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The City of Heroes Expansion & the Issues of User-Created Content
eldavojohn writes "Wired has a piece on the new City of Heroes content that is created by players — or rather the severe abuse of it. Namely, creating missions for the characters. The problem is that gamers game this system, even though Paragon City has tried to maintain a good risk/reward ratio for experience in these missions. Making the situation even worse is that people who architect highly-rated missions get architect awards, which are redeemable for prizes — almost ensuring experience farming missions. Eric Heimburg (lead engineer and producer of Asheron's Call and the upcoming Star Trek MMO) comments on this: 'It may seem sad that giving the players what they want is detrimental to the player's overall length of enjoyment of the game, but that's the truth. Once you reached that top of the hill, if there's nothing left to do or see, players are likely to move on. Length of enjoyment (equals) amount of money earned, so developers have a strong incentive to keep players from gaining power and levels too quickly.' Matt Miller (lead designer of CoH), addressed the community on this very topic. This is resulting in an unexplained ban/loss of experience if you are determined to be abusing the mission architect, causing an uproar in the community. Is user-generated content a dead end for an MMORPG?" Update: 05/20 20:27 GMT by T : Rather than lead engineer of Asheron's Call or the Star Trek MMO, a correction at Wired says rather that "Heimburg worked as Star Trek Online's systems designer at Perpetual Entertainment, prior to the game's transfer to Cryptic Studio."
Why not wait and release the product without these gaping loopholes for players to abuse?
Create a mission they said!
Everyone Wants User-Created Content They Said!
Then you get banned. Bah!
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
MMO users exploiting a perceived weakness in the game? Who saw that one coming?
Is user-generated content a dead end for an MMORPG?
Not quite. It's probably a dead end for missions than grant experience but can still be a great part of the content. Provide some sort of ranking/point system and even add in cosmetic or other minor rewards and it will still have value.
MMOs are mostly about the sense of achievement but there's still room for a little fun in them :)
They should have seen this coming.
The casual players want well crafted stories and fresh content, they usually don't play through it at a rate much faster than the developers can give them something.
The hardcore players are all about min-max'ing for the most beneficial use of their time. They also have the most time to create things like this.
You have the abusers making the content, of course it will be ripe for abusing.
This is like putting a drug dealer in charge of the war on drugs.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
Length of enjoyment (equals) amount of money earned, so developers have a strong incentive to keep players from gaining power and levels too quickly.
I get board if I can't level fast enough. I guess that why I don't play mmorpgs anymore. I think gaining levels should be matched on the content of the game of course, but most grinds are just too boring. If you have to raid the same place too often it hurts rather than helps.
The issue is not loopholes that are able to be removed. The issue is that the only way to ensure that abuse cannot happen is to have nearly zero ability to create anything original. The tradeoff is an inability to have variety. This makes user created content even less desirable than the worst pre-made stuff.
The Mission Architect is the best addition ever made to City of Heroes. The fact that farming is a widely used form for created missions actually stems from CoH/V deciding to include high levels of loot and crafting. Add in an intention extreme scarcity of the most desirable stat modifying drops, and people that are stat-obsessed react by finding ways to acquire those drops with the least time input. People that obsess over stats are drawn to loot, and it's bonuses. Those same people are the ones that will end up farming, or paying a farmer, instead of waiting a full year to acquire or save enough to purchase their "optimal loadout".
Loot begets farming. The farmers have found a way to optimize every aspect of the game for power or profit. Mission Architect is just another area they are leveraging.
At the end of the day, user created content opens a whole new area for player development and expression. The benefit outweighs the risk.
They can create missions they have exclusive knowledge of how to solve, and share secrets with their friends, I suppose, or play their own characters through it -- granting themself an advantage.
And using sockpuppets to vote/rate on their own mission.
Well in a commercial MMORPG they should be able to positively identify people and prevent most of these forseeable abuses...
Playing your own mission should not come with any rewards.
The rewards (and dangers) of other people's missions should not be controlled by the creator.
Otherwise, player-generated content is a brilliant idea.
What they should do is after a mission is created and receives some sort of rating, get a few player volunteers to 'review' it in exchange for another reward, before the mission can be "enabled" for gameplay reward.
Until "enabled", no 'items' can be obtained from it, no experience, etc, or other benefit from playing the mission.
The reviewers get to examine the mission and 'flag' any element, place, waypoint, etc, in it as needing to be changed.
If the mission is accepted, the reviewer who reported the highest number of problems that were acted upon gets a prize, but they are disqualified if they have a high miss-rate (reporting a large number of problems that other reviewers did not independently find and were not acted upon).
