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The State of the Foundry
doc4goth
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 61
First let me say this is a long post and if you are looking for a TL=DR version sorry no can do!
The ability to use the Foundry and create adventures was a large part of my decision to play this game. For the most part I find the game enjoyable. That said there is a distinct lack of long term content and playability. Why? Simply because the current content level is designed to get your character to level 60. Once you get to level 60 you encounter a drastic drop in the amount of content available.
This is a problem that all MMO games share, however this is also one of the few games that has the means to alleviate this issue. As is evidenced by the amount of content that has been created and is still being created using the Foundry in the current state, there are many Authors out there willing to invest significant amounts of time into creating content. This potentially is a gold mine for both the Developers and the Companies they work for. I do not propose that the Developers stop developing new content I simply propose they leverage the creative energies of the community.
In order to truly be able to do this several things need to occur. I have written the proposal below that I hope will give players some food for thought.
The Developers are the only people who can truly create new content and are, I am sure, busy doing that and fixing the odd bug or glitch. The community authors can only take existing content and rearrange it. In order to be able to use the foundry as a basis for adding true new content to the game the tools available to the community would require some improvements.
The State of the Foundry
AKA
A Question: Is the Foundry the future or foundering?
The ability to use the Foundry and create adventures was a large part of my decision to play this game. For the most part I find the game enjoyable. That said there is a distinct lack of long term content and playability. Why? Simply because the current content level is designed to get your character to level 60. Once you get to level 60 you encounter a drastic drop in the amount of content available.
This is a problem that all MMO games share, however this is also one of the few games that has the means to alleviate this issue. As is evidenced by the amount of content that has been created and is still being created using the Foundry in the current state, there are many Authors out there willing to invest significant amounts of time into creating content. This potentially is a gold mine for both the Developers and the Companies they work for. I do not propose that the Developers stop developing new content I simply propose they leverage the creative energies of the community.
In order to truly be able to do this several things need to occur. I have written the proposal below that I hope will give players some food for thought.
The Developers are the only people who can truly create new content and are, I am sure, busy doing that and fixing the odd bug or glitch. The community authors can only take existing content and rearrange it. In order to be able to use the foundry as a basis for adding true new content to the game the tools available to the community would require some improvements.
--Doc4Goth
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Post edited by doc4goth on
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This would remove much of the burden on the developers when creating new content especially combined with changes to the foundry proposed below. Finally the review team could assign the quest to a specific hub on the map if none is specified or if they desire to balance the quest availability. They would even be able to make the quest level specific.
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4. Changes to the foundry: In detail things that I see the foundry has a definite need for are the following;
a. Objective logic tools: The authors need to be able to create logic paths for the quest. If we are able to do that we can then offer players a choice of how to complete a quest.
b. Dialog Logic tools: We need the ability to create branching paths and changing dialog based on player choices.
c. Timers: The community needs the ability to use timers in the foundry. We currently have several workarounds however they are not very exact or truly viable in many circumstances especially since the all require things from several places in the budget. Primarily they use up encounters and rooms. Secondarily they suffer from several extreme drawbacks. As an example, one of the common "timers" used at present is a NPC pathing a long path to an encounter where he is killed. This requires a minimum of 1 room, 1 NPC and ! Enemy encounter. It is not very accurate and the NPC must spawn within a certain radius of the Player.
P.S. I apologize for the lack of indentation but for some reason everytime I try to indent in this post it deletes almost all of the post.
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e. Scalable encounter mobs: If given the abilty to scale the level of an encounter say from easy to Boss level we will be able to create much more durable and enjoyable content.
f. Cut/Paste/Link tools: Currently we are unable to create dialog and cut and paste it from one location to another. Changing an objective means we have to recreate the entire dialog. This make the process of creating quest much more difficult. If we were able to write the dialog and then simply link it in a similar fashion to costumes that would ease the level of difficulty immensely.
g. Improved UI: The current UI is extremely user unfriendly. The basic concept is ok however certain aspects could definitely use major improvements.
ii. Allow us to do cooperative work. This means enable for example sharing of the interface between clients so that people can see changes being made live when someone else in the group make them. The synergy that comes from working together can be amazingly productive and increase the quality of the final product hugely.
