Question:- Can I do the above when said "fix" is not implemented? Answer:- Yes.
Question:- Can I do the above when said "fix" has been implemented? Answer:- No.
Can I exploit the system after above mentioned fix is implemented if I want to? Answer:- Yes. {Not going into details how}
EDIT:-
As most players have a preference for simpler quests, preferable handheld ones with golden path - the foundry seems to be catering to them. However that is in initial period when people have not got bored with same missions. After spending enough time with game (like a few months) they would look for advanced scripting quests like above. If the features that make quests like above possible have been removed already, there will be no way to make such quests later which is the real purpose of foundry.
Also by removing such features, many author who are there to make only unorthodox quests would have left already. Even if they include such features later it will be of much less use to them.
I am not seeing how the fix listed above limits this example. This is only 2 spawns in the same spot. According to that solution this would be able to be done providing the foundry allows you to spawn specific monsters by a trigger like that (but this has nothing to do with the exploit fix, it is a matter of how robust the scripting is). Now if it was 5 or 6 different possible different spawns then it would not and that would be a limitation. But not one that I think a creative mind would get around. While you say it doesn't stop the exploit you have in mind it does stop others. There is no one fix for all possible exploits and yes that fix does fix some exploits they have already seen in STO.
Any fixes put in place to stop exploiting are going to limit the foundry in some way. Is the solution to just not put any limits in place and allow rampant exploiting to make the foundry the most versatile it can be? I only have my opinion on this, but personally I feel the damage caused by rampant exploits will cause more damage to the game than the benefits from a more versatile foundry would be. Creating content in the foundry is my biggest draw to this game so I hope it is robust but I can see the dangers the foundry presents.
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zaphtasticMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited February 2013
Sorry in advance for the huge post, but this is probably the most important area of the game for me.
I'm going to withhold my comments on how the Foundry works until I actually have a chance to test it. I'll just list a few major problems from my ~3.5 years of Mission Architect (COH) authoring experience that are present in any such system independent of the actual implementation of the tools. Wall of text incoming!
"Abusive" and farming content
I have written two fairly lengthy posts about this here and [url=http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?33891-Let-us-make-a-pact-concerning-Foundry-and-its-rating-system&p=592711&viewfull=1#post592711
]here[/url], so I won't repeat it here. TLDR: you should expect most of the Foundry content to consist of low-risk high-reward 'farming' quests that will have FAR more plays and 5-star votes than any story-focused quest. Farmers are NOT the enemy, and they should not be considered as such -- even if you personally dislike farming (I do, I don't plan on playing any such quests myself, and my own storyarcs in COH were heavily story-focused).
Old authors vs. new authors
Quests and missions that have been there since the get-go (whether that 'get-go' is alpha, beta, or launch depends on when quests are wiped) will enjoy a significant head-start and amass a VERY sizable number of plays. Basically, if you're there at the launch rush (EVERY MMO has a launch rush with a sharp drop-off in players thereafter, NW will be no different), you'll get far more exposure than someone who comes in 3 years later. In Dec 2012, the only story-focused arcs with more than 100 plays were either the ones hand-picked by the devs, or ones that were made in the first ~2 months of the Mission Architect (as a reminder, the MA was implemented in April 2009). There were maybe 2-3 exceptions of heavily marketed and super-popular story arcs that broke this trend, and that's not an exaggeration -- someone on the MA forums kept track of the Hall of Fame (story arcs with 999+ plays and a 5-star average) and there was precisely ONE arc that had an ID over 200000 (meaning it was created more than 2 months after the system went live). I personally had a storyarc that I considered 'decent' made in Aug 2009 (by that time a lot of people have stopped using the MA to search for stories, but it was still 'a thing'), and it picked up about 70 ratings by the end of 2012. A (IMO much better) storyarc I made in Oct 2011 had 18 plays by Dec 2012, and I can account for 15 of those as guildies / friends / arc reviewers I specifically asked to play the arc. Both of these arcs had a 5-star average, btw.
