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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."
I think the GP's idea here was to farm out the responsibility. In the devplayer model, the dev becomes responsible for looking at every single piece of content. In the devCAplayer model, you allow a semi-free market approach whereby new CA's can enter the market insofar as they are needed. Content can thus be pre-approved.
If it is flagged by some player even after pre-approval, the dev's can then look at it, presumably cross-referencing the dependability/reputation of the CA (and potentially, both creating and flagging players) with the content review process. This lets the dev smartly prioritize what they review, reducing the burden on them, and building a more robust reputation mechanism into the game (since the CA will accumulate reputation based on many player's actions, rather than one persons).
This is actually a pretty elegant solution, IMO.