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ii. Allow us to set a default difficulty level for encounter. By this I mean allow us to choose whether an encounter is going to require a group or is soloable.
iii. Perhaps raise the budget levels in certain areas.
d. Dialog Trees: The interface of adding response and sub topics is very clunky. Simply allowing us to zoom in and out would be a major improvement. Allowing us to change the width and height of the various dialog boxes with a corresponding change of the way text wraps would allow us to have a much better overview. Here a flowchart based layout would also be a great benefit.
e. Costumes: Allow us to create a costume and the select the NPC who will wear it from the list of NPCs/encounters we have placed on the map rather than having to redo the costume for each NPC.
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I'd love to see the foundry to get more love from the devs, it's is a potentially very powerful tool, but it's greatly underused currently.
Most quests in there are just random enemy slaying quests made just to get quick exp/items.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
I voted 'disagree'
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
Also, most of this stuff is not really important compared to the big picture. For example, making certain things easier to place on a map will never be worth developer time. There a already tens of thousands of crappy quests made; making it even easier to make crappy quests provides no value.
I think that what the Foundry needs is a way for the authors to form a community, collaborate and link quests together, and entice players to come join their worlds. If we could do these things, we could work together to make a few great quests instead of thousands of crappy ones, and everyone could feel they contributed in a small way rather than having to compete against each other for eyeballs. Quests should have a credits screen like the movies do, with many makers, not just one.
"...projects are never finished, only abandoned....."
HellsHot is a proud member of Scribes' Enclave.
1. The Haronomous Saga NWS-DJIKP5IWK a four part, story driven, campaign.
2. The Ruins of Xylon NWS-DC76ORA4I a two part, dungeon crawl.
3. Armor Odyssey NWS-DAUPTR46M a three part, story driven, odyssey.
"Real" MMORPGs are Sandboxes. Sandboxes never has a programmed ending like a max level.
The real problem is that the most MMORPGs are content driven. That means i put X money in that game to get Y hours to play out. Some game mechanics can strech Y but "THE END" is unavoidable and the developer is forced to put more money in the game to create more content and in the End it's allways a lose situations and the servers are shut down. The reason is not the game is bad (or technically outdated), but its finished, the "mainstream" of player played that game and is going to another game.
And that is the real problem about modern MMORPGs. And a problem for Neverwinter. With the Foundry you can create new content, but it has no real impact to the game. It would be better if the Foundry is more like a Minecraft-Like-Toolkit. You create new Content, like Arenas, Gamemods and Stuff.
Or at least give more spotlight to the foundry. Like the opportunity to get a artifact that you only get from the Foundry.
Like it is right now, it's like the appendix. It's there but it does nothing. Would it die, all would big cry and it would hurt but after surgery + 1/2 weeks all would be fine and good and we would continue to play neverwinter without it.
Here are a couple things to keep in kind:
1) Man-hours are expensive. Hence, the human assets required to take the Foundry where we'd all like to see it are simply enormous. Therefore, the Foundry is a shared/project. I mean to say the developers working on Foundry are not dedicated to Foundry, they have other obligations also, such as Web Gateway and I've even seen Champions Online in Robobo's signature, so he's probably got some obligations there, too.
2) The Foundry is a gift. To my knowledge Star Trek Online and Neverwinter are the only MMOs that even offer such an in-built tool (read: not some hack or aftermarket add-on); don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
3) Foundry authors are a fraction of a percentage of the overall player-base, created Foundry quests of any quality are a fraction of the Authorship accounts. Hence, consider number 1) above to be even more expensive in the grander scheme of things.
