Fun Fact

sominator

Fun fact: over 600 quests have been created and published in the Foundry so far, with over 16,000 projects in the works. How cool is that!

chili1179

Now if there were a way to speed up the chance that authors will get plays, like featuring 4-5 quests per week instead of 1 and giving players a bonus to AD for being one of the first 20 to play a newly published quest.

drakedge2

That's awesome!

I agree, I think there should be a way to feature newer authors. Have something like another tab - trending newer authors or something.

zovya

That is cool. Just don't want it to be like CoH and STO where thousands of quests are never seen or played.

ancillary

zovya wrote: »

That is cool. Just don't want it to be like CoH and STO where thousands of quests are never seen or played.

That's an inevitability, unfortunately, considering the size of the system and the number of quests that are likely to be published. Persistent advertising and word-of-mouth does pay off, though, if the content deserves it.

Back in the City of Heroes days, I made an effort to recommend "Blight" (one of the player-made missions) on the forums, which helped to give it a solid nudge upwards and eventually got it placed as one of the most-played maps out there. (This isn't to brag that I'm some sort of social marketing genius, but rather to highlight how effective even a little bit of advertising can be.)

zaphtastic

ancillary wrote: »

That's an inevitability, unfortunately, considering the size of the system and the number of quests that are likely to be published. Persistent advertising and word-of-mouth does pay off, though, if the content deserves it.

Back in the City of Heroes days, I made an effort to recommend "Blight" (one of the player-made missions) on the forums, which helped to give it a solid nudge upwards and eventually got it placed as one of the most-played maps out there. (This isn't to brag that I'm some sort of social marketing genius, but rather to highlight how effective even a little bit of advertising can be.)

Blight was pretty controversial too, iirc (at least I seem to remember some pretty big flamewars between the reviewers about it) due to the nature of the plot twist. If nothing else, it shows that controversy sells!

My experience in COH was, unfortunately, much worse -- despite my best efforts to market my work and having some arcs on the best reviewers' favorites lists (also nominations for player-run "best arc" contests, including a win), I barely got any plays on them at all. I DID come in late (Aug 2009 for my first arc, 2010/2011 for the rest), which probably didn't help... but still, I had several storyarcs that didn't get played at all unless I explicitly asked someone to play em. Then when one of my arcs got Dev's Choiced, it accumulated over a hundred plays overnight and I woke up to a screen full of ingame comments saying it was the best arc ever! See also the link in my sig.

hercooles130uscg

Umm, I know you intended this post to be a good thing...but..

IT IS DEPRESSING!

Frankly Cryptic, and we have been saying since Alpha, your system sucks bad. 600 quests, and I bet only 50-60 of them have the required plays to be counted as a daily, if not less...this is counting all the players from the beta weekends as well. 16,000 in the works...ya if the system can't manage 600 then we are all doomed as Foundry authors.

Yes the game just went "live", but there were a lot of people in the Beta Weekends, and the problem existed then...with even less quests to choose from. Heck, some quests could go through all 3 BW and a month of alpha and not get a single play, as it was on page three of the list...no one goes to page three.

fallensbane

chili1179 wrote: »

Now if there were a way to speed up the chance that authors will get plays, like featuring 4-5 quests per week instead of 1 and giving players a bonus to AD for being one of the first 20 to play a newly published quest.

Excellent idea.

dark0v

There should be more quests related to the Foundry...

Daily: Play any Foundry quest for # Astral Diamonds
Daily: Play any Foundry quest published this week for # Astral Diamonds
Weekly: Play three Foundry quests for # Astral Diamonds and Professions Resource Chest
Weekly: Play and rate seven Foundry quests published this week for # Astral Diamonds

Once a Foundry quest is played it will no longer count towards Daily or Weekly quests if replayed until the following week resets the quests.

zagemogga

I believe there will be a system, like if a player doesn't logon for ~1-2 months the quests are taken offline? Like the characters would be put on idle or in many other games plain deleted because of inactivity.

This way only active playing user's quests will be in the foundry...

tilt42

What's the point in that? People don't care whether or not an author is logging in. They just want to play his/her quest. It's not like it gets worse by the author not being present.

zagemogga

tilt42 wrote: »

What's the point in that? People don't care whether or not an author is logging in. They just want to play his/her quest. It's not like it gets worse by the author not being present.

I meant with logon, the actual client logging in before you hit the 'The Foundry' button.

This makes total sense to me, otherwise we end up with 1mio test-quests to keep the 1-2 good ones of people not interested into the game any more?
They will eventually stop working properly after a while due to patches and updates...

zaphtastic

I don't agree with culling quests based on when the author logged in for the last time -- but quests will get broken by future patches, and the author may no longer be around to fix them.

To that end, I recommend some sort of flag (or graphic) to indicate whether a quest has been updated since the last major patch. Maybe add this as a possible filter option as well down the road.

volcxxx

nice info, thx!

I hope in those numbers quality>quanity

maddllama

Not sure how the featuring system is going to pan out, but in STO once a mission is featured it stays that way with always being eligible for quest rewards, etc. A very small amount of quests get featured for a reason, and this might be that reason.

To me, what is comes down to is if your quest is good, it will get played. Folks are going to have to develop some sort of way to push their quest in the form of advertisement if they feel they have to.

For mine it just... well, kinda happened through sheer luck. I took advantage of the first Foundry contest to showcase my creation style. After that, my quest ended up in a few articles, two by Cryptic that were quest related and a couple where one reviewer or another just happened to play it and liked it. 18K plays later and I am featured.

I never pushed this, or forced advertisement. Heck, in Alpha I had a grand total of 9 plays, so that is what I launched with. It took a lot of attention to detail and a desire to tell a fun story to be successful. From there the stars and the reviews just built the quest's reputation. Taking advantage of the contest helped too.

