Exploit missions will always be in UGC and pact or no pact there will always be players who want to grind out toons to max level the quickest way possible.
If those players want to do it by repeating the same rat pit mission over and over that is their call and to be honest it doesn't bother me how they want to spend their game time.
Everyone is different and everyone's opinions and likes and dislikes hold equal merit, as well they should.
There are now time walls and drop limits on zerg missions in STO UGC for instance which do a bit to mitigate the exploits but there will always be a demand for them and so there will always be a supply.
I know it can cause the real creative foundry mission creators an amount of frustration that a zerg mission put together in 20 minutes is getting thousands more hits and tips than their carefully and lovingly crafted mission which has taken weeks to create.
But remember a player who wants to slay and grind for quick xp/loot would most likely not appreciate a long story driven mission to begin with.
I hasten to add I am not putting those players down at all its just the way they like to play.
The tech systems which are coming in NWN will allow a community of foundry creators and players to keep tabs on their favourite authors so much easier.
Also in game foundry Chat channel would be a boon to keeping us up to date with great UGC content and spread the word.
Foundry forum pages can also spread the word and for those of us into the story of a mission we can easily pass over the exploit ones.
I would imagine that the NWN devs will include a featured UGC mission on a regular basis so everyone can see cool missions these will be the cool story and action missions and not just high rated zerg fest ones.
By hook or by crook the cream will rise and I would much rather have the thumbs up from fellow foundry authors and players for a job well done.
Than just be near the top of a general list anyway.
In essence the best way to look at it is let people play how they like grind or story in truth does it really matter as long as people enjoy the ride.
Honest people will be honest without the need of any pact. Dishonest people will be dishonest. Also, most people playing the game won't visit the forum or do so only to complain when something doesn't work ("Server down!! Fail!!!!", "Rogue OP!!! Nerf! Nerf!! Fail!!!").
Pretty much this^
Most people that will play this game won't even know this thread ever existed and its unrealistic to expect that making a pact will solve anything (or will be required for those that are honest regardless).
While I don't personally like Quoforgeds play style, he is just as entitled as we are to playing the game in a fashion he finds enjoyable. The idea of blacklisting someone is pretty harsh. What I find a bit disheartening is the fact that Quo makes his desire clear, and also asks that you call out the type of quest you've made in the description, so he can avoid it; a reasonable request, and a way to avoid a down vote. He's not trashing anyone's dungeon that way. Yet people here are saying they will simply down vote what they feel is an exploitative quest, no matter what, just because they don't like it. I don't know, but to me witchhunts, and book burnings are bad things.
I'd rather have a couple hundred really bad quests given 5 stars by the power gamers, than have any of the foundry's tools disabled in an attempt to fight exploiters. Instead of a blacklist of "undesirables", how about we look beyond the in game rating system, (which will always be dominated by EZ Mode quests), and think about an unofficial rating system working in tandem with the official one. Heck, lets get a stickied topic in a foundry specific forum here, and as a community, keep a ratings list there.
Just some early morning thoughts.
I can also agree with this^ concern
What exactly constitudes an "exploitative" quest can be pretty subjective.
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zaphtasticMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited February 2013
Man... this is a subject I could rant about for pages and pages.
TLDR: 'farming' and non-story content WILL be there, and its creators / players are not the enemy (talking about stuff that isn't an obvious gameplay exploit here, of course). The challenge is letting everyone find the type of content they want. And I say this as an author who has always made (and will make) story/plot-heavy content and doesn't play farming content at all.
Longer version:
I don't have much STO experience, but I have a lot of experience with the Mission Architect of COH (which was also made by Cryptic, sort of) which is basically the same setup. In the end the in-game interface for viewing player-made content was almost completely dominated by missions (or 'arcs' for 'story arcs') designed to get as much reward with as little risk as possible. There were plenty of story-focused arcs as well as challenge-based arcs in the system, but the search tools (and in part, player attitude) were just not up to the task when someone was trying to find them. So you'd see pages upon pages upon pages of similar content against the same enemies that were all rated 5* (people were incentivized to create new ones because there was some kickback to the author of the arc if people played/rated them), but finding any but the most aggressively-marketed story arcs (this meant using every bit of your online / forum presence to advertise it, or even holding contests / paying people to play the arcs) was a lost cause because even a five-star story arc was completely buried under hundreds of pages of farm arcs. And even if an arc got visibility for a few minutes, all it took was a single 4-star vote to sink it back down again (the same thing applied to non-story arcs too, of course -- but they're admittedly easier to create than story-focused arcs). So unless you got in VERY early when the system was still new and everyone was trying it out (spring of '09) or your arc was so absolutely awesome it was picked up by multiple fansites or hand-picked by the devs, it probably didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever being played by people you didn't explicitly ask. The "solution" was maintaining ingame channels and forum posts that recommended good arcs to people who searched for them, but understandably this only works for the really tiny minority of the playerbase who reads forums or joins custom channels in the first place.
