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Player Created Content for an MMO
Aaror
Member Posts: 25
I made a post about how "if I made an MMO," and the most important part was player created content, then I saw another thread about the same thing (calling it "sandbox")
That being said, there are certainly dangers, and difficulties, in doing so. I'd like to throw out my thougts on the problems and solutions, and would welcome the thoughts of others.
1. Min/Maxing. A danger of letting players create content for MMO's is that they could create adventures with rewards much greater than the challenge requires, or make adventures that give items as rewards that are better than what the developers created.
The best solutions I see are, first, making sure that the quest reward that the creator can set is a "slider system," rather than allowing the creator to just set it. That way while the creator can set the reward to mostly reputation, mostly gold, or a "cleric mace." they can't set the actual amount or stats. Those can be set by the "difficulty," of the adventure, as determined by the amount of damage characters of different levels take, and how often players die. Granted, some players could game the system by not attacking and letting themselves take extra damage, but the reward of that would be small, and not worth the time. Speaking of time, rewards could also be partially keyed to the time it takes them to beat.
2. Adventure quality. Specifically, helping players find the fun ones, since there is nothing wrong with people making bad adventures to learn the ropes. There are three ways to help with this. One is simple, but slow, word of mouth. Better would be a ranking system of some sort, possibly with tags (similar to little big planet), a third is a little harder, but...
If you allow all characters to build a house, castle, dungeon (based on tiles so the programming cost is low), and let them "hire," guards or "buy," pets to guard those buildings and dungeons, that content (in terms of variety of locations) will probably be high, and the dangers and costs low. What you need is for the materials and "guard currency" to not be standard currency, so most people will create buildings and hire guards instead of just using all their money for gear. I think buildings should work like "investments." They should earn money each day, and also each time they are attacked, based on the level of the attacker, but the attacker should be able to "steal," part of the money accumulated. If you check your house daily, you will collect most of the money, and attackers will mostly earn you money, but if you are inactive, your buildings will accumulate lots of money for attackers.
3. "Fun design/fun to design." I think using a "tileset," for buildings will make it easy to design, and reduce the development cost. The trick is allowing players enough "tiles," to be able to design what they want. I suggest that developers create a forum for players to suggest new tiles and guards, and listen to it...
Players should also be able to put "frontage tiles," on their buildings once they set the interior tiles. After all, a castle without crenelations or a dungeon without a mountain would look weird. Guards should be cheaper when further away from eachother, so that dungeons with multiple waves of foes are reasonable (instead of putting one big guard or all your guards in one room since that improves the danger to players).
4. Terrain issues. Unless the developers build big plains into their design for the world, players have to find places to build! the solution to that is simple, but unorthadox. Make a "heart area," with the faction capitals on the outside and the Developer created content in the middle. Then allow players to "colonize," outside their faction capital, moving out from the center. Land can be created by the players as they build their houses and dungeons. Limited abilities to "teleport your buildings," should be available, both for moving your house to your guild's castle, and to change factions.
Draw distance will be an issue as well, I hope that tiles and frontage tiles will make the graphics issues low, and hopefully some "generic terrain," can be set up for the land created as people move outwards, including main, named, roads so people can find their own house!
Rivers, mountains, jungles, etc should be easy for players to create for "flavor," you should be able to create a reasonable amount of background terrain for your area...
Comments
Another way of tackling min/max would be to have the tools include stock risk/reward packages. That is, if you want to put in 100 gold as the reward, you can pick from a set of risks. A dozen orcs, three ogres, etc. The tools would bind the monsters to the treasure to make sure that the players had to get past the monsters to get the reward. It wouldn't be possible to include a 100 gold reward that was just sitting around waiting for farmers to pick up.
If you want to get even more flexible, don't put all the player content into one geographic space a la Second Life. Go with the Neverwinter Nights approach of creating separate spaces. A space could be a single room or it could be an entire world, depending on the computer resources and tools available.
To bring the various random rooms and such back together, designers could fashion links, bridges or portals between their worlds. If the authors of two environments agree that their content is compatible, the portal is created. Portals can be closed on demand by either author. Making a change to your content would create a new environment and would require other authors to update their end of the portal to point to your new content. That's stock version control stuff to avoid someone getting hooked in, then making outrageous changes that nobody else wants hooked in.
Everything would start with the character creation point. You'd go to the science fiction character point, create your character, then enter whatever player content can be reached from that point. Alternately, you go to the high fantasy character point, create your character and enter whatever was available from there. Then you get a network of compatible character types and environments. It's very much like the old style MUDs.
My worry with that is that if I am designing a dungeon I could put the 3 ogres at the end of one branch, and the 100 gold at the end of the other branch. The difficutly for most players would only be 50% (half would go to the gold, the other half would find the ogres, then find the gold). The difficulty for my friends would be 0% (walk to the gold, walk out). That is why I can only see a "dynamic" treasure working...
Also note that this helps with the fact that dungeons become known. The first time you explore the tomb of horrors (old DnD adventure) you have 80% casualties or worse. The 10th time you only lose the newb. With a dynamic treasure system, once the dungeon becomes known, the treasure goes down.
Idea (because this could get really tricky):
Rather than including loot in the design system at all, (which would be a nightmare to balance and players exploiting the system would be an easy way to rack up positive ratings) player created levels and zones would be opened for public test. Ratings would include multiple categories (lore ratings, difficulty ratings, entartainment, etc.) that would allow both developers and the community to find the most universally appealing, original designs. Player content creators would be encouraged to include design notes suggesting possible allocation of loot.
Developers could then pick those creations they feel would be the best fit for the game, and add them to a pool of approved designs available in-game through some sort of instancing. They would add appropriate loot, and the player creator would be given some sort of recognition at the entrance, and a title (or something) would be made available for their characters.
^
What he said!
I do want to automate the process though. What I was saying was something like this:
After 5 people run through the dungeon, the computer looks at their levels, how much damage they took, how many of them died. This determines the "danger level," of the dungeon. The computer also looks at the average time it took, and assigns a treasure multiple for the dungeon length. I'd love to have a "vote up/vote down" system too, allowing people to say the dungeon was fun or boring, but that wouldn't affect loot, it would just show on the rating.
If a dungeon killed the level 3, did 80% hp damage to the level 5, did 50% hp damage to the level 7, did 15% hp damage to the level 10, and the level 15 wasn't hit, it would probably be a level 7 dungeon, and would give standard level 7 treasure, based on the time it took. If it killed the 3 and 5, and the 7 took 70% damage, it might be level 8...
Knowledge of the dungeon would give an edge certainly, but that edge would lower the rating of the dungeon and thus the treasure.
We could always just run the player content for the fun of experiencing the story and not have any persistent character gains from it...
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