I have a question relating to the mod, specifically regarding your crediting policy. It sounds mostly alright, but, there are parts that sound odd, probably unintentionally. The first of them that I want to mention is relating to "ideas". Given the changes I saw, I wanna know which changes you'd consider notable enough to require crediting, because it's easy to come into the same conclusion at an individual level when it comes to most, if not all, of these changes. So I'm curious as to what specifically you mean when it comes to this concept of a modder's ownership of ideas.

For instance, dual-wielding not reducing damage and instead penalizing accuracy. It's an idea that someone could come up with on their own naturally. I ask because in those circumstances, I wouldn't expect the condition to credit for ideas to be so rigid, so I'm curious to know what circumstances would make it a rigid condition. It'd be hard to guess whether or not the person came to the conclusion on their own or not. Even then, you wouldn't necessarily have ownership over that concept; so I wanna know what kinds of ideas you mean when it comes to crediting being an important condition.

Again, this could end up going down to extreme specifics (such as specific numerical values in very specific tags) when it comes to some ideas, which I feel is probably not your intent and probably shouldn't happen either way, so I wanna know what your intent is with that wording. It sounds unclear and too vague when it comes to ideas, but it makes perfect sense when it comes to taking the actual mod files and making direct edits to them in order to create alternate versions of the mod altogether which specifically use this mod as the foundation to start editing from, instead of starting the modification of the game with the vanilla game as the foundation. Some of these balancing changes are a specific kind of fine-tuning; and again, someone could come into the same conclusion easily, further adding to my curiosity.

Adding another crediting policy bit into the discourse, I take issue with the idea that even the mere act of looking at the internals of a mod requires permission or credit. It shouldn't. That's just unreasonable in many ways. If you'd like to explain to me your purpose with that, go ahead, because it sounds incredibly unreasonable to me.

And further beyond, I want to know what level of inspiration you qualify as requiring credit. Just in general. As it stands, these things run the risk of making it sound overly controlling of something in such a way which can be deleterious to a modding scene, which I don't assume is your intent. Hence why I'm asking for clarification, because there's some logic in there for sure, but it needs more clarity, as it can also sound quite bad due to how much it leaves up to interpretation, and to me, the most logical interpretations are unhealthy.

Also, I'm sorry for the length of this text. I just want to make sure it's as clear as possible. Obviously, I'm not against you wanting your work and the work of those who helped you to get fairly credited. I just find aspects of how you describe that desire to be unclear and overly vague to a detrimental degree if one is to read and inspect it closely.

As a somewhat extreme example; that crediting policy text bit could accidentally end up being interpreted in such a way that it ends up being a pernicious crediting policy which ends up spreading harmful conditions and standards for the Halo modding community; particularly the cultural values, internalized behaviors and attitudes of that community, and even more specifically about the process of learning to mod and the overall attitude towards ownership and crediting works. For example, taking ownership and demanding credit for specific numerical values and singular balancing decisions, regardless of surrounding design context, and having that become standard, commonplace, and widely accepted as the norm within the community.

That conclusion is an unlikely one for someone doing cursory reading of that crediting policy text bit, and I don't feel like that extreme example is likely to become a widespread problem in reality. Even with that, I still feel like it is worth mentioning, since that kind of a crediting policy would be extremely unhealthy for a modding community; if taken as what I find to be its literal interpretation, that is. I hope you take this criticism well, and that you find it helpful and constructive, which is what I intend it to be.

What I actually think your intent is, is what a regular person would want. Just to receive fair credit for yourself and those around you, and to make sure people recognize your work and that of those who helped your personal vision come true, with no exploitation of your passionate collective efforts, while respecting what people may want to do with it. So, I hope this doesn't sound demonizing, it's more so a critique of the wording itself rather than an assumption of foul intent, and a general request to clarify it.