And here's the thing -- the farmers are not the enemy. Heck, I'll even say there's no such thing as a "pure farmer", there are people who may decide that they want to play something quick and easy to wind down, or be at least moderately entertained while grinding currency_du_jour_01. Keep in mind that there'll ALWAYS be people who try to maximize rewards while minimizing risk, and I'm 99.99% sure they'll be better at this than the devs. If there's a particular map/enemy/whatever combination, they WILL find it. Trying to fight this is completely pointless, and will only alienate players.
What needs to happen (which, unfortunately, never came for COH) is to have a really robust search engine that allows ALL kinds of players to find the type of content they enjoy by using categories, "my friend liked x" lists and public reviews intelligently, kinda like Amazon or other large sites. Farmers would find the (non-exploiting!) adventures that get maximized rewards with minimized risk, challenge-seekers would find arcs with really tough custom enemies, story enthusiasts would find story arcs that fit their particular tastes, and everyone would find arcs that their friends enjoyed / rated highly. That way there's no need to build grudges and have sniping / griefing wars between various "factions" of the community (which is a bit silly in my eye to begin with -- we're all players!).
Edit: as a bit of a tangent, I also think very negatively of voting cliques and such. There were a few of them in COH too (though their presence was overshadowed by the interface issues), and it's really disheartening for a budding storyteller to get their work downvoted by a gang of people because important_personage_01 thought it wasn't up to snuff -- or worse yet, because the creator was targeted by forum trolls who then go and one-star the adventure. This also highlights the weaknesses of an unweighted rating system, but that's a rant for another day.
Gil already said it but-- vowing 'Not' to do something is not going to address it. Other people will still do it and they would easily outnumber us.
Instead why don't we sign up to be the 'reviewers' that check the map before it is posted and then adhere to a code of ethics not to rubber stamp that garbage?
Man... this is a subject I could rant about for pages and pages.
TLDR: 'farming' and non-story content WILL be there, and its creators / players are not the enemy (talking about stuff that isn't an obvious gameplay exploit here, of course). The challenge is letting everyone find the type of content they want. And I say this as an author who has always made (and will make) story/plot-heavy content and doesn't play farming content at all.
...
Only read tl;dr because am drunk after party - hope you dont mind.
But it does not adresses the main issue. The main issue here is exploiting - not farming,. Both are very different. Exploiting is defined as playing the game as it is not intended to be. It is like a crime.
While I understand the sentiment of "death to the exploiter!," what you guys don't seem to get is that nobody'd exploit the Foundry system in CO/STO if Cryptic would just MAKE SOME FRIGGEN' CONTENT!
It's only an issue because Cryptic expects the players to make the content themselves, so Cryptic doesn't have to.
Thoughtful discussion here. To be honest, it never occurred to me that the Foundry could be exploited in that way, but having seen this discussion I now see that distinct possibility.
My immediate reaction would be to categorize the rating system or provide the option of qualitative feedback. Provide a rating on several categories such as story, difficulty, and reward/incentive. That way if you have a low story rating yet a high reward rating, then you can safely assume the quest's purpose.
Conversely, adding comments would allow for a qualitative response like an App store. The trick here however would be to avoid spoilers.
In any case, I trust that there are enough dedicated players such as myself that will speak up if the Foundry system does get abused.
While I understand the sentiment of "death to the exploiter!," what you guys don't seem to get is that nobody'd exploit the Foundry system in CO/STO if Cryptic would just MAKE SOME FRIGGEN' CONTENT!
It's only an issue because Cryptic expects the players to make the content themselves, so Cryptic doesn't have to.
Yeah, that's not even remotely true. Sorry, I'm not buying that people would stop playing low risk/reward ratio, low time/reward ratio content in the Foundry, if only Cryptic had more high risk/reward ratio, high time/reward ratio content outside it. If that were true, they'd be seeking out the analogous content in the Foundry.
While I understand the sentiment of "death to the exploiter!," what you guys don't seem to get is that nobody'd exploit the Foundry system in CO/STO if Cryptic would just MAKE SOME FRIGGEN' CONTENT!
It's only an issue because Cryptic expects the players to make the content themselves, so Cryptic doesn't have to.
Not entirely true. If thats the case-- why do being play DnD outside of published modules? Its very much in the spirit of DnD to let people create and share their own campaigns and for the designers to provide tools to do that.