What does this mean? If you're a new author, it's going to be rough to 'break in', which can severely hamper enthusiasm and the influx of new blood. I've played many, many story arcs in COH that had 0 or 1 plays and were languishing in the middle of nowhere on the list -- and they were GREAT arcs, better than some of the ones with 5-star averages and 200+ plays! How disheartened would you feel if you spent several weeks putting an awesome quest together and nobody played it because you're a newcomer and your quest was played by 1 person who voted 4? Cults of personality are nice and all, but arc rating should not devolve into a simple popularity and 'who was here first' contest.
Voting cliques
Voting cliques are bad, period -- whether it's 50 people upvoting a quest made by their friend (just because he's a friend) or 10 people deliberately 1-starring quests made by people they dislike on the forums (or just random people they want to grief). This was a problem with COH, but was overshadowed by other unfortunate shortcomings of the system.
Solutions
I've seen some promising things in the NW Foundry. There's a "waiting for review" queue of new quests, which is good. The main 'browse' view seems to be a simple popularity rating, which is not so good. Major websites dealing with user ratings (amazon, stack overflow, slashdot, whatever) have mostly figured out reliable ways to tabulate ratings. Weighted ratings, making ratings themselves rated, identifying anomalous voting patterns, etc etc. It will be interesting to see if the NW Foundry has something like these. Right now it looks manageable because there are only 10 or so campaigns / standalone quests. What'll happen when there are 500000+? (COH had 300000 story arcs in the first 4 months, and a storyarc is a multi-mission construct that is similar to a NW campaign)
The single most important focus of the Foundry (which mitigates basically all of the concerns I listed above) should be to let everyone find content they want. There'll be (a lot of) farming content. There'll be story-focused content. There'll be content targeted at friends and guildies. There'll be content designed to provide hard combat challenges / bragging rights. There'll be content to demonstrate Foundry functions. There'll be silly content, serious content, blah blah. I've seen tags in the interface, but are lists such as "similar quests to this one", "your friends who liked this quest liked these quests too", and in general "your friends' favorite quests" planned? I'm sure there are many other ways to make sure people find what they need.
I'm positive that they mention the vetting process in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pn7iU4EwTc but I am at work right now so cannot confirm or give at what time etc
If I remember correctly he says that once you complete your work it does not get published immediately but is vetted by alpha testers before being approved, I'm sure they are not testing for quality of story or spelling etc but for exploits and bugs and just downright horrible people that would set up an area to insta-gib anyone who enters etc
I guess it is just one of those things to "see how it goes" and it will no doubt come down to the community to some degree police themselves by reporting and not using the exploits.
Based on my experience with the CoH Mission Architect, I am very, very skeptical about any manual vetting process simply because of scale.
Vetting processes with a small number of "QC" players work when the pool of content creators is static and controlled. Right now there's a really small number of missions in the beta, so at first glance it looks like it would work. However, if NW is popular at all (and I think we all want it to be), there are going to be over 10000 quests made in the first few weeks -- and that's a very conservative estimate. You can't hire enough people to deal with that, which means 'vetting' will fall back to just looking at the star rating, which inevitably leads to people playing the already-popular missions in the first 2-3 pages and ignoring everything else.
Edit: Actually now that I watched that video, all that talk about incentives worries me. It's very likely to result in a handful of 'rockstar' content creators (probably ones who had the opportunity to create decent-quality missions first), and create a huge barrier-of-entry to new authors. I hope to be proven wrong!
I do understand the concerns raised here but in reality I don't think it will benefit anyone to exploit the kind of things they can get in foundry levels, it will be up to the community to report any exploits that get through the net and we just have to hope right now that cryptic/pwe will act and ban the author etc.
On a slightly different note (but related) does anybody know wether any big fan sites or gaming sites are going to have a foundry review section? seperate to the in game foundry level reviewer for people to chat about foundry level stuff and give opinions and reviews of created content, I have a horrible feeling some of the best stuff will be buried from the top ten list or whatever before i get to try them or even know they exist.
(snip)
On a slightly different note (but related) does anybody know wether any big fan sites or gaming sites are going to have a foundry review section? seperate to the in game foundry level reviewer for people to chat about foundry level stuff and give opinions and reviews of created content, I have a horrible feeling some of the best stuff will be buried from the top ten list or whatever before i get to try them or even know they exist.
