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Managing Player-Created Content In City of Heroes
Superhero MMO City of Heroes recently went live with its 14th expansion (release notes), one of the main features of which is the Mission Architect, a system to allow players to create their own quest content and then submit it to be implemented into the game. Now, Joe Morrissey of the City of Heroes team has written an article about how they plan to manage the content that players create. "You have to decide how draconian you want to be. The more hardcore you are, the fewer people who will see inappropriate content, but you expose yourself to potential grief voting. Grief voting is when a player flags perfectly acceptable content as inappropriate just because it's fun. If it only takes a single vote to eliminate content from the game, clicking that button is going to be the game for a lot of players. You don't want perfectly good content getting pulled because someone's a jerk."
Grief voting is when a player flags perfectly acceptable content as inappropriate just because it's fun. If it only takes a single vote to eliminate content from the game, clicking that button is going to be the game for a lot of players. You don't want perfectly good content getting pulled because someone's a jerk.
Sounds like they could use some meta-moderating.
Another way is to introduce CAs (trusted by the MMO vendor) to certify content made by players. Player makes content, player has it verified and signed by CA(s), player uploads content and signature(s). If the CA goofs up and signs something the vendor deems inappropriate, the CA is suspended or even banned. OTOH, if an CA is too strict, people will look for other CAs, which could be bad news for a CA, since it seems there are always ways to make money out of things like this.
I've never played City of Heroes, but I have to assume as an MMORPG its players cover a wide range of ages.
Why not just implement a public voting system that works along the lines of movie and game ratings, with the game client itself possessing a parental rating lock? There's much less grief-voting incentive, unless the playerbase includes a large number of pedophiles specifically looking to get furry porn voted down to a PG rating and expose some kids, but it wouldn't be hard to lock content's rating once it has received a certain number of trusted votes.
That brings me to another point: AFAIK this is a pay game, which means creating new accounts isn't free or trivial. Many other communities have implemented the idea of 'trusted users' who can be expected to vote reasonably. If someone is consistently voting erratically, stop weighing their votes as heavily as someone who has been spot-on with majority ratings in the past.
I don't quite understand why this guy seems set on only having a simple 'flag as inappropriate' button when there are so many more options available.
I don't quite understand why this guy seems set on only having a simple 'flag as inappropriate' button when there are so many more options available.
"Flag as inappropriate for Pastafarians."
This user-generated level, "4Chan of Heroes" was brought to you by Anonymous Coward.
Squirrel!
This is very confusing. Is he talking about /.?
Meta will eat itself
The biggest problem isn't language or subject inappropriate content, it's farming missions.
The devs of CoX are fucking idiots, to be blunt: they've repeatedly shown an inability to predict what simple game and chaos theory tells anyone with a lick of common sense what will happen when you create an exploitable system: it will be exploited.
The system was pushed live with so many opportunities to minimize risk and maximize reward that overnight it's become a better method to power level than anything prior in the game.
What's hilarious about the CoX devs is when there's what they deem an "exploit", their reaction is slow, and inevitably the worst possible response one could possibly imagine. One that winds up not only not solving the intended problem, but pissing off people who are just trying to enjoy the game.
For an example, do some reading in the forums about the hot mess that is the CoX PvP system. They pulled some SOE SWG type fuckery on that, and instead of the zones and arenas becoming more populated as was intended, all the zones became a ghost town, and the PVP community on Test almost all cancelled their accounts.
What the CoX devs fail to grasp is that people will do what they enjoy with their game, and if you make it too hard for them, they'll cancel their accounts.
Some people like to powerlevel through the game. Yes, some of them will get bored once they realize there's no endgame, but the majority of people who prefer this pace will stay if you keep giving them new opportunities to advance their power.
They got the Invention system sort of right, but it exacerbated the farming issue severalfold.
Anyway, it'll be hilarious and sad to see what they do as a response to the Mission Architect exploitation for XP/rewards.
I used to love the game. I still enjoy playing with my friends sometimes, but if the devs keep alienating everyone, there'll be nobody left.
They call it content management, but it's clearly censorship.
And who will fight censorship?
Captain Penis! Of course.
And Ass Guy, his faithful sidekick, or should I say flag bearer.
Look at newgrounds.com to see how user submitted content can be flagged. You have greifers, but you also have spammers who submit garbage content like rickrolls and screaming clowns.
I love that the intro to his article goes on and on about how useless text filters are. Yet point 1 of his essay is, "Filters are a good place to start!"
He never defines 'inappropriate content' either or explains how standards are communicated to the community-policing, other than to give an example of the terrible & mighty beef-stick. I guess they know it when they see it.
I'd say make a ratings system, "Adult" or "Not Adult" and let users. . .oh wait, I forgot, by the ToS I think you must be over 18 to play, and of course everyone is. Of course.
I purched both City of Heroes and City of Villains. From my experience I found the servers extremely laggy. It was a very fun game at first, but then I started exploring and would run into parts of the map where I could no longer move. When I visited the club I wasn't allowed to act like a bad guy in any way. Which to me defeated the whole villain concept so I retired from the game. In my case I was banned for running around with a few other guys telling heroes to give us their money while they tried to pick up men pretending to be women. If you want to be a good guy this is a very good game. Bad guy not so much. I think player created content will do just find if it's exactly like every mission. Since after all they are all pretty much identical.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."