While I understand the sentiment of "death to the exploiter!," what you guys don't seem to get is that nobody'd exploit the Foundry system in CO/STO if Cryptic would just MAKE SOME FRIGGEN' CONTENT!
It's only an issue because Cryptic expects the players to make the content themselves, so Cryptic doesn't have to.
Are you serious? So people cheat and play exploit missions to level and get stuff fast because Cryptic won't make more content that would have them leveling slower and getting less stuff? If you can't see amazing flaws in what your wrote, no one can help you.
Only read tl;dr because am drunk after party - hope you dont mind.
But it does not adresses the main issue. The main issue here is exploiting - not farming,. Both are very different. Exploiting is defined as playing the game as it is not intended to be. It is like a crime.
Farming is like unethical but legal thing to do.
Farming is unethical? Games are designed to be farmed. Any game that requires a player to gather X resource to do Y thing is requiring a player to farm those resources.
Now I am totally against exploiting, but it is hardly like a crime unless you are calling it a crime like j-walking is a crime, it is more unethical. Don't agree? That's okay everyone is entitled to their opinion. However once you have been the victim of a serious crime then you can reanalyze your opinion.
Although they could probably stop the exploitation pretty easy by putting a timer on mission repeatable's.
Nah, just make 10 missions that are exploitable and cycle them. Then to stop that you would have to put a restriction on how many mission someone could pick up and x amount of time, and that could just as easily restrict the people not looking to exploit. To many restriction will make the system less fun for the people who are using it as intended. If you keep restricting things so 1% of the people who are bad eggs can't exploit something you make it less fun for the 99% who are playing by the rules. The only people that suffer are the 99% not the 1% much like real life.
It an interview I saw that one way STO people were exploiting the Foundry was they would make a mission with a HUGE number of very weak mobs in a mission all right on top of each other. Then people would run over and AOE the huge group and kill them all with one shot getting TONS of XP. Now the interview said they put a stop to this by limiting the number of mobs that could be hit with a single AoE, but lets just use this as and example. Room 1 100 trash mob AoE. Room 2 100 trash mob AoE....Room 50 100 trash mob AOE. This would make the person in the "exploit" adventure get HUGE amounts of XP per encounter, but it would take awhile for them to get through the whole thing. Then they could just pick it up again when they got out because the timer would have run out with the mission being huge.
I agree that same things need to be done to curtail the exploits, but Cryptic needs to be careful to evaluate what they do as to not put restrictions on the players that are playing the game as intended. This is like making laws in real life that don't really stop crime but just inconvenience law abiding citizens which humorously happens all the time just about everywhere.
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aavariusMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
Then I guess you are ready to understand why am I so pessimistic.
- There is no point of mobs - they dont have numbers. It fails anyways - one way or the other.
- Cryptic solves it by removing foundry features limiting it slowly. It cripples the features of foundry.
- Because of number, exploiters escape action as it becomes too much of a bother to hunt all down.
There is just no optimist-ism here at all. So your 'faith' will end up reducing features of foundry. 'Mobs' as you say, or otherwise will fail. It is a losing battle against exploiters.
I hear you. I don't agree with you, however. I think you're making too many assumptions.
Nah, just make 10 missions that are exploitable and cycle them. Then to stop that you would have to put a restriction on how many mission someone could pick up and x amount of time, and that could just as easily restrict the people not looking to exploit. To many restriction will make the system less fun for the people who are using it as intended. If you keep restricting things so 1% of the people who are bad eggs can't exploit something you make it less fun for the 99% who are playing by the rules. The only people that suffer are the 99% not the 1% much like real life.
Very true. Still has to be a way to fix it...
If anything as long as we vow to vote it down and refuse to take part, it should work well enough for us at least.
The thing you want to look at with any fix is does the "fix" do more damage to the "lawful" people than the damage without it would do to the "Lawful" people. Now the intersting part to me is that The Foundry is not a new thing for Cryptic that is being released in a new game. It has had a long time to use STO as a beta test bed and a lot of the knee jerk reactionary nonsense that people do to stop "bad things" has already been worked out of it. I am sure there will be problems and loop holes like anything else, but at least in is not being launched on its maiden voyage with a brand new game in an untested state and I think that is going to give it a big leg up.
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zaphtasticMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
The thing you want to look at with any fix is does the "fix" do more damage to the "lawful" people than the damage without it would do to the "Lawful" people. Now the intersting part to me is that The Foundry is not a new thing for Cryptic that is being released in a new game. It has had a long time to use STO as a beta test bed and a lot of the knee jerk reactionary nonsense that people do to stop "bad things" has already been worked out of it. I am sure there will be problems and loop holes like anything else, but at least in is not being launched on its maiden voyage with a brand new game in an untested state and I think that is going to give it a big leg up.
