User-generated content (UGC)

[PhiLL.1746]

Is GuildWars 2 possibly able to have such thing?I mean, a system to work apart and independent of LWS.Would you like such system in Guild Wars 2?

[Trise.2865]

Can you be more specific? Literally anything users make is "user-generated content".Something like the Guild Missions, perhaps?

[Adrianna.3092]

I think he means something like custom missions... like city of heroes has or um... i think neverwinter? was the other one something like that.

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

Some MMOs have attempted player made content, but never had the real drive to see it through. City of Heroes and Star Trek Online is a prime example of a decent attempt.

As for cosmetics, Warframe is a game that lets players design and make weapons and outfits. Most games are paranoid of releasing engine data to the public for fear of someone doing it better than them.

There's a lot of examples and scenarios out there about why each one fails or thrives. What specific kind of player made stuff are you referring to?

[mindcircus.1506]

@"PhiLL.1746" said:Is GuildWars 2 possibly able to have such thing?I mean, a system to work apart and independent of LWS.Would you like such system in Guild Wars 2?

All MMOs with user created content (UGC) have displayed two things:

1. If the system does not offer rewards in line with normal play, the players will abandon it.
2. If you offer players rewards in UGC they will simply use the system to get as much reward for as little risk and time investment as possible.

City of Heroes touted it's UGC system with a boxed version, selling it as a small "mini-expansion". 6 Months later, the system had been abused so badly to power level, exploit and farm rewards that the developers finally just nerfed the rewards and said "we'd love to support it but...". They halved the rewards for all but a very small number of story arcs that were vetted by the devs and let the system wither on the vine.The levelling process became trivialized (in a game who's only endgame for 6 years was "roll alts"), the economy was a shambles and the player base was completely polarized.City of Heroes' vision was to give the players maximum power to create anything they wanted and by far the vast majority used it to create farms.It was a disaster that so bad that when the game resurfaced a few months ago (thanks to private servers) the problem came right back.

PWI's games that used UGC (Star Trek Online and Neverwinter) shuttered their systems a few months ago. Players reported the exact same problems. A playerbase that flocked only to farming missions, content discovery systems polluted by exploits and a developer team that eventually just gave up trying to balance it all.

Would I like to see a system like this in place?As someone who no-lifed making content in CoH for months, someone who toiled away making what I thought were good stories with interesting enemies, I can say no.I don't think there is a dev team going that could handle the problems inherent to the idea.

[wrathmagik.3518]

@PhiLL.1746 said:Is GuildWars 2 possibly able to have such thing?I mean, a system to work apart and independent of LWS.Would you like such system in Guild Wars 2?

Anet are such control freaks they won't even allow us to move the UI around.

Theres zero chance of this ever happening.

[Randulf.7614]

It would likely have needed to be designed with it in mind. I’m in agreement that the chance is almost zero

[flog.3485]

Well you kinda have UGC in guild wars: it is basically called guild halls.

Your best bet would be to get invested in guild hall activities by creating guild hall jumping puzzles, beetle races or doing some guild fights with the in game arena and some player contributing prizes.

The main problem though is that it always feels like a hassle to group up players within a guild hall due to how the instances are generated.

[b k.1648]

Eek.

User-generated content is something of a nightmare to support in most games. You really need to design the dev tools with that in mind.

The tools used for creating art will generally be publically-available things like Maya, ZBrush, Substance Designer etc. but actually implementing things in the game can require a bit more work on the game developer's part. Additionally, quality control would be needed to ensure that all user-generated content is up to standard and working as intended. In the end, supporting user-generated content could easily be more costly to the developer than just making it themselves.

[AlexxxDelta.1806]

If you mean user generated quests/missions, it has so much potential for abuse, as described above.

Now if it was player-made cosmetics, it would be interesting but will never happen, as it would hurt Anet's bottom line. It would be certainly fun to see though, I bet it wouldn't take players nine months to make an armor set.