Going from memory here -- but in COH there was a "COH Mission Review" site (with a dedicated reviewer who did a LOT of reviews, ~200 or so over the 3.5 years), a regular weekly internet radio event where the hosts reviewed story arcs (AEtertainment Tonight), there were several forum threads showcasing "good story arcs", there were unofficial contests, and there were several ingame channels. Of course a lot of arc authors used the forums as an advertisement method, too.
Initiatives like this are great, but (there's always a but!) they are not going to be used by the overwhelming majority of the playerbase. I remember reading a quote from a MMO dev somewhere that less than 2% of the playerbase even views the forums (never mind posting), and the same is true for fansites. Still, such channels and sites are a great idea to foster a good community between Foundry authors (who are a lot more likely to make use of these channels).
Edit: Also, keep in mind that one man's chaff is another man's treasure. Fansite communities, review site communities, or even the official forum community will eventually have a consensus of "we really like these 100 or so quests" (out of a pool of 500000+, mind). The real value of such sites in my mind comes from identifying great lesser-known / obscure quests and helping to make them popular (of course it'd be even better if the Foundry browse/search system assisted them in this).
The foundry is the most exciting part of NWO for me I'm really looking forward to it I already have my first 3 quest chains plotted out with characters and everything (I may have issues)
Do you think it is worth downloading STO to try out the foundry there if i've never tried it before? how much do you have to do on STO before you can use the foundry? and how similar will the 2 tools be? any help will be appreciated thanks
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tykytysMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
It would be interesting to see a Vetting process for the final version of a quest. Something like a Cryptic Seal of Authenticity for a truly epic quest that allowed a really nice reward if the content deserved it.
Lock it from further changes and set your baby free into the world after all the revisions...nice.
I like this idea. Either via community vote or direct developer involvement, the modules that are judged "best" get special loot. Very quickly, these modules will crowd out the majority of the XP farms. Of course there'd have to be a way to keep these top-quality missions from pushing out the slightly-lesser-quality-but-still-fun missions that don't award better loot. So it'd take some work and tuning to make it happen. Sounds good, though, as it will be another way to encourage creative modules and discourage XP grinding.
As of creation I believe there is only one account/adventure. However very likely it is not forbidden to ask people to join on creation of a Foundry quest together like nobody cares if you discuss your adventure with other creator alive with both video and voice communication. In theory a group of creators could divide the task. However it would be still that only one account would get praise and reward for creating that adventure. There is one account/player.
You are correct that there is currently no ability to collaborate on foundry missions from within the game(two different accounts working on the same mission either at the same time or independently, obviously two people could work on the same mission if they shared one account.) And such ability will not be available at launch(as it currently stands). However, during the NOCS interview one of the developers stated that the ability to collaborate on foundry missions in game is something the devs are actively interesting in implementing and are working on a system to make it able to be done.
Sorry Zaphtastic I hadn't read your post when I posted just now that was very interesting thankyou
I would still like an external review site to help seperate the "wheat from the chaff" as it were in regards to finding intersting story quests etc
STO has a site called starbaseugc that hosts foundrycentric podcasts, as well as mission listings(mostly story based), and even a chatroom. I can tell you that there is a similar site planned for Neverwinter(and it even already exists in preliminary form), but I'm not sure that the website's name is public information as it is still very much a work in progress.
From what I have heard you are not correct about the loot. The loot you get from end bosses and chests depends on a lot of things. Some of those things are number of people in the group, how many enemies you killed and their strength, and time. Not sure if there are other factors as well.
As I understand it, for foundry missions, what you've stated is not the case. The way in which they determine "difficulty" and reward for the quest is strictly through average play time. In that way a storycentric mission and a combat grinder give you the same XP and chest rewards. This is also the case if there's 5 people in your group or 1. In that way I guess its better to run foundry missions that are combat grinders with large groups as you can clear them faster without affecting the average play time too much(as you're just one group of potentially thousands.) If you have specific information to the contrary, I'd love to read, see it, because I don't think I've seen it in anything I've read/heard.