Yep, this is what I've been saying in my long ranty post on the last page (though the Mission Architect has been around a lot longer than the STO Foundry -- April 2009 until Dec 2012, RIP). People will need to accept that there WILL be farm content, it WILL be more efficient than just running official content, and most of the people using the Foundry WILL use it to play such content. The goal is for all players and playstyles to coexist, and not start witch-hunts against one another to protect the 'purity' of the game. I also have high hopes for the Foundry in NWN simply because it's a much more integral system than it was in COH or STO (neither of those games launched with it, for one), which will hopefully lead to a lot of high-quality stories.
To reiterate: I personally dislike farming and think it is boring and monotonous -- I exclusively played (and created) story-driven content in COH's Mission Architect. But really, other than the improved efficiency, creating a farming dungeon and running it over and over again is no different than someone running a particularly lucrative 'official' quest over and over, or killing enemies that have good drops in an area over and over for hours. Yeah, a player using only frost attacks and optimizing their gear to resist fire will probably have an easy time farming player dungeons full of fire elementals -- but they could just farm fire elementals in official dungeons / in the world for the same effect.
Really, it's simple - the things that make it possible to have 'farming' content is due to the Foundry
A. being open to all players
B. allowing players to create content with rewards comparable to official content
C. being (presumably) flexible enough to optimize enemy encounters for max rewards / least risk
You can NOT remove any of these, or you remove the entire point of the Foundry in the first place. City of Heroes decided to cripple C, which ended up hurting 'legitimate' story arc writers just as much in many cases.
The other way to 'cripple' farming in COH was to nerf specific enemy XP (or make specific enemies harder) based on datamined information. In each case it took less than a day for the 'farmers' to come up with another optimal configuration, and suddenly thousands of new farming arcs appeared in the system -- with the thousands of the pre-nerf ones still there and clogging up the interface, making it even harder for story-seekers to find their arcs. Sounds like a lose-lose situation to me.
Now exploitation is different, of course... and unfortunately it can mean the Foundry losing some of its flexibility to address the exploits. As a simple example, a player may be able to set up two enemy groups that fight each other with their power calibrated so one of them kills the other, but ends up with very little hp left -- then the player can swoop in, use an AOE attack and rake in massive xp at no risk. These should be solved at a basic game systems level (ie. if an enemy didn't start at 100% hp when a player engaged them, scale their reward xp appropriately), but the easier solution is to remove the option for enemy groups to fight each other in player-created content. Or if there are special geometry configurations that allow a player to kite a melee enemy indefinitely at no risk due to the AI not being up to the task, it's a lot easier to disallow the creation of custom geometry in player-created dungeons instead of making the AI more aware that it's being kited. Etc.
People will need to accept that there WILL be farm content, it WILL be more efficient than just running official content, and most of the people using the Foundry WILL use it to play such content. The goal is for all players and playstyles to coexist, and not start witch-hunts against one another to protect the 'purity' of the game.
Good luck on that one, tolerance is a dirty word to most people. They are going to flail and rail against anything they don't like. I do it with the idiots that keep pissing and moaning about this or that is pay to win, I am sorry to say. People can't just play the game they want and enjoy it. They have to start witch hunts against perceived slights. They will say the farmers are ruining the economy and the grinders are ruining the game by leveling to fast. They will whine stamp their feet and scream its not fair its not fair. The game isn't even out and it is already happening. Eventually they will whine and scream so much that the coolest feature of this game (the Foundry in my opinion) will be restricted into uselessness and then they will cry about being so restrictive and sucking. It is human nature I am again sad to say.
Good luck on that one, tolerance is a dirty word to most people. They are going to flail and rail against anything they don't like. I do it with the idiots that keep pissing and moaning about this or that is pay to win, I am sorry to say. People can't just play the game they want and enjoy it. They have to start witch hunts against perceived slights. They will say the farmers are ruining the economy and the grinders are ruining the game by leveling to fast. They will whine stamp their feet and scream its not fair its not fair. The game isn't even out and it is already happening. Eventually they will whine and scream so much that the coolest feature of this game (the Foundry in my opinion) will be restricted into uselessness and then they will cry about being so restrictive and sucking. It is human nature I am again sad to say.
Such is the way of the world. We can only hope knee jerk reactions are few, if any, in changes made in time.
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Now I am totally against exploiting, but it is hardly like a crime unless you are calling it a crime like j-walking is a crime, it is more unethical. Don't agree? ...
I said "like a". I didn't say is a. You are taking it literal.
When you exploit, you are violating the ToS and the agreement you agree to before you start the game. That is why exploiting and farming are different - taking action against exploiting and reporting them actively is justified and expected of you.