If the mission got rejected, the reviewer who reported the most problems that there was a consensus on from other reviewers (but who had a low miss rate) still gets some prize.
Leave it up to the player reviewers to find any effort at cheating in the mission or backdooring and to reject or report it, before the mission goes 'live'...
... It's not that user created content is bad, it's that user created content for an MMO has to be vetted by the developers themselves. Letting users create content with no filter for an MMO is stupid.
For single player games it's fine since each person chooses what the download and what they want to play.
Also making user created content that does not let users change rules of the game or build their own missions would have done a lot to preven this.
User created content is FINE as long as you limit it to things like character customization, aesthetics, art, etc. Things that really don't effect the core game.
From TFA:
"Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they'll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible."
Once you give participants the tools to mold a game, then "molding the game" becomes a meta-game. And the goal is obviously to exploit loopholes in the original game as much as possible. It's just too bad the meta-game-playing folk conflict with the original-game-playing folk.
Back in the early 90s you could use the add-on Mission Builder for Red Baron to create your own missions and share them via CompuServe, BBSes and the like. Players made sure-thing puff missions, nearly impossible ones, really weird ones, and everything in-between. Other players downloaded and played whichever of these they wanted. Players could also download various unofficial patches (to, among other things, tweak difficulty up or down) if desired. This didn't matter a bit since Red Baron was one-player only (though it had a large, interacting community of players) and it was up to the player how to play the game he'd purchased.
While I have some respect for game designers who want to protect the artistry and gameplay of their creations from "cheating," I have none for companies like Paragon who are fundamentally driven by greed. If you can only stay in business by artificially stringing players along, you deserve to fail right out of the gate (better yet, don't even release such an inherently horrible game). Money-grubbing MMO games like this are bad for gaming.
Every current MMO is based on repetitive raiding and questing until you're different just like everyone else. Some games require you to have specific gear to defeat specific "bosses" how do you get this gear you ask? You run the same raid 20+ times just to get 1 piece of it, you might find that fun, I find it to be the definition of tediousness.
How hard would be to not require players to do endless, meaningless quests in order to level, or get required crafting items? I want to feel like I'm participating in something epic, not get a second job.
The apparent game vs. the actual game:
In most multiplayer gaming contexts, players are competing against one another either singly, or in teams. This goes way back into our heritage as damn dirty apes, and is unlikely to change, barring some sort of radical transhumanist break with human nature.
In some games, with FPSes and RTSes being the clearest example, this social competitive game is more or less identical with the apparent game(that is, the computer game actually being played). You achieve dominance by killing the other guy in the game, you bond with your teammates by working to do so, and so forth. In this context, "user-created content" has a strong track record. Just look at the mod scene for FPSes, or the endless subtle tweaking and rebalancing that goes on in TA:Spring. This works because people are quite good at building satisfactory rules and mechanisms for competition with one another(such as every sport ever invented). Since the computer game is a direct proxy for the social game, this works pretty well.
In many MMORPGs, the situation is different. The computer game is, in many respects, closer to parallel single player than to competitive multiplayer(some degree of cooperation is generally required at high levels, and there may be some more or less cosmetic PvP; but the game mechanics mostly involve grinding NPCs). However, the social competitive game is still there, it just doesn't align with the computer game all that well. The social competitive game is the acquisition contest between players, for XP, levels, loot, prime raids, and all that. For that reason, the drive to win the real game is a drive to subvert the computer game, rather than to refine it, since the obstacles of the computer game is an impediment to success in the real game.
Another matter to consider is barriers to entry/costs of switching tactics in a given game. Most FPSes and RTSes, for instance, have relatively low investments in a character, class, faction, or strategy. If the zerg get nerfed, I can play the terrans without too much trouble. If snipers get overpowered, I can switch from medic to sniper. MMORPGs, on the other hand, often have fairly high investments. If I have a level 60, and my class gets nerfed, I have just lost a lot. For that reason, it is reasonable to expect that RTS/FPS players would prefer "fair" rule formulations(since, with low character investment, everyone will just move from the unfair side to the fair side, causing the game to contract a bit; and conveying no lasting advantage to anyone) while MMORPG players would be more likely to be strongly invested in a superior outcome for themselves(since, with high character investment, not only do they win, the losers are somewhat constrained and so may stick around to continue to be losers).
I stopped playing CoH / CoV because it got boring / repetitive. Wasn't CoH/CoV losing playerbase before the expac release? If so, the current actions seem... counter productive...
I used to play this game a lot for a good 2-3 years. I eventually grew bored of it since Real Life was becoming much more demanding.