Now as far as "end bosses" are concerned. They don't exist in the foundry as such. There are only mob types. One of these mob types is an "elite" mob(or some such, not sure the actual title). These mobs have better drops but are harder. It doesn't matter if you kill 100 trash mobs before you kill one or 0. They still drop the same stuff, which is based on the individual mob's difficulty(which is a combination of its mob difficulty level and creature type.) Now of course these mobs can be placed in mob groups which have difficulty set based on types of mobs contained within, but that's the only situation where a mob's drops are based on other mob's, when they are in a group together. At least this is how I understand it to work, again if you have specific information to the contrary I'd love to hear/read it.
this is an interesting thread for sure. And it needs to be discussed.
If the reviews are static, I can see this problem with early content getting the most plays. But what if the rating was time-based. Ie: "The past 2 months, this content has been played by HAMSTER players who avaraged 3.5 with a spread of 3 and 5. The mean etc etc".
Would that solve one of the problems stated above?
The Cryptic team could simply label it. exploit, story-arch, wipe-fest, etc. Then we could choose what area we are searching in.
I am sure that many players will opt for a moderator role and will police the UGC as much as possible. But I agree that story-archs should be highlighted. As I posted somewhere else, cryptic could have monthly competitions to highlight new authors to counter-balance the persona-cults that will invariably grow from a system like this.
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ashrox10Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
cryptic could have monthly competitions to highlight new authors to counter-balance the persona-cults that will invariably grow from a system like this.
I like this idea. Either via community vote or direct developer involvement, the modules that are judged "best" get special loot. Very quickly, these modules will crowd out the majority of the XP farms. Of course there'd have to be a way to keep these top-quality missions from pushing out the slightly-lesser-quality-but-still-fun missions that don't award better loot. So it'd take some work and tuning to make it happen. Sounds good, though, as it will be another way to encourage creative modules and discourage XP grinding.
Again going back to COH, this was intended from the start -- "Hall of Fame" story arcs that had 999+ plays and a 5-star average dropped normal loot instead of tickets. There were also hand-picked "Dev's Choice" story arcs that dropped normal loot instead of tickets. An additional advantage of these two prestigious categories was that they were in the first 4-5 pages of the "browse" interface, so they got FAR more exposure than anything else. Also, if an author got one of their arcs honored this way, it no longer counted against their story arc limit (which was up to 8 arcs total in 2012)
The problem is that this'd just highlight the early birds (see my earlier post for specifics). Also, ironically, most of the Hall of Fame arcs (999+ plays, 5-star average) were story-less farms... which shows what most people actually used the Mission Architect for. Again, I have no problem with farms, just showing that "beware what you wish for"!
----
this is an interesting thread for sure. And it needs to be discussed.
If the reviews are static, I can see this problem with early content getting the most plays. But what if the rating was time-based. Ie: "The past 2 months, this content has been played by HAMSTER players who avaraged 3.5 with a spread of 3 and 5. The mean etc etc".
Would that solve one of the problems stated above?
The Cryptic team could simply label it. exploit, story-arch, wipe-fest, etc. Then we could choose what area we are searching in.
I am sure that many players will opt for a moderator role and will police the UGC as much as possible. But I agree that story-archs should be highlighted. As I posted somewhere else, cryptic could have monthly competitions to highlight new authors to counter-balance the persona-cults that will invariably grow from a system like this.
Not a bad proposal, but the snowball effect of just having the arc on the first few pages during that time cannot be underestimated. The term 'four-star hell' in COH was very real; in fact, 2 years after the MA's release, even having a 5-star average with less than 40 plays (basically impossible unless it was a super-popular farm or you had a massive group of friends to play it) relegated you to page 50+, aka "nobody will ever see this" land. Even if the mission/quest is going to sink back down unless it gets new plays regularly (which is what you are suggesting, if I understand correctly), just the fact that it's still in the first ~10 pages is going to get new players to play it instead of the "no-name" missions on page 50... and this effect will snowball through the forums / other venues with people recommending just these missions to everyone else. Still, it could be a start.
