Fascinating discussion. As with all discussions each side makes a number of valid points and suffers from a number of perceptions that appear prejudiced.
As the evil monster who unleashed this thing, I want to point out a couple of things.
The mod is often called unrealistic because (aka the Kapalua Discussion) the ball wont stop at the hole. Well, I just got back from playing there twice and I honestly believe that the MS greens are unrealistic. Many of the old APCD created courses featured unrealistic slopes to induce the kind of rolls that were there IRL with the standard 1.05 settings. Take Augusta V2 for example...
I think advocates of 1.05 have a valid point and concern about combining all the settings. The number of pure 1.05 tournaments may be reduced quite a lot. The effect of this can be compensated by only allowing mod settings to be used together or 1.05 settings to be used together. This will effectively leave it as it is today except that people wont have to click a different icon to play one or the other. More importantly for tour managers and lobby hosts it will mean not having to write separate code for both. I am sure the merits of allowing soft 1.05 and say Moderate 1.06 will be discussed at length before any decisions are made.
However, having said that I do not believe that the "The Mod is a more accurate simulation of golf" is a valid argument either. It is a different simulation of a different set of conditions that may be more akin to what tour players face on a day to day basis. It can easily be argued that the 1.05 settings are a more accurate reflection of the cow pastures most of us play on a day to day basis. When discussing these topics both sides must be careful to avoid these types of comments as they merely serve to inflame the other side and serve limited value
I remember beta testing Links 2001 and 2003, and I remember the fact that the swing meter for click had a different timing than Links 2000 / 97. I remember having to adjust to it. The lie penalties in Links 2003 are greater than the penalties in previous versions. New things come out all the time and we adapt cos that is the game. Here we are talking about giving people more choices not less and concerns are expressed that this is not the intent of the original designers of the game. I find the arguments about source code, pirating, and so forth to also be wholly self serving and of limited value to the real discussion that should be taking place about how we make the game better, provide more choice, improve the quality of the tour experience and so forth.
Anyone who actually played a game out there called Custom Play Golf would find that in those games the actual speeds of the greens roll on the fairways and all the other ball physics stuff was actually built into the course file by the designer. So there were no standard settings. The very first beta of the APCD contained that very same capability, and the first courses created using that would have had variable speeds to any level. One could argue therefore that this was the original intent. However by the time the game came out these screens in APCD had been removed and the stock settings put in for all fairways and greens.
Perhaps what we should do is make a simple change to the Links engine so that instead of using the texture properties for greens and fairways in the there it pulls those values from the CRZ instead. Then there would be no 1.05 or 1.06 settings just the settings the designer wanted the players to use. The firm to slow values would then merely be a multiplier of the course designers settings, and indeed you would have to practice a course a lot to get the speeds of the greens down to a point where you could play well. Perhaps an option to turn off the standard settings and use the course settings so again this could be a choice that people play with.
the problem of course is this. The more options you have (grid, speeds, gimmies etc) the more tour operators have to either force rules or check ver file settings to ensure everyone is playing the same and this adds to the headache of running a tour.
Happy holidays to all even those who have not yet discovered the frustration and challenge the mod provides to me....
