I was recently watching City of Heroes Post-Mortem video and Positron was discussing issues that they ran into especially with the release of COV and that they had to do essentially double the storylines. A common issue he addressed and has been addressed by WoW devs and so forth is the time investment to game content. Positron said that four months of work would lead to two weeks of actual content for players if you are lucky as a developer. He said the mission architect was put in place in part to alleviate the content gaps. It has been my feeling especially given the success of modding programs like used in Skyrim and Fallout and the problems of content creation in MMO's, that one of the greatest resources developers have is to give players the tools to create in part their own content. That is, similar in the architect system in which you load into a predefined area in which the player can create the story the badguys and so forth. I was wonder the DEV's thoughts on this? With the smaller design team does this route make sense from an expanded content standpoint? And any general thoughts.

This Hardly seems like a Bug Report.... Just Saying.

Yes. Was a mistake in the section it was placed. However making an account and having only one post to point out a thread in a wrong section seems kind of strange. Why not actually post to discuss the game itself or specifically to address the point of the post...Just saying.

Yes, we are going to be tackling some of these issues commonly faced by MMOs via a few systems. They are going to be ranging from randomply generated content to player created content. Randomly generated content isnt really anything that needs to be explained but I think we are approaching some problems caused by player created content differently. For example of you are familiar with the architect system from coh some of the issues that caused the game branched from a few directions.

First was farming, I personally am a fan of farming, there is something relaxing about just grinding a few maps mindlessly while making a money, but the way you could make maps in AE was far to efficient and made it the only viable rout for efficient farming. There should be quite a number of ways that all fall within a few % of efficiency of each other.

Second was lack of interest, the AE system had thousands of player created missions but the number of players that experienced that content was very small probably around 5%, fixing this issue would be the goal. The solution would vary from changing how the player interfaces with the good content to giving making this content really feel like its part of the world(AKA promoting player created content to the actual game). Many hours of design work has gone into the how and why of implementation of systems that provide the player with the best experience and this is one that will have a huge impact.

If you have any questions let me know, I will try to go into as much detail as we can.

I happy to see that you like farming in AE(and the main world) as I enjoyed that too. I had my favorite maps I would like to farm as it gave me multiple benefits: lots of enemies that made me feel powerful(I couldn't just stand there and faceroll my keyboard though), getting tickets were rewarding because I could buy things I wanted and were useful(say unlike Marvel Heroes currency where there is little to buy from the vendors) and it allowed me to avoid the auction house on certain items I felt were overpriced. But as you say, I also didn't really play it for any advancement of story. It never felt like part of the world and didn't really do anything to relieve the repetitiveness of story missions. Whether we need more map variety, more variety in how missions can be completed beyond beat up X thugs and click Y or show the player created content somehow affects the main world, I don't know. Any chance of introducing little mini-games that require a minimum amount of skill to accomplish an objective, for example, lock picking in ESO?

SavageFist wrote:
STO has a rudimentary version of this with its scanning minigames, and EVE Online has those cool hacking games you play to unlock data and relic nodes.

Maybe certain minigames could become easier based on your chosen character traits, for instance a super smart character with a computer backround or robotic physiology would have an easier time hacking a terminal.

And just to be clear, I liked the tickets from AE so I hope you do not think that reward was "too efficient". Yes, I did use it a couple times for XP farming and yes, it was nice but I would be happy with diminished XP but keep something like CoH's ticket system.

Thanks for the response Jaximus.

For the farming aspect I do agree with you it is a bit tricky when players could edit the types of enemies they face and use it to make easier farming. Personally I would be fine with slightly lower XP gain in these types of missions or perhaps using a lock system to how much XP you can get from the missions in a certain day/week. After you past the threshold you no longer get XP from that mission until the day/week is up.

Yes. I think promotion is a big part of it. When I think about Skyrim and Fallout for example there is no shortage of websites promoting player quests. Maybe having a section of the website dedicated to this so that players can post their own missions with descriptions of them. I would also say a good idea would be to do a YouTube "highlight" video with different quests the devs love or by fan vote and so forth. I'm thinking something like what Battle.Net App does for the front page. It would also give players incentive to really be creative as they can get "featured".


SavageFist touched on an important point which was the limited nature of the architect mission as far as the very structured "mission types" that is defeat all enemies, rescue so and so. That is an area I personally would like to see what is possible as far as the definition of what "mission accomplished" looks like as that is integral in creating a more rewarding system for player creators.

I enjoyed the Mission Architect in CoH, but it did go into a downward spiral of exploits and nerfs, workaround exploits and new nerfs. I realize I am probably on one end of the scale in this, but I would have preferred if player-made missions remained "training rooms" with non-leveling rewards (badges, inspirations, enhancements, salvage and recipes - possibly not even the most rare recipes at that. Then you'd have to use these in the actual game OR missions "canonized" by the devs. There was some of this - you got "real" rewards in approved missions - but it did not stop us from getting "broiler" characters that got to level 50 in a couple hours doing the same mission over and over. So I would prefer restricting leveling in random player-made missions but take some time to test, canonize (and of course changelock) the good ones.

Another thing I wonder if is possible at all: Cosmetic player-made content, like in Skyrim where you can import meshes and particle effects and such. That may be a stretch though.