NCsofts MMO City of Heroes enabling user created content.

Yep, they are giving users ability to create their own missions, share them with rest of the world and generally kick some ass.

Tools given are quite simplistic, but still cool.

Now, that is pretty awesome-ish. Lots of decent content is gonna appear along with some gems. Makes me actually think about CoX subscription even if I dont exactly like superehero thing.

But ... imagine this in GW ... even basic ability to just seed areas with enemies having complete teambuild ...

Could be a good way to wring some more life out of PvE for those who enjoy a challenge.

Drop rates strike me as the biggest potential problem. ANet could probably just use an EotN area as a template and not permit user modification.

To all my IRC peeps: "I TOLD YOU SO!"

Make my own missions for GW you say?

Room full of nothing but ecto dropping enemies(ex: dryders), and when you clear the room one chest from every dungeon/elite area appears. LOL

Sounds good to me, I think I'll make my area entirely composed of level 31 smite crawlers with empty skill bars. Yeah, I think about 300 of them in every room should just about do it.

EDIT : if this were added, it'd be like the BMP. no drops

They may be owned by the same publisher but thats where the similarities end, i wouldnt expect anything like that for GW.
CoH also gets regular free content updates in the form of Issues, course its a pay monthly game.

Might see more CoH influences in GW2 however, they mentioned the sidekick system would be used.

Isnt COH pay for play? THAT makes a hug difference hwne trying to maintain a fanbase.

All the people talking about room full of ectos didn't look at the CoH article closely (it specifically says random monster drops are disabled. Instead, custom missions drop some sort of item you can exchange for with collectors).

Anyway, sounds really cool. Lots of multiplayer games support user created maps and content already. It is only a matter of time before MMOs start doing the same thing. Still a few years off before this becomes mainstream, but cool none the less.

Awesome. GG Cryptic, let's hope it's going to be a global model for all future NCsoft products.

But then: 1) Greed was to be expected from users. 2) Why not drop the FoW armor and other BDSs directly? 3) Oh wait, it won't allow you to do that anyway...

It works for CoH because there is not Loot drop system, at least not in the traditional way. Theres nothing to really farm from what I remember, though I haven't played since the release of CoV so who knows now...

There is a marked lack of creativity in this community. This is apparent simply by zoning into any PvP outpost, and indeed, any PvE outpost. People are always begging for the wiki builds and insisting that PUGs play the way the wiki tells them to.

Any user-generated content would just be more of the same rehashed bullshit the common player vomits up every day, and the very instant someone came out with an instance full of level 1 Mindblades that dropped ecto every other kill, the game would die.

Crusty is indeed correct. If I remember, the only real drops are tokens or something that unlock costume pieces for your character, or skill enhancers. This means they have less to worry about when it comes to drops. I must add I also really think this is cool, CoH has always been a cool game and it's nice to see that even with it aging they're still trying new things.

Drop rates wouldn't matter, they'd obviously turn it into something different like collectible thing you could use for unlocks or a trade in system or something. But people forget to even dream anymore is stupid. There literally aren't enough people working on GW1 to make much of anything but skill changes and events reactivated.

It would be excellent if they let people create their own missions and so on, and if drops were disabled in custom user content they picked the best mission/quest/dungeon created that month and made it official, giving it drops and so on - sort how Valve and TF2 pick a user created map and put it into the official maps.

Its likely the design wouldn't drop high end farmable items, maybe nothing even, but the fun of it. Im doubtful that this would happen... although it could be added in teh anticipated April big update =), no jk thats for storage etc.

If they enabled this in Guild Wars, it would probably be good again. Imagine creating your own PvP maps.

The thing with user created content is, if it is possible to make something in the shape of a penis or goatse, you will see it (a lot).

Eh if we were able to choose only certain monsters and not mess with loot tables, they could still drop things and it wouldn't be too bad. Anet could put limits on what we could do... X out of 20 monsters available in this area, so much space, etc.

And my guess is that you'd get banned for that. NCsoft/Cryptic can easily regulate that, but you need resources that Anet doesn't have (on GW1 at least...). Similarly for the loot abuse problem, I'm sure there are plenty of solutions (no loot at all and Anet can add loot to the "best rated" levels, special loot only available to these user-created levels).

As someone used to tell me, when someone is showing you the moon, don't look at his finger.

sadly i dont think anet will ever go for it. how ever it would be epic to make some side quests or just mess around with the codeing for guildwars.

Why it will never happen.

I could easily see them giving us the ability to create quests or even missions using existing maps/cities.

