Player Created Content, part 21

[Venkman]

Akkori raised the spectre of player-created content again, and I didn't want it to get lost in the all-but-done SWG death thread.

Once again, I still think that *any* game would be well-served to put in tools for players to create and submit Content. How hard would it be to tell players "Use a program to create 3D art assets that can save the results in .XYZ format. Submit Story in .TXT format. Submit Quest scripts in .ZYX format with WP to all NPC's, and expected general Loot rewards..." and so on.

It just seems to me that that it would be MUCH more efficient to go through thousands of submissions and choose worthy ones to forward to the Devs. They would be able to hire non-programmers (in lower pay scales? (saving money maybe)), and these people could be anyone with an eye for things people think are Fun.

For a Dev Team as big as it supposedly is/was, they sure dont get much done

I don't think it's a technical nor resource question, but rather, a legal and accountability one. Basically, business stuff.

iD software does not take responsibiliity for what players create because once they shipped their engine, their hands are mostly clean of it.

MMORPGs don't have that luxury because the ability to play them at all is based on a centrally controlled server the company is responsible for keeping up. Part of that is the content itself. The arguments about players and avatars and who is allowed to own and trade what are irrelevant in this particular discussion because, in the end, the company created the assets and/or hosts the assets is seen as owning those assets. It doesn't matter if any player character has seen that asset yet.

As such, there's a whole slew of controls a company needs to have in order to gain the most back from the investment of creating that asset. And they are accountable for it, to their employees, to their investors, to their players.

Plus there's a bank of lawyers who'd probably dissuade any discussion about handing reigns over to players. Even having players volunteer as class correspondents is very risky, though with less impact.

But this is all just about the current state of things.

I can envision a future where MMORPGs are mostly faciliated through P2P experiences. We're seeing that a bit already with things like those NWN persistent quilt worlds. In those cases, all we need is for some forward-looking company to develop a middleware suite they sell to a group of players from which they collect either a one time buyout or periodic royalty. Then the people who own the suite can create whatever they want and become the sole arbiters of what is allowed.

Basically, it's FPS modding MMO style. With 50mil households in the U.S. alone with Broadband, and the sheer prevalance of it elsewhere, I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened yet. I guess companies just love tossing dollars at new graphics engines.

There's more to it than the above though, which is why I broke it out to a new thread.

[Margalis]

The very first question for proponents of player-created content - if I can create a texture, how are you going to prevent me from putting "FUCK YOU" on my shield?

Having people submit things for approval is ok, but then you get into problems like video card memory limitations, a glut of crappy submissions, etc. One thing you could do is limit submissions to something like one per player per month.

The P2P plan reminds me of those things you can get that allow you to annotate web-sites. In those systems the annotations are stored in some separate repository and the software displays them as stickies over the website. You could do something similar - have player-created textures on some 3rd party website. The makers of the game are essentially providing support to apply textures on your local machine only, and some other software is reponsible for distributing them, etc.

I say textures because fo the most part textures are the only thing I can think of that make sense. Player created quests? Player created model? Very unlikely, for a variety of reasons I'm not going to get into.

[Merusk]

Second Life allows unprecedented player-created content.  Yet nobody I've seen advocating PC content just about anywhere seems to play it. Why is that?

Of course, Second Life also shows us taht players, when given the tools, will create cocks, tits, and furries out the wazoo.  Thus, my belief that Player-created content is never a solution.  What I think is that you all are looking for a 'game that goes-on forever.'  One you won't get bored of, or tired with and will always have all the content you could ever want.  That's not going to happen, so I need to ask, why bother with it?

[Venkman]

Second Life allows unprecedented player-created content.  Yet nobody I've seen advocating PC content just about anywhere seems to play it. Why is that?

Of course, Second Life also shows us taht players, when given the tools, will create cocks, tits, and furries out the wazoo.

You answered it. Few game companies would sign on for that. But then, that's why Second Life isn't really a game per se (and they have a teen version anyway).

My NWN/P2P example doesn't replace the fact that someone needs to approve all of the content that gets loaded to a persistent state world, or accept what happens in those pockets of autonomy they allow. By acceptance, I mean people who will do as you said plus put up hate propoganda, anti-this/that stuff, discriminatory crap, alongside all of the good that can come from free speech in an anonymous environment.

That's why I say this isn't really a technical challenge. It's a business one.

