Player Created Content, part 21

[Yegolev]

heh, if you really believe that the best stuff for morrowind was actually included in the game, don't click this link.

http://home.wnm.net/~bgriff/MW_NordM.html

Those are extra-extra gay.

[Xilren's Twin]

Dungeon 1 -
   Number of Entries: 25
   Money Made: 500 copper
   Dungeon Creator Experience Gained: 1000xp (2000xp to go to Level 2)
   Number of NPC Deaths: 200
   Number of PC Deaths: 1
   .. etc ..

And so Bob goes on to create larger and more complex dungeons, becoming the best known Dungeon Creator in the game ..

And if it doesn't work, what have you lost?

As much as I like the concept, that would be best suited for NWN3.0, the persistant world version, than the kinds of games we have today mainly b/c the players would still fuck it up in expected ways. 

Else Bob would get to the Best Dungeon Created simply by having his guildmates run through his work over and over to powerlevel his DM experience...or, Bob simply makes sure the loot earned exceed the cost to enter and he has just made a money machine for his guild..

You get the picture.

Xilren

[Viin]

Just like anything else, it'd have to be balanced.

You could easily add a 'instance creation fee' to each instance. Which would be paid by the builder, based on how many items at what cost, etc. If the builder wants to absorb all of that fee then fine. Otherwise, he'll want to make sure his entry fee is high enough to cover his 'instance creation' costs.

Add in random loot, based on the NPC spawning it, and yer set. It would never be much over or above the 'level' of the NPC, much like any other content done by the company.

There's no free lunch! (We just have to make sure it's programmed that way!)

[Samwise]

I've had similar ideas, Viin, and I agree that it should be balanceable.  My theory is that you'd have to approach it like a sim/strategy game - for example, you can buy a Foozle Spawn for 100 gp that (if farmed constantly) yields an average of 1 gp per day, so given a few months, your investment would pay for itself if you just went and farmed that spawn constantly.

To discourage that, though, there's a system in place whereby you're always able to adventure in zones that are higher level than what you yourself can create.  (If your game has money and character level tied fairly closely together, like WoW seems to have, that's simple enough to enforce in most cases just by setting appropriate prices on Foozle Spawns and so forth.)  Hence, it's more worth your while to get lower level characters to farm your Foozle Spawn (and siphon some portion of their earnings into your pocket) while you go and farm Mega-Foozle Spawns placed by higher level characters for more money (in turn siphoning money into someone else's pocket while he spends his time whacking Uber-Foozles).  It might take six months instead of three months for your own Foozle Spawn to pay for itself, but it's made up for by the fact that you've been getting even more money by whacking the Mega-Foozles.  (Or you could just spend all your time RPing in a tavern and let the money flow in at its own pace, whatever floats your boat.)

So yes, your Foozle Spawn is like "free money", but only in the sense of being an investment that pays off after a certain amount of time. The rate at which your investment pays off varies depending on how good your economic/social engineering/content generation skills are; having a successful (and profitable) zone would require that you either gets lots of guildmates to adventure in your zone, or that you price your zone more attractively than your neighbor's, or that you invest enough of your own creativity to make your zone more fun to adventure in than similarly priced ones.  Bam, you've hit three playstyles with one stone.

As long as you made it fairly easy for players to filter out the 99% of zones that would end up being boring crap (a game like this would cry out for some sort of fairly sophisticating ranking system, perhaps some sort of Bayesian thing that would distinguish between different likes and dislikes so that if you're a hardcore catass you could seek out dungeons that other hardcore catasses like rather than dungeons that story-loving carebears like), some good stuff could come out of it.  I think.

[Velorath]

I've had similar ideas, Viin, and I agree that it should be balanceable.  My theory is that you'd have to approach it like a sim/strategy game - for example, you can buy a Foozle Spawn for 100 gp that (if farmed constantly) yields an average of 1 gp per day, so given a few months, your investment would pay for itself if you just went and farmed that spawn constantly.

