August 2020

Another month has come and gone... which means it's time for Lexy to ramble and waffle in a Patreon post! This is a long ramble, so fasten your seat belts.

First, we finally completed the long-awaited guide update which went quite smoothly for a change. PheonixSunStar completed his video walkthrough of the latest guide as well.

On the Discord side of the house, we had a bit of an overhaul. It was long overdue, as the server was getting pretty unmanagable. We had a few staffing changes as well: MDC officially decided to leave the staff after being inactive for the last few months. I also removed Xanza as a Help Desk Minion. Xanza was originally brought in since he was looking after the WabbaJack list for MDC (more on this later). TIN TIN was also promoted to Administrator to replace NatStar (who, like MDC, hadn't been around for a long while).

After a good bit of looking and testing, we've also settled on the MEE6 bot. You may have seen it in the server in the Moderator role in the last week or so. It's features can be seen here (https://mee6.xyz/?). 

The big news this month, though, is about WabbaJack. This has been brewing for a while, and it finally came to a head after a PC Gamer article published an article about WabbaJack. If you missed it, you can read it here (https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/auto-installing-over-600-mods-makes-skyrim-beautiful-and-confusing/). To summarize, the author briefly mentioned trying my guide and having trouble with it before he moved on to The Phoenix Flavor guide.

After the article was published, I was speaking on The Pnoenix Flavor's discord server, where I voiced a few of my own criticisms of WabbaJack and how the community (as a whole) uses that software. They were not new criticisms - I had voiced them many times before in many places.

The next day, Halgari and Timboman (two of the developers for WabbaJack) come onto my server and confronted me over those comments at what was the worst possible time. In thinking back, maybe I should have walked away and dealt with it later, when I was in a different frame of mind. But I didn't. There was a long-winded discussion about their perceptions about me: my lack of communication with them, my hostility towards users who were installing the guide through WabbaJack, and my inability to maintain the list because I'm still using Windows 7. As I mentioned last month, I did try (unsuccessfully) to install The Phoenix Flavor... and that was a complete disaster. In the end, I decided it would be best (for my own sanity) for the WabbaJack list to be dropped until I have the ability and desire to maintain the list myself instead of relying on other staff members or random people in the community.

Being totally honest with myself, I have never truly embraced WabbaJack. When MDC first proposed the idea of creating the list, I was like, "yeah, sure, whatever, I don't really care." And therein lies the fundamental problem. I always saw the WabbaJack side of things as MDC's personal project, something I had no personal involvement or investment in. I mostly watched from the sidelines and let MDC do his thing. Should I have taken a more active role in the early days of the project? Well... yes. I should have. But I didn't have the time to devote to maintaining the entire written guide as well as the WabbaJack listing. Fast forward a few months, and MDC had stepped back from maintaining the list, and Xanza had taken over. That worked for a whiel, but it wasn't ideal.

Could I have handled the situation better? Again, yes. I could have. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Have I damaged my brand because of this in the short term? Possible. There will always be a place for a manual installation and a well-written guide, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

I know that my decision to drop support for WabbaJack will upset some of the user base, and for that, I am truly sorry. That said, I can't do everything myself. Having others maintain WabbaJack has been problematic. I just don't have the time to maintain both the written guide and the WabbaJack listings, and as I discussed earlier, I can't maintain that list even if I had the time (because Windows 7). But it's always possible that, in the future when I can do these things, the guide may return to WabbaJack. What many of you may not realize is how much time it takes to maintain a guide as large and complex as Lexy's LOTD. In addition to my full-time job, I put in (easilly) 40 to 45 hours a week on the guide as well (so, essentially, a second full time job). Between those two, plus family, something has to give somewhere.

If you feel you can't support me any longer because I've dropped WabbaJack, that is totally fine. I won't hold it against any of you.

The second big piece of news Is Evertiro the Website server Admin and Guide author of LOTD Plus announced he has been diagnosed with cancer you can read more about it here https://lotdplus.com/2020/08/20/one-step-forward/  What does this mean for website? firstly I have spoken to Evertiro and his prognosis is very good. Secondly most users actually won't even notice a difference in service, there maybe times when I need Evertiro to do something but he maybe not available for obvious reasons this is OK we will work around issues if that happens.

Now, on to more pleasant things. I mentioned last month that I was looking at building a new PC, and I have narrowed down what I want. I have ordered an i5 10600K, Gigabyte z490 Aorus PRO AX motherboard, Noctua NH-D15 Chromax black cooler and case fan, and a pair of 32GB (2x16GB) Patriot Viper Steel Series DDR4 3600MHz RAM. All the parts have arrived I just need to backup all my important data and then actually build it.

Once it is built... I plan to have another go at installing The Phoenix Flavor with WabbaJack.

Well, that was a lot longer and a bit more rambling than I expect, but I think that wraps up everything that's been happening this month. So, as usual, here is your resident mad-lady, signing off.

- DarkLadyLexy