A sudden and scary surprise for modders of Battle of Empires: 1914-1918 as a new announcement told that the Workshop would be shut down every mod that didn't meet a certain set of requirements.
Today a Steam Announcement revealed that Battle of Empires: 1914-1918 will undergo a purge that will shutdown all the mods on their Steam Workshop "in response to increasing cases of game client crashes because of incorrectly configured mods..." the suspected reasoning behind most of the crashes is an improper set up dependency given the fixes they provided.
Mod authors are now required to properly add the correct dependency (shown below) as well as add an image of their package.
After this is done, the author is required to "upload [their] package on the Steam Workshop using the package manager in the game and write a comment to this message — we will enable your mod."
Quick Take
This seems like a clumsy thing to have happen. While not being a modder of the game myself, it doesn't take much imagination from a modding veteran to see where the real issue lies. Installing a mod that clumsily forgot to rely on the right resources is a common issue of crashes. Heck, most of the crashes in a modded Skyrim installation is simply to blame to mod dependency being configured wrongly. Where the real issue lies however is the fact that the game seems to lack a proper built-in Mod Manager.
Skyrim suffers this too, having a distinct lack of any proper tools to manage your mod load order. The launcher only gives you an option to enable or disable plugins, which is the most basic of feature a mod manager should have. Thankfully, Skyrim's popularity has lead to some powerful tools being made to alleviate this issue, as well as proper websites hosting mods in a better framework, such as The Nexus.
A worthwhile in-between solution can be found an example of with Torchlight 2. The game comes with a launcher giving you the option between the Vanilla game or a Modded game. Vanilla is always available, and choosing the Modded option leads you to a mod manager where you can select a maximum of 10 installed mods (that you subscribed to in the Workshop) while setting up the order, with the option of setting up profiles as well.