4) Because of number 3) above, no one wants to play the Foundry (meaning the percentage of overall players that do play it is a much smaller fraction than it could be) - thus better incentives to play Foundry is badly needed - something OTHER than a time-based incentive, which causes people only to look for the shortest possible quests that are easy to complete; grinder-zerger quests.
I agree with many of the OP's points. However, if it were easy this thread (and most others like it) simply wouldn't exist. I have no doubt the developer teams at Cryptic are working hard on everything. However it also comes down to priorities. Hence my comment about Foundry being a "shared-project" (meaning it shares dev time with a lot of other projects). I suspect it's a big 'round-robin and thus the Foundry has to wait its turn for developer time and effort.
Now with that long-winded diatribe out of the way, hopefully the Devs will see the OP (if they haven't already) to, at least, know our thoughts on the subject.
We need better search tools, like matching (people who like what I like, what else have I NOT played that they also liked?), or even 'populate a list of what my friends rated highest.'
I think reward is irrelevant -- if you increase rewards, you'll just make the problem of awful grind foundry quests worse, not better.
If search is improved and people STILL aren't playing, then you've made your point. But when people who want something other than mindless swill are driven away from Foundry, I think it swamps any other analysis of the audience.
I would return to NW in a heartbeat, warts and all, if Foundry search worked decently. As it is, I have no interest in busting my hinie to create in depth missions nobody can ever find unless I constantly spam channels in the game (until I get silenced) or jumping up and down on this backwater subforum.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
Here's why incentives (I never said "rewards") are more important than the current state of search (priority-wise):
In order to find the quests you really enjoy, you have to *play* them. But there's no reason to play them (except during Event, but then you only play the short ones you already know). No matter what they do to search in an attempt to improve it, it will never be "good enough".
However, if you can get more people to play during non-event time, without concern for the quest playtime, then you will have more people playing. (I know: redundant statement). More people playing more Foundry Quests = more likelihood more quests will be found. Then people of like-mind will begin sharing what they've found, word-of-mouth circulates, etc., etc. AND the current search system (with tags and reviews) starts working a little better. THEN go to improving the search/discovery system.
The primary *problem* with the Foundry right now is "Play Incentive". First, create a strong incentive to get more people playing (other than combat-based rewards). More people play, which improves the *existing* search feature; then improve the search feature to make it better. Priorities. None is more or less important than the other. It's about priorities.
Making the search feature a lot better doesn't do much if the same fewer players are playing to begin with. *This* is my point. Build it the same way you build a house: begin with the *foundation* (the players) - then consider the roof and walls, and the sheetrock/electrical come later.
Er... No! That is the worst idea that I have ever read on this board. If someone makes changes it is no longer your own work. If defeats the purpose of the foundry.
I am not trying to tell someone how to do thier job but throw a considered set of proposals out there that may provide the start of a solution. Bug fixing is important but in all honesty you have to keep the big picture in mind at the same time. While the bugs cause problems, we can work around most of them, also having to work around missing tools just makes it much worse.
The review team I am talking about would be Cryptic/PW employees and at this point anything we create in the foundry belongs to them. For example when your foundry is spotlighted you can no longer make changes to it.
Agreed and that is the overall idea behind this post. If the Developers are able to improve the toolset we work with, we will be able to create much better content. As I said a good toolset does not mean a bad author will create good products, but a good author with a good toolset will probably be able to create better content. As far as the cost is concerned it would be similar to comparing the ROI (return on investment).