Farming - as long as not exploiting - is a playstyle, even when game was not made to be played like that.
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wolfhaartMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 2Arc User
edited February 2013
I'm all in for this pact.
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iamtruthseekerMember, Moonstars, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
I figured I'd post this^ since its relevant to this discussion and there's a lot of speculation going on.
Its kind of a long presentation about UGS in general, but it explains a lot about what kinds of measures the devs have taken into account to determine UGC rewards in NWO. The actual UGC Rewards part starts around 22 mins in (you can jump right into that section by clicking from the list on the side), but they also cover a lot of background details at the begining, reviewing UGC systems leading up to NWO, which may give a hint about the dev's thought process going into this.
I figured I'd post this^ since its relevant to this discussion and there's a lot of speculation going on.
Its kind of a long presentation about UGS in general, but it explains a lot about what kinds of measures the devs have taken into account to determine UGC rewards in NWO. The actual UGC Rewards part starts around 22 mins in (you can jump right into that section by clicking from the list on the side), but they also cover a lot of background details at the begining, reviewing UGC systems leading up to NWO, which may give a hint about the dev's thought process going into this.
Oh you found it, very cool. I have been looking for that again. Watched it once and forgot where it was. Yeah that was a very good video. It was the one I had referenced earlier on one of my posts.
Oh you found it, very cool. I have been looking for that again. Watched it once and forgot where it was. Yeah that was a very good video. It was the one I had referenced earlier on one of my posts.
Yeah, I had that bookmarked since like a month ago. Don't know why I didn't link it since my first post. I guess I forgot I had it at the time >.>
I dream of a world where your ideals are shared by the vast majority of people. However I find it more likely that Cthulhu will awaken and destroy the world or the zombie apocalypse will wipe us out first.
I'm right there with you... I have the utmost faith in the average gamers desire to be spoon fed and handheld.
Yeah, that's not even remotely true. Sorry, I'm not buying that people would stop playing low risk/reward ratio, low time/reward ratio content in the Foundry, if only Cryptic had more high risk/reward ratio, high time/reward ratio content outside it. If that were true, they'd be seeking out the analogous content in the Foundry.
Not even plausible, sorry.
You don't see it as plausible that a majority of the people wouldn't game the system if Cryptic made stuff for people to do? STO became a game that people log in for about an hour, just to do dailies, because that's pretty much all there is to do, and has been for a VERY long time. That is who a majority of the people doing those exploit missions are - people just wanting to get their dailies done in as short a time as possible - check out the post history of the people who MADE these missions on the STO forums.
Are you serious? So people cheat and play exploit missions to level and get stuff fast because Cryptic won't make more content that would have them leveling slower and getting less stuff? If you can't see amazing flaws in what your wrote, no one can help you.
Read above. The exploit missions don't "get stuff fast," since the dailies they're connected to are on a 20-hour cooldown timer anyway. You're just getting your mission done in ten minutes versus an hour, still having to wait another 20 hours to do it again.
Not entirely true. If thats the case-- why do being play DnD outside of published modules? Its very much in the spirit of DnD to let people create and share their own campaigns and for the designers to provide tools to do that.
Dungeon Master's Guide comes to mind.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be UGC in a DnD game - far from it. I've never played a PnP game using an official published module. That being said, if Cryptic is worried about exploiters, they better actually make some content, since nothing that I've seen suggests anything other than a very vast majority of content production responsibility being passed on to users, just like in CO and STO.
You don't see it as plausible that a majority of the people wouldn't game the system if Cryptic made stuff for people to do? STO became a game that people log in for about an hour, just to do dailies, because that's pretty much all there is to do, and has been for a VERY long time. That is who a majority of the people doing those exploit missions are - people just wanting to get their dailies done in as short a time as possible - check out the post history of the people who MADE these missions on the STO forums.
No I don't see it as plausable or they wouldn't be gaming the system right now they would be trying other content that players are making. So if Cryptic puts out new dailies that take an hour to completely instead of 10 minutes people are going to flock to them and stop using the exploit missions? A few people maybe but in my opinion the vast majority would just keep cranking out their least time for greatest reward missions.
Comments
If those players want to do it by repeating the same rat pit mission over and over that is their call and to be honest it doesn't bother me how they want to spend their game time.
Everyone is different and everyone's opinions and likes and dislikes hold equal merit, as well they should.
There are now time walls and drop limits on zerg missions in STO UGC for instance which do a bit to mitigate the exploits but there will always be a demand for them and so there will always be a supply.
I know it can cause the real creative foundry mission creators an amount of frustration that a zerg mission put together in 20 minutes is getting thousands more hits and tips than their carefully and lovingly crafted mission which has taken weeks to create.
