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."

Comments

Meta-Moderation

[cjfs]

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.

Re:Meta-Moderation

[Thansal]

Actually, yes, that is what it needs.

However I came up with a possible idea a while back (it was for allowing an MMO to let in player created art for guild banners or whatever). It would basically be moderating, however seed the new content with items you know to be good/bad. Any one that regularly votes up/down content incorrectly is removed from moderating AND submitting new content. This way the Meta moderation can be handled via a program. Obviously not perfect and would require some human oversight (random spot checks).

A second part would be to compare votes on unknown items, if you get some one regularly voting down/up items that the majority vote the other way, check em, and ban em.

Of course, make the entire system opt-in, so if players want they can simply play with vetted content (in my case it would be blank banners for un-vetted content, for CoX it would be a limited pool of missions).

And no, this wouldn't really work for /. as that would require false comments to be seeded into articles, and locking their Score artificially, something that would be kinda silly.

Here is an idea...

[Tinctorius]

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.

Re:Here is an idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

How about age-appropriate ratings?

[Spazntwich]

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.

Why stop at age-appropriate rating?

[Tinctorius]

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."

The never ending fight

[Thanshin]

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.

Re:What the article didn't mention..

[Anonymous Coward]

>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.

You're complaining about alienating people over a "fix" that you have constructed in your mind about an exploit that may or may not be a problem while handily ignoring the fact that this has been - by far - the most popular issue EVER.

It's funny that you mention PvP. See, the hot mess that was PvP was the fact that it was DEAD. "All PvPers left, cancelled, QQ" whatever. All twenty of them? The devs did the only thing they could do, they scratched the previous system completely and started from the ground up. Because the "old" PvP was just THAT bad. It was totally, completely utterly fucked up. And the PvPers on test behaved like a bunch of spoiled 12 year old brats throwing tantrums and holding their breath threatening to hold it even more - between screams - instead of being constructive at all.

"Farming missions" are not a problem, son. The Architect is loaded with good arcs and stories and callenges and whatnot. Choke full, full to the brim with them. It's so easy to find good stuff it's laughable that you think farming is a problem. Must be the glasses you're wearing to look at it. The only "fucking idiot" here is you, who hasn't realized just how good this issue has been to the game, and are just focusing on the existance of farms. Considering what the Architect has given to the game, the farming missions are naught but a minor nuisance, a minuscule price to pay for such a fantastic result.

Re:What the article didn't mention..

[Bonker]

Op is so full of fail and retard that he's not worth listening to.

First, the game devs have been working to put the experience gain curve completely into the control of the player's hands. They're not really concerned about how fast you level. First, there's the 'Patrol Experience' feature, which was introduced with the last issue. It works about like 'Rested' experience in other games. There are other boosters that increase experience gain. There is also a voluntary switch that users can toggle on and off to eliminate EXP gain.

The devs are concerned about keeping the game challenging. They are eliminating objects that don't fight back from the architect system and have implemented a special game currency that's dropped based on how much effort you put into fighting an enemy.

Yep. They're skee-ball tickets you trade for drop rewards at the vendor outside the mission. You get more of them based on how much work you do inside the mission... so 'easy farming' is a contradiction.

They are concerned about copyright violations. If you make a mission about fighting the Incredible Hulk and Spiderman, you can bet that your mission will be banned nigh-instantly. They're also concerned about inappropriate content. The architect interface features a real-time word checker that will warn you for inserting vulgarity or profanity into your missions.

As for the PVP issue, yes, it was recently revamped in terms of how powers worked. Unlike the infamous 'New Game Experience' in SWG, no powers were removed. Several were added, and made available for PVE players as well. Powers were revamped slightly in how they worked, making 'one shotting' and other kinds of grief play not work. The only people upset about this are the core of PVPers who got their jollies by making life difficult for everyone else. The other PVPers and even a good number of PVEers are reather happy with it.

Another change they made was to add PVP-only drops. If you defeat another player, you have a chance of getting a GOOD drop from them. It doesn't take anything of theirs away and encourages more people to play PVP, particularly in Arena matches. Again, this makes the griefers unhappy because they don't get invited to the matches.

PVP in CoH was pretty much dead. Now it's burgeoning. I personally don't care for it, but all my friends are doing it.

So in other words, OP is full of shit. Go read the CoH boards for a better view on what's going on.