Superhero mmo City of Heroes recently introduced a new feature called mission architect, allowing its players to create their own missions and share them with other players. Player created content in mmos is still rather unusual because it’s obviously difficult to manage – as far as i know Ryzom is the only mmo which tried something like this before. Today on the train i finally had the time to read this Gamasutra article, where Joe Morrissey goes to great lengths to explain how they intend to keep male body parts out of their game. Judging by the recent controversy over exploitative player created missions (Elder Game has some great analysis) it seems they shouldn’t have worried as much about their customers juvenile tendencies as their urge to follow the path of least resistance… But aside from the fact that things aren’t going the way the developers expected and it being dubious policy at best to arbitrarily swing the banhammer, there are possibly some interesting game design considerations to take into account: when players in their “exploitative” behavior strive towards easy gratification, then the core premise of your game probably just isn’t as fun and entertaining as you originally thought? On the other hand games most definitely need to be challenging in order to be fun.
Anyway, i sure hope they’ll figure out some way to make mission architect work, as it’s probably the most exciting new feature in a mainstream mmo in the last few years. Besides, they score extra points for being one of few (two?) mmos on the mac.
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