[Soln]

Pirates of the Burning Sea is the only other game I know of than SL that will support real unique player customization:

2.07 Can I make items?
In R1 you can create your own flag and sail graphics. Here on our website you'll find our innovative peer-reviewed player content submission system, through which you can submit your flag and sail designs for other players to vote on. The best ones go into the game, where you can use them on your ship and sell copies of them to other sea captains. In future releases we'll be looking at ways to expand the player-created art in our game, and we'll investigate what in-game crafting options would be the most fun.

I read somewhere's on their boards once I think the same will be applied for some crafted items.  Don't take my word on it though.

[HRose]

It doesn't work and it will never work. Or the content sucks or it's good enough that you would better get paid for it.

This second possibility isn't anymore about development, but publishing.

Plus there's what Mike Rozak wrote:

Morrowind and NWN provide toolkits that allow users to create their own content. Unfortunately for the skilled players that might be able to produce good content, the skilled Morrowind/NWN content creators squeezed most of the variations (content) out of the engines before the players got a chance at the tools.

[Akkori]

Okay, I am glad to see a thead on this (thanks D), but I am still mystified that it seems to be so "impossible".

What I have seen so far is: Some people are perverts and submit sex stuff, there might be legal disputes on "ownership" of assets, how to stop me from putting "fuck you" on a shield, and how its a useless gesture to try and keep a game alive.

Well, it seems most of the problems could easily be solved through the submission policy. If you send me a shield with some nasty writing on it, well, it gets deleted... no problem. Yes, I am sure that a good % of stuff sent in would be crap, but considering the volume of stuff, and the relative ease of the screening process, I dont see how a Dev team can lose. People sign off on all rights to the Content they submit, so no legal problems. As compensation, they get their name in "lights" as a contributor, and a summary of their contributions.

As the vast majority of my experience comes from SWG, I will use it as an example. I could write up a Story Arc for that game, a small arc dealing with a single planet, or maybe just... say, the Meatlump Faction. I write a little story about something internal to Meatlumps. I make a Boss, design the Quest(s), add in some suggested Loot, then go in game, and find WP for NPC Actos that will hand out info or Keys or Maps, etc... These can be existing NPC's, or new ones. Maybe I even go crazy and set up a generic house as the Bosses house or climactic showdown location, decorated like I would want and include the screenies as reference for the Devs.

If I submit all that raw data, text for Actor scripts, WP for Actors, and suggested loot rewards, then all the Devs have to do is almost literally cut & paste the data into their World Building tool, add a few lines tot he database and make up some names for any new NPC's, and then either add in a unique loot item or assign it to a loot table. Isnt that about it? It seems to me it shouldnt take someone who can read reasonably well more than 15 minutes to look it over and pass it up the chain to the next review level. And thats a Quest, probably the most complex thing to review.

Adding in an Art asset, like a Shield, would take all of 60 seconds. Load the data file in the graphics program, spin it around looking for hidden phallus's or nasty writing, check for quality (which a Dev member can easily touch up if needed), and pass it up or delete it.

I guess my biggest frustration is in the fact that there are likely very few Devs who know as much about the game as some players do. The guy who codes for the Entertainers, for example, might not know as much about Droid Engineer as I do. Or he might not have the in-depth knowledge of my server's resource history. Or he has never even tried Chef. I would be willing to bet that there *might* be 2 people on the SWG Dev team who are as knowledgable in DE as I am. And I can further bet that those 2 guys are probably spending very very little time on anything DE-related.

So, why not tap into the potential gold-mine of knowledge and *devotion* that MMO players bring to the table? I absolutely guarantee that at least 2 people I met in-game would call in sick to work in order to work on something like this, and they'd do it for free! THAT'S how much people can love a game.

Incidentaly, its these people SWG has pissed off with the NGE, but lets not get into that again, lol!!

[Kail]

Plus there's what Mike Rozak wrote:

Morrowind and NWN provide toolkits that allow users to create their own content. Unfortunately for the skilled players that might be able to produce good content, the skilled Morrowind/NWN content creators squeezed most of the variations (content) out of the engines before the players got a chance at the tools.

-CHOKE- uhm, okay.  Would have been nice if they'd included some of it with the game, but whatever.

I think there are a few different interpretations of the phrase "player generated content."

1- You can just go free-form, "the only limit is... YOUR IMAGINATIONNNNNN"  kind of way.  Give the player map editing tools, modelling and animation tools (HINT HINT, Bioware/Bethesda), let them create their own characters, worlds, and everything.  I can't see this catching on in a big way, though.  First of all, it's a TON of work, and while I disagree with the idea that nobody could ever match the skill of the designers (especially with Morrowind, for crying out loud), I admit that the average level of quality is probably not going to be very high.  Second of all, the gameplay would be totally different from what's out there now (because either the way I look affects my stats, in which case everyone is going to be a nine armed fifty foot tall continent eater, or the way I look doesn't affect my stats, in which case everyone is going to be a two micron tall speck that nobody else will be able to target), so you'd have to iron out some incredibly thorny issues with balance, with goals, with the interface, with everything.  It would be an interesting thing to see (I'm tempted to sign up for Second Life just to see if that's what it is), but I don't think the mainstream is anywhere near ready for that, nor are there a lot of companies that are really ready to produce something like that.