This game lets you join others that want to play at the pace you do. You don't have to join up with gold farmers.
You could have a bunch of top levels running around you and it won't ruin your game. Just don't play with them.
The real problem would be making it easy to find good user-created stories and not high-ranked user-created gold farm missions.
There is a joke/story that Jick, one of the creators of The Kingdom of Loathing, likes to tell and refer to in his biweekly podcast. To roughly paraphrase:
Someday, I'd like to make a game called "The Future". And all what this game would be is an empty space to start with. The users would then, for a fee, be able to upload the game's content. Everything, down to dungeon designs, graphics for monsters, items, weapons, game mechanics, everything would be user-created, because as we all know from all these game developer conferences I go to, "user-created content is The Future "!
So we'd create this game and release it. All user-created content. And then in a matter of a couple weeks, we would have a few thousand drawings of cocks and balls making up the vast majority of the game's world. Cocks and balls as monsters, cocks and balls as items, cocks and balls as weapons, dungeons shaped like cocks and balls populated with cocks and balls that drop cocks and balls that you fight with cocks and balls. And that's all anyone would ever bother creating, because that's the only sort of person with time to do this, and anyone who's been on the internet knows this is what would happen, because user-created content, on the whole, sucks. And that's The Future!!
That's the sort of thing I think back on and chuckle about to myself whenever I hear of a game world made of user-created content and how it's the future of gaming and how awesome it's going to be. Looks like Jick's not too far off the mark.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
As someone with an active CoH account, I've seen several articles like the above and it strikes me that the only people who are angry enough about this to write online articles (and get them linked) are the gold farmers who were abusing the heck out of the system even after the devs told them to stop and warned them about not abusing it. For regular players this has not been a problem at all.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with the whole situation was that farmers were clogging up the rating system and making it difficult to find good arcs on the admittedly inadequate search system CoH has for the Mission Architect. The price collapse on the player run markets was also a concern, but that was only partially the result of the farmers and more the result of players being able to craft particular (and expensive) items that were typically only available on drop tables that were full of crap. In other words, since the players can react to price spikes of small numbers of items directly and greatly smooth out the market, which is apparently what is happening. What's more, even after the devs implemented the anti-farming provisions the market did not return to its previous state.
In the long run, the Mission Architect has given the players an enormous amount of new content. It really is an amazing system, and it has plenty of headroom to grow even more amazing.
I read the internet for the articles.
MMOs rely on the carrot and stick thing. Do things, level up so you can do "harder" things, do those harder things, level up so you can do even harder things, etc. That's the reward, that's the payoff for the VAST majority of the players.
Yes i know that players exist that play for the story or other aspects of MMOs, but they're the least inclined to stay around and the hardest to hold on to. I don't feel like going into the specifics of why.
The playerbase is there to chase the carrot at the end of the stick. User-created content lets the player control that stick, completely removing one of the gameplay fundamentals. No duh they're breaking your game. Hell one of the fundamental tenets of game design is the player rarely knows what he/she wants.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
This is why I like tabletop gaming. Because you aren't interacting with a machine. Machines are, while amazing things that can bring us wonders beyond our own imaginations, in the end as inbias as the people using them. They are fair. This means they are as fair to the gamers who want to level as fast as possible and get the best stats as they are to those who want to become heroes through complicated stories and plots and other things that make the fantasy genre of books entertaining.
City of Heroes is trying to emulate a series of books (in this case, comic books). But would anyone read batman if instead of solving interesting mysteries he just ran around beating up gang members 20 at a time? Of course not. What if he did it again and again with no properly explained reason? Also foolish.
RPGs, as technology stands right now, only works with either a low number of players, single players or in the medium of tabletop entertainment in which a real person (a GM) can rate the entertainment value of his or her world and include player created content at a consistent rate that doesn't exclude any players from achieving what they hope to achieve by playing the game.
For example, recently in my groups 3.X Eberron campaign I wanted to change characters. This has been done in the past by various members of the party...but as a character who has been in the group since the beginning it seemed kinda silly to just suddenly change. So I requested that the DM do a story arc with it (he was running a little low on ideas at the time anyway since we were at a "blah" stage of progression in our levels). So I gave him suggestions and he made it into a story arc (a "set of missions" if you will). It made the character transfer memorable for everyone and really let my character's backstory more interesting and notable by everyone at the table. At least moreso than another player who just joined the party as "random prisoner we find in our big bad evil genius' lair (tm)".
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
With the advent of the merit system in Issue 13, the devs made it ABUNDANTLY clear that it's a trinary equation of risk and time vs reward.
