What if you could create your own tailor made adventure? What if you could be the hero or villain in your own story? Better yet, what if you could gain several levels in only one short adventure?

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There are many benefits and dangers to allowing players to create their own content. The option opens up the tools for creating adventures to everyone, but is it really a good idea? In just a short 24 hours after the City of Heroes (CoH) Mission Architect system went live, player content had already surpassed content created by the developers. As developers soon found out, not all of this content was created as intended.

While allowing players to create content might sound like a good idea, it’s not without its dangers. Providing players with the tools to shape things as they will gives them a lot of power in the MMOG world and with great power comes great responsibility, and the developers at Paragon Studios learned that some players are simply irresponsible. By failing to plan for player abuse, the team soon learned that players were creating several exploit missions that gave huge rewards for very little effort. The scoring system for player created missions was even undermined by some unscrupulous players who went around giving exploit missions 5 stars while driving down others. By running through these exploit missions, players were able to level up very quickly, so a mechanic intended to give players a bit of creative control was turned into a power leveling mechanic.

The developers at Paragon Studios are veteran designers for the most part, and have been dealing with bugs and exploits over the last few years as they worked on CoH, so how they were blindsided by such an obvious coming problem is beyond this writer. You can’t hand the kids the keys to the car and be surprised when they drive it off a cliff. However, to the developer’s credit, they did address the issue with fixes and a few firm swings of the ban hammer. As you might guess, this led to quite a tantrum on the forums.

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These systems open up the game to the public to create whatever adventures they choose. Some of those adventures have the potential to even rival that of what the developers create, but let’s be honest, there is only a small part of the massive populace that has the creativity to pull that off, so in actuality there will be a few pieces of good content and a whole lot of bad. So oversaturation of player quests can be a concern if mechanics aren’t in place to cut down on the wave of player created content.

Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) is the latest game to join the player created content bandwagon with their Chronicle Master system. Like CoH’s Mission Architect system, the Chronicle Master system allows players to create their own Star Wars adventure using iconic Star Wars characters in dialogue only parts of the quest. The SWG system allows players to craft and trade adventures in the form of holocrons.

The Chronicle Master system doesn’t sound as free-formed in creation of quests as the Mission Architect system and this may be why there hasn’t been as much abuse. With the SWG system, players need to acquire relics that have specific quest events or specific actions associated with them that can then be used to help craft their quests. This system is more controlled in its creation than Mission Architect and keeps the player on a shorter leash. However, one of the biggest complaints by many SWG players is the hassle of farming certain relics needed to create their quests.

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These two games are the most prominent examples of player created content mechanics, but they will likely not be the last. Some developers have hinted that player created content is the next big thing. Brad McQuaid, Matt Wilson, and many others have expressed their belief that player created content will only continue to grow in the coming years, but then that brings up another issue? Who gets the rights to that content? Currently, a player forfeits the rights to the developer, but as player content becomes more common, is it unlikely to assume that player developers may eventually want a piece of the proverbial pie? Isn’t it also likely that someone will eventually create a popular piece of content and try to take a legal stance on the contents popularity to gain some cash for their created content?

Is it really a good idea to let the inmates run the asylum? Player created content can certainly be a great addition to a game as it opens up the creation process to some potentially creative people who otherwise might not get the chance to create content such as this for a large audience. However, if you don’t plan carefully, there are players out there that will happily use your mechanic in a way it wasn’t intended to be used and find new and creative ways to abuse the system. A lesson Paragon Studio learned the hard way. We pay subscriptions each month to ensure developers provide us with service and more content. Isn’t it best left in their capable hands?

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

About The Author

Stacy "Martuk" Jones was a long-time news editor and community manager for many of our previous game sites, such as Age of Conan. Stacy has since moved on to become a masked super hero, battling demons in another dimension.

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