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The City of Heroes Expansion & the Issues of User-Created Content
Posted by
Soulskill
on Tue May 19, 2009 10:28 PM
from the can't-you-just-play-nice dept.
from the can't-you-just-play-nice dept.
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."
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Managing Player-Created Content In <em>City of Heroes</em> 43 comments
Superhero MMO City of Heroes recently went live with its 14th expansion (release notes), one of the main features of which is the Mission Architect, a system to allow players to create their own quest content and then submit it to be implemented into the game. Now, Joe Morrissey of the City of Heroes team has written an article about how they plan to manage the content that players create. "You have to decide how draconian you want to be. The more hardcore you are, the fewer people who will see inappropriate content, but you expose yourself to potential grief voting. Grief voting is when a player flags perfectly acceptable content as inappropriate just because it's fun. If it only takes a single vote to eliminate content from the game, clicking that button is going to be the game for a lot of players. You don't want perfectly good content getting pulled because someone's a jerk."
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Create a Mission And This is What Happens. (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone Wants User-Created Content They Said!
Then you get banned. Bah!
Depends on the reward (Score:4, Insightful)
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 :)
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>>Not quite. It's probably a dead end for missions than grant experience but can still be a great part of the content
MMORPGs have been doing user-generated content for decades. MUDs are often expanded / given new content by the players, not the admins. They are usually vetted first, though.
As a modder myself (for Quake, and many other games) I've been waiting for a modern MMORPG to let its content be mod-able or extensible, but the CoH way doesn't seem to be it.
Is it just me or do you hate the grind too? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Gaming the system (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Gaming the system (Score:4, Interesting)
Or get rid of the global ranking altogether. There are tens of thousands of custom counter-strike maps but who cares if people make abusive maps? Your ranking is determined by your skill; if you're good then you'll almost always be at the top of the scoreboard getting whatever pleasure pulls in MMO addicts. And if you play achievement servers all day then you simply won't be good enough to top a scoreboard; abuse does nothing. This kind of skill-based stratification is possible in MMOs too.. again Guild Wars proved it's possible, so where's the followup? 90% of active Guild Wars characters are at the level cap and probably a good 50% have beaten enough to have competitive options for PvP combat or finishing the rest of the games. Almost everyone is on an even level technically so the "ranking" is just how good you are. And for those who haven't beaten it, many missions are completely impossible without a full team of skilled players and you usually have to play through it a few times to get a tactical idea of where you fit in.
So give me an MMO with a low level cap. Everyone has exactly the same number by their name and the same possibilities for stat building, so there's no epeen waving and no reason to abuse the system. If players want to sit around all day playing farming missions then I guess they're having fun and it's fine because their little number isn't moving. Of course it always comes down to EPIC GEAR that (even in guild wars) takes at least like a thousand hours of farming, but you can just make user generated content not eligible for those items.
Parent
More examples of developer cluelessness... (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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.
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finding loopholes IS the game (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Dead End, mostly. (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
CoH/CoV = Repetative. = zZZzZ (Score:3, Insightful)
User-created content is The Future (Score:5, Funny)
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.
These articles are just the cries of gold farmers (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
See... (Score:2)
City of Heroes i
It is NOT risk vs reward. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
There have to be limits (Score:2)
User-generated content is great, but it must exist within pre-defined limits or constructs such that abuse is largely mitigated. As the freedom of the user to generate content is increased, the complexity of the construct required to maintain reasonable parameters of play increases exponentially. The trick is in balancing the complexity of the construct you have to maintain behind the scenes with the level of freedom your players wish to enjoy. It also helps if you're able to entice your most gifted users i
Analgous effects. (Score:2)
True in games. True in Politics.
I am not producer for the Star Trek MMO (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [eldergame.com] but a link to it always seems to get omitted in the article coverage...
Could we get a "duh" tag? (Score:2)
Every single MUD headwiz knows the problem. Every single one of them.
No matter how well you try to "balance" the system, if your creator wants to abuse game mechanics, they can. Mobs don't just have X HP and you do Y damage, so it takes Z time. Even in a game like MUD where positioning abuse and kiting isn't really possible. Resistance vs. damage type it the most obvious abuse point. When you have to give your mobs a certain total level of resistance, make them resistent to the damage you don't do and susce
This just out! (Score:2)
Gaming company executives try to replace content designers with users doing it for free and users stray from "the vision" ...
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Tell that to Second Life.
Tell that to most tabletop RPGs that depend on such content.
Yes it is an MMO which changes things some but there are ways to game the system regardless.
My real problem with the AE system is that it is too timid in not giving the creator any real control over level layout or design. Maps are either pregenerated or randomly generated. Basically all the creator is doing is adding a script and which monsters will spawn.
While the AE creator can indeed be used for great things I think w
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Re:Poor Design (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Poor Design (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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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"
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 desirab
As a COH player, I can believe that (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why I stopped playing. Statesman kept shifting his position on the powers and the modifications to the powers. Regen scrappers w/all the toughness and extra resist skills slotted fully were uber ... because no one bothered to run a particular scenario of :
"Gee, I wonder if I acted like a min-max character what kind of abuse of the system could I do?"
They nerfed Invuln tanks. They nerfed regen scrappers. They nerfed fire tanks. And then they nerfed everyone across the board with diminishing returns fr
Glossary for the above comment (Score:3, Informative)
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" -
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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
Re:Poor Design (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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It would seeme that a system measuring the length of the fight, how much damage each participant took, if the fight was balanced, and how close you came to losing would e a much better way to calculate experience gained.
So, you start a level, battle your way through it for hours, nearly die several times, and of course you get a ton of experien
Re:Poor Design (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Poor Design (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
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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.
Unfortunately, for most people it is (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately, for most people it _is_ the kind of crap he described.
E.g., I have a _lot_ of low level alts and routinely group with newbies. And with other players who made alts. I've yet to see one who's happy with the grind to level 20-22. If the topic comes up, virtually _everyone_ just gnashes their teeth and grinds through the non-fun teen levels, to the point where they
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"So, yes, I still wonder why the COH team doesn't fucking fix their game to be fun at all levels already. There was no level range on WoW where I had the impression that I just need to grind 9 more levels and _then_ it'll be fun. Whatever class I was playing, and I've played all 10, had a good enough mix of spells to be fun playing at any level from 1 to 80. Why can't COH be the same?"
Is there some other game that is called WoW? I ask because World of Warcraft doesn't really start being a game until max lev
Re:Unfortunately, for most people it is (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Parent
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Re:Poor Design (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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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.
It's still a problem (Score:2)
Unfortunately, it ruins the experience for everyone else too.
E.g., a lot of grouping before in COH had been for xp. Let's not pretend we're just a more social bunch and need to go even to the toilet in groups. The game just gave a bigger group xp bonus than, say, WoW does, so pe
Re:Poor Design (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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This is the internet!
First of all everyone knows each other; communities usually grow around user generated content. The formal process would just be rushed through ("<ma
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Drug user really, which given the last three presidents explains a lot.