2- You can give the players a fairly strict framework and then let them create their content within those guidelines.  Looking at the NWN toolset, for example, it seems to me that if you wanted to, say, design your house in World of Warcraft, they could implement a similar tool to allow you to do that.  The player has a fairly trivial amount of work to do (lay down some rectangles, choose a wallpaper, drop in some furniture, done), but it still allows a lot of customization.  Another example that springs to mind would be games like Dungeon Keeper or Evil Genius, in which one player is designing a dungeon/fortress/whatever according to one set of rules (the Sim/base building rules) and another player is attacking that dungeon/fortress/whatever according to another set of rules (FPS or RPG rules, possibly).  Or you could give merchant characters a quest generator, and just have them fill in the blanks (I need X amount of item Y, the reward will be Z), and float those quests out there for the adventurers to do.  That sort of thing.  I think that these kinds of things might be possible, and are more realistic goals than just "give the player a canvas" ideas (though still, obviously, not exactly simple to implement).

I don't think having a submission policy would solve very many problems, though.  If you're allowing people to upload new art assets, that is a major problem in and of itself, even without having to worry about combing every line of player-submitted spaghetti code looking for exploits.  Having staff review all submissions is a serious investment, and you'd need to work hard to ensure that all of those people are using the same criteria.  And if you're constantly uploading/downloading art assets, that's some serious bandwidth that all your users are going to be consuming.  And once you start non-standardizing the visuals, you run into a lot of potential hacks (replacing solid walls with semitransparent walls, for example) which would be difficult to check for. 

I think, if you want player created content to be workable, you need to be extremely strict with the format in which it's submitted, at least to try to protect against exploits.  But I think you could definitely include more of it than most games do nowadays.

[Chenghiz]

There's a certain pleasure in creating a large amount of cohesive content for a game(world) but it's much more fun when the player defines the parameters within which a larger experience can take place. In this respect I think pen-and-paper RPG ever be superior to computer RPGs, because the master of the game is a creative human being instead of an AI defined by rulesets or a preset rail of a storyline.

If I create the content, then I've already experienced it.

[Margalis]

Player created textures are very doable. You need some sort of submissions policy. That's pretty much it, although even that can get tricky as people will do things like submit copyrighted images.

Player created quests? WAY WAY harder. If you create a quest I have to:

Play through and make sure it works.
Make sure it has no bugs. If (or when) it does, we give it back to you and you try again?
Make sure it has no nasty easter eggs.
Proofread.
Etc.

The nice thing about a texture if you just look at it - it's very simply to evaluate. A quest is very difficult to evaluate and people *would* try to sneak in things like intentional crashes, item wipes, random easter eggs and whatever else they can think of. Even with 3D models you have to make sure the UV coordinates are mapped properly, the number of polygons is right, etc etc. And there are plenty of tech limitations as well. EQ2 is slow enough already without everyone running around with their own player-made buckler on their arm.

There are two perspectives here:

1: I like to create stuff, I'm good at it, and I want to see that in the game.
2: I want to experience what other people create.

1 is fine. 2 is fine, but the amount of good content that comes with 2 is going to be very small. Most people who can create textures, models and quests at a professional level are doing so, or applying that skill to some other job.

People have this weird notion that you just allow for user content and suddenly everyone will produce awesome things for you. That didn't work with NWN and that was really the entire point of the game - it was an OK game and all the modability and community made it still OK.

Textures I like. Textures are a nice little flourish people can add. Although I'd take coloring your equipment over player-created textures. But anything beyond textures is probably more trouble than it's worth to the devs.

[Merusk]

While Darniaq is right in that it's a business problem, it's also a technology problem.

  The talk about 3-d modeling being 'just a 60 second' review shows very little understanding of what goes INTO modeling anything in 3-d.  I've had little experience with it and even I know that it's far more complex than just loading it up. Margalis mentions some of the problems, and on top of that (using the shield example) there's making sure it works with all the animations for all player models and doesn't clip (because players WILL bitch if it does.) and it 'looks right' when seated  (Whoops armature modeler inverted the x and z coords) and I'm sure there's many other issues a pro could list.

