Guest Post: Into the future with user-created content
by J. Chesley Roberson Jr. 
Oct 4th 2010 at 3:00PM
One wonders how long World of Warcraft will remain viable. It is quite possible that my warlock will still be going strong decades down the line. Of one thing, however, I am certain: I will be playing some sort of MMORPG for as long as I'm able to tweak my spec. But will that game be WoW?
My friends and I muse about what it would take to switch to another game. That game would have to build upon WoW's legacy and offer something new and amazing to boot. Speaking of boots, I'd wager my Prelate's Snowshoes that the new game will be some incarnation of WoW itself, as Blizzard has proven so willing and able to adapt and grow with its fan base.
What makes WoW so popular and enduring? For starters, the game is so accommodating, with plenty to offer noobs and leets alike. Players can feel a sense of accomplishment from merely questing, while others can savor the challenge of working through multiple levels of high-end raid content. I can feel the delight of one-shotting a low-health rogue sneaking around the lumber mill or experience the soul-destroying chaos of getting quickly roasted in arena. And those of us with creaking, overworked CPUs are able to take part in the fun.
The power of people and players
WoW's most powerful legacy is its community. Imagine all of the man-hours spent creating the artwork, addons, comics, machinima, websites and endless forum posts (BTW, I think I figured out an awesome new demo spec). In my humble opinion, the most exciting part of the whole experience is the out-of-game time spent researching, theorycrafting and just plain daydreaming about the game. It is an imagination engine, a fantasy facilitator (an alternate existence?). Blizzard actively encourages this community by shaking things up on a regular basis -- rebalancing the classes, adding new content, giving and taking away. And we are allowed to create our own programs that enhance the experience, which gives us a glimpse into the future of MMOs: user-created content.
The web at large has been moving in the direction of user-created content for years. Why should online games be any different? My son plays a game called Roblox that allows the users to create their own environments in which other players may participate. Seemingly very simple, some of the user-created game spaces are devilishly complex and interesting. Ratchet this up to a Blizzard-like level of complexity and creativity, and we have the future! Imagine the possibilities ...
The player-created dungeons, battlegrounds, grottoes, panopticons and so on might be too difficult for some, too easy for others, downright boring or wondrous. The WoW community would guide us to the best of the lot, which we know would end up being mind-blowingly ingenious. For all the greatness of the Blizzard designers, there is some misfit out there willing to "waste" countless hours to design a delight to knock your socks off. Perhaps Blizzard could get out of the design business altogether and simply be in charge of the uber-rules and basic design pieces.
Nothing is as creative as the collective overmind of those who wish to build for the love of it. This, my fellow fantasists, is where we are bound.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Afrigginhobbit Oct 4th 2010 3:02PM
Fir......jk. This a huge thing for me with WoW, how incredible the creative user base is and how it shapes the game as a whole. Things are only looking up!
RetPallyJil Oct 4th 2010 3:08PM
Go download the demo of Mount & Blade over at taleworlds.com, then imagine their combat mechanics integrated into World of Warcraft. The mind boggles at the possibilities.
Joker Oct 4th 2010 4:39PM
Darkfall + WoW + M&B Combat = The perfect MMO! With ships!
Deathknighty Oct 4th 2010 3:08PM
What I'd personally love to see, is an official "Make Your Own Encounter" contest, and maybe the best few could be gathered up and made into a really awesome dungeon.
I've already made mine in (most likely unwarranted) anticipation. :O
rockjaur Oct 4th 2010 3:10PM
City of Heroes did this a while back. They had storyline creators where you could create missions or chains of missions for your character to play through. You could choose who they fought against and make up your own villains and factions to face. You could then share these missions with the public and they could play through them.
StClair Oct 4th 2010 4:36PM
Unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law applies: most people just used it to farm (usually by filling instances with mobs that give full xp but only have weak attacks, are meant to be part of a spawn or boss encounter, etc), and of the 10% or so that's left, 90% of THAT is #$@*. And the way the rating system works, anything that doesn't have an absolutely perfect score drops off the first few pages within minutes and is never seen or played again.
Wonderful idea, awful implementation.
Rufio Oct 4th 2010 4:46PM
@ St Clair, I'd not heard of Sturgeons law until now! Thank you for introducing that into my vernacular! I'd read Theodore Sturgeon but missed that somehow. Awesome!
Eirik Oct 4th 2010 6:40PM
City of Heroes rescues some of the "good but not minmaxxed" content by
* Empaneled judges, where the CoH staff make "Developer's Picks"
* a variety of filters, including the ability to look for a particular author's other works, ability to look for works with low numbers of votes, particular villains, keywords, etc.
I don't recall whether they have a "judge value" factor, where the amount a given person influences the score of a work depends on how their ratings compare to those of others. (That is, down-weighting outliers.)
And I'm pretty sure that they do NOT have a means where the community can judge other judges (ala Slashdot metamoderating).
I'm pretty sure, though, that one of the problems is "number of submissions" vs "real estate required to display them". If only 1 percent of the wow players were to create something like CoH's missions, that'd be several hundred thousand missions. The only filters I can imagine that would be up to handling that would be variants on either "trust known judges", or "trust people you know personally".
Faith Trust Oct 4th 2010 3:17PM
Are you daydreaming a Little Big Plannet / WoW crossover?
Jamie Oct 4th 2010 3:30PM
LittleBigAzeroth, indeed.
oniryuujin Oct 4th 2010 3:29PM
There are some problems with this idea though that I think won't let it mesh with something like WoW. First a lot of games with user generated stuff are very basic, in that there is no story or just a bare outline that can be filled in by the player. With something lore rich as WoW this would limit on what people want or could do. The biggest issue and one I also see on other user generated games, there's gonna be a lot of crap. Sure there'll be the guys who take it seriously, but can we not forget what happened with Spore and the rapid explosion of certain male body part creatures.