[hugo.4705]

User generated content.... ?The only thing I could think about is a home instance where you can edit everything apart nodes (or at least place the ones you already bought)

The issue with map is as said abusing of putting ton of mats and rewards turning it into farm party. But I guess it's possible instoring an algoritm to check how much gold and mats can be earned by a player a day if farming 24/24h just by entering events infos/number of nodes.

About weapons/armors not real issues, just have to check if clipping is okay, placeholder too. I mean the weapon contest turned rapidly the drawings into weapons.

To sum up, it will require a check on each work some rules like presence of obscene/racist content whatever. And if it works perfectly. But It has been 6y now, I can only see specs and housing added.

[Trise.2865]

@wrathmagik.3518 said:

@PhiLL.1746 said:Is GuildWars 2 possibly able to have such thing?I mean, a system to work apart and independent of LWS.Would you like such system in Guild Wars 2?

Anet are such control freaks they won't even allow us to move the UI around.

Theres zero chance of this ever happening.

If something is infinitely variable, then it truly doesn't matter. Do you want it not to matter?

[Squirrel.6318]

It honestly should have been possible since the beginning. When we were told we would be able to have player housing, that's what I thought it would be. Like we could craft or buy our own furniture and move them around the house which I thought would be public space.

That would have been sick, imagine if there were like army base camps around the world, where players can register to be part of that camp and move and craft equipment and furniture around. Our own personal bunk rooms.

[PhiLL.1746]

OK, i ve never played COH before so i dont understand how it failed much.We have seen in this game a lot of time gated rewards...Maybe if we combine these two with an horizontal tier of reward, it could work no?

[mindcircus.1506]

@"PhiLL.1746" said:OK, i ve never played COH before so i dont understand how it failed much.We have seen in this game a lot of time gated rewards...Maybe if we combine these two with an horizontal tier of reward, it could work no?

You don't need to have played CoH to understand the problem inherent with the idea.Let me explain:City of Heroes offered players the ability to create their own mission arcs and enemies. It took their fantastic character creator/customization tool and gave it another use, allowing the user to create their own enemies. You could assign whatever powers in the game you wanted to them. You could design tiers of enemies from basic trash mobs all the way up to "Archvillains" which were roughly the equivalent of Champions in GW2. You then would choose a map for the mission to take place on (out of a couple of hundred instance maps), create events in the map such as villain ambushes, text events such as dialog, create interactable objects for the player to hit for any reason. You could assign failure or success conditions and then when you were done you could chain up to 5 missions together to create a "Story Arc".The only real limitation was the fact that the missions had to start with an NPC (who's appearance and dialog was set by you) in a specific location.Otherwise it was pretty much the same tools as the developers used to create content for the first 4 years of the game. It was incredibly powerful and amazingly fun.

The goal of the tool, and selling point of the "mini-expansion" was full rewards.Players could level from 1-50(the game's level cap) solely in User Created Content at a competitive rate to the dev created stuff and be rewarded in about the same way. At the level cap the rewards became tickets that the player could cash in to buy gear.It was the answer to every MMO company's problem of players burning through the content too fast and complaining there was nothing to do. And for a small number of hobbyist game designers like myself it was a dream come true.

Without getting into a lot of the issues with the tool, such as bugs and exploits here is what the players did with it:They would build a character and stack their defenses against Fire damage as an example. Then the would build their toon with Fire attacks. A Fire/Fire melee character hardly an abnormal thing to do.Then they would go to the Mission Architect and create enemies that were weak against fire and did fire attacks.So now the player's challenge was gone. They could safely mow down enemies at an accelerated rate because they specifically designed or picked enemies that were weak to their attacks and did little damage to their build.Then they would trigger waves upon waves of enemies to come at them. No downtime. No risk, pure reward/profit. When the mission was done, they exited the instance and restarted or just played the next mission in the arc which was typically just a cut and paste of the first.

The result was in a game where it could take you a couple of weeks to reasonably level a toon the the cap, you saw players hitting max level in less than a day, without even really exploiting.There were a lot of other factors but this is in essence the problem. When you a player can pick their build and their enemies they will simply choose the path of least resistance. They will create easy encounters, mitigate risk in any way they can from both the player and designer end and hit publish. Then they will use that system to benefit as fast as they can.