But remember a player who wants to slay and grind for quick xp/loot would most likely not appreciate a long story driven mission to begin with.
I hasten to add I am not putting those players down at all its just the way they like to play.
The tech systems which are coming in NWN will allow a community of foundry creators and players to keep tabs on their favourite authors so much easier.
Also in game foundry Chat channel would be a boon to keeping us up to date with great UGC content and spread the word.
Foundry forum pages can also spread the word and for those of us into the story of a mission we can easily pass over the exploit ones.
I would imagine that the NWN devs will include a featured UGC mission on a regular basis so everyone can see cool missions these will be the cool story and action missions and not just high rated zerg fest ones.
By hook or by crook the cream will rise and I would much rather have the thumbs up from fellow foundry authors and players for a job well done.
Than just be near the top of a general list anyway.
In essence the best way to look at it is let people play how they like grind or story in truth does it really matter as long as people enjoy the ride.
Pretty much this^
Most people that will play this game won't even know this thread ever existed and its unrealistic to expect that making a pact will solve anything (or will be required for those that are honest regardless).
lol, I'm guessing it won't really be as simple as "kill ten rats" once we go in
I can also agree with this^ concern
What exactly constitudes an "exploitative" quest can be pretty subjective.
TLDR: 'farming' and non-story content WILL be there, and its creators / players are not the enemy (talking about stuff that isn't an obvious gameplay exploit here, of course). The challenge is letting everyone find the type of content they want. And I say this as an author who has always made (and will make) story/plot-heavy content and doesn't play farming content at all.
Longer version:
I don't have much STO experience, but I have a lot of experience with the Mission Architect of COH (which was also made by Cryptic, sort of) which is basically the same setup. In the end the in-game interface for viewing player-made content was almost completely dominated by missions (or 'arcs' for 'story arcs') designed to get as much reward with as little risk as possible. There were plenty of story-focused arcs as well as challenge-based arcs in the system, but the search tools (and in part, player attitude) were just not up to the task when someone was trying to find them. So you'd see pages upon pages upon pages of similar content against the same enemies that were all rated 5* (people were incentivized to create new ones because there was some kickback to the author of the arc if people played/rated them), but finding any but the most aggressively-marketed story arcs (this meant using every bit of your online / forum presence to advertise it, or even holding contests / paying people to play the arcs) was a lost cause because even a five-star story arc was completely buried under hundreds of pages of farm arcs. And even if an arc got visibility for a few minutes, all it took was a single 4-star vote to sink it back down again (the same thing applied to non-story arcs too, of course -- but they're admittedly easier to create than story-focused arcs). So unless you got in VERY early when the system was still new and everyone was trying it out (spring of '09) or your arc was so absolutely awesome it was picked up by multiple fansites or hand-picked by the devs, it probably didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever being played by people you didn't explicitly ask. The "solution" was maintaining ingame channels and forum posts that recommended good arcs to people who searched for them, but understandably this only works for the really tiny minority of the playerbase who reads forums or joins custom channels in the first place.
And here's the thing -- the farmers are not the enemy. Heck, I'll even say there's no such thing as a "pure farmer", there are people who may decide that they want to play something quick and easy to wind down, or be at least moderately entertained while grinding currency_du_jour_01. Keep in mind that there'll ALWAYS be people who try to maximize rewards while minimizing risk, and I'm 99.99% sure they'll be better at this than the devs. If there's a particular map/enemy/whatever combination, they WILL find it. Trying to fight this is completely pointless, and will only alienate players.
What needs to happen (which, unfortunately, never came for COH) is to have a really robust search engine that allows ALL kinds of players to find the type of content they enjoy by using categories, "my friend liked x" lists and public reviews intelligently, kinda like Amazon or other large sites. Farmers would find the (non-exploiting!) adventures that get maximized rewards with minimized risk, challenge-seekers would find arcs with really tough custom enemies, story enthusiasts would find story arcs that fit their particular tastes, and everyone would find arcs that their friends enjoyed / rated highly. That way there's no need to build grudges and have sniping / griefing wars between various "factions" of the community (which is a bit silly in my eye to begin with -- we're all players!).
Edit: as a bit of a tangent, I also think very negatively of voting cliques and such. There were a few of them in COH too (though their presence was overshadowed by the interface issues), and it's really disheartening for a budding storyteller to get their work downvoted by a gang of people because important_personage_01 thought it wasn't up to snuff -- or worse yet, because the creator was targeted by forum trolls who then go and one-star the adventure. This also highlights the weaknesses of an unweighted rating system, but that's a rant for another day.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Seven Against Thay: An RP-Focused Guild for all Races and Classes
Instead why don't we sign up to be the 'reviewers' that check the map before it is posted and then adhere to a code of ethics not to rubber stamp that garbage?
