This is indeed quite an annoying thing. There are many cases where I'd want like 90% of things in a community patch, but the remaining 10% makes me not install it.

I make it a rule for myself to first play through any game I play in as vanilla conditions as possible. That automatically excludes any gameplay changes. I don't have a problem with technical changes/fixes, but really don't like changes.

It's especially annoying when they're pre-installed with no way to get rid of them. This also extends to any remasters/remakes/rewhatever for me. I won't play them until I've played through the unchanged vanilla at least once, unless the rerelease is completely unchanged from the gameplay perspective.

Even official patches. For patch sensitive genres like RTS or ARPG, I might go through the patch history and opt for playing with a specific, non-latest patch. Battle for Middle Earth 1, Command & Conquer 3 or Diablo 2 would be great examples of that.

Anything beyond 1.02 for BFME 1 has great detrimental effects to the campaign experience due to multiplayer balancing changes. Diablo had several patches with sweeping changes impacting and changing the entire game.

Leading to one of the main disadvantages of digital distribution - you will always be fed with a game using the latest official patch with no option for anything else. Including cases where patches may even remove/censor content.

Sometimes, a remake can be so different from the original to the point where I consider it to be a completely different game.

The SaGa 3 remake is an example of this. Consider, for example, that levels and XP, very common RPG gameplay aspects that are present in nearly all RPGs (but not in the rest of the SaGa series), were removed from this remake. That alone completely changes things. That, plus all the other changes, make it an entirely new game, as far as I'm concerned, and which version I'd play depends on what sort of game I feel like playing. (My understanding is that the Romancing SaGa remake is just as drastic a change, though I haven't played the original. On the other hand, the SaGa 2 remake preserved most of the game mechanics; it just added new ones.)

Sword of Mana (GBA) is another remake (of Final Fantasy Adventure) that completely changes the game, to the point where I heard, on a speedrun video, the idea is that it's a different game that happens to have the same characters.

There's other cases where a remake changes the gameplay drastically. We see this in the DS remakes of FInal Fantasy 3 and 4, which may look similar on the surface, but if you dig deep into the actual game mechanics and combat formulas, they've been completely redone. It may not be as drastic as the examples I mentioned above, but it still is enough for me to consider them different games.

If the patch changes the story/content, mechanics or fundamentals/core of the game, I'd hope it has a good reason for it.

Changing AI behavior? It would have to be quite blatant, and even then I'm not sure it would matter.

Most lazy AI is 'move towards player and attack if close enough'. And raising difficulty is 'give more damage, have more hitpoints per NPC'.

Others might choose a specific branch of behavior based on weapon and a script associated with it.
Hammers? Rush in and hit, then back off.
Bows? Strife and shoot form a distance of 20-30 meters
daggers? attack get close, use poison if present.
Shield? Use shield to actively block; Wait for stamina to recover, then power attack til out of stamina
etc etc.

Just saying an AI branch may change how fighting/path-finding is altered a bit; Hopefully for the better.

That's assuming the game actually tracks enemy stamina. It's actually quite common for games not to bother tracking non-HP resources of enemies. For example, there's many RPGs in which enemies have no limit on how many spells they can cast. (SaGa 2, for example, doesn't enforce use limits for enemy attacks, even though your abilities and items have limited uses. On the other hand, SaGa 1 *does* enforce this limit for every enemy except the final boss; a certain Flare using boss, for example, can only use it 3 times during the battle.)

This is true. Tactics and RTS games tend to give them infinite resources.

When i wrote this i was thinking Skyrim/Morrowind/Oblivion where they actually do track it. (And draining stamina is an actual strategy making them collapse panting and helpless for several seconds).

In a tactics games, i can see them not caring because the turns would probably not pass 10 most of the time, so if you usually aren't even using 25% of your resources why bother keeping track?

But i think that's wrong and cheap; All units should be treated equally.

Does he have a legal basis to use the DMCA like that? Seeing as copyright is meant to protect original and creative work, and since the patch is primarily a collection of bug fixes, something I wouldn't consider to be original or creative, then I wouldn't expect copyright protection to apply to it. But then again, I'm not a lawyer. It's sad to see projects become so toxic, and it's especially toxic since so many other people have contributed to those same patches over the years.

Maybe because developers often do it themselves, with patches and/or expansions, as you've recently seen yourself with Night of the Raven? But I agree these things should be kept apart. The best community patches are those that let you opt in and out of everything (I think it was TOEE's Circle of Eight modpack that positively surprised me that way?).

Some people have this weird conception that developers are in some way superhuman and that you shouldnt "question god", i.e. the developers.

When in reality developers are just regular humans and they make errors and they may not have thought things through.

Theresfore some bugs are simply annoying, such as outright missing but necessary functionality, and impossible to fix without changing the game.

Of course theres also just bad fixes in the first place.

A good fan fix for a game should of course make any changes to gameplay that arent strictly necessary optional. Kind of like the regular and the plus patch for Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Personally I think one shouldnt play the regular patch more than once because its just inferior to the plus patch. The plus patch is even less buggy than the regular patch, since theres a lot more freedom to fix things.

And, as we all know, VtMB was unfortunately never truely finished. We cant get the actual vision for the game in the first place.

The way I see it (IANAL) is that:
* There are some aspects of the patch, like the new added dungeon, that could be considered original/creative work, and hence eligible for copyright.
* On the other hand, it is precisely those aspects of the patch that are particularly controversial; in particular, the substitute patches are *not* going to want to replicate those details.
* There's the problem that the DMCA is too easy to abuse; when the takedown is sent, the content will be removed if the target doesn't file a counterclaim, which requires providing personal information.

(Sidenote: Another situation where I've seen toxidity in projects is in the emulation scene. It happens with the developers of some emulators, and with the people who use them. I'm aware of one emulator developer who actually committed suicide due, I think, to harassment.)