Labels are a must, and they must be used intelligently. Labels should not just be about things like 'solo friendly' (though that should be included too), but should also highlight what kind of playstyle the mission is aimed at: story, dungeon, challenge, achievements (if achievements are indeed possible to get in Foundry, there are going to be a ton of quests focusing on getting them as efficiently as possible), etc.
Regarding contests and such: IMO the biggest caveat is that any process that involves actual manual effort from Cryptic's side to qualify ALL content is bound to fail. It's just scaling -- there's no way to cope with tens of thousands of story arcs (admittedly most of them being half-finished / unmaintained / just plain bad... see also: Sturgeon's Law). There were yearly (sort of) official Mission Architect competitions in COH where the main MA developer decided on a theme and some other restrictions (such as "a level 1-10 mission about someone losing their superpower"), authors submitted their arcs, the dev(s?) played through the arcs, and finally came up with the winners. Now, this was enough to highlight maybe 5 arcs per year (along with some minor attention on the others due to forum activity) out of a pool of 500000+. Plus, even though the MA developer had the best of intentions, it's still only one person (or maybe a few colleagues) that may not necessarily find the same sort of content good as the majority of the playerbase. Indeed, in later contests there was some bitterness between MA authors about some authors "pandering to the judges"... I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.
Hmm. Zaphtastic's posts actually make me somewhat concerned about the Foundry now. If I spend weeks working on a complex, story-driven adventure with tons of dialogue options and branching choices and carefully-designed environments, but then it's just way down on some massive list where no one ever sees or plays it . . . that's going to be a real bummer.
Hmm. Zaphtastic's posts actually make me somewhat concerned about the Foundry now. If I spend weeks working on a complex, story-driven adventure with tons of dialogue options and branching choices and carefully-designed environments, but then it's just way down on some massive list where no one ever sees or plays it . . . that's going to be a real bummer.
Yep this is depressing. They really need to jump in on this one before game launches to make sure all new content created has a decent chance to be noticed.
THIS IS CLERIC AGGRO IN BW3
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ashrox10Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
Hmm. Zaphtastic's posts actually make me somewhat concerned about the Foundry now. If I spend weeks working on a complex, story-driven adventure with tons of dialogue options and branching choices and carefully-designed environments, but then it's just way down on some massive list where no one ever sees or plays it . . . that's going to be a real bummer.
I suppose promotion through chat channels / forums / guilds should help out here.
I understand your point though.
Vuxadin@Kaelangx on Mindflayer.
PvE Enthusiast.
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zaphtasticMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited February 2013
Bah, nobody should feel disheartened -- after all, there's still time left on the clock, and for all we know, Cryptic may have already thought of the same issues already and came up with the appropriate solutions. I'm just recounting my experiences with the COH MA that I think to be typical of user-generated content with a truly massive userbase that's much less asymmetric than typical mod communities and such.
As for me, I have much higher hopes for the Neverwinter Foundry than the COH MA because it's a much more integral part of the game... this is independent of its actual capabilities, which look pretty promising so far. I'm sure the same applies to the STO Foundry.
I suppose promotion through chat channels / forums / guilds should help out here.
I understand your point though.
Yeah, promotion was always sort of a touchy thing in the MA.
Forum advertisements were the standard, and they didn't count for much (I got barely any plays as a result of advertising my story arcs in the various threads dedicated to this). If you poured a lot of extra effort into it and made video trailers / comic covers and such, it'd probably get noticed a lot more; this isn't within the means of most authors, though. Getting good reviews in reviewer threads got a bit more attention -- from other authors. Ditto with unofficial contests, podcasts and the like. Some people actually paid people in-game money or items to play their arcs (either directly or by holding a trivia contest where you had to have played the arc in order to know the answers to the questions), which was sort of a grey zone IMO; I would never do it, but it was probably a lot more effective than other paths. Finally, if you had a strong community presence (this goes back to the cult-of-personality bit), you'd probably get a lot more forum dwellers playing your arcs.
Anyway, the main problem with forums and fansites is that most of the players won't even know about them, much less actively contribute. They're great for getting feedback from other authors and active community members, but honestly, that's a really really really small minority of the playerbase.
tabris82Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited February 2013
Some answers for this questions can be found here, where cryptic states how they will handle user generated content in neverwinter with some data about the foundry in STO.