As such, you could be fighting NOTHING but AVs, but if you're levelling "too fast" you're abusing the game.
This point was reiterated with the nerfing/capping of the ticket awards for AE missions as well.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
User-generated content is great, but it must exist within pre-defined limits or constructs such that abuse is largely mitigated. As the freedom of the user to generate content is increased, the complexity of the construct required to maintain reasonable parameters of play increases exponentially. The trick is in balancing the complexity of the construct you have to maintain behind the scenes with the level of freedom your players wish to enjoy. It also helps if you're able to entice your most gifted users into telling you when they find an abusable loophole.
In the end, it seems a lot simpler to build a sandbox with enough carrots and sticks that it becomes more profitable and efficient to work within the construct. That alone will take out a large number of those who are otherwise just looking for shortcuts to success. As for the "hackers" who will continue to hunt for any cracks in the system just for the pleasure of doing so? Find a way to reward their efforts such that they'll tell you rather than their buddies when they find those cracks.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
(new character, a cyborg hero) Day 1. I have no idea what's going on... Discovering the hero system. Start doing random beginner mission. Having fun. Jump up to Level 3. Day 2. Join a party and do more beginner mission. Having fun. Level 8! EAT MY LIGHTING PUNCH! Day 3. Join a Architect mission party. Farming begins... Everyone in the party are Level 40 and above. @ the end of day... gain... 10 levels. Level 18. Day 4. More Farming... Gain 1 level every 30 minutes. Let the shopping begin! Level 26. Day 5. Spend some time with story missions... NOT FUN. NO ONE willing to do them... I wonder where everyone is... Day 6. That's it... It's been fun but AE missions are really screwing up the game. Back to WOW! Day 7. WOW and more Street Fighter 4!
True in games. True in Politics.
Money is the root of all evil?
Hi, Eric Heimburg here (quoted in article).
I just wanted to clarify that although I was the producer for Asheron's Call 2, and have been lead engineer/lead designer for other MMO titles, I'm not affiliated with the upcoming Star Trek MMO. I worked on an earlier incarnation of the Star Trek MMO, when it was being made by Perpetual. (They went bankrupt and lost the license.) Somehow wires got crossed in the Wired article, and then they got crossed here, too.
This detail would be irrelevant and not worth mentioning, except that the company making the new Star Trek MMO is also making the superhero MMO "Champions Online" -- a direct competitor to CoH.
So there's been a meme of "he's a shill for the competition!" going on at Wired.com, which makes me sad. I am not a shill for any major MMO company... at the moment.
However, I am hyping my amazing blog at http://www.eldergame.com/ but a link to it always seems to get omitted in the article coverage...
Most of the responses here seemed to be tainted by folks who either don't play MMOs on a regular basis, or WoW throw-backs who don't know how to play an MMO that isn't a WoW clone in form or function. It would be nice if those who don't play MMOs in the first place not comment on this MMO in particular. As for the Architect being counter productive to City of Heroes, we have a saying on the boards over there, "More content is always better!" I couldn't give two squirts about farmers complaining about AE, I can select the missions I want to run and if they suck, I can create a mission I think is better, or even not participate at all. The point is it's my choice as the player and having more choices can never be wrong.
Every single MUD headwiz knows the problem. Every single one of them.
No matter how well you try to "balance" the system, if your creator wants to abuse game mechanics, they can. Mobs don't just have X HP and you do Y damage, so it takes Z time. Even in a game like MUD where positioning abuse and kiting isn't really possible. Resistance vs. damage type it the most obvious abuse point. When you have to give your mobs a certain total level of resistance, make them resistent to the damage you don't do and susceptible to damage you do and you got a decisive edge. Bonus points if you can corner the market so far that it's only useable to a certain class (because, say, clerics are the only ones who do holy damage) so you can pump your character while nobody else can. Or, in this case where you get bonus points if people use your content, create weaknesses that can be exploited by many.
Now add equipment, damage types, rooting and so on and you can easily see where you could exploit it. Make them weak to rooting spells, give them only close combat attacks and kiting a heavy mob becomes trivial.
Am I the only one who knew this would happen?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For a lot of MMOs time IS money and so the game designers use XP to ration the content (areas, capabilities, classes, etc) and extend playing time to reap more $$$. The game design is all all about placing barriers to content access - this is an incentive for users to generate content that avoids the barriers.
It seems like you cannot avoid a red-queen race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen) unless you change the underlying incentives. I've no idea how or what you would be left with after...
I'm surprised they offer real rewards for player created content at all. The mission creator is meant to be a creative outlet, and it seems the only way to let creativity and fun missions dominate the rankings is if the farmers and PLers have no interest in it.
