CoH players make a zillion missions
It still happens — I get into a conversation with someone, and they say ‘but, surely user-created content can’t work on the Internet? Won’t most of it be bad?”
Then you get a story like this, wherein we learn that the users of City of Heroes, given 24 hours, made more missions than the entire dev since the game was first started — and what’s more, around 10% of them got rated as 5-star by the other users.
In a letter to the community posted on the official City of Heroes website, Matt “Positron” Miller revealed that within the first 24 hours of the new updates’ existence, players in both hero and villain factions had created more than 3800 story arcs, each consisting of five missions a piece – more content than the development team had created during the game’s entire existence.
Really, the quintessential challenge here isn’t going to be volume of high-quality content. It’s going to be filtering, bubbling the good stuff up to the top. But this is a largely known problem these days on the web. So it’s about time that the skepticism stop. Yes, users can be just as good at game design as pros — what they usually need is tools with a low enough barrier to entry, and the context within which to create.
21 Responses to “CoH players make a zillion missions”
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I have this strong suspicion that the popular/highly-rated missions are going to be optimized for farming. I’m only saying this based on the fact that I finished the last 5 levels of my first hero… farming, because that’s the main type of group available at that level.
The true creative gems will, in my cynical world view, get washed away by the “useful” ones. I sure hope I’m wrong, though.
[…] CoH Players Make a Zillion Missions […]
@Tachevert Or put another way, the vast majority of the highly rated user content simply does what the users want it to do given the game design and tools used in the process. CoH as a game requires certain activities and it’s only natural that the critical path through these activities becomes the most emulated and developed aspect of the user generated content. The challenge is not to figure out how to make the users make the content that the dev’s want but how to adapt gameplay such that there isn’t one true way for content anymore. When the devs have control over the content, they can do with it as they please. When you release control to the players you have to fix the underlying game design issues that get exposed which were previously covered up by your team’s self selecting design feedback loop.
CoH’s adding that kind of user created content is an interesting experience and I bet the CoH devs learn more about their development team’s culture in this process then the players learn about how they create content. The CoH team is going to go through a culture shift as they embrace user generated content. It would be interesting to get a post mortem on the process once they feel they’re doing thing under the new way as well as they were under the current way.
Agreed, Kressilac. If players are showing patterns in mission creation, it’s an honest evaluation of what your core game design is doing right, and what it’s doing wrong. To be fair, there will always be a trend to instant gratification, but mining the data that people come up with should show some insight that the devs really should take to heart.
I’ve encountered more 5-star stories than farm missions so far. Farms get marked down by those concerend about their impact on the game, good stories (that integrate well with good game mechanics) really are floating to the top. There are some very creative (and innovative) sorts out there.
I credit much of the success of this to the kind of player culture that CoH promotes. The character creator appeals to the creative- those that like expressing themselves. Alts are supported- heck, encouraged, while many people that want to grind-to-50 as fast as possible start to feel that the achievement track is pointless.
The result: A community slightly skewered to creative sorts that enjoy expressing themselves creatively in the game… and enjoy experiencing other peoples’ creations.
What Chas said. I think the devs of CoH/V were quite successful in their oft-stated goal, that the so-called “end-game” should not (and is not) the goal of CoH. Because there’s little classic end-game content, if any, as CoH (at least last time I played, which was over a year ago) didn’t have any “loot” to speak of. So, no farming for “purples”.
CoH was always about experiencing the story as much as possible, and if you levelled too fast, you missed parts of it. In fact, you couldn’t (according to the devs) experience all of it on *just one character* (the “alts encouraged” that Chas mentioned).
There’s quite a bit about CoH that I didn’t like (it’s a bit too simple for my taste), but they really did some things (actually, quite a lot of things it seems) right.
(The only reason to “grind levels” in CoH is the fact that you get the certain powers at certain levels: I levelled my robotics/ff mastermind to 32 uncharacteristically quickly, just so I could get all 6 robot henchmen 😉 )
Am I wrong in thinking that the porting of what basically amount to limited dev tool functions through the client UI as a one-time cost (with a slow, but steady, update of art to keep it fresh) provides an incredible return on investment for the amount of activity it generates?
I see time and again the mantra repeated that sandbox/player-generated content is a “lazy” developer design or that players couldn’t possibly generate the quality of content that professionals do. Of course, I’m one of those silly people that think the “90% of everything is crap” rule applies to both the pros and the enthusiasts. Even if it only applied to the amateur, there’s most certainly more than 10x as many of them :9.
That other game that has player tools for creating scenarios (:9) has seen the tools find widespread acceptance even for sprucing up semi-static venues, transforming little clusters of buildings into impressive starport/fortresses, backwater fuel depots, and the wandering nomad market. A number of “generic” sets are available as decorated houses with a blueprint for the storyteller set ready to deploy. Just contact the group that maintains them, pay the IG cost of set-up, and with no major commitment of time you have a basic warehouse, jail, or outpost to plug into your story.
@Kerri, but a world where 90% is crap is going to be useless for anyone interested in immersing themselves into a believable world…
I’m not so sure of that, Ola. The real world is fairly believable, and it has a pretty high degree of useless stuff. You’ve just got to pick and choose. Beyond that mildly snarky observation, though, an MMO just isn’t going to have all elements appeal to every player. It’s OK to be choosy, but it works best when there *is* choice.
