(TL;DR translation: We're a community group, not affiliated with Starbreeze/Overkill. The Staff/Moderation team of MWS is all volunteers with a lot of history in modding PAYDAY games.)

Hi,

To start out with, here's the "About Us" section, which should answer most of your questions.

ModWorkshop (and by extension, Milk Deluxe, the parent company) isn't at all affiliated with Starbreeze Entertainment or Overkill Software, nor to any other game company. They don't have oversight or any direct input here (though some of us have social/unofficial contacts with some of their employees, and sometimes they ask us to take down certain mods for legal reasons). As such, we're solely a community-run resource (mainly, a website and a Discord server).

Originally, a gaming clan called LastBullet Gaming was responsible for hosting community-created mods for PAYDAY 2, but the clan has since collapsed (about 2015 or so), and ModWorkshop was created from some of its former members to help fill the responsibility of hosting PAYDAY 2 mods. Leadership has changed several times, and moderators and staff come and go, but Tsuna is the site owner/company owner for Milk Deluxe, and Luffy is the main site dev for ModWorkshop. They've both been around in the community since the LastBullet days, so at this point they've been involved and trusted in the community for at least a decade.

As for safety, we (MWS staff) moderate mods as closely as we can, and it is our policy that all mods on this website must be open-source, so that anyone can see and audit the code for themselves. You can see the rules here. (We haven't had any significant issues with actual deliberately malicious mods, but on that note, we urge you to please report suspicious or harmful mods to the moderation team via the "report" button- we take those cases quite seriously, and they're very quickly dealt with.)

Pretty much all of the moderation team (like Luffy) either is or was also pretty active and invested, either in communities and forums like Reddit or Steam, or in active development of modding tools like BeardLib and SuperBLT, which have been in use in PAYDAY 2 modding for many years. You can see some of our staff pop up in the commit history for those repositories, as well as the Reddit/Steam forums dating way back. (SuperBLT was forked from original BLT in 2017, and BeardLib was created in 2015 or so- which is quite a long time and a lot of work, so I'd say that's a lot of investment in improving the modding community- at least for PAYDAY 2.)

Feel free to ask if you have additional questions, and I or other moderators/staff will try to answer them.