Rasmus Oct 4th 2010 3:33PM
I usually tend to think wow is better than most, becouse of quality control. Everything in game just works, 99.9% of the time. Sandbox style gaming? sure there is plenty of that in 2.nd life and what not. I dont see any birght future in that direction for wow or wow2.
TheBigFatMuffinMan Oct 4th 2010 3:34PM
Please, read all of this comment before you reply. If you're too lazy, don't downrank it or troll it for being long. My apologies for the wall of text.
This is genius. What I have always wanted to do is make my own quest lines. Maybe even my own NPC. But a system to make your own dungeon would be a little too easy to exploit. Just put the "bosses" as trash and give them epic loots. This WOULD happen.
Look at Little Big Planet. Started off great. It was the only reason I would even touch my PS3. Then, as time wore on, people got bored, and now look at it. To get to the good stuff, you have to wade waist deep through all of the sh*t, all the levels with giant c*cks made out of wood and the impossible levels (yes, impossible) that some ten year old thought was funny and put it on.
While Blizzard COULD go ahead and try to funnel through only the good stuff, they have a lot on their plate. WoW, the next (hopefully) WoW expansion. Starcraft, Diablo, the next Diablo they will put off for years again...and by the time they came up with this system, they will probably have even more games out. Like any other game with user-based content, the crap would leak through. You may never have noticed, but early on in the story-line creator in City of Heroes, there were a lot of missions from users that simply told the player to go and f*ck themselves. There were the ones that gave you exp for doing nothing. these were taken down very fast by the developers (I forget their name), but they were there. They made their mark. And for every single one that was put up, a few idiots said to themselves, "That looks like fun, let's go ahead and make one just like that."
/end rant.
On the other hand, almost no one is going to read this far into my comment and they are going to downrate it...
oniryuujin Oct 4th 2010 3:40PM
I read it all =D and concur.
(cutaia) Oct 4th 2010 3:41PM
"On the other hand, almost no one is going to read this far into my comment and they are going to downrate it..."
I read the whole thing and thought you made some fine points. But now I'm gonna downrate it, 'cause NOBODY PUTS BABY IN A CORNER!
Jamie Oct 4th 2010 3:51PM
Huh, well now I want to uprate this comment but not before taking TheBigFatMuffinMan by the hand and giving him the dance of a lifetime while "The Time of My Life" plays and I dress all Patrick Swayze-like (And if anyone disagrees with me I will roadhouse you! [yes, I'm fully aware it's a completely different film but I feel it fits the Swayze reference]).
Capital opinion, sir.
Robert Oct 4th 2010 4:43PM
Taking into account the success with the map maker in Starcraft 2 I don't see this being too far fetched.
"But a system to make your own dungeon would be a little too easy to exploit. Just put the "bosses" as trash and give them epic loots. This WOULD happen. "
Considering that SC2 custom maps do not offer any achievement points, any ranking, any rise in stature, WoW could implement a custom dungeon feature that offers no benefit other than the enjoyment of completion, in which the wheat rises to the top and the chaff is downranked into obscurity.
Your little big planet point would still remain completely valid with there being thousands of maps shaped like a phallus.
Hob Oct 4th 2010 5:10PM
Broderbund had a great game in the 80's called "Lode Runner". One of the best features (IMO) was the ability to design your own "level" and save it ~ sharing it with friends, or running it on your own.
I think the ability to design your own WoW instance - or populate an existing instance - would be a lot of fun, if implemented correctly. You could select an instance (or build a random one from existing themes - underwater, night elf ruins, haunted castle, etc.), determine level range, mob table, boss table, and loot table from pre-selected options, and the system would populate it accordingly. So...
Hob's Dire Maul:
Level 15 - 18
Mobs: Shadow Raven Priests, diseased ghouls, felguards, floating eyes, polar bears (all level appropriate and randomly distributed between stationary and wandering).
Bosses (names chosen from random name-generator): Voidwalker boss / Dwarf paladin boss / Moth boss
Loot table: level-appropriate, emphasis on warlock gear.
Hob's Wailing Caverns:
Level 74 - 77
Mobs: Grimtotem tauren, lashers, ancients, bats
Bosses: four murloc bosses, which summon a final tauren boss
Loot table: level-appropriate, class emphasis exchanged for 0.1% chance to drop a random mount or random epic weapon
Just ideas, but you could definitely have a system that controls the mobs, loot tables, and bosses, without being a welfare instance or a d*** in a box instance.
StClair Oct 4th 2010 5:24PM
Absolutely right. As I said upthread, that's what happened when they gave us the ability to do this in City of Heroes. Some had good intentions but couldn't write their way out of a paper bag, while many more just wanted maximum loot and eeps for minimum effort. The devs couldn't or wouldn't spend the time and manpower to police it. End result: a few gems in a massive pile of #%@&.
TonyMcS Oct 4th 2010 11:00PM
This mirrors the dichotomy between open source and proprietary software. OSS advocates see this as harnessing the creativity of thousands of people, while proprietary advocates just see the mess.
Do I want user generated content? I don't think so. For the occasional gem the RNG throws up, you have to wade through a lot of manure. I've participated in a lot of mod and software development and in the end I prefer to see content that some creative and talented people were paid to make. Content that has been thoroughly tested and has been designed with an idea of the big picture, rather than someone's bee in their bonnet.
I'm happy with Blizzard's creativity, design and ongoing development and I see no need for anyone else to participate directly. We already have forums, blogs, in-game messaging, PTRs and beta patches to try and influence the game.
On the other hand, one thing I would like to see, is being able to play the bosses and adds against raiding players. There would of course, have to be some restrictions on controlling the bosses, but it would add a different feel for all existing dungeons.