Even if those are fixed, you need to establish a way to distribute them.  Patch them in? Ok you still have a maximum memory allocation for models. If there's 1,000 level 1 shields out there (because everyone was modeling when they started) that leaves little room for the stuff later in game.  So either you're going to need to enforce retirement after x number of days/ weeks/months or the players that come later need super uber graphics and PCs just to run and load the 100 million 3-d models you've implemented.  Streaming? Ha.. streaming tech still sucks, and even when it doesn't you've just eliminated dial-up and a significant portion of users who have iffy-at-best speeds on their crappy broadband network (due to misconfigs or just a shitty provider) from the spectrum.  Plus you'll still lock-up anyone who just plain can't load the amount of custom models you're looking at.

If you're going to the custom player-modeling route, something along the lines of Second Life (really, download the trial, play with it to see how it works.) would be the best bet.  But it's SLOW to load-up zones, even with a standard set of parameters and only sending things like information about vertexes and colors. Nothing gets optimized because there's nobody making sure there aren't 100k polys in that cell phone that could be done with 2 and some textures (Because, hey I can model all the parts, let's do that).

So you hit the NWN-level of custom, because it's the most effective solution. Problem is, people don't feel they have the creative control (which they don't) and each 'custom' area is really just a custom way of displaying the same 15-20 models.

Textures, I agree, are the best way of going if you're going to allow player content. They're the simplest to review, catch ugliness, and easiest on the memory of the end user.  You can also keep them small and put placeholders  so that they can download in the background for anyone who hasn't seen them before.  The problem is bloat, since eventually you'll have a LOT of custom skins floating around (esp if everyone custom-skins their avatars and then their equipment) and you'll need to implement some way of purging them after a time, or else you're going to have a 2-gig game with 200 gigs of texture.

On the business end of things, that peer review that POTBS is using is great. Your users will have thousands of times the depth of image knowledge that any staff could ever have.  If it's copyrighted by someone else, you can bet someone in your userbase will probably catch it. The problem is going to be getting people to go out and review them and review them fairly.

 Still, like HRose said, most people producing anything professional quality expect compensation for it.  I'm certainly not going to design, draw and develop houses for folks online and give-over the rights to that finished product when I can get paid to do it. (And in fact could get in trouble for doing it 'on the side' anyway.)  I doubt many other professionals wouldn't feel the same about their modeling, texturing or authoring of quest content.

Stormwaltz, Raph, Mahrin, Psychochild any of you want to design me up a quest and sign over the rights, gratis, so I can sell it to other people? No?  Damn.

[Akkori]

Well, I will gladly admit I have no 3D modeling experience, but I still find it hard to believe that reviewing a single item woudl take that long. Maybe 60 seconds was extreme, so how about 5 minutes? I also do not suggest that you let in all of the 2% of submissions that are worthy. I further do not suggest that each player be able to have a custom skin (I know its been done in single-player games, and maybe it would work here too, but I think some consistency in an MMO is required).

My suggestion is to release some World Editing Tools. A 3D modeler, and a Quest Generator. The modeler can work on any size item, and it prevents the inclusions of easter eggs and such, elimiinates most problems with clipping and extra polygons, and provides an end product that theoretically could be patched into game right away and viewable as is, due to the fact that it is coded in the format the game is built on. The Quest Generator would be just as easy, allowing multiple steps and locations, coordinates for pertinent characters or locations, text boxes for NPC scripts, and notes to direct the reviewer/developer to add in what they feel are matching rewards and results. There would be no chance to add in exploits or the like since you do not define things like special weakness or the bad guys, and you dont generate terrain or structures for it (to take advatage of secret portals), and the only Bugs in it would be directly attributable to the Game itself, not by anything you do.

I know that it would take development time for these tools, but it seems a wise use of time. Especially for Quests. I mean, come on! I bet that just about evey one of you who read this board regularly can put together a pretty cool Quest, big or small! Maybe it gets added in, maybe not, but it would be (to use a military term) a significant Force Multiplier for the development team.

I would love to see ANY inclusion of any of these ideas. I would love to be able to generate and get approval for a new texture for the exterior or interior of houses in SWG. Or to generate a new skin for an armor foundation. Allowing me to write scripts for iin-game, appropriate, in-character Quests would rock!

[schild]

Ya know, the fact of the matter is that 99.99999% of player created content in any game will just suck balls. Even if they took it all seriously. Creating the tools, for the most part, is just not worth it. Either make the game or don't. But don't rely on player created content. I mean you can talk about the legal ramifications, censorship, player accountability, or bad taste until the cows come home. What it comes down to is that it's not worth sifting through 100 items to find 1 good one. There's a reason these people are players and not designers.