Then what happened is the content discovery systems reflected this. Actual story arcs that people created went unplayed or were given low player ratings because they werent for powerlevelling/farming. The farm missions dominated the content discover system. The actual good stuff was lucky to get a couple dozen plays, the missions created for farming would get thousands of 5 star reviews.This made the issue worse because the top rated content that put on the "front page" of the content discovery system was the farm content and the stuff that reflected the original intent of the tool was never seen or played.

Anyways.... sorry for the wall of text.TLDR: Gamers will use any system to their advantage. Giving them developer tools is a mistake.

[Ygdrasill.9135]

Aside from what's been mentioned here, User generated content puts a LOT bigger load on the game at both ends. As it stands now, Anet creates the content, whatever data is needed for that content is pushed to the end-users as patches, and everyone has that data locally with objects and such fast to render because they are always the same. building and land features are always in the same place, etc. If you start allowing user created content, the game has to check on a constant basis if something has changed or been updated in the environment compared to what it thinks is there. I play in Second Life which is mostly user created content and the graphics detail level and FPS is nowhere near as good as here or any other MMORPG. To be fair it's not a game in itself, more an editable environment for social interacting, but it does come at a cost as far as beinng able to render the world as smothly.

[Magnus Godrik.5841]

Custom dungeons, races and guild missions would be great for gw2. People like to build shit and play other peoples content if good. This would be great and will alleviate those droughts that we have in between game content.

[Rasimir.6239]

@Magnus Godrik.5841 said:Custom dungeons, races and guild missions would be great for gw2. People like to build kitten and play other peoples content if good. This would be great and will alleviate those droughts that we have in between game content.Some people like to do that. The vast majority, as explained above in detail (and the way I have experienced it in a variety of games that allow user generated content), abuses systems like that to farm.

Either the rewards for playing user generated content are so miniscule that only a few hardcore players would ever touch it, or they are generous enough that players quickly set up farms that make AB multiloot and Istan in their glory days look negligible in comparison.

[Cyninja.2954]

mindcircus.1506 has twice now explained very nicely and in detail why and how user generated content does not work in MMOs. Not sure why this topic is still an issue.

The ony place UGC can work is pure sandbox games and even there it often breaks part of a games aspect or all of it.

[AlexxxDelta.1806]

@Ygdrasill.9135 said:Aside from what's been mentioned here, User generated content puts a LOT bigger load on the game at both ends. As it stands now, Anet creates the content, whatever data is needed for that content is pushed to the end-users as patches, and everyone has that data locally with objects and such fast to render because they are always the same. building and land features are always in the same place, etc. If you start allowing user created content, the game has to check on a constant basis if something has changed or been updated in the environment compared to what it thinks is there. I play in Second Life which is mostly user created content and the graphics detail level and FPS is nowhere near as good as here or any other MMORPG. To be fair it's not a game in itself, more an editable environment for social interacting, but it does come at a cost as far as beinng able to render the world as smothly.

Like you said in the end, SL is more like a creative/social platform, a huge sandbox if you may. I can't ever see UGC being implemented like that in an actual MMO game. Also I would argue that when it comes to graphical detail, SL can look better than any other MMO out there, because of the UGC. Which is also its problem, as said content is too detailed (thus demanding) for the average rig to handle in bulk.

I would imagine that any UGC here would be heavily limited and moderated, unlike pure sandboxes like SL. I still think it's extremely unlikely as it only has downsides on Anet's part.

[Samnang.1879]

nah... thats like doing their workload for them...

am not here for that

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

I doubt it will happen, especially since User Generated Contents tend to be more for games that have network functionalities but not exactly MMO games (think Mario Maker or Super Smash Bros).

[Evil.1580]

I think that by "user-generated content", OP means a world that the players are building around them, where everything can be built or destroyed by players. Also, a story that unfolds around the player - the world grows with the players, where storylines can either blossom or wither based on player activity.