Of course the majority of troglodytes here are calling for player created content to be removed instead of just reducing the rewards and making it less appealing to farmers.
I know the above has become a popular argument to make on Slashdot in any topic, but in COH's case, as someone who's played it from launch, I can tell you that your faith is misplaced. Yes, COH actually has a long history at implementing stuff without thinking, and then being suprised when they discover how it can be (ab)used.
From day zero there had been such "exploits" (read: just doing what the system allowed) as the smoke grenade that could floor the enemy's to-hit, or the Hasten which could end up stacking with itself. Let me explain the latter because it's a case where, yes, 2 minutes and some basic arithmetic could have foretold it.
"Hasten" was supposed to be a situational power, which for a while made all your attacks recharge much faster. But it wasn't supposed to be permanent. But the darndest thing is: nobody seems to have actually tested what happens when you put six Single-Origin recharge reducers in it, a perfectly valid scenario allowed by the game. In fact, it was possible to make it permanent (recharge time equalled the time its effect stayed up) with only _two_ Single-Origins. Anything more would cause it to recharge faster than it stays up, so you could even have it stack with itself.
Statesman seemed genuinely surprised that this is possible. Nobody did the maths there, and we're talking simple arithmetic and standard "equipment" available at level 22. We're not talking some arcane combination of bonuses or epic equipment being off the chart, but the bog standard stuff bought from the vendor at level 22.
Eventually he agreed to let players have it permanently on, but said that then you'd need a full 6 SOs for that. Something he'd later turn around and present as an exploint in the ED.
The ED itself screwed up power sets like, say, defense because it was an across-the-board change to everyone without any thought about how it affects any particular build, nor any attempt to balance it. It took more than a year to fix the screw-ups introduced by the ED patch.
But to get to the present, just look at some patch notes about architect missions. E.g., one says that now all the melee sets for custom enemies have at least one ranged attack too. Aha. So they launched it without foreseeing that critters with no ranged attack, can be bombed with impunity by anyone who took Hover or Fly? In a game where half the people can fly, nobody foresaw that?
So, you tell me. How come in all their thinking and meetings and all, nobody foresaw something as elementary as that exploit?
Because from where I stand, it looks to me like, yes, sometimes they don't even try.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Unfortunately, it ruins the experience for everyone else too.
E.g., a lot of grouping before in COH had been for xp. Let's not pretend we're just a more social bunch and need to go even to the toilet in groups. The game just gave a bigger group xp bonus than, say, WoW does, so people grouped.
But then suddenly farming AE missions came and offered much higher xp than anything else. You can see where that's going.
I pretty much gave up on playing my defenders (support chars, for whoever isn't a COH player) because the chances of being invited to anything else than yet another AE farming session became almost nill.
Even on other characters it's a rare day when you find a non-farming group and it doesn't degenerate into "why don't we go farm AE missions instead? They're more xp." And then into "screw this, guys, I need xp" if you don't want to go farming.
E.g., you can see the effects on the auction house. Certain kinds of common drops (especially in the pre-50 ranges everyone skipped) became rare because nobody does those enemies any more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Unfortunately, for most people it _is_ the kind of crap he described.
E.g., I have a _lot_ of low level alts and routinely group with newbies. And with other players who made alts. I've yet to see one who's happy with the grind to level 20-22. If the topic comes up, virtually _everyone_ just gnashes their teeth and grinds through the non-fun teen levels, to the point where they finally get their Stamina and stop sucking.
So, yes, I still wonder why the COH team doesn't fucking fix their game to be fun at all levels already. There was no level range on WoW where I had the impression that I just need to grind 9 more levels and _then_ it'll be fun. Whatever class I was playing, and I've played all 10, had a good enough mix of spells to be fun playing at any level from 1 to 80. Why can't COH be the same?
E.g., both in game and on the forums, the consensus is that if you're, say, a Blaster, oh well, you better get used to faceplanting lots and being in xp debt half the time. Or that you can't really solo past a point anyway, because everyone and their grandma mezzes and you just have no protection against being mez-locked. It's one of those things that just are, like the sun coming up in the east.
But if you think about it... why? It's the most piss-poor example of game design. How about some actual balance?
And is it surprising that then a lot of them went and made custom missions full of enemies which _can't_ mez for a change?
Etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Gaming company executives try to replace content designers with users doing it for free and users stray from "the vision" ...