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zaphtasticMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited February 2013
I can't watch that right now [at work], but if that's the one where they talk about exploits and farming, that's not the issue here. The issue is making a rating system as well as a search/browse system that scales to hundreds of thousands of UGC missions, and allowing players of ALL playstyles - whether it be farming, story-focused missions, challenge missions, etc - be able to find content they like (or will probably like).
Your for instance is a big concern, and in my opinion something that got brushed off way too easily by Andy the developer during the interview he did with the community. He basically said, well that's not really an exploit because you're still killing the mobs...but also said, we're going to rely on the community(not exclusively) to tell us what the exploits are and fix accordingly(and pull foundry modules). The second part is good to hear, but the first statement seemed pretty odd when I heard it.
It is also worth noting that the problem is, however, slightly alleviated by the fact that foundry content gives rewards based on average play time for the mission, and even extremely difficult mobs give very little XP compared to XP given for turning it quests.
The foundry quests i played gave terrible "rewards". They were far worse in comparison to those given for game quests of comparable difficulty and length, being essentially worthless (grey unusable weapons for example, after the Dweem temple quest).
I really need some help everyone. I am making a large foundry (My first too) and I need some assistance with the good guys! The guards basically cower in fear, and don't fight back. How do I change this?
Goddess Uniique, lvl 60 DC.
PinkSugar, lvl 60 CW.
Baby Cakes, lvl 60 GWF.
*******, lvl 60 TR.
Premium Juicebox, lvl 60 CW.
Pink Exxxtacy, Ranger There is NO pvp in Neverwinter.
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adinosiiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,294Arc User
edited September 2013
The big problem with the attempts to limit exploitation possibilities is that it makes it very hard to make foundries that give meaningful rewards - you cannot have really challenging bosses, you cannot have resource nodes or specific "reward" loot, even when players would feel that they have earned it.
What this means is that the reward/work ratio for foundries is always going to be lower than if you just wander around an appropriate level area and kill everything in sight.
Having said that...this thread was really dead a long time ago and no need to resurrect it.
Not reading the whole thread..but I had a few things to say about the foundry:
I generally do not run any foundry quests let alone the daily foundry. Why? There isnt really any point to it. I am afforded two hours per night to play, if I don't split that time with another game. Currently I need to get my dailies done because I want to progress through the campaign. Leaves me with 1.5 hrs or so currently. So then I can go after the 4 foundry missions for the daily but I'll choose the same one or two that i know are super quick, just to get the carrot at the end..the AD once I complete four runs.
For me, there is no completing foundry missions for the sake of the playing for fun. And the reward at the end of a single foundry misison is always utter junk.
It would be beneficial if there was something useful at the end of a foundry mission. Even if you aren't doing the daily, and just wanted to run a foundry mission. It would be great ifthere was a nice time vs reward at the end. If I spend 15 minutes in a foundry, I should get low amounts of reward. If I spend 45 minutes in a foundry, I should get a lot more. But then how does one prevent exploiting this? I could easily start a 15 minute foundry mission, kill almost everything, run around literally in circles for 40 minutes and open the chest at the end for great loot.
Overall, something needs to be done to help the foundry. If there was a podcast that explained changes, I missed it. But I would like a risk vs reward, time vs reward experience and I want to be rewarded for doing foundry quests outside of the daily foundry. I want to DESIRE to do these foundry quests because some of them are great. But sadly, outside of the four each day, theres no point. And theres no point in doing any foundry mission longer than 15 minutes.
I don't really see power leveling from the foundry as a huge problem. The fact that it is it is easy to hit 60 in a week doing regular quests. You don't even have to finish the regular content to do it. And since there are no good drops in the foundry, that exploit won't happen. The only real exploit, if you'd call it that, is short 15 min runs to get the daily. That's why @60 you need to do 4 runs for daily, so you're still spending an hour grinding.
