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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."
Create a mission they said!
Everyone Wants User-Created Content They Said!
Then you get banned. Bah!
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
The "loophole" is the whole point of the expansion. User generated content is their selling point but it ends up being destructive.
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 :)
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.
The loopholes here is "players can create content, and rate others' content, and gain rewards from the content itself and getting good ratings." The inevitable result is:
Honestly, it's not the system, and it's not even a lot of players. It's the tools who come in, pay real cash for IG money and levels, and will soon get bored and move on anyway. Screw them. You can't base your business model on that.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
... 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.
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).
Lawl.
We're talking about an MMORPG that has never taken its own EULA seriously, never done serious work to curtail the influence sellers (read: gold farmers), and never done anything to fix the various missions they themselves created that were being used as farms.
In other words, they already had a broken system. The fact that Mission Architect broke it even further should surprise no one.
New players rarely, if ever, come to CoH/CoV any more. If they do arrive, the chance of their being treated well and learning the game and having fun is virtually nil. Getting into anything on the high-level scale is either a function of grinding all day and all night (not fun) or worming your way into one of the insular and unhelpful "Supergroups" (guilds) in the game, also not fun since you're just signing up for all the usual drama-queen stuff that goes on with any organizational setup like that.
If they really wanted to improve the game, focusing on making it fun at all levels would be the way to go. Unfortunately, the game's not set up like that, and so the race to 50 (or 46 and then locking, if you're making a "bridging" character for the powerleveling crap) will continue unabated.
geez, you don't sound bitter at all...
You do realize you are quite obviously describing your own bad experience and deciding that it must be "the whole game" for everyone?
More seriously, name a game that does "serious work to curtail the gold farmers." I've played bunches of MMOs and they're pretty rampant in all of them.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
A fair analogy would be our legal system. While it serves us reasonably well for the most part, nobody would claim that is completely fair or that there are no loop-holes. Additionally, we have to keep adjusting in on a regular basis.
What makes you think that a handful of game devs will "get it right" where thousands of lawyers and politicians over the years have tried and are still trying?
There is no such thing as absolute balance. There are always loopholes. I have no experience with CoH so I can't say whether their implementation stinks or whether it's amazing, but I think it's fair to say that expecting anything approaching perfection is unreasonable.
I can't believe they screwed this up. This game utterly revolves around heroes and antagonists, yet they don't have the foresight to have each side compete for the available experience points? Then they can set up an equation that makes it very unfavorable to let someone win, as well as an equation to have the most skillful players pair up for a challenging and longer lasting experience. Took me 2 minutes to come up with that.
Help fight spam
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...
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.
The thing is, the devs problem isn't with farming per se. If someone wants to farm nothing but bosses on the same map all day, every day, the devs don't particularly LIKE that sort of play style, but you're not going to get nerfed/delete/banned for it. Their problem is with abuse of exploits within the system. Prior to public release, there were certain "enemy" types that simply did no damage on their own. They were "healer" types or "enemy generator" types. But, because of how they appear and are used in some of the dev arc missions, they give XP. Most of these were stripped out prior to release. So the exploiters moved on to the next level up. "Skewed XP awards and mechanics exploits". This was the so-called "Rikti Doll" farm. A certain type of Rikti, the Communications Officer is a minion-class (lowest) foe. However, it gives liutenant (next class up) XP. Why? Because it's an "enemy generator" type that summons additional foes. Bit of historical info. Initially the Commos gave minion-class XP, but players were essentially farming them because all the summoned foes gave XP too. Like a fountain of endless XP. So the devs changed it so the summoned foes gave no XP, but bumped the XP on the Commos themselves to compensate. Bit of mechanics info. HOWEVER, in a group, only ONE Commo will pop a portal to summon more foes. This stops you from running into random groups that might occasionally have a high number of them and spawning an unmanageable horde of XP-less foes. The exploiters were utilizing this mechanic to built farms of low-risk enemies that gave out inordinately large quantities of XP. There were instances of people levelling from 1 to 50 in 6-8 hours. Which is just NUTS. (Note: There is one piece of "performance art" that purports to have gotten an L50 character in 1 hour. In actuality, what this person did was level-pact with someone who was farming these exploit maps. They then logged off and only logged back on after the pact had hit L50, resulting in an L50 character with a total played-time of 1 hour.) As soon as the devs were able (they were in a code freeze for a major event in the game), they removed the exploitable enemies.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Took me 2 minutes to come up with that.