But it does not adresses the main issue. The main issue here is exploiting - not farming,. Both are very different. Exploiting is defined as playing the game as it is not intended to be. It is like a crime.
Farming is like unethical but legal thing to do.
It's only an issue because Cryptic expects the players to make the content themselves, so Cryptic doesn't have to.
My immediate reaction would be to categorize the rating system or provide the option of qualitative feedback. Provide a rating on several categories such as story, difficulty, and reward/incentive. That way if you have a low story rating yet a high reward rating, then you can safely assume the quest's purpose.
Conversely, adding comments would allow for a qualitative response like an App store. The trick here however would be to avoid spoilers.
In any case, I trust that there are enough dedicated players such as myself that will speak up if the Foundry system does get abused.
Yeah, that's not even remotely true. Sorry, I'm not buying that people would stop playing low risk/reward ratio, low time/reward ratio content in the Foundry, if only Cryptic had more high risk/reward ratio, high time/reward ratio content outside it. If that were true, they'd be seeking out the analogous content in the Foundry.
Not even plausible, sorry.
Not entirely true. If thats the case-- why do being play DnD outside of published modules? Its very much in the spirit of DnD to let people create and share their own campaigns and for the designers to provide tools to do that.
Dungeon Master's Guide comes to mind.
Are you serious? So people cheat and play exploit missions to level and get stuff fast because Cryptic won't make more content that would have them leveling slower and getting less stuff? If you can't see amazing flaws in what your wrote, no one can help you.
Farming is unethical? Games are designed to be farmed. Any game that requires a player to gather X resource to do Y thing is requiring a player to farm those resources.
Now I am totally against exploiting, but it is hardly like a crime unless you are calling it a crime like j-walking is a crime, it is more unethical. Don't agree? That's okay everyone is entitled to their opinion. However once you have been the victim of a serious crime then you can reanalyze your opinion.
Although they could probably stop the exploitation pretty easy by putting a timer on mission repeatable's.
Nah, just make 10 missions that are exploitable and cycle them. Then to stop that you would have to put a restriction on how many mission someone could pick up and x amount of time, and that could just as easily restrict the people not looking to exploit. To many restriction will make the system less fun for the people who are using it as intended. If you keep restricting things so 1% of the people who are bad eggs can't exploit something you make it less fun for the 99% who are playing by the rules. The only people that suffer are the 99% not the 1% much like real life.
It an interview I saw that one way STO people were exploiting the Foundry was they would make a mission with a HUGE number of very weak mobs in a mission all right on top of each other. Then people would run over and AOE the huge group and kill them all with one shot getting TONS of XP. Now the interview said they put a stop to this by limiting the number of mobs that could be hit with a single AoE, but lets just use this as and example. Room 1 100 trash mob AoE. Room 2 100 trash mob AoE....Room 50 100 trash mob AOE. This would make the person in the "exploit" adventure get HUGE amounts of XP per encounter, but it would take awhile for them to get through the whole thing. Then they could just pick it up again when they got out because the timer would have run out with the mission being huge.
I agree that same things need to be done to curtail the exploits, but Cryptic needs to be careful to evaluate what they do as to not put restrictions on the players that are playing the game as intended. This is like making laws in real life that don't really stop crime but just inconvenience law abiding citizens which humorously happens all the time just about everywhere.
Very true. Still has to be a way to fix it...
If anything as long as we vow to vote it down and refuse to take part, it should work well enough for us at least.
The thing you want to look at with any fix is does the "fix" do more damage to the "lawful" people than the damage without it would do to the "Lawful" people. Now the intersting part to me is that The Foundry is not a new thing for Cryptic that is being released in a new game. It has had a long time to use STO as a beta test bed and a lot of the knee jerk reactionary nonsense that people do to stop "bad things" has already been worked out of it. I am sure there will be problems and loop holes like anything else, but at least in is not being launched on its maiden voyage with a brand new game in an untested state and I think that is going to give it a big leg up.
To reiterate: I personally dislike farming and think it is boring and monotonous -- I exclusively played (and created) story-driven content in COH's Mission Architect. But really, other than the improved efficiency, creating a farming dungeon and running it over and over again is no different than someone running a particularly lucrative 'official' quest over and over, or killing enemies that have good drops in an area over and over for hours. Yeah, a player using only frost attacks and optimizing their gear to resist fire will probably have an easy time farming player dungeons full of fire elementals -- but they could just farm fire elementals in official dungeons / in the world for the same effect.