Comments
I am not seeing how the fix listed above limits this example. This is only 2 spawns in the same spot. According to that solution this would be able to be done providing the foundry allows you to spawn specific monsters by a trigger like that (but this has nothing to do with the exploit fix, it is a matter of how robust the scripting is). Now if it was 5 or 6 different possible different spawns then it would not and that would be a limitation. But not one that I think a creative mind would get around. While you say it doesn't stop the exploit you have in mind it does stop others. There is no one fix for all possible exploits and yes that fix does fix some exploits they have already seen in STO.
Any fixes put in place to stop exploiting are going to limit the foundry in some way. Is the solution to just not put any limits in place and allow rampant exploiting to make the foundry the most versatile it can be? I only have my opinion on this, but personally I feel the damage caused by rampant exploits will cause more damage to the game than the benefits from a more versatile foundry would be. Creating content in the foundry is my biggest draw to this game so I hope it is robust but I can see the dangers the foundry presents.
I'm going to withhold my comments on how the Foundry works until I actually have a chance to test it. I'll just list a few major problems from my ~3.5 years of Mission Architect (COH) authoring experience that are present in any such system independent of the actual implementation of the tools. Wall of text incoming!
"Abusive" and farming content
I have written two fairly lengthy posts about this here and [url=http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?33891-Let-us-make-a-pact-concerning-Foundry-and-its-rating-system&p=592711&viewfull=1#post592711
]here[/url], so I won't repeat it here. TLDR: you should expect most of the Foundry content to consist of low-risk high-reward 'farming' quests that will have FAR more plays and 5-star votes than any story-focused quest. Farmers are NOT the enemy, and they should not be considered as such -- even if you personally dislike farming (I do, I don't plan on playing any such quests myself, and my own storyarcs in COH were heavily story-focused).
Old authors vs. new authors
Quests and missions that have been there since the get-go (whether that 'get-go' is alpha, beta, or launch depends on when quests are wiped) will enjoy a significant head-start and amass a VERY sizable number of plays. Basically, if you're there at the launch rush (EVERY MMO has a launch rush with a sharp drop-off in players thereafter, NW will be no different), you'll get far more exposure than someone who comes in 3 years later. In Dec 2012, the only story-focused arcs with more than 100 plays were either the ones hand-picked by the devs, or ones that were made in the first ~2 months of the Mission Architect (as a reminder, the MA was implemented in April 2009). There were maybe 2-3 exceptions of heavily marketed and super-popular story arcs that broke this trend, and that's not an exaggeration -- someone on the MA forums kept track of the Hall of Fame (story arcs with 999+ plays and a 5-star average) and there was precisely ONE arc that had an ID over 200000 (meaning it was created more than 2 months after the system went live). I personally had a storyarc that I considered 'decent' made in Aug 2009 (by that time a lot of people have stopped using the MA to search for stories, but it was still 'a thing'), and it picked up about 70 ratings by the end of 2012. A (IMO much better) storyarc I made in Oct 2011 had 18 plays by Dec 2012, and I can account for 15 of those as guildies / friends / arc reviewers I specifically asked to play the arc. Both of these arcs had a 5-star average, btw.
What does this mean? If you're a new author, it's going to be rough to 'break in', which can severely hamper enthusiasm and the influx of new blood. I've played many, many story arcs in COH that had 0 or 1 plays and were languishing in the middle of nowhere on the list -- and they were GREAT arcs, better than some of the ones with 5-star averages and 200+ plays! How disheartened would you feel if you spent several weeks putting an awesome quest together and nobody played it because you're a newcomer and your quest was played by 1 person who voted 4? Cults of personality are nice and all, but arc rating should not devolve into a simple popularity and 'who was here first' contest.
Voting cliques
Voting cliques are bad, period -- whether it's 50 people upvoting a quest made by their friend (just because he's a friend) or 10 people deliberately 1-starring quests made by people they dislike on the forums (or just random people they want to grief). This was a problem with COH, but was overshadowed by other unfortunate shortcomings of the system.
