SubSerpent

I think it wouldn't be a problem playing it if the Dev team goes with my idea AS LONG AS you have A) Already provided a verifiable link to them that shows your upload contribution works and B) You PROMISS not to tell ANYONE (not even your own mother) that you have a working copy of the mod. This means NO hooking people up before the OFFICIAL release date or even bragging or mentioning that you have a copy of it.

I haven't thought of a consequence for anyone who breaks the rules though. Maybe the Dev team could get a moderator or Neal to ban them forever from Subsim.com if they break the rules/promiss agreement! That would certainly be a good punishment for those found guilty and keep them from getting any patches or fixes that come out for quite awhile in the future!

Perhaps GWX could be "packed" in an installer program file that won't open until a "key code" has been released? This way the Dev team could hold onto at least that "key code" until the actual release day. This way nobody can even open up the installer program file and no one would be able to play it until the "key code" gets released to the public on the forums in the official GWX mod released thread. This would avoid any "pre-released" and downloaded versions of the mod to even be used by any of the "trustworthy" people who turned out to be "untrustworthy". What are they gonna do with a program file they can't even open?

There are several ways to go about it and to make the upload/download "sharing" process work A LOT smoother than the previous expansion.

Just some ideas that I'm throwing at the Dev team to help them out. If they have any better ideas then so be it! I just hope it turns out to be a much smoother process than before. My reason for this is because I (as well as others) found it difficult to get a working copy of the mod at first and when we did get it we had to ask the same questions that other people had already asked nearly a week prior to us. This quickly became frustrating to the Dev team as they got hammered with a plethora of questions (some new and some already addressed million +1 times) already.

Then those of us who were confused or unknowing about the mod started to make accusations that the mod was no good and yada yada yada because we didn't get the help we needed to make the mod work the way we wanted it to. This only furthered the question and answer process for the Dev team to have to respond to the BS that was being spread. This slowed down further advancements of the mod and fixes that were needed. I'm wondering still if there is anyone out there who hasn't even tried the GW mod because they saw some BS post from someone that made the mod look bad. This is a robbery to those people because they truely don't know what they are missing and now are too afraid to even make the effort to download a file that size thinking that it may be a waste of time.

I think the quicker it is released and the easier it is to download by the public the better the whole process will be. This allows everyone to be able to get it fairly quickly (even slow dial-up modems) and allows for people to test it out for themselves for a week and then come to the forums to start their postings about questions or problems they have encountered.

Now all the Dev team has to do is kick back and answer legitimate questions about the MOD and not about download links and about approximate waiting time, etc etc.

OMG! Could you imagine there being 50+ working and unique download sources just on the first day!?! Then if other people add one and then another and another this will spread wickedly fast!

Some folks may decide to leave their link up for a week or two before removing it just so that their bandwidth for the month doesn't get too high. That sometimes kicks up the costs if someone is renting a server for space or whatever. As long as they provided a link that first week or two, that would be truely great. This gives a lot of people the chance to get the mod and to add it to their servers and take some of the bandwidth.