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.

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..

[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.