Audacious and Huge Feature - Never seen in a MMORPG Before...

Have you ever played Half-Life? Unreal Tournament? Quake?

What do all these games have in common?

Yes that's right, they offer their gamers the ability for them to create custom contents (mods, levels, scripts, etc).

What would I like to see implemented in Guild Wars?

- Custom Explorable Areas (SDK released to public).

Let me explain a bit more in-depth (and dont reply unless you read everything, because IMO it makes sense).

What if every guild could be allowed 1 (one) custom mission/island that we could access via an NPC at the Guild Hall?

Now I know this couldnt be implemented within a month. I know I'm talking long term addons (or maybe even a whole expansion designed to custom content). Or if its not an expansion, maybe even a buyable feature (like extra caracter slots).

Dont get me wrong, I know there are a lot of issues with this, so thats why I'm here to try and find solutions to them, since its easier to do so with more people.

I personnally have been designing levels for the Unreal Engine since the year 2000 (thats 6 years of mapping... wee). Though since GW came out a little more than a year ago, I have stopped working on UT maps because my addiction to GW has grown over my passion for level design. I'm sure there are a lot of good 3d artists, script editors and level designers within the GW community that could work on custom content.. enough to make GW's replayability go through the roof.

I personnally would love to be able to just play around in the GW level editor just to mess around and the such. But there are several issues that need to be addressed in order for this to work.

*****

Issue 1. Crappy Missions Flood:
There would obviously be a lot of low quality content that would be added by beginners OR just plain dumb people who want to brag about what they made (even if it sucks...). Now this is not a way to tell I'm better than anyone here, dont get me wrong we all have to start somewhere. Thats where my solution for this comes in.

Solution:
Have the designers submit their content to a 'validation' team before it can be put ingame. It needs to be good enough for that team in order to get in.

*****

Issue 2. Possible Hack Problems:
No wonders, there are already enough hackers without SDKs being available to the community. If the script codes are released to the community, you can expect hackers to have their hands full trying to code new bots that bypass the detection of scripts, etc. We dont want that now do we...

Solution:
Do not allow the view/edit of Server Scripts, Cinematic Scripts, etc. Only scripts concerning mission completion and AI behavior should be released and allowed to use. And then maybe have it so the custom scripts are hosted on a separate server (or the whole custom areas could be hosted on a separate server) so it doesnt interfere with the current codes and scripts.

*****

Issue 3. Farming/Power-LVLing Abuse:
We already got Drok Runs and Power LVLing there, we dont need an easier way of doing it. Since it would be accessible from the guild hall, it would require to have high level mobs and bosses. . As far as the farming is concerned, we dont need no new greens or anything. No need to have uber leet drops. This idea's primary objective is to have custom areas, not more drops or more farming spots.

Solution:
Players from the party would need to be lvl 20 to enter the mission (just apply a lvl requirement filter.. just like Ascalon and Monastery arenas) and Gold drop rates could be drastically reduced or almost removed totally from the drops sheet. Making the XP gain lower would make it better too (no skill point/XP farming). Another idea would be to prevent the use of Skill Cap Signet, to prevent abuse of any kind. A simple message would popup when trying to enter the mission that someone from the party has a cap sig.

Note: Argh, I forgot a lot of issues that I thought up this week, I will come back with them later.

I personnally am the type of gamer that prefers to create than play (I like playing, though I LOVE creating content for a game I like). So dont come in saying this idea sucks because you cant creating something (YET!). If you love this game and you have the desire to learn, you can do just like I did in the old UT days and learned from scratch.

Now I dont only want people to come in saying 'Good idea, /signed!'. I'd like everyone to think about it and reply with any issues I may have missed.

Since GW is a MMORPG, there are a lot of possible problems that could come up.. (lag, server overflow, etc) but if this because a good and popular addons, I'm sure ANet wouldnt mind opening a new server for all the artists within the community.. and who knows, maybe they could even find new people that could help them in the future expansions I got a few friends that are now working in game companies because they were doing custom maps for Half Life and UT in the past years

Thanks for reading! I'm waiting for your replies!

Nuke

I think that all drops should be removed in these areas. A farmer could easily just make a huge open area with tons of huge mobs of desert griffons, it would make it possible to make 25-30k and hour from just merchant fodder and gold drops.

Otherwise I really like the idea.