Really, it's simple - the things that make it possible to have 'farming' content is due to the Foundry
A. being open to all players
B. allowing players to create content with rewards comparable to official content
C. being (presumably) flexible enough to optimize enemy encounters for max rewards / least risk
You can NOT remove any of these, or you remove the entire point of the Foundry in the first place. City of Heroes decided to cripple C, which ended up hurting 'legitimate' story arc writers just as much in many cases.
The other way to 'cripple' farming in COH was to nerf specific enemy XP (or make specific enemies harder) based on datamined information. In each case it took less than a day for the 'farmers' to come up with another optimal configuration, and suddenly thousands of new farming arcs appeared in the system -- with the thousands of the pre-nerf ones still there and clogging up the interface, making it even harder for story-seekers to find their arcs. Sounds like a lose-lose situation to me.
Now exploitation is different, of course... and unfortunately it can mean the Foundry losing some of its flexibility to address the exploits. As a simple example, a player may be able to set up two enemy groups that fight each other with their power calibrated so one of them kills the other, but ends up with very little hp left -- then the player can swoop in, use an AOE attack and rake in massive xp at no risk. These should be solved at a basic game systems level (ie. if an enemy didn't start at 100% hp when a player engaged them, scale their reward xp appropriately), but the easier solution is to remove the option for enemy groups to fight each other in player-created content. Or if there are special geometry configurations that allow a player to kite a melee enemy indefinitely at no risk due to the AI not being up to the task, it's a lot easier to disallow the creation of custom geometry in player-created dungeons instead of making the AI more aware that it's being kited. Etc.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Good luck on that one, tolerance is a dirty word to most people. They are going to flail and rail against anything they don't like. I do it with the idiots that keep pissing and moaning about this or that is pay to win, I am sorry to say. People can't just play the game they want and enjoy it. They have to start witch hunts against perceived slights. They will say the farmers are ruining the economy and the grinders are ruining the game by leveling to fast. They will whine stamp their feet and scream its not fair its not fair. The game isn't even out and it is already happening. Eventually they will whine and scream so much that the coolest feature of this game (the Foundry in my opinion) will be restricted into uselessness and then they will cry about being so restrictive and sucking. It is human nature I am again sad to say.
Such is the way of the world. We can only hope knee jerk reactions are few, if any, in changes made in time.
Tiko
When you exploit, you are violating the ToS and the agreement you agree to before you start the game. That is why exploiting and farming are different - taking action against exploiting and reporting them actively is justified and expected of you.
Farming - as long as not exploiting - is a playstyle, even when game was not made to be played like that.
*looks at paper again*
Oh, DON'T take it too seriously.
Nevermind.
I figured I'd post this^ since its relevant to this discussion and there's a lot of speculation going on.
Its kind of a long presentation about UGS in general, but it explains a lot about what kinds of measures the devs have taken into account to determine UGC rewards in NWO. The actual UGC Rewards part starts around 22 mins in (you can jump right into that section by clicking from the list on the side), but they also cover a lot of background details at the begining, reviewing UGC systems leading up to NWO, which may give a hint about the dev's thought process going into this.
Oh you found it, very cool. I have been looking for that again. Watched it once and forgot where it was. Yeah that was a very good video. It was the one I had referenced earlier on one of my posts.
Yeah, I had that bookmarked since like a month ago. Don't know why I didn't link it since my first post. I guess I forgot I had it at the time >.>
For people interested in the Foundry I highly recommend watching it. It is very long but I found it very informative and cool
I'm right there with you... I have the utmost faith in the average gamers desire to be spoon fed and handheld.
You don't see it as plausible that a majority of the people wouldn't game the system if Cryptic made stuff for people to do? STO became a game that people log in for about an hour, just to do dailies, because that's pretty much all there is to do, and has been for a VERY long time. That is who a majority of the people doing those exploit missions are - people just wanting to get their dailies done in as short a time as possible - check out the post history of the people who MADE these missions on the STO forums.
Read above. The exploit missions don't "get stuff fast," since the dailies they're connected to are on a 20-hour cooldown timer anyway. You're just getting your mission done in ten minutes versus an hour, still having to wait another 20 hours to do it again.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be UGC in a DnD game - far from it. I've never played a PnP game using an official published module. That being said, if Cryptic is worried about exploiters, they better actually make some content, since nothing that I've seen suggests anything other than a very vast majority of content production responsibility being passed on to users, just like in CO and STO.
No I don't see it as plausable or they wouldn't be gaming the system right now they would be trying other content that players are making. So if Cryptic puts out new dailies that take an hour to completely instead of 10 minutes people are going to flock to them and stop using the exploit missions? A few people maybe but in my opinion the vast majority would just keep cranking out their least time for greatest reward missions.