MMOs generally aren't fun. If i unlock all the teams on a sports game is the game over? Hardly it's just begun! With an MMO they only thing is the psychologically carrot/stick grind. It's a total MindF---. People will start seeing MMOs for what they are and they will be revolutionized soon. They can't just dangle higher level mobs with higher level gear over peoples heads forever... or maybe they can...
"It may seem sad that giving the players what they want is detrimental to the player's overall length of enjoyment of the game, but that's the truth. Once you reached that top of the hill, if there's nothing left to do or see, players are likely to move on."
If your game has not intereting endgame, or is linear. Probabbly sandbox games don't have this problem.
-Woof woof woof!
This is why you need a closed resource system.
Where resource is a correct sum of npc's x experience gained.
Resource is converted to attackable npc's until finally the resource is depleated and no extra npc's can be added.
An npc who can summon minions will only be able to summon minions until his actions depleted the remaining resource.
The top 100 most often played missions at the end of every month are guaranteed to be played by the developers or GMs or player volunteers, and officially rated. Those that are good get awarded manually and a form of in-game badge next to them.
This would be a slight bit of workload in the beginning, but if you only give one award in the lifetime of a mission (or minimum with 3 months in between), then you wouldn't have to re-rate all the previously rated ones.
Okay, most people seem to either miss whats actually wrong, or don't play the game. First of all, this was based on an original developer tool. User created content only really became broken with the addition of the 'Auto-sidekick' feature built into the content creator code. This code was never a feature of the original game, as it allowed a level 1 player to fight as a level 50 player, and without another player helping them. This feature is *still* there and is still part of the problem, but they don't seem to recognize it. Additional issues such as the rikti lt. and the and bomb farms become much less of a problem when the player simply can't access them.
"Is user-generated content a dead end for an MMORPG?"
As seeing as how this is the one and only 'experiment' of this kind that I know about (correct me if I'm wrong - please), I'd have to say the data is totally incomplete. We need a few other games to try this out and their various takes on the idea to see if it's feasible. Just because it "failed" once doesn't mean it'll happen again.
What I'd much prefer to see is something like where the player creating the content has to pay a minimal amount to see the content come to fruition, *OR* things being set up so that the rewards from player-dungeons are far less important than official-dungeons.
With players paying to publish their content, only the hard core lovers of the game will bother since you have to pay, and who wants to pay (real world money) to upload utter crap? Sure a few will do it I'm sure, but surely to all hell at least someone at $BIG_GAME_COMPANY reads and looks over the stuff as they're importing it in to the system. A possible alternative is to require players to pay gold to play the campaign, probably based on average XP gain.
With rewards gained being 'cosmetic' (as good of a word as any), people will still do the player-dungeons just for the FUN of doing them AND to have that neat cape that sparkles when you run, or that useless pet that looks cute but does nothing else. I would be OK with this but the campaign would have to be pretty fun for me to waste my time this way.
A combination of the two is also possible, although if I pay money or gold for a campaign I want a reward that is digitally tangible and actually does something (like a unique unique item, where it's the same as the regular unique but sparkles even more when you run).
XP and gold should always still drop at their regular rates. Play time is play time, and I'd be pissed as all hell if I played through a day long epic and all I got was a stupid cape and no levels.
There is another entirely different possibility, and is something I want to see happen *BADLY*. Open up the bug/issue/idea tracking software to the hardcore trusted users and let them comment on things, AND THEN PAY ATTENTION TO THE COMMENTS. We're talking about 20-30 people, not many, so it should stay easy to manage. NDA's and such will have to be signed, of course.
Your hardcore fans represent your typical player for the most part, they just play more often, they don't skip the cutscenes, and they have the theme music on their PMP. Most hard fans play the game the exact way you want it to be played and absolutely hate exploits and cheats because it gives an unfair advantage. They play because they love it, not because they sell their gold. Listen to them closely, as they really are your target audience in a very broad sense.
Before Hellgate: London went belly-up (*cries*, I love you Bill Roper!), they were working on another expansion and for the most part they were outright taking suggestions from everyone on what we - the players - wanted to see. They had some Lifetime Members (in this case, people that payed for a lifetime subscription upfront before the game got released) patrol the forums, pick out good ideas, and officially submit them to the dev team. From all I could tell it was working perfectly up until they shut down, but we'll never know now that $FOREIGN_GAME_CORP owns the rights and we'll never hear of it again.
In short, there are many MANY ways to do this, and to do it well. It's just a small matter of figuring out exactly what works well, and so far there hasn't been enough tests of this idea to come up with anything conclusive.
Just remove all rewards gained from the user created content (XP, Gold, whatever). Perhaps the reason to play the modules should be fun? I realise the concept of "fun" in an MMO might conflict with the work ethic most players seem to have, but it seems obvious that allowing players to set rewards is going to end up abused. Itd be like allowing employees to set their own pay.
