Thomas Kaira]

I wouldn't be surprised if I do get banned, since I've effectively responded to his lackies sabotage of my beloved lists by putting up his entire mod collection (I wonder how long it will take for him to notice all those fancy schmancy new additions?). And I'm not even a member of TEG, I just lurk and read. :lol: I'm not going to try, though. I prefer being able to see what they are doing. :evil:

[Arthmoor]

Then who's private forum were you referring to? That's the only reason I was starting a countdown was because I thought you meant TEG :P

[Thomas Kaira]

I guess I've confused you, then. I lurk on TEG because I occasionally need a good dose of comedy to spice up my day, and the place delivers, but I am not a member and don't intend to ever sign up. My knowledge of modding this game surpasses anything that is available on that site at this point, and you know what happens when you are more intelligent than Giskard. (/vanity clause) Anything I post here on the "vent your spleen about Giskard" topic comes from TEG. Those are the 'private forums' I refer to. Not exactly private, though, so I guess it was a bad word choice on my part. Maybe 'underground' would have been better. Just TEG. Nowhere else. The only sort of 'underground' (in that sense) forum I am a member of at this point is Chorrol, and that's not a modders forum.