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.