Perhaps once the "best" content comes through, the dev team could check it themselves and award XP and loot.
I recently started playing COH/V again (I'd played for a year or 2 at release, and off and on again after), and it was largely because of what I'd heard about the Mission Architect system coming out. Now that it's here, I've done some missions on it, but it's very hard to find missions that I think are worth running.
Anyway the other day I join a group doing AE missions (mission architect missions). The first one we do is a normal one that's not bad, has an AV in it, and took a while to finish. The 2nd one was an outdoor map filled with Lt. level mobs (normally you have a mix of minion, Lt, and Boss levels). I didn't realize it at the time but it was a 'farm' mission. The thing was, we had alot of deaths in the mission. Scrappers died, Tankers died (he was SK'ed though), Defenders died, etc. It wasn't that big of a deal but there was definately risk involved in this 'farm' mission. If you aggroed to much, you died.
On the whole there are alot of things to like about the CoH system, it's great for a certain type of play. Mission Architect added an additional content path in the game, but nothing says you have to use it. There's no huge end game at level 50 in CoH, you run out of stuff to do pretty easily. Given that people who want to PL their way through the game burn out on that eventually and go somewhere else. Trying to slow down their burn rate is a bit of an exercise in futility at this point in the game's life cycle.
Sorry but CoX has been a complete Monty Haul for some time now. That and the limited formula of missions is what is killing the game.
Oh hey. Aren't they the ones coming out with Champions Online? DIRECT COMPETITION to City Of *?
Way to get an "unbiased" opinion.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How can anyone be rightly bothered by other users who, within the confines and rules of any game, manage to play it more successfully than they can? If a game is designed in such a way that it benefits users who are smart enough to figure it out over those who aren't, then isn't the problem with the game itself?
Are these users cheating, or are the ones complaining doing so to cover up the fact that their incompetent? And what of the game developers? Is it just easier for them to hire watchdogs to go on random witch hunts for suspicious activity, rather than admit they took on a task too big for them to adequately handle through software alone?
Besides, isn't it human nature to get competitive over a limited resource when operating within a large crowd? Whether it's a determined user playing the game excessive hours to build up characters, or someone paying other users to play for them, the end result is still the same. Those who are better able and have better opportunities to play are always going to do better than those who don't. Attempting to "level" the playing field to benefit more casual users is just as unfair to users who have better resources available to them.
If anything, what these MMORPGs really need is a little McCarthyism to start weeding out these communists.
8==8 Bones 8==8
add filter toggles, let people call them "farms" and alow them to be rated accordingly.
I have no issue with power leveling.. I've done it a few times. this game is often about making MORE characters and doing it again.
I've got characters I'd deliberately left around level 30 because I like doing the sewer trial, or the Hess task force. I LIKE doing different things with different toons. I made a stalker JUST so I could use him to design MA missions, (invisible, so I can walk up to all my critters and check them "in mission")
Allow people to rate things as a farm, or as Fun, or as Too Hard or as Too Easy. HAVE a content rating, have a way to select missions with no AV's or not over level 10, or under level 40. Once it becomes clear what people want... THEN data mine these ratings to tweak the game.
If people rate everything as too easy, then leave the game... fix that.... but if the people rating it as farm keep playing (and giving the game money) then no problem, right?
The content isn't the problem.
Many people are using the Mission Architect (MA) to create customized story-based missions, for themselves or their friends. This enables long role-playing sessions in a coherent group, just like the tabletop games of old. The MA has brought role-playing back to this MMO-RPG. It's an amazing thing that no other game has accomplished as well.
The problem is the *reward*. Giving full xp for MA-created enemies was just stupid, and providing an easy way to cash in tickets for loot is bizarre. The MA gives such good rewards, they left very little incentive to play the regular game.
I have faith, however, that this will be fixed, and that they'll nerf the MA before long.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
User-generated content systems for MMOs aren't a dead end. But *shitty* user generated content systems that are poorly implemented and left wide open for abuse are.
The Mission Architect system has some good points and some very, very, VERY bad ones:
Good:
Players were able to make more missions in 48 hours than the development staff had made in the history of the game
Some of that content is interesting and well executed
Gives players with a creative side something to play with/get under the hood/tell stories
Bad:
The system for earning rewards for designing missions is so obviously and easily exploitable that it's ludicrous. Cartels of players were simply modding up/down missions to help people get badges regardless of the quality of the missions, or to grief people who've made missions.