[Shockeye]

Just so you know, 1 in 100 would be 1% or 99% crap, not 99.99999%.

[schild]

Just so you know, 1 in 100 would be 1% or 99% crap, not 99.99999%.

Fine, .000001% decent content comes out of players. That's probably closer to the truth anyway.

[Kail]

What it comes down to is that it's not worth sifting through 100 items to find 1 good one. There's a reason these people are players and not designers.

I think Margalis makes a good point, though, in that there are some people who want to experience good player content, and some people who just want to make it.  Having a million shitty Sephiroth clones wandering around doesn't really impact my ability to make something I personally like; if anything, it gives me a bit of an ego boost to see that everyone else's stuff looks so crappy in comparison.  And the internet is full of people who want little more than somewhere to show off their work.  There are tons of shitty webcomics and deviantArt pages and blogs full of people who spend a ton of effort and money on their hobby just because they enjoy it.  The nine billion shitty Neverwinter Nights mods don't exactly scream "wow, high quality game," but it does imply that there are a lot of people who enjoy doing this kind of thing.

[Akkori]

Dont mistake me on this... I dont think games should *rely* on player-generated content. It should bea bonus thing. And, you shouldnt have to worry about crappy player-generated content if the review process works.

I further take issue with your guess of how much would be crap. I know it would be really low, but I think that 1 out of 100 is probably pretty right on. Think of it this way: If there were TEN players in a game who had some skills in this kind of thing, and they submitted one item every 6 months, that would mean 20 items a year. Thats not too bad as a bonus set of new quests and art assets. Shoot, getting a couple new items each publish would be cool.

I'm not talking about players making all of the games content, just enough to make it more interesting for more people.

[Margalis]

Again there is a huge difference between quests and textures. It's very hard for me to imagine people creating their own quests. Again, the devs would have to:

Put out the tooling for making quests.
Put out the tooling for testing quests. (Not trivial)
Spellcheck submissions
Test submissions
Hunt for easter-eggs and general tomfoolery as well as malicious things.
Make sure the quest reward is of the right scale.
Make sure the quest fits with the game.
Make sure the quest doesn't include some plot point they don't want, will later contradict their plans, etc.


Now look at textures:
Devs provide no tools.
Very easy to scan for quality.
End-users can uncheck "show user created textures" to get perf improvements or if most textures suck.

The main difference here is textures are cosmetic. They have no actual effect on the game.

If I were a dev I would start small - allow guilds to create a guild icon they can texture over shields or on their backs or something like that. If that appears to be working expand it to each player, and just ramp up from there. Maybe the next step would be textures for clothing (not armor) so you can customize your casual appearance. In the end even new textures is somewhat limited - how many people can create a good looking texture for a suit of armor? And even then you could hit "grief textures" like painting your leather armor to make it look like it is scale, just to annoy people and get invites.

[Nija]

It doesn't work and it will never work. Or the content sucks or it's good enough that you would better get paid for it.

This second possibility isn't anymore about development, but publishing.

Plus there's what Mike Rozak wrote:

Morrowind and NWN provide toolkits that allow users to create their own content. Unfortunately for the skilled players that might be able to produce good content, the skilled Morrowind/NWN content creators squeezed most of the variations (content) out of the engines before the players got a chance at the tools.

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

[Akkori]

Will somebody hire me already! Gimmie a chance to respond to the challenge! I shall pick up thine gauntlet and smack dat ass!

[Kail]

Again there is a huge difference between quests and textures. It's very hard for me to imagine people creating their own quests.

Well, I don't think it would work to just hand out C++ kits and tell people to get cracking, but I think you could implement player quests as long as you kept the format very simple.  I've heard the idea of a "reverse auction house" floated around a few places, where crafters would say "I need ten mithril bars, I'll pay ten gold" or something, and adventurers would be able to go out and get that for them.  Those kinds of "quests" I think could be made to work without killing the game.  And I think you could go a bit beyond that if you wanted to.  The VAST majority of quests in games follow a fairly simple format ("Please, brave adventurer, I need you to: go to location/kill a monster/retrieve an item/all of the above, and I will reward you handsomely for your efforts"), and it should be fairly easy to just put together a mad-libs sheet that lets people fill in the blanks with drop down boxes for monsters/locations/whatever.  Maybe give them a page to fill out a text description of the mission (maybe... probably not).  The potential for people to abuse the system is significantly smaller when the options are that tightly controlled (especially if the reward is calculated automatically rather than selected by the designer).  Granted, at first you're maybe not looking at something that's going to be way better than the random quest terminals in SWG or anything, but at least it's a start.  And I agree with Akkori that if this, by itself, were the game, it would suck, but that it could be a fun addition to some more conventional quests and things.