To discourage that, though, there's a system in place whereby you're always able to adventure in zones that are higher level than what you yourself can create.  (If your game has money and character level tied fairly closely together, like WoW seems to have, that's simple enough to enforce in most cases just by setting appropriate prices on Foozle Spawns and so forth.)  Hence, it's more worth your while to get lower level characters to farm your Foozle Spawn (and siphon some portion of their earnings into your pocket) while you go and farm Mega-Foozle Spawns placed by higher level characters for more money (in turn siphoning money into someone else's pocket while he spends his time whacking Uber-Foozles).  It might take six months instead of three months for your own Foozle Spawn to pay for itself, but it's made up for by the fact that you've been getting even more money by whacking the Mega-Foozles.  (Or you could just spend all your time RPing in a tavern and let the money flow in at its own pace, whatever floats your boat.)

So yes, your Foozle Spawn is like "free money", but only in the sense of being an investment that pays off after a certain amount of time. The rate at which your investment pays off varies depending on how good your economic/social engineering/content generation skills are; having a successful (and profitable) zone would require that you either gets lots of guildmates to adventure in your zone, or that you price your zone more attractively than your neighbor's, or that you invest enough of your own creativity to make your zone more fun to adventure in than similarly priced ones.  Bam, you've hit three playstyles with one stone.

As long as you made it fairly easy for players to filter out the 99% of zones that would end up being boring crap (a game like this would cry out for some sort of fairly sophisticating ranking system, perhaps some sort of Bayesian thing that would distinguish between different likes and dislikes so that if you're a hardcore catass you could seek out dungeons that other hardcore catasses like rather than dungeons that story-loving carebears like), some good stuff could come out of it.  I think.

Two problems with this idea that I can see:

1)  You're talking about foozle spawns.  That's barely content, and just beating on foozles I think is something we're all trying to get away from.  Player created foozle spawns aren't going to be any more entertaining than dev created foozle spawns.

2)  As far as creating an instance goes, with the way your idea is set up it seems like there'd be little reason to actually create a challenging instance.  If you syphon off some of the earnings that other players get out of it, you're going to create an instance layout that allows for the most efficient killing.  I could see people creating a dungeon that is just a long hallway with mobs perfectly spaced out so that they are just far enough away not to add and you just go through and grind, grind, grind.  I think you'll find that many MMO players given the option between efficient but boring content and challenging content will choose the boring content, even if they aren't having fun.

[Strazos]

I think you'll find that many MMO players given the option between efficient but boring content and challenging content will choose the boring content, even if they aren't having fun.

I think we've already established that the generic MMO player is too fucking stupid to know better.

These are the kind of people that are allowed to vote alongside me. 

[Velorath]

I think you'll find that many MMO players given the option between efficient but boring content and challenging content will choose the boring content, even if they aren't having fun.

I think we've already established that the generic MMO player is too fucking stupid to know better.

That's why the generic MMO player should not be allowed to make any kind of content in a game I'm playing.  Realistically, the man hours it would take a dev team to implement this kind of stuff would just be better used working on the content themselves.

Edit:  The only other thing I can add here, is that if player created textures is the best compromise we can come up with here for player created content, why even have this discussion?  At that point it's a novelty rather than any sort of selling point for a game.  It might be a fun little diversion for the small fraction of the playerbase that knows how to do it, but who else is going to care?  Again, this kind of thing hardly seems like it would be worth the time or money to implement.

[Samwise]

1)  You're talking about foozle spawns.  That's barely content, and just beating on foozles I think is something we're all trying to get away from.  Player created foozle spawns aren't going to be any more entertaining than dev created foozle spawns.

I'm stripping it down to the bare mechanics for purposes of discussing game balance.  In actual practice the content creator would hopefully have some scripting abilities, so instead of a "foozle spawn" it would be an "orc ambush", with customized battle cries and tactics and so forth.  In any case you'd balance it by evaluating its challenge rating (to borrow a term from D&D), make sure it gives treasure/XP that's suitable for that challenge, and have it cost a correspondingly suitable amount such that the investment will pay off after a certain minimum length of time.  The player gets to add whatever "dressing" they want on top of that skeleton.

