The issue with this particular mod is that there's barely any practical use case for its primary function. It's pretty much only useful for players who:
- Have all the keypad codes memorized,
- And lack the self control to not enter codes before finding them,
- But somehow do have the will to seek out and install a mod to stop themselves.
I think you'd be surprised how many people this is.
Most players don't have all the codes memorized. Just 1 or 2. But that's often enough to cause problems already. I have literally had people install this because of the 00000 code and no other reason. The medsci2 armoury code is especially important.
This mod is in the vein of QBR Breaker, as well as
other mods for other games. These sorts of "anti-cheese" mods will always have an audience because, despite sounding counterintuitive, it is actually easier to install a mod to fix the issue than it is to not abuse them.
I guess you can chalk it up to human nature, or lack of self control, or whatever. My theory is that it's much harder to ignore a clear advantage when it's presented to you, even if you think it's unfair, than it is to prevent the advantage in the first place.
So yeah. If you want better uptake, I'd rebrand this as something like "Keypad Enhancement Mod", touting the HUD display of found codes as the main feature, because people like mods that add functionality instead of taking it away. Then maybe offer variants with and without the anti-cheesing function.
There's no real point offering the non-cheese version since
people might as well use this one, and rebranding this will mean that the people who ARE specifically looking for the no-cheese functionality aren't going to know that it's some secondary function of a QoL codes mod.
If it was all just about pure download counts, you're right, this mod is not the most popular idea and a pivot to QoL is likely to generate more clicks. But I think it's more important to service this specific niche, which is a small but significant portion of SS2 players.
I'm mainly annoyed that I got a bunch of "it's broken" posts after SCP b5, then fixed it, and didn't get a single "it's fixed now" post, so I have absolutely no idea if my fix actually worked or not other than it working on my machine (which as we all know, isn't a good standard for developers to use).
Also only offer the most current version for download, and PM a mod to roll over the download count when you update.
Normally I do this. My other mods usually only offer the latest version. If there's an experimental beta that's usually available too. In this case, SCP b5 is still new enough that some important mods haven't been upgraded to be compatible with it yet, so I want to keep the old version around for people who are still using SCP b4. I will probably remove it once more mods have made the transition.
Also also, was this thread moved directly over here from Engineering? It's usually a better idea to create a new, uncluttered thread when going "live" with a mod.
I was under the impression that this was standard procedure. All of my mods have done this. I don't mind having "cluttered" threads personally, so it's not a big deal.