[Venkman]

Again, the limitations aren't technical.

Any company that spends tens of millions of dollars on a persistent world, and then tens or hundreds of thousands a month to keep it going, counts as the highest priority protection of its investment. Everything a player does would need to be reviewed and approved, by companies already resource strapped. I consider the ability to customize at inverse proportion to the investment a company makes on a game. The higher the customization, the lower the game probably cost to make and continue.

This isn't to say customization is impossible. It's just to reiterate the business issue behind doing this. In this regard, I consider Second Life the rule. Little cost to create and maintain (relative to SWG, EQ2 or WoW), since most of the work, from tool enhancements to the content itself, is done by players pro bono.

How to manage player created content needs no further definition than NWN, or even Dungeon Siege. In fact, people truly dedicated to creating content (not flighty tinkerers with interest that wanes in the face of complexity) are already doing this. It's not to a AAA level...

Because you get what you pay for.

Player created content needs to be fun, which requires time, talent, and the social skills to work as a teams. By comparison, the tools are the easy part.

[Margalis]

Well, I don't think it would work to just hand out C++ kits and tell people to get cracking, but I think you could implement player quests as long as you kept the format very simple.  I've heard the idea of a "reverse auction house" floated around a few places, where crafters would say "I need ten mithril bars, I'll pay ten gold" or something, and adventurers would be able to go out and get that for them.  Those kinds of "quests" I think could be made to work without killing the game.  And I think you could go a bit beyond that if you wanted to.  The VAST majority of quests in games follow a fairly simple format ("Please, brave adventurer, I need you to: go to location/kill a monster/retrieve an item/all of the above, and I will reward you handsomely for your efforts"), and it should be fairly easy to just put together a mad-libs sheet that lets people fill in the blanks with drop down boxes for monsters/locations/whatever.  Maybe give them a page to fill out a text description of the mission (maybe... probably not). 

What does that add though? Now I can do a bunch of quests where I go collect 10 mithril bars and go kill 20 scorpions. Most games have plenty of those quests already. Are player-created versions of those worth anything?

Also I would point out that a "reverse auction house" is basically equivalent to a normal auction house. "Go get 10 mithril bars and I'll give you 100 gold" is functionally equivalent to "10 mithril bars sell for 100 gold at the auction house." Either way you collect 10 bars and make 100 gold.

[Alkiera]

Also I would point out that a "reverse auction house" is basically equivalent to a normal auction house. "Go get 10 mithril bars and I'll give you 100 gold" is functionally equivalent to "10 mithril bars sell for 100 gold at the auction house." Either way you collect 10 bars and make 100 gold.

Assuming, of course, that you know that Mithril Bars are worth something to someone.  If someone can check the rAH and see what players are willing to pay for, you can see what you should keep, and what the percieved value is.  The AH is not a very useful tool for this.

Consider> I started WoW recently.  I've gotten a few gems over various types, they have green names.  Does this mean they're useful?  As best I can determine, it seems to make them force group rolls instead of just normal looting.  Do players pay more than a random merchant for them?  How do I know?  I mostly just give them to NPC merchants.  Same with the green magical equipment I happen across, and can't use.  If I don't have another char that can use it, it goes to an NPC.  If there was someplace I knew I could find 'hey, this guy will pay 1 sp per tigereye', and I get less than that from an NPC, then I can facilitate part of the in-game economy, rather than hold a thimble under the gold faucet.

Alkiera

[Kail]

Also I would point out that a "reverse auction house" is basically equivalent to a normal auction house. "Go get 10 mithril bars and I'll give you 100 gold" is functionally equivalent to "10 mithril bars sell for 100 gold at the auction house." Either way you collect 10 bars and make 100 gold.

Yeah, the idea of the "fill in the blank" quest generator isn't exactly earth-shattering; in that case, about the best thing I can think of it doing is proving that player generated content can work, at least as well as what's already out there in some games (like SWG).  At that level, it's not going to blow anyone away, but I do think that if the idea were polished enough, it might turn out to be useful one day.  Or it might be a waste of resources; I dunno.

