

An auto-update feature would be completely oblivious to such instructions.

Even so I'm sure a lot of users ignored the instructions and messed up their games unknowingly. That update needed a big disclaimer telling users to first click the "disable and dispell all effects for update or uninstall" button that was built into the mod before uninstalling and updating. At one point enough of my users had requested a rebalancing of penalties that I decided to edit those effects.

Just to provide anecdotal evidence, I made a needs mod that applied penalties via actor effect when you became hungry, tired, or thirsty (which is pretty standard, it ended up being the way New Vegas applied its hardcoe mode penalties.) The way actor effects work though, if you alter or remove the changes they make in an update, it will permanently alter the players stats if they are under any of those effects at the time of updating.