Now my campaign is languishing a bit... but hey, you can't hit a home run at every at-bat.

fugln

Thats awesome. But I do not think we have seen the best foundry-quests just yet. I did release one quest right after launch, just to test it out (and got 4 stars for a simple quest). The next one I would rather use 3-4 weeks to make it awesome and hopefully we will see a lot of quests that arent just released too early like many of those we are seeing today. (Btw, those of us working with foundry-daily-quests should get some diamonds in payment!

kamaliicious

hercooles130uscg wrote: »

Umm, I know you intended this post to be a good thing...but..

IT IS DEPRESSING!

Frankly Cryptic, and we have been saying since Alpha, your system sucks bad. 600 quests, and I bet only 50-60 of them have the required plays to be counted as a daily, if not less...this is counting all the players from the beta weekends as well. 16,000 in the works...ya if the system can't manage 600 then we are all doomed as Foundry authors.

Yes the game just went "live", but there were a lot of people in the Beta Weekends, and the problem existed then...with even less quests to choose from. Heck, some quests could go through all 3 BW and a month of alpha and not get a single play, as it was on page three of the list...no one goes to page three.

My conclusion, based on my time to make the content versus total amount time people have spent in my content, is that it's not worth it to make content. I released content for another game at the same time as my Neverwinter Online content, it currently has around 1000x the player time as my Neverwinter content. That content has some 70x the number of plays, and is 40x the length, so 1000x the player time is a reasonable assumption, assuming less than a third completed the content (it's for an old game, so the people who still play it like the game a lot obviously, and are likely to actually play the content to completion). While it certainly took longer to make the content, it did not take 1000x the time.

The low play rate is apparently not because my Neverwinter Online content is bad, as the four quest campaign is currently higher rated than the feature quests and the contest winner. Admittedly, I have fewer ratings than the featured quests/contest winners. I had an entry in the beta Foundry contest, which meant my content appeared twice in postings by Cryptic employees as part of the contest in addition to my listing of it in the contest thread, but my contest entry was played once (since the Foundry catalog includes number of plays, that was easy to see).

As near as I can tell from my playing UGC, is that assuming it has a moderate level of polish, what content will become popular is simply random. And once a quest gets ahead of the pack on plays, it becomes a self sustaining leader because people head for the quests with more plays as if it's an indication of quality.

Since I was a Foundry beta author, I went through all the Foundry assets to see what was available, and went through all the official maps and saw how things were used. Seeing content in some popular Foundry quests that doesn't currently exist in the Foundry doesn't help with my confidence in the system either.

zaphtastic

kamaliicious wrote: »

My conclusion, based on my time to make the content versus total amount time people have spent in my content, is that it's not worth it to make content. I released content for another game at the same time as my Neverwinter Online content, it currently has around 1000x the player time as my Neverwinter content. That content has some 70x the number of plays, and is 40x the length, so 1000x the player time is a reasonable assumption, assuming less than a third completed the content (it's for an old game, so the people who still play it like the game a lot obviously, and are likely to actually play the content to completion). While it certainly took longer to make the content, it did not take 1000x the time.

The low play rate is apparently not because my Neverwinter Online content is bad, as the four quest campaign is currently higher rated than the feature quests and the contest winner. Admittedly, I have fewer ratings than the featured quests/contest winners. I had an entry in the beta Foundry contest, which meant my content appeared twice in postings by Cryptic employees as part of the contest in addition to my listing of it in the contest thread, but my contest entry was played once (since the Foundry catalog includes number of plays, that was easy to see).

As near as I can tell from my playing UGC, is that assuming it has a moderate level of polish, what content will become popular is simply random. And once a quest gets ahead of the pack on plays, it becomes a self sustaining leader because people head for the quests with more plays as if it's an indication of quality.

Since I was a Foundry beta author, I went through all the Foundry assets to see what was available, and went through all the official maps and saw how things were used. Seeing content in some popular Foundry quests that doesn't currently exist in the Foundry doesn't help with my confidence in the system either.

Pretty much. MMO-scale UGC is very different from traditional mod communities. It's a much more symmetrical setup with a lot more content... most of which is going to be bad. Therefore, getting plays depends almost entirely on momentum.

However, I'd add that the devs have promised some improvements in this area -- e.g. adding a tag system by itself would help things greatly. Incentivizing people to go beyond the top 10 should be the name of the game... and it will be, eventually.


edit: also, reposting from another thread:
Consider that from a player's POV, having a group of stable 'known good' quests in the browser (even if it's the same 100 quests over 10 years) is much better than having a vast sea of uncertainty. Most players aren't going to be Foundry fiends; they may play a handful of quests during their account's lifetime (and those are likely to be the max-reward min-effort quests). I seriously doubt even the most hardcore Foundry enthusiast (excepting dedicated reviewers, maybe) is going to play more than 200 quests over their account's entire life. There'll be more than a hundred times that many quests after the first month, so it makes sense that everyone wants to play the best of the best and ignore the rest. Yes, the list is going to be stale, and it's going to be impossible to break in. No, this doesn't actually matter to most of the playerbase. Especially when you consider that there'll be a few quests spotlighted every week/month -- keeping the content somewhat fresh, keeping up with the heavier Foundry consumer's needs, and showing that the Foundry is making great content.

bobcat1313

What about another daily for under 20play quests? and two weekly for published and under 20play, the more options players have the more UGC will get played.

dark0v

bobcat1313 wrote: »

What about another daily for under 20play quests? and two weekly for published and under 20play, the more options players have the more UGC will get played.

They definitely need to tailor the quests to encourage people to play new UGC quests, rather than just repeat the ones they have previously done / know well.