We wouldn't have direct access to the coding at all. It would most likely look something like this;

1) Select starting point
2) Select NPC from list to hold quest
3) Select map for quest/mission
4) Select mission goal from list (kill boss, protect NPC, find item(s), reach destination NPC)
5) Select number of bosses
6) Select type of monster for each boss
7) Select profession of each boss
8) Select number of guards for each boss
9) Select location for each boss from list
10) Select location of NPC's or item(s) from list

Toss in a couple of text boxes for the NPC's and a list of items players can be hunting for or even player created items (currently existing pic with new player text ie Icy Loadstone becomes Crystal Shard of Lyssia).

Even this limited form would allow for some rather creative quests to be built, plus they could allow multi-chain quests where you need to collect X number of items to complete quest and recieve the reward. Rewards will ofcourse be created by Anet and scaled to the quests difficulty.

I don't think Anet has enough resources devoted to GW in order to create such a system, although it would be a really nice addition to the game.

This would really kick ass! I hope they do this sometime soon to keep their playerbase busy while GW2 is in the making. Its basically a win/win situation for the players and Anet. Anet doesn't have to shell out more money for another campaign/whatever and the players can just entertain themselves with a toolkit to make their own campaigns/missions. I played NWN/NWN2 before and alot of the user-made campaigns were even better than the originals. Wishful thinking I know but it would really really be great if they did this.

Very cool idea, and should all work as planned it would be awesome. The biggest problem I see in this (or any system of user made content) is sorting out the gems from the garbage. I think the Zero Punctuation review of Little Big Planet sums most user made content systems perfectly.

Content quality is gonna be cotroled by player ratings and flagging inapropriate content, plus devs picks. That ought to be enough to filter bad stuff. Only issue is people voting down nice, but challenging content (hurt pride hurts).

This is not about "code", but texture and maps (in the 3D mesh kind of sense). So security-wise, the risk is very low. The only thing that could be unearthed is small position glitches (you can check for malformed maps without too much hassle) and as long as these maps are not tied to normal maps, you wouldn't get any advantage. As zwei2stein says, the real problem may lie with players' pride, but it wouldn't be any worth than it is now.

And that is possible to inspect nowadays anyway.

Neverwinter Nights did this more brilliantly than any game I've ever played, enabling people to set up their own persistent servers and create advanced content, even allowing people to recode many aspects of the engine, including AI and spells. I've spent more than 3 years on one server, first as a player, later as a coder and DM.

To make this worthwhile, a game should include such features from the basic design upward into every aspect of the final game. I think that ship has long sailed for GW.

The loot problem is fixed easily. Just limit all monsters in user-created areas to gold plus a single collector "trophy" item, with the standard loot scale rules applied. A-net can pick what the collector trophy may be traded for.

I'd be concerned, because this would happen.

There is a LOT to admire with City of Heroes.

I think that people are reading into this way too much. I think that there's some kind of wishful thinking that somehow the CoH model is going to transport over into GW. I find this hard to believe.

If CoH had done this from the get-go... That is, embrace the fans and release a dev-kit quickly, then I would have said that it was brilliant. Yes, games like Neverwinter Nights gave fans an adventure editor and such. But keep in mind that any game that offers a dev-kit to fans often does it very quickly... If they don't include it right in the game launch, then it comes out within 6 months after release. So why the three or four year wait to release a dev-kit?

I read this as desperation. CoH is now looking at the upcoming release of DC Universe Online. New MMO players will soon be able to make a superhero that fights next to real comic book heroes like Superman or Batman with a new graphics engine. While there will always be diehard gamers that will stick with a game to the end (look at Auto Assault), many new gamers will make the obvious choice. So I read the CoH change as: Well, this game is pretty much a dead-end, so we're not going to create much new content. But rather than listen to your constant bickering, here's a dev-kit so you can make up your own crap.

Guild Wars fans only want more quests and missions if it actually made the game more interesting. I mean, nobody wants more "fetch this item" or "kill this idiot boss" quests in the game. To be honest, I think the real demand is for more customization and to make their characters more personal. I think that people would have paid to get more faces and hairstyles in the character creation windows (or an option to change their current hairstyle via an NPC). I think that there would have been some intrepid fans that could have come up with some good armor styles or weapon designs. And I don't mean "submit your artwork and we'll model the ones we like", but release the dev-kits to let people create their own textures, meshes, and the like. People could upload their ideas to a beta test server, and any obviously broken stuff ("I'm going to upload my M4 assault rifle from Call of Duty!") could be reviewed and caught before it went live.

To be honest, it can't be any worse than what we've got now. We already have plenty of weapons and armor that clip into character models and such, and people already complain heavily about the holiday headgear as it stands.

Souns nice, but must be very limited to ensure they don't make 'easy farm' areas and things like those.