2)  As far as creating an instance goes, with the way your idea is set up it seems like there'd be little reason to actually create a challenging instance.  If you syphon off some of the earnings that other players get out of it, you're going to create an instance layout that allows for the most efficient killing.  I could see people creating a dungeon that is just a long hallway with mobs perfectly spaced out so that they are just far enough away not to add and you just go through and grind, grind, grind.  I think you'll find that many MMO players given the option between efficient but boring content and challenging content will choose the boring content, even if they aren't having fun.

That depends on the underlying mechanics being sophisticated enough to give rewards that correspond to the challenges faced.  This is perfectly possible, since at the game mechanics level you can boil any encounter down to the statistically probable number of hit points/mana points/whatever that will be needed for a level X character to overcome it.  (Again, D&D 3rd Ed is largely built around that concept and it seems to work pretty well as far as that aspect of it goes.)  The role of the content creator wouldn't be to make individual encounters more or less challenging or rewarding, it would be to arrange the encounters into an entertaining (and rewarding) experience.

Will some people make big grindy monster hallways?  And will some people seek those out?  Of course.  People grind no matter what.  I don't see any problem in providing a system that allows them to do it, if that system also allows for fun stuff to happen.  That's where that sophisticated ranking system comes in - there will probably be something like five people who actually make really cool stuff with that system, and I'd want to be able to find them.

[Venkman]

I think you'll find that many MMO players given the option between efficient but boring content and challenging content will choose the boring content, even if they aren't having fun.

Player created content in a game about item-acquisition is not going to be as good as content created by developers. If the developers built a game around items, they built it around raw content, which means the success of the title is tied to the quality of that content. In a successful game, the players will be having all the fun they want with the superior created content, so the need for player-created stuff is minimal. Basically, someone raiding BWL every night is only going to see player-created content as a new faucet from which to get their foozle, marginalizing the need for a player to create boring repeatable content in the first place.

Games not built on a item-acquisition may be built around challenging puzzle solving though. This is a better test-bed for player-created stuff in my opinion because the tools available for creation are more appropriate for the type of people attracted to the game in the first place, both as creators and as consumers. DDO would probably be a better game to try this out in, considering D&D itself is more prone to "mods" in the first place.

For it to work though requires certain types of players. Knowing that can mitigate the need to bother with any discussion about whether it would be fun for, say, an Auction House sitter or a Planetside base capper.

[HaemishM]

You could try this for player-created content.

Some players, a very few, choose to play the game as "wizards" in a fantasy setting. Wizards are not an every day player class, they are special. Their gameplay is more akin to Dungeon Keeper, in that they start as a powerful badass indvidually and are given a certain number of points to spend building a lair. Their gameplay is more RTS-based, kind of like the city-building in Shadowbane. They build dungeons, populate them with monsters and traps, etc. They also pay more for the client, and for each dungeon they build, they have to pay a fee (real-life money) to set it up, and their subscription is actually their maintenance fee. Their maintenance fee is based on the number of dungeons, but say up to 3 dungeons, they would pay less for than a player who just plays an adventurer. Wizards can also attract followers, which are PC's aligned to that wizard's faction. They can use their wizard's dungeons for training purposes, but only gain half experience. Their job is to attack other wizard's dungeons.

Someone had an idea similar to this in the Game Development forum a while ago, I think, so I'm pretty sure it's not an original idea.

The original part is the wizard paying setup and maintenance fees on his dungeons, while the regular players pay a subscription. Wizard accounts can't be player accounts, and vice versa, so you would have to buy 2 accounts/boxes to be both. That might actually pay the dev costs on building those content creation tools.

Still may not be enough to make it worthwhile, though.

[Strazos]

Player created content in a game about item-acquisition is not going to be as good as content created by developers.

When you have jackasses such as Furor and Tigole creating your content, I beg to differ.

[glennshin]

Noone seems to have mentioned the player created content from the Sims series. SOME of the items/furnitures(some w/ custom animations) are very much EQUAL in quality to whatever was shipped with the game.