Yep that crossed my mind too. All drops should be removed in order to keep the farming to a minimum (or no farming at all )

Forgot to mention that it would also help guilds perfect their PvE team work. One could create a zone specifically focused on what their guild has trouble working with in PvE and they could practice (wether its energy managament, anti-interrupt, etc)

If all drops are remove, and the story telling tool are limited, what would left? You just get lots differnt geographic fedex go there, kill that, uninteresting quests. Also even if the reward is given only if you finish the mission, one could easily make a runner mission.

It would be good to see user sumbit maps, but its really hard to make a fair, none exploitable one for a MMO or COO game like GW.

All I can say is the best alt seem to put out a Graphica Map maker program (somethat that would give you easy access to the graphical assets, place monster location icons, etc) and a fourm/submitsion place, where other can vote on which one is good, and it will get review and play tested by a reveiw team, and could easily turn into a real map.

It could be left in the hands of the devs to drop the mobs on the maps, or certain limits on mobs could be imposed.

I don't think this is feasible.

Since games like Half-Life and Unreal Tournament are hosted from a personal computer that acts as a server. Guild Wars is played on central servers and only the initial protocol for network connection and the *.dat files are locally retained. This enables only state flags need be sent and content is driven from the personal computers.

Therefore these maps, skins, and scripts would have to be distributed to all players when they access these new areas. If this kind of effort was to be put forth by Anet (in addition to the review of all code generated by the editor to ensure no security openings have been included) they would have an easier time generating their own levels and scripts.

The main reasoning for keeping central control of all generated material for Guild Wars is that when errors/bugs/security issues are found the company has a standard notation in generated code that allows other programmers locate and repair the defective code.

The driving limitation of this type of game is summarized with your Issue 2. Possible Hack Problems. The content is server oriented and couldn't be segregated to separate servers without distributing the ability to host the entire Guild Wars game.

Even though I think it would be great to have the entire Guild Wars community create new and involving content for the existing campaigns, which Anet has seemed to push off to the side, I, sadly, do not see this ever coming to fruition.

Great Concept, but do to Security Problems, Amount of resources it would require, and the over all infinite "What If?" scenarios this gets an /unsigned from me.

Neverwinter Nights had this, and it was both offline and MMO. :P

Sounds good, but has kinks to work out. So for now I won't sign.

Good points there..

What if when a party joins a custom mission (ok the mission files would be hosted on the GW server), what if there is a way that the mission scripts, AI and other things like that would run (be hosted) on the player with the fastest connection/bandwith/computer automatically. Dunno if there would be a way to make this work.. Just thoughts I'm putting up

Instead of having custom PvE areas, what I propose would be something like custom PvP areas (think Fort Asphenwood kind) where no drops or loot of any kind are involved.

Personally I just find it very shallow to play against AI if there isn't any form of "financial (ingame) gain" involved, but that's just me. Fort Asphenwood as well as snow ball arena are 2 really good examples of games that I'd hope to see more of.

However I can certainly understand why Anet wouldn't want to introduce this. It certainly takes something away from their current position of being the sole provider of content ingame, and that might undermine sales instead. Why, if people are too busy playing these custom games, they may just stay contented and not buy future chapters instead!

Are security problems, amount of resources it would require, and like wise the infinite what-ifs scenarios of any concern to you, as both a paying customer, and as a gamer?

This is definitely a very good idea, and if Anet can see how to fit in this system to their business model kudos to them too.

/signed definitely.

Yeah it wouldn't be possible. The GW community is what...couple million in size? Even if .001% of the community participates in modding, it'll be 2000 people. I doubt only .001% of the community would participate, it would be a massive number of people, both skilled and unskilled making new content. The only way to make this possible resource wise, would be to put all custom content on the client side, and have third party sites mirror the custom content.

Yes, this is a problem to security, it would force ANet to run completely client-side like an FPS, which is why MMORPGS DON'T do this type of thing. GW content is server side so that it can be easily modified, and its highly secure.

Yes, this is a resource problem, because it isn't possible to pay $50 for a game and expect a company to maintain terabytes of information at any single moment in time. So, considering 300 GB of space goes for $100, at the cheapest I have yet to find, why do you expect your $50 to go so far as 1000+ GB?(1 TB)

This is a good idea, I'm not saying that it isn't, but there are reasons why MMORPGs dont do this, and it goes from everything from disk space all the way to the engine of the game, it's just not possible to pull it off.