@Ola, 90% of the Internet is crap and yet we’re still here. People just figured out ways to get the worthwhile stuff out in front of viewers. The rating system in CoH is part of that, but there are also several threads in the forums right now dedicated solely to reviewing missions and so on, so the good stuff is easier to find.
Wow, that is absolutely amazing!
I haven’t had a chance to get hands-on with this, but as I understand it, the initial design very deliberately limited the potential xp gain from player-created missions. If they followed through, the farmers will stick with street sweeps, task forces, hazard zones, etc.
My hope and belief is that this is one of those systems that changes the direction of the industry for the better. It’s an open challenge to developers to build frameworks where player-generated content can slot into a coherent whole. I can’t wait to see what happens next!
*cough* http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=17624 *cough*
Just kidding of course 😉
Here’s the link to press release of November 3rd: http://www.gamerelease.net/releases.view.php?pr_id=343
I think I might add as well a rating system. So far, all quests need to be approved either by me or a GM. That’s still a lot of work considering the amount of quests created (we’ll hit 2 000 quests created by players soon) but for an indie game, it’s helping a lot.
When a quest looks just like a farming plan or is badly written, it just gets rejected.
I must admit that a lot of players are better than me at writing quests…
The interview at massively mentioned Developer’s Choice content which the lead engineer looks for things that they didn’t think could be done and done well.
http://www.massively.com/2009/04/06/gdc09-mission-architect-in-depth-part-2/
There’s already part one of a postmortem on Mission Architect up on Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3995/mission_architect_how_are_you_.php
A lot of people are making “useful” missions, true. (though not very well, ie not optimized, because they have no idea how) And a lot of people want to use “useful” missions.
I put my slots into telling stories – have a look for Glazius or GlaziusF in the search and you’ll probably find them – and there’s a subsection of the official forums to plug the same.
The reality is that you have to promote your arc or have it catch the eye of a promoter, otherwise it just vanishes under the tide. People may think there’s something wrong with that, but honestly, what’s the alternative? When there are 20,000 things to choose from, how do your get yours noticed, aside from speaking up?
There’s a bazillion missions but Sturgeon’s Law is in full force. I despaired at the sheer size of the pile two days past launch.
There’s lotsa voter griefing (quid pro quo, or else!) and apparent gaming of the system so that the ratings are near useless.
Word of mouth seems to work for finding better content though. Biggest problem I think is it needs more dimensions for rating- a quick-n-dirty 15 minute timekiller mission suitable for a solo player is judged against the same rating system as an hour and a half arc.
I’d like to hear more about this, if anyone closer to the trenches can figure stuff out cleanly enough to show what might be going on. Perhaps find some differences between the current system and other vote/rating systems to see if we can figure out some correlations? American Idol, for instance.
Not sure if you’ll come back to check the reply, but- when I said quid pro quo, how it works is you get a message from someone saying, “I did your mission, I rated it 5 stars!! Please do mine at __” Voting is anonymous, comments aren’t, but they can see how many times their mission has been played and the cumulative rating. My missions have been de-rated once for sure (too much coincidence that all 3 were played in an hour and all three went down in ratings). The quid pro quo though is a very small numerical effect if you have dozens of people doing your missions.
I’ve heard rumors of people getting their second account or entire SG (guild) together for a voting vendetta (I haven’t seen this and really doubt it). The bad part about the quid pro quo isn’t the actual numerical effect on ratings but that the fear of it encourages people to only rate numerically and not submit negative comments or constructive criticism, out of fear of retaliation.
The ‘gaming’ of the system- it’s probably easier to get your guild to come out and vote _for_ your missions than against your enemies. Some missions which are obvious dreck have very high ratings and high numbers of play. I’m not sure of the mechanics of it, whether its by informal promotion within a guild, promotion on the boards, or what. Some 4 star missions have good intros, stories, twists, well-balanced enemy groups, while some are just a huge map with lotsa monsters and no story or explanation (and too hard monsters to be useful for farming).
What’ll be interesting is how the system looks in 5 months.
Agreed. It’s not possible to give a fair shake to a system right out the gate.
That’s extremely interesting. It sounds like the problem is that there’s no critical mass: relatively small, organized groups have a drastic and obvious effect (I hope Cryptic publishes numbers someday; that description I made is unfounded) on a noticeably large percentage. Stuff like that is supposed to be drowned out in the noise of lots of ratings and comments flowing in.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a case where comments were used to track down targets for retaliation; this might be a first.
Eh, corollary to Sturgeon’s Law. 90% is crap, but everyone thinks they’re in the 10%.
The problem is that unfiltered it’ll go the way of Little Big Planet. The high-rated missions will dominate play and continue to be rated high more and more. A newly posted mission with no ratings will have very little chance of being played, and no chance of accumulating the number of ratings it needs to compete with the established ones. As a result, the amount of reward for making a mission – and thus, the amount of effort it’s worth spending on doing one – goes down and down and down.
Leyf, don’t forget there’s not just voting vendettas but a social tilt. If someone sees that a mission is 5-star rated, not only are they more likely to play it, they’re more likely to rate it 5-star themselves, even if they wouldn’t have if its rating was unknown to them.