City of Heroes' new Mission Architect system can be *gasp* used exploitively for powerleveling. It's also piling up a lot of junk content. Neither of these are much of a surprise and both Syp and PvD are laughing at Paragon Studio's reactionary response. I'm chuckling a bit here too.

So here's my chance to show I'm better than everyone else at Design 101. Nah, not really. I'm just stating some obvious stuff and there's bound to be a bunch of other methods as well. There are plenty of lessons available from established so-called Web 2.0 apps, ala Wikipedia etc..

How to do Player-Generated Content right in an MMORPG:

Three Easy Steps

Step One: Scale Rewards

Come up with a formula where players are rewarded by time & effort that isn't so easily exploitable. The simple mob killing = exp isn't going to cut it when you're giving players control over their own content. Cap the rewards if necessary. This would be a lot easier for a game designed from the ground-up for player-derived content. As it is, CoH may be a bit hardwired.

Step Two: Peer Review

Elevate some players to status for reviewing content. Either let them all review (that's likely a mess), or create a filter team to get rid of the junk content. Perhaps make content compete, with a sort of ladder / tournament system that keeps players along for the ride watching which content climbs its way to the top.

Step Three: Limit New Content

Put limits on new content. Time limit it. Limit it to friends-only. Maybe even limit how many times it can be played through. Then reduce the limits as it climbs up the review scale. Delete content (after a week or so?) that hasn't been favourably reviewed.

. . .

Paragon Studios has their work cut out for them trying to kludge in any new controls and/or filters now that they have a mountain of content to deal with. Hopefully it doesn't bog down an otherwise great game / content platform. The plus side is that future projects can do it better.

Dan Ariely has some insights on the likelyhood of people to 'cheat' in any given situation. Note: He is not a game developer, this is about human behaviour.

Most of his talk goes against established game theory, but much of it rings true.

I wonder how much of this could be applied to online gaming.

In one instance, he talks about how people will much more readily steal tokens or items than cash, even if they have the same intrinsic value. Is there some possible way to give weight to game items by making them more like real money or something else we would apply the sort of psychological guilt he refers to?

And what about signing some sort of 'moral code' document, as he exampled, to significantly reduce cheating? Self-policing methods like this are probably a lot more effective than trying to convince players they're being watched, or having players report player abuse / exploits (which I suspect psychologically speaking, isn't much deterrent at all).

Last night a group of us pushed our way through Toirdealbach's Tomb. We had a lot of fun, which we tend to do, but I was disappointed as an example of Age of Conan's dungeons.

For starters, I hate fast respawns as a difficulty mechanic, and the respawn rate in there was insane. Twice, a guard literally reappeared immediately after killing it. All of the patrols would respawn behind us, there was no time to rest.

Next, when we got to the last boss, I was pretty sure we were going to wipe since I'd heard Toirdealbach is ramped up for ~ level 60 and our highest group member was level 56. We did wipe, Toirdealbach was nasty. The problem is, she ran all the way to the starting spawn point in the dungeon to kill us while we rezzed and of course, as you can expect, the whole thing ended in a respawn zerg.

It wasn't something we'd done intentionally, but afterwards it left a nasty sour taste in my mouth. Intentionally repeating that behaviour would be openly exploitive. Not the zerg itself per se, but the way it dragged the end boss all the way to the start. I'm sure some players might have a different take on this, being that it's Funcom's bug, but taking advantages of bugs for gain is one definition of exploiting. I'm pretty anal about this stuff, I like to enjoy a game as it's intended, so I did report the bug after we were done.

This morning's patch from Funcom brought in two fixes which would have made our experience better (I hope):

I'll probably go back after a few levels and see if it's more enjoyable.