Managing Player-Created Content In City of Heroes 43
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."
Re:Here is an idea... (Score:3, Informative)
I think the GP's idea here was to farm out the responsibility. In the devplayer model, the dev becomes responsible for looking at every single piece of content. In the devCAplayer model, you allow a semi-free market approach whereby new CA's can enter the market insofar as they are needed. Content can thus be pre-approved.
If it is flagged by some player even after pre-approval, the dev's can then look at it, presumably cross-referencing the dependability/reputation of the CA (and potentially, both creating and flagging players) with the content review process. This lets the dev smartly prioritize what they review, reducing the burden on them, and building a more robust reputation mechanism into the game (since the CA will accumulate reputation based on many player's actions, rather than one persons).
This is actually a pretty elegant solution, IMO.
Re:What the article didn't mention.. (Score:3, Informative)
That betrayal exists solely within your mind, since you were never promised a PVP-less game in the first place. Arenas were originally going to be a launch feature; they just kept getting pushed back until Issue 4. PVP was always part of the plan. Frankly, it's silly not to have PVP in a superhero MMO (as long as it's optional), especially once you add villain play.
Re:CoV (Score:3, Informative)
I've played CoH for about three and a half years now, mainly in hero mode.
I've found that if you play on the high usage servers, Freedom and Virtue, you get lag at times, especially during special events. But if you steer clear of them, the response is pretty good, even with dialup.
As far as acting like a bad buy in the club, Pocket D, it is meant to be a place where heroes and villains can party and go on joint missions, which can be interesting.
Not being a Player Versus Player type, I don't know much about those zones. If you are high enough level, you can have a good guy vs bad guy conflict.
As far as having problems moving about different zones, a player usually tries getting a travel power that allows them to change elevation, which is usually the biggest barrier. You also have to worry about level differences between you and the foes in the zone. A lowbie can navigate through a high hazard area IF they are careful.