User blog comment:Gamemasta424/A Little Explanation/@comment-3967954-20120325095157

Being a small-time modder myself, I can safely say that some modding is purely for fun and not to anyone's disadvantage. However, whenever people make new discoveries with a game's engine, it's bound to be exploited by someone, usually for all the wrong reasons.

Usually, single-player modding is perfectly acceptable; some developers even encourage it (Valve, being the nice guys they are). Valve and Betheseda have even made free mod tools for would-be developers. However, multi-player modding is a whole different story. Fair enough if you're making a standalone multi-player mod (the original Team Fortess on the Quake engine, for example), but when people start to mod the multi-player that is already built into a game (let's say, MW3 or BF3) the community are going to be understandably concerned. If you're not a "hardcore" PC gamer, then the word modding probably means to you 'using mods for an unfair advantage', hence the outrage sometimes associated with mods.

DICE are quite well-known in the modding community for making their recent games more or less mod-proof. The reason they have done this is simple: they don't want people to mod the multi-player experience and potentially "ruin" it. Understandable, but also a shame, considering that the more responisble modders could have used Frostbite 2 to make their own small game, wether it be single-player or multi-player. That game could have gone on to be noticed by a developer, who might have contacted the maker of the mod and possibly employed them. This sort of thing has happened in the past, but given the amount of people who abuse mods and use them to their advantage, it looks like future developers won't allow the community to tamper (in a nice way) with the engines or even do something as simple as change the textures.

On the topic of the CoD community's reaction to AlterIWNet's closure, and to modding in general, I'm not suprised; nor should anyone be. Given that CoD has always been a game series that has distanced itself from allowing any sort of player-created content, the majority of the CoD community has only been introduced to the "bad" side of modding, the illegal side that uses mods purely to get the upper hand in multi-player games. Generalising the entire community as anti-mods is a mistake however. In the said blog, there was threads of support for AlterIWNet; some people, like yourself, who had seen the great things that modding can accomplish.

Unfortunatly, given the majority of developer's attitude to mods, which is the fault of the people who used mods in illegal ways, it looks like the "good" modding will soon die out for the most part.