The idea of the reverse auction house, I think could work, though.  On the one hand, it's functionally equivalent to a regular auction house, so you're not throwing the game balance off too much.  On the other hand, I think it helps give players a direction, much like any regular quest does.  Most of the quests in WoW consist of something along the lines of the King telling you "Go off and gather me ten mithril bars, and I shall reward thee with 100 gold," and then you doing that.  With the reverse auction house, you just replace the NPC King with a PC crafter or something, and you've got basically the same quest.  It doesn't have the same lore, so if the majority of players are really into that kind of thing, it would probably not be as interesting, but on the plus side, it's more consistent with the "world" (E.G. your mithril bars are actually going to be used in the world, not just vanish into the ether once you finish the quest), and it also has the advantages Alkiera points out (as well as being more casual friendly, etc.).  The big advantage, in my opinion, though, is that it gives the player a sense of purpose.  You're not just wandering around picking up crap to sell at the auction house, you're on a mission.  You've got a clear goal, you've got a clear reward.  You're helping someone else out.  You end up in exactly the same place, functionally, but I think the way you get there with the reverse auction house has some benefits.

[Margalis]

Assuming, of course, that you know that Mithril Bars are worth something to someone.  If someone can check the rAH and see what players are willing to pay for, you can see what you should keep, and what the percieved value is.  The AH is not a very useful tool for this.

Correction: The AH in the game you play is not useful for this. FFXI AHs are awesome and perfect for this sort of thing. They list every item in the game along with the most recent selling points of each. It sounds like WoW could use some general AH improvements.

The other issue with the reverse auction house: the trend is towards quests giving XP. How would a reverse auction house grant XP? Seems like that would be hard to make work properly. I would always choose the built-in quest that gives XP over the player-created one that does not.

[Viin]

Just a note, EVE does these 'reverse' auctions you are talking about. Basically, you put up a 'buy' order which says, "I will take 1000 units of Ore at $100 a unit". Anyone can fill the order and get 100 bucks per unit. You don't have to sell all 1000, you can sell 1 or 2 and still get 100 bucks per unit.

Since EVE is so large, a lot of people make good money being traders (buying low in one system, flying across the star systems to another system where someone is buying high). 99.9% of items sold are sold to players, you can only sell very specific quest items to NPCs.

I can check the local markets to see who is offering to buy what at what price, and then go out and fill the order. If I happen to get a lot of one item I can check around to see who is buying it for the highest price (which might be many systems away).

While it's nice, it's no replacement for an actual story based quest.

[Sky]

I don't like player-created content. Sure, some of it is good. But relying on it is lazy and unprofessional.

What I like is professionally created content. I think some of these dev houses need to crack down on people who aren't into making great levels and content but rather just pay lip service to it. Sure, making and implementing content is hard, but there sure seems to be a lot of shit content in a disproportionately huge amount of games, which leads me to believe there are a whole lot of fuckers in the industry that deserve to be sweeping floors rather than sitting around an office pissing their salaries away.

[HaemishM]

Well, it seems most of the problems could easily be solved through the submission policy. If you send me a shield with some nasty writing on it, well, it gets deleted... no problem. Yes, I am sure that a good % of stuff sent in would be crap, but considering the volume of stuff, and the relative ease of the screening process, I dont see how a Dev team can lose. People sign off on all rights to the Content they submit, so no legal problems. As compensation, they get their name in "lights" as a contributor, and a summary of their contributions.

It's not the policy that is the problem, it's the process. For everything that has to be deleted, a human has to look at it, and preferably a competent, well-trained one. MMOG companies aren't willing to pay top or even mid-level dollar to train their customer service reps, and you think they want to hire someone(s) to look over and delete penis-shaped rock formations? This task would be a monumental one just to vet the stuff and forward it on to a team dedicated to implementing it. And then you'd still have things that get through.

Think about naming policies for MMOG's. They NEVER work. Someone always gets a variation on Legolas or Drizzt through, and that's even with people hand-approving each name. And a name is only a few characters long. Imagine someone trying to approve a quest and how long that would take? And just how well someone would need to be trained?

And if the end little Timmy gets to see a dildo-shaped rock formation and Timmy's momma sues, that just adds to the costs that lawyers and executives don't want to pay. Why bother when you can make money doing it the "shove content down their throats" way?

The mod community works for FPS games because the companies don't have to deal with the mods themselves, either in approval or implementation.

[Viin]

Why submit anything?

Let the players decide what they want to play with.

Imagine... (hazy future scene fades in)...

Bob: Damn it, I'm tired of killing foozles. What do I do now?
Joe: Why don't you retire from adventuring and make your own dungeon/zone/adventure/whatever?
Bob: How do I do that?
Joe: Simple. We all start out with a Dungeon Creator level of 1, so you just need to buy rooms from the Guild with those hard earned millions.
Bob: Really? Maybe I'll check it out!