In other words, GW2 doesn't have direct "user-generated content" and the closest things that come to my mind are the event chains, where the progress is generated by the user however these are repeatable and doesn't put a permanent mark in the world of GW2 if completed or failed.

For example, user-generated content would be if I and my friends decide to build a city, bigger than LA in Maguuma Jungle. After that, some other guys decide to destroy it, etc etc. Content that everyone can change with a specific amount of efforts or resources. Basically, it should have some limitations but you get the overall idea.

P.S Currently there are several MMO games which are in development and have UGC.

[mindcircus.1506]

@Ygdrasill.9135 said:Aside from what's been mentioned here, User generated content puts a LOT bigger load on the game at both ends. As it stands now, Anet creates the content, whatever data is needed for that content is pushed to the end-users as patches, and everyone has that data locally with objects and such fast to render because they are always the same. building and land features are always in the same place, etc. If you start allowing user created content, the game has to check on a constant basis if something has changed or been updated in the environment compared to what it thinks is there. I play in Second Life which is mostly user created content and the graphics detail level and FPS is nowhere near as good as here or any other MMORPG. To be fair it's not a game in itself, more an editable environment for social interacting, but it does come at a cost as far as beinng able to render the world as smothly.

The framerate issues with Second Life are largely a problem with the builders not optimizing their creations.What happens is they will (among other things) use a very high definition texture on a small object, not realizing that a smaller texture would give an almost identical fidelity many times. The average builder in Second Life simply buys items off the market and places them. The items sold are almost always at an irresponsible level of resolution for the included textures.While professional game designers and world builders always have their eyes on performance and optimization, most builders on SL have no clue.This is made worse by the fact the the official LL clients for SL have zero ways to measure the performance impact of your creations. They tend to measure only how many primitive objects are used in the area you own. Linden Labs has never really cared about this. They left it to the creators from day one. The result was the Virtual World equivalent of a bad Myspace page circa 2007.The upstream bandwidth was not a huge concern in terms of the framerate once everything got loaded. The problem was that rather than use a 256x256 texture on a tiny prim, builders in SL who really didnt understand the issue would use one four times the size. Instead of learning the proper methods of tiling textures, builders would use one 4 times bigger than needed.Then they would clutter their Sim/parcel entrances with hundreds and hundred of these prims in the form of Ads hoping to monetize their creations.

The problem was/is compounded by the fact that while an MMO will load files from your hard drive, Second Life operated more like a web browser in that it would request the assets within your field of view at any given time, download and cache them. Sometimes you could go back to a parcel a couple hours later and have to download it all again.It was/is a highly inefficient system and the poor performance of Second Life was one of the main factors that keeps it as the niche product it is today, suitable only for the hardcore RPers and people who flock there for the adult content. The casual users have moved on to products like MMOs where framerates are better and it doesnt take a someone 2 hours to learn to put on a pair of shoes.

[mindcircus.1506]

@"bOTEB.1573" said:I think that by "user-generated content", OP means a world that the players are building around them, where everything can be built or destroyed by players. Also, a story that unfolds around the player - the world grows with the players, where storylines can either blossom or wither based on player activity.

In other words, GW2 doesn't have direct "user-generated content" and the closest things that come to my mind are the event chains, where the progress is generated by the user however these are repeatable and doesn't put a permanent mark in the world of GW2 if completed or failed.

Actually event chains are straight up "theme park" design. By your definition Silverwastes would be UGC. The story changing depending on the players input/actions is just branching content. It is still dependant on the player chosing the outcome from a few set results defined by the developers. In UGC, or even the Sandbox example you gave, the users would create the actual story.

Actual UGC as it stands in GW2 would be:-People building Roller Beetle tracks in their Guild Halls.-Fashion contests-RP events like Brother Drake's "Pilgrimage Across Tyria"

P.S Currently there are several MMO games which are in development and have UGC.And there are many existing ones. Sandbox MMOs such as EVE online or Star Wars Galaxies or ArchAge provide systems for the players to interact and "become the content". The reality however is that these tend to be niche products that rarely appeal beyond a small but dedicated core audience.