Let me start an example of creating a quest involving a new dungeon to explore(places to go things to do, not new items) using imaginary numbers. Imaginary because I can only guess at the DEV side of the numbers, where as I can make a much more accurate estimate on the author side
On the cost side of the ROI is
a full weeks worth of man-hours from 5 developers. So 200 man-hours (I am sure their tools are much better than what we have available :cool:),
versus
An author creates the same thing and takes the same exact amount of man-hour investment namely 200hrs plus say 1 day from a quality control/review team consisting of 5 people (40hrs)to review the author created content and tweak certain things such as what type of loot is dropped in the final encounter/chest. However because the author is an unpaid volunteer it changes the equation
so for this example we have on the cost side 200hrs of employee time versus 40hrs employee time plus 200hours UNPAID volunteer time.
play filter due to them being easy peasy gimmes designed to meet the daily foundry requirement and nothing else. This type of foundry would however not requires more than 15min of a single employees time to eliminate it as a candidate. In all truth since the employees would have the tools to look at the underlying design it shouldn't take more than 2-3minutes to eliminate such foundries. Long term a change to the review system or some form of tweak could even eliminate this.
On the return side I can not even begin to calculate because I lack the numbers necessary for calculation and comparison. However Cryptic/PW can easily calculate this. The return would consist of old players continuing to play, new players joining, Both groups spending money. Also needing to be considered here is the network/server infrastructure cost. If the load on the infrastructure increases at some point new hardware will be required to balance the load again. An increase in content would probably not increase the load too much unless it brought new/old players into/back into the game. If the current player base stayed the same there is unlikely to be a requirement for additional network/server infrastructure
And one which I am grateful for because it also gives me the ability to exercise my repressed creative D&D side.
agreed therefore my points 1 and 2. The QA/Review team from the company to evaluate the quest for inclusion as a permanent part of the game and to assign the amount of "foundems"
Agreed. That is another of the goals of my OP. I originally posted this under the General Discussion forum but because I called it the State of the foundry and emphasized the foundry too much in it, it was moved. I am currently rewriting it to make it more game specific even if it will still contain a good bit referencing the foundry. That way I can post it under the general discussion forum to get a wider sample of opinions. And finally I apologize for the wall of text
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Fine then allow the authors the option of excepting their content from this process and from consideration for inclusion into a permanent part of the game.
As is once we create the content, legally Cryptic can do whatever they please with it, it belongs to them. Same way when you develop a new device at your place of work the patent rights unless previously regulated in your employment contract belong to your employer.
In this case we are using tools Cryptic provides to arrange assets they also provide on the servers they provide. Basically we are doing remote development work.
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That is one of the goals of the proposal to provide us the tools to create shiny new content that is worth the time to play for the playerbase while still allowing Cryptic/PW full control of what can and cannot be done.
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See Below
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Not gonna happen. How many employees do you think they would have to hire?
STO gets 1500-2500 UGC quests every month. Wonder what NWO is... 3,000 per month? 3,500?
If it's 3,000 per month, that's 100 every day. How many QA people would be needed to review 100 quests per day.
Too many.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
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I realize they get a lot. That is why the use of the review system. There can also be additional levels prior to it getting that far. The primary reason for the QA/Review team is to evaluate quests that are being considered for permanent inclusion into the game.
Let us use your example and say it one employee is assigned to do an initial rough evaluation. With that I mean he takes a quick look at the quests that cross a predefined threshold of player reviews and ratings, to determine which are worth taking a deeper look at for further consideration. By any logical evaluation criteria especially when you can look at the underlying design and not actually have to play through the quest a single employee could evaluate several an hour.
I can usually decide if a quest is something I consider worthwhile or just a grind/xerg/farming quest within 10min at the most. If I had the ability to look at the underlying design I could do it much faster. Using myself as a baseline that means in 8 hrs I could do a minimum of 4-6 per hour. Times 8hrs means I could theoretically do a rough sort of between 32 and 48 quests a day. That is also I believe a very low end estimate. I sincerely doubt that there are that many quests that would cross a given threshold for evaluation each day, in all likely hood probably not each week, provided the threshold is not set too low.
Granted this is all theory crafting. I am sure that given some thought a system could be worked out that optimizes the ROI balance between time invested by employees versus time saved by not having to design as much content to keep the playerbase interested. Section 2 of the proposal, the foundry bounty, should be enough to keep a majority interested.
