The mysterious MODs of The Settlers Online – What / how / etc are they?
First thing you need to know about the MODs, is that they never sleep.
Some people even claim the MODs aren’t even real humans, but a hybrid life form!
So who are these elusive creatures that keep an eye out for all the chatters online?
Nobody really knows… All we do know are a few facts!
There are a few types of MODs, the ones that keep an eye on chat write in yellow letters are the most common. At this moment we know they get smarter every week, as they get a bit more real world personalities after each maintenance. We suspect there is a lab somewhere in Germany where MODs are created and upgraded. Up until now many people have searched for the location, but it is better hidden than Area 51. You can even do a search with virtual maps, but after searching for over 2 years, nobody has succeeded.
There are also MODs that are especially adapted to work on the forum. They are able to read about 1500 pages and/or posts every minute. Chances are these MODs are connected directly to China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, since they can keep up with whatever we do, and some can respond through private messages or directly answer your posts.
The strongest type of MOD, a superMOD if you will, writes in blue letters in chat. These are even more elusive than the MODs controlling chat and forum. We can safely state that there is massive engineering in Artificial Intelligence involved here, since once you found a blue-writing-MOD, you can actually chat with these sophisticated creatures. Some people even found out that one of the superMODs seem to like white chocolate, proving the immense programming skills. It seems impossible to upgrade or enhance the superMOD with the current intellectual knowhow of human kind.
With this knowledge, and MODs are indeed a non-human life form, then it is logical to find out their energy source. Humans eat and drink to get energy and it would be safe to assume non-humans don’t. One of the yellow writing MODs once admitted that all MODs retreat to their original makers a few seconds before maintenance time. (Pretty awesome, since they are based all over the world, yet move to the home location in mere seconds!!!) It seems a vast team of very intelligent engineers is waiting for them to use the available maintenance time to recharge and reboot all mods. Many get upgrades in software, firmware, and occasionally also hardware. It’s a fact that some MODs get more advanced upgrades than others.
Need more proof? A chatter once came in the room, stumbled and knocked over a MOD by accident. That particular one lost his compassion-chip and damaged his anger management unit. Until now both the chip and the unit are still lost, and the chatter was never heard of again. Another good reason for maintenance, right? MODs seem to have a fragile side though, they damage easily. The engineers hang the mods upside down for recharging and repairs overnight, so they can keep an eye out for bad behavior for an entire week! Try that with your smartphone! We still don’t really know what kind of batteries they have, but I think they’re top of the line, after all, we mortal chatters do keep them very busy, yet they’re always there.
As with all humanly created artificial intelligence, the programmers can alter directives and behavior according to the needs and wishes of the commanders they answer to. Normally, machines, robots, computers, you name it cannot operate outside of the human created directives, but will seek answers inside their own data on how to respond to certain actions online and most likely do so, unless a superMOD steps in and overrules the data given to the lower ranked MOD.
This makes it super hard for mortals to escape a penalty when you crossed the line. Both the MOD and the superMOD are equipped with a really large amount of RAM-memory. Should one have a memory overflow and write all data to a backup server, the other still has that data alive. So please, make sure you stay inside the rules, to avoid triggering MODs banning directives, because they simply have no alternative but to do as commanded.
If anyone still has any more information on how the MODs work and behave, or have even seen the hidden location where they are created and maintained, please let the world know, for as of this moment, there is only one thing very clear…
We are not alone…….
DISCLAIMER: This post is not meant to be offensive to anyone, especially not MODs. It's meant for everyone - including but not limited to - players, moderators, developers and who ever reads this, hoping they will have a good laugh at this. There is absolutely no scientific proof about the MODs at the moment, but we ALL know Halloween is coming soon........