Uh-huh. And in the two years the professional CoH designers and coders were thinking daily about this problem, in their two years of doubtless intensive meetings, not one of them ever once considered your idea. Right? The only possible alternative is that perhaps your two-minute inspiration isn't a perfect solution -- that it may even have unsuspected shortcomings. Nah, that couldn't be. Yeah, they're just dumb.
Drug user really, which given the last three presidents explains a lot.
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!!!
The "loophole" was allowed to get people to use the system.
As a player of CoH/CoV over the past couple months I can say that while the Wired article is correct that the AE system was abused and broken at first the rewards have been pushed in the opposite direction once everyone was using AE.
I think the overly heavy reward ration was merely a ploy to get people talking about the system, and one that may have backfired.
The lawyers (and politicians, mainly, are ex- and future- lawyers, in the US) have no incentive whatosever to fix the system. On the contrary: they need it as complicated and open to abuse as possible to maximize the present (and , in the case of politicians, future) livelihoods.
The same bould be said about devs: buggy systems to fix are one source of work (and I've seen devs VERY aware that bugs = work = $$)... but still, they can also probably find other projects.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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...
6-8 hours on Rikti Doll/Meows are actually not as big an exploit as the guy who leveled to 50 in 90 minutes using a bigger exploit. Those are the guys who really got the devs PO'd.
Nah, that couldn't be. Yeah, they're just dumb.
Wouldn't surprise me. I'm amazed how many developers spend months deciding whether to implement something, when it's clear to almost anyone that it's a bad idea.
Big developers and big teams seem to lose sight of what's easily doable, and easily exploitable. Some features just aren't worth the time or hassle, especially when what you currently have actually works.
It's depressing watching developers shoot their games in the foot, but many MMOs go that way. I guess the design teams feel the MMO has "stagnated", so they want to spice it up a bit? Usually they just ruin it.
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.
Speaking of shooting themselves in the foot, here's another bone-headed idea that Blizzard recently came up with.
See, they added a world PVP zone called Wintergrasp that turned out to be wildly popular. Too popular. There are often hundreds of players in the same tiny section of the zone.
What is their solution? If you guessed instance the zone, or add incentives to spread out within the zone rather than concentrating on the area, you'd be wrong. Their brilliant solution was to make the zone less desirable and less enjoyable, so that fewer people show up to do it.
I guess that does technically solve the problem, though. I wish I could get away with crap like that at my job.
Ah, so you rate flag-waving over effect? My WHO toons got a billion goldspam mails every day. Each toon, every day. Banning 20k gold selling accounts and bragging about it is like bragging about killing 20k cockroaches in New York City.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
I'll be honest, I've play CoH/V and I don't know what mez means, I can guess it means mesmerized, but I have no idea. I personally hate the huge number of acronyms and shortenings that are used for games. There's rarely, if ever any documentation on what all of them are and they inevitably get to a point where you have a lot in a single sentence. It's okay when you use one, usually someone can figure out what it means based on context, but as you start stacking more and more it becomes impossible for an outside to come in any understand the language. This is likely another part why CoH/V doesn't see many new players. I can look at the chat channels and barely understand what's being said because I have a habit of playing for a month or two, quitting for 5 and going back. I can't imagine what it would be like to start as a new player with everyone and their mother talking in all these acronyms that you can't decipher. A lot of people are self-conscious about sounding dumb, myself included. If I were to be on my level 50 character and ask what half these acronyms were that I didn't know, I would probably get a lot of replies like "loludum" and the such. After all, how could a max level NOT know all the acronyms?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.