Finally this is represents only my opinion. I make no claim to having all or any of the answers, just some ideas. My desire is to see this game continue to survive and thrive for many years to come. The lore base is large enough for it to do so, it just has to be implemented.
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A couple of things here...
It seems to me you are doing a lot of assuming here.
For instance... "for a Dev who has the tools"... What tools are you talking about? Do you Know that these tools exist?
Do you know how much time would be required to do this, or are you just pulling times out of thin air?
Do you really think that Cryptic would give Devs that may, already, be overworked another task to do?
And lastly...
These ideas are good to play around with...
But I highly doubt any of this will be implemented... For a number of reasons...
Narayan
The software tools used to develop the game and foundry. If you are asking can I prove it, then the answer is no, it is simply a logical deduction based on certain facts
1. They created the game and the foundry
2. All we do in the foundry is rearrange things they developed.
Logically the tools must exist otherwise neither the game nor the foundry would exist. Nor would we be able to author anything.
The time is a professional estimate based on years of programming experience, QA work, software project management and on how long it takes me to decide if a foundry is worth doing. As I stated in a previous post, if the foundry is a grind/xerg/farm quest it rapidly becomes noticeable. I would estimate it probably takes the average person familiar with the game and/or the foundry less than 15min to determine if the foundry is worth playing or not. If a player can do this without being able to see the underlying structure and the storyboard, a developer who can see it should take less. That however is my opinion.
As far as the Devs being overworked that is definitely possible. Perhaps Cryptic would have to hire some people to do the review/QA. All of that would have to be factored into the ROI calculations.
The MMO market is very volatile and maintaining theplayerbase much less increasing it, can be difficult because of this. The number one cause of MMOs dying is players leaving for such reasons as lack of end content or another MMO has new content that they have not seen. See the increase in returning players to the other MMOs whenever they release new content. We have this problem here as well.
Honestly once you hit 60 what are your options currently?
Gauntlgyrm, Epic Dungeons, PVP, Dailies in DR/Shar, Lord Neverember's dailies and Rhix's dailies. Of course you can also run foundries to collect xp to level up your pet or just for the joy of the game. Expanding the world by adding in new quest hubs and places to explore through a system that allows the developers to concentrate on new content (items, bosses, etc) and fixing bugs, while at the same time offering rewards to players for running foundry quests seems like a win-win to me.
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There is a big problem with this. Who is to say if a foundry is worth doing?
I have posted my own idea with this. I think there should be foundry mods. The only power I would give them is a red flag option. Then a dev could go through it and take the appropriate action without the need to play every quest.
One thing is a must though. Only exploit and offensive quests should be removed. It's simply not on to remove a quest because someone does not like it or because it is poor. I know I have played quests I have thought very poor but have five star ratings.
All this is irrelevant when it comes to end game content. Foundry quests are far too easy for well geard level 60 players, so the only reason to play any foundry quests now is to play the AD quests.
There are two ways around that as far as I can see.
1) AD drops in the foundry - problem is it will be exploitable, a positive is it will create a grind of foundry quests.
2) Another combat level for each mob based on gear score.
Or of course both the above.
I agree with much that has been said though.
One last thing and then I won't say any more...
Cryptic has said that less than 1% of foundry quests are as good as their quests...
So you will be eliminating 99+% of the quests right from the start.
So you really expect Cryptic to pay someone to do this? When the time could be spent by them creating quests?
Narayan
Nor are they going to implement foundry content as official core game content, for legal reasons. For all their "we own your stuff" legal language, as soon as they take something and make it core game they are going to get sued for pay for the content.
The ToS and EULA say otherwise, but I am not a lawyer. See also the statement when you submit your quest for the spotlight. Other than that I have nothing further to say on the legal issues regarding player authored content.
This thread is about possible long term solutions. If anyone has better ideas, please by all mean lets put them together into a thread. For that matter we could create a seperate thread for each section of a proposal and the collaborate to come up with a proposal that most of us can agree on.
Be constructive, people
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