BUT for every fan site that I found with exceptional content, I had to wade through tons of absolute crap. Nevermind the fact that some of these items would crash the game and you'd have to figure out which item it was. (not so easy if you got lazy and imported like 10 items at a time ^_^) This of course in a single player game where what you do has no effect on on anyone else. (I had a house w/ Darth Maul and Darth Vader w/ slave leiah and 5 other wenches =-p)

I can only imagine that in an MMO, it would just be an abosolute nightmare just handling the amount of crap that would be submitted.

[Alkiera]

Noone seems to have mentioned the player created content from the Sims series. SOME of the items/furnitures(some w/ custom animations) are very much EQUAL in quality to whatever was shipped with the game.

BUT for every fan site that I found with exceptional content, I had to wade through tons of absolute crap. Nevermind the fact that some of these items would crash the game and you'd have to figure out which item it was. (not so easy if you got lazy and imported like 10 items at a time ^_^) This of course in a single player game where what you do has no effect on on anyone else. (I had a house w/ Darth Maul and Darth Vader w/ slave leiah and 5 other wenches =-p)

I can only imagine that in an MMO, it would just be an abosolute nightmare just handling the amount of crap that would be submitted.

Ask Second Life about that.  8)

Player created content in a game about item-acquisition is not going to be as good as content created by developers.

When you have jackasses such as Furor and Tigole creating your content, I beg to differ.

Agree you there, Strazos.  And the thing about 'player created content' is that it's not the same kind of thing as what devs come up with.  Most player created content revolves around altering the game world, in most cases just the social structures, since little else is mutable.  Old UO and Eve are prolly the best places to find player created content.  Corp wars, Large Alliances, small group actions, all kinds of stuff.  People taking over areas and claiming them, defending them from others.

I don't think anyone is really claiming they want players to send in models and textures for a game.  That kind of content is really best done by people being paid to be artists.  Give players sufficient combinations of items and colors for logos and whatnot to be semi-unique, a la CoH, and you'll be fine on that front.  Can even do something similar like what Horizons did for weapon models, allowing the crafter to alter the appearance of the final item separate from the stats, by choosing from various options for each part of the weapon model.

The trick to player-created content is to give players to tools to allow them to affect other players, without completely ruining someone's day.  Manage expectations so people coming in know they can be killed.  Give them some areas that are fairly safe, but make it profitable to move into dangerous areas.  Give players info like EVE's 'number of ships killed here in last 24 hours/last 1 hour/number of pods killed in last 24 hours' etc metrics, so they know where it's dangerous to go.

Alkiera

[Koyasha]

One way to get around the 'super easy dungeon' creation would be to tie the reward the dungeon creator gets to the time spent in the dungeon by the players.  Have the game provide a target playtime of the dungeon.  If the players get through it faster than the target playtime, the creator doesn't get as much experience, money, whatever.  If the players never complete the dungeon, the creator also gets very little experience/money/etc, because the assumption is then that the dungeon was too difficult or boring for the players.  A dungeon creator would then have to challenge the players with just the right level of challenge to match the target playtime, while also taking into account the level range of the dungeon and the group cohesion.  The same group of people running the dungeon multiple times would also be designed to eventually stop giving benefits to the dungeon creator.

Oh, and that reverse auction house thing was implemented in EQ before the last time I stopped playing.  You set up a 'buyer' in the Bazaar, much like setting up the same sellers as always.  Of course, EQ's failing in their Bazaar has always been that you need to not only be online, but leave a character and thus an account tied up completely idle.

By the way, Alkiera, WoW's auction house system is far inferior to the FFXI AH system, as it saves no history of pricing on all items.  Luckily the Auctioneer addon provides an excellent resource to do just that, and more.  With the addon, it's actually better than the FFXI AH, for the most part.

Speaking of which, WoW UI's are an excellent example of good user-created portions of a game, although I'm not sure they could be properly referred to as 'content'.  There are so many excellent UI modifications for WoW that I couldn't imagine playing without a lot of them.

[Venkman]

Koyasha, I love the thinking in your first paragraph! Awesome idea to tie success to the creator. Doesn't resolve the grief/exploit angle, but I don't think that's solvable easily anyway, and why MMOs shy away from it.