Solutions
I've seen some promising things in the NW Foundry. There's a "waiting for review" queue of new quests, which is good. The main 'browse' view seems to be a simple popularity rating, which is not so good. Major websites dealing with user ratings (amazon, stack overflow, slashdot, whatever) have mostly figured out reliable ways to tabulate ratings. Weighted ratings, making ratings themselves rated, identifying anomalous voting patterns, etc etc. It will be interesting to see if the NW Foundry has something like these. Right now it looks manageable because there are only 10 or so campaigns / standalone quests. What'll happen when there are 500000+? (COH had 300000 story arcs in the first 4 months, and a storyarc is a multi-mission construct that is similar to a NW campaign)
The single most important focus of the Foundry (which mitigates basically all of the concerns I listed above) should be to let everyone find content they want. There'll be (a lot of) farming content. There'll be story-focused content. There'll be content targeted at friends and guildies. There'll be content designed to provide hard combat challenges / bragging rights. There'll be content to demonstrate Foundry functions. There'll be silly content, serious content, blah blah. I've seen tags in the interface, but are lists such as "similar quests to this one", "your friends who liked this quest liked these quests too", and in general "your friends' favorite quests" planned? I'm sure there are many other ways to make sure people find what they need.
----
Based on my experience with the CoH Mission Architect, I am very, very skeptical about any manual vetting process simply because of scale.
Vetting processes with a small number of "QC" players work when the pool of content creators is static and controlled. Right now there's a really small number of missions in the beta, so at first glance it looks like it would work. However, if NW is popular at all (and I think we all want it to be), there are going to be over 10000 quests made in the first few weeks -- and that's a very conservative estimate. You can't hire enough people to deal with that, which means 'vetting' will fall back to just looking at the star rating, which inevitably leads to people playing the already-popular missions in the first 2-3 pages and ignoring everything else.
Edit: Actually now that I watched that video, all that talk about incentives worries me. It's very likely to result in a handful of 'rockstar' content creators (probably ones who had the opportunity to create decent-quality missions first), and create a huge barrier-of-entry to new authors. I hope to be proven wrong!
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
On a slightly different note (but related) does anybody know wether any big fan sites or gaming sites are going to have a foundry review section? seperate to the in game foundry level reviewer for people to chat about foundry level stuff and give opinions and reviews of created content, I have a horrible feeling some of the best stuff will be buried from the top ten list or whatever before i get to try them or even know they exist.
I would still like an external review site to help seperate the "wheat from the chaff" as it were in regards to finding intersting story quests etc
Initiatives like this are great, but (there's always a but!) they are not going to be used by the overwhelming majority of the playerbase. I remember reading a quote from a MMO dev somewhere that less than 2% of the playerbase even views the forums (never mind posting), and the same is true for fansites. Still, such channels and sites are a great idea to foster a good community between Foundry authors (who are a lot more likely to make use of these channels).
Edit: Also, keep in mind that one man's chaff is another man's treasure. Fansite communities, review site communities, or even the official forum community will eventually have a consensus of "we really like these 100 or so quests" (out of a pool of 500000+, mind). The real value of such sites in my mind comes from identifying great lesser-known / obscure quests and helping to make them popular (of course it'd be even better if the Foundry browse/search system assisted them in this).
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Do you think it is worth downloading STO to try out the foundry there if i've never tried it before? how much do you have to do on STO before you can use the foundry? and how similar will the 2 tools be? any help will be appreciated thanks
I like this idea. Either via community vote or direct developer involvement, the modules that are judged "best" get special loot. Very quickly, these modules will crowd out the majority of the XP farms. Of course there'd have to be a way to keep these top-quality missions from pushing out the slightly-lesser-quality-but-still-fun missions that don't award better loot. So it'd take some work and tuning to make it happen. Sounds good, though, as it will be another way to encourage creative modules and discourage XP grinding.
If you can do it with 6 spawns - I will respect you.
If you can do it with 2 mobs ever, I will bow down to you and worship you.
I am talking about myself there. I need at least 6 (possibly 8) mobs to do it.The keyword there was me - what I can do. I cannot speak for others.
You are correct that there is currently no ability to collaborate on foundry missions from within the game(two different accounts working on the same mission either at the same time or independently, obviously two people could work on the same mission if they shared one account.) And such ability will not be available at launch(as it currently stands). However, during the NOCS interview one of the developers stated that the ability to