Bob goes to the Dungeon Creator's Guild and purchases a small 10 room dungeon. He doesn't want to go big until he has a chance to check it out.

Bob uses the Guild's teleport pad/wizardly portal/whatever to transfer to his plot. He immediately sees that there is a vendor here in his own personal Creator's room, which overlooks his dungeon and gives him access to creation/building tools.

Checking with the vendor he sees that as a level 1 Dungeon Creator he has access to the following items:

 - Foozle of Whacking (100 gold)
 - Basic Quest Starter NPC - no dialog tree (2000 gold)
 - Textures 1 - 10 (100 gold)
 - Basic Door (100 gold)
 - Basic Trap Door (100 gold)
.. etc ..

Using the tools provided and the items available from the Dungeon Vendor, Bob creates a little 10 room dungeon.

Now Bob has to decide where to put the entrance to his dungeon. Since Bob's dungeon is really just to try out, Bob decides that the newbie city's designated Dungeon Entrance area would work just fine. Here Bob purchases a Single Player Entry Portal which is automatically placed within the Dungeon Entrance area. Bob sets a low fee to enter (free for first timers, 50 copper for repeats) and logs out, hoping that when he comes online the next day someone will have tried his dungeon.

The next morning Bob logs in and checks his Dungeon Stats:

 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 ..

Bob notices there is a message waiting for him, which he reads. It says:

Bob! What a great Dungeon! My buddies and I are hoping you make a bigger one that will allow Groups so we can explore it together. Thanks! - Sam

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

.. (fade back to reality) ..

Anyways, if you didn't read all that, my point is just that the players can decide who makes good content or not. If they don't like your content then they won't play it. Just as long as it's not *forced* on anyone. (Notice I'm not allowing anything new to be created, just using existing items). Any new items would take a lot of man power to approve, and any scripting you allowed would have to be tested for infinite loops, etc - but if the application was created correctly it could be checked programmatically and even if there was a problem, only those within the dungeon would be affected (which could be reported and the dungeon turned off by a GM).

Just like with Half-Life, the intial game has to be worthwhile. After that, why not let the players expand your game and make it the most popular game of it's type for *6 years*?

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

[HaemishM]

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

Development money building the engine that allows the player to play with the creation of content. Development time which could probably be better spent adding more content in or fixing existing bugs.

[Viin]

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

Development money building the engine that allows the player to play with the creation of content. Development time which could probably be better spent adding more content in or fixing existing bugs.

Bah, you have to make those tools anyways for *your* content designers. And once you make them, *your* content designers can make crap a whole lot faster than doing it the hard way. This is stuff you should do when developing the product, not as an afterthought once the game is launched.

[HaemishM]

But it is expensive to make your content creation tools user friendly. Shit, most programmers would be happy with mouse control, I'd imagine. I get the feeling most MMOG content dev tools are two steps removed from a piece of chicken wire and spit.

[Sky]

Mmm...Dungeon Keeper Online.

Guk needed a workout room.

[Venkman]

It's already expensive enough to deliver professional-grade content. That's why FPS games are sold almost as much as an engine for creation as they are as compelling content-based experiences. But MMORPGs still have that 900lb gorilla of a monthly maintenance. Unless the game is only slightly persistent (like Diablo 2 chat room "slightly"), there's a not-insignificant amount of money being paid to place hundreds of people within virtual eye-sight of each other.

People want to play a game first, and that means content, which means money. But setting aside the business/legal part a second, there's a middle-ground.

I've longed for an MMORPG that was launched as a Gametic one but retrofitted with Virtual Lifestyle components later. For example, player-directed content like Eve's Contract/Auction system could complement the rudimentary WoW AH Bazaar one. That would work particularly well in SWG too. Players are already creating their own quests in these games, they're just not called quests and don't result in XP.

But this sort of after-launch retrofit could apply to player created content too, you would just need to heavily compartmentalize it to minimize the impact. It could be like CoV Bases, separate zones with no relevance to those not invited to go there. Enhance that with the ability to upload textures, models, sounds, and music, leaving the Guild leader/council as final arbiters.

Heck, you could even allow them to make this zone publicly accessible, ensuring players signed a virtual dialog EULA box type thing ensuring they don't blame the company for what the players did in their own private sandbox. That's taking a page from Linden Labs, which specifically states, for very smart reasons, that all IP generated by players in their world are owned by their creators. Puts LL in a semi-safe position, though they still do occasionally have problems.

Just gotta find a company willing to do this.

Good luck with that.