The tools allow for ridiculous and obvious exploits. For example, you can make completely invulnerable friendly NPCs who will fly around after you and continually use powers on you that will make you virtually immune from damage. For example, some enemy groups provide much more xp than others, but not all members of those enemy groups are actually a challenge - so you could select individual enemies from groups that were incredibly easy to kill but gave huge rewards. Oh, and you can put giant bombs in the middle of enemy spawns that would literally kill everything around them and give the player experience.
The way the missions were integrated into the game - they're all "virtual reality" as far as the storyline goes, so it isn't as if any of it actually matters, for people who actually care about content/lore/storylines. So the people with the most incentive to play missions in this thing are people who just want to get massive amounts of experience without difficulty.
The problem here isn't user generated content. It's the way the system was implemented. I beta'd the MA system and submitted notes on obvious exploits - the exact same exploits that caused this problem! - and they put it live with those flaws which were well known in it anyway. I think they kinda lost the right to bitch that their system was abused when they put it live without fixing the obvious flaws.
There are good systems for allowing user generated content - Paragon simply chose one of the worst ones and implemented it poorly.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Having just seen the post from the Heimburg above, and the clarification that he was involved with an older incarnation of the ST MMO and not with Cryptic, my parent post is redundant.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Pretty much hit the nail right on the head. That's exactly what happened. Every single AE mission I've been invited to has involved one single damage type (e.g., all enemies do only lethal (sharp) damage, one of the two easiest to resist or dodge for anyone), all of the enemies were melee only, none of them had any stun/hold/sleep/etc attacks, none seemed to resist such status attacks, etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wired's article reads just like the slew of 'Wah! I can't do what I want to so I'm taking my ball and going home,' posts on the COH message boards when Matt 'Positron' Miller's anti-farming announcement came out.
The Mission Architect system is an amazing add-on to the game. Players are creating literally thousands of missions and arcs that are NOT farms. The real difficulty at that point is not avoiding the farms, but finding the gems among the brass.
I have in the last few days
- Stopped the filming of the latest Highlander movie
- Rescued chocolate makers from kidnappers and a corrupt corporation bent on making (dangerously) addictive chocolate.
- Helped newbie heroes fight against the hardest foes in Paragon City
- Defended myself from love-lorn super-villains responding to a crank personals ad.
- Saved the world countless times.
The change in the reward system was completely unnoticeable UNLESS you were abusing the hell out of the system. Most players weren't doing that, but those who were screamed long and loud.
Positron's announced changes were welcomed warmly by the majority of the CoH playerbase. They were pinpointed to hurt exactly those who'd broken the (Very new) system, and they did. Everyone else is busy kicking ass and taking names in player-created missions.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The problem with user created content is it doesn't force the people to work within the designed system to do the best they can. There is no incentive to challenge the laws around the game when you can change them.
...every professional game designer could have told you this in five minutes. Of course they are going to game the system.
I think it's even mentioned in the book by Jesse Schell.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I recall this topic. I was modded down and finally stopped caring about karma. As I stated before this user content idea will never work because CoH/CoV only wants one type of player on their server. One that does exactly what they ask. When they say jump you say how high? This is probably the kewlest game ever made but their insistence on babysitting you on the server ruins the enjoyment. I didn't have enough time to grow tired of anything except that. It took two days and I was out 80 bucks.
Enhancements - In City of Heroes, each power can have up to 6 "enhancement slots". Enhancements are items that can be put in those slots to 'tweak' the power. Examples include "more damage", "accuracy", and "recharge time".
Single Origin Enhancement - an enhancement whose benefit is (typically) a 20-30% bonus (to damage done, or accuracy, or whatever). Exact values vary depending on what factor is being enhanced. (IE Accuracy has different percentages than damage resistance.)
ED - "Enhancement Diversity" - a system of diminishing returns limiting how much any given facet of a power can be improved. Where before, you could add up to six of the same type of enhancement and get full benefit from them, under ED you could hit the diminishing returns limit after applying only two. Any enhancements (of that type) after two returned barely noticeable increases.
I was going to allow people to make their own emotes and dance animations for my game. The trick was that they'd have to be GAME MASTER approved so you don't get obscenities into the game.
You can do the same with levels to make sure they're not giving too much reward/risk.
God spoke to me.
I bought the game and started playing again because of AE.
I heard how you could level up quickly and then go out and enjoy PVP as well as get plenty of gear etc.
I even played around with the mission architect to make a chain mission about saving the sewage system below lord recluse's castle.
I got up to level 40 in a week or so, then they announced that they were deleveling people and removing XP.
I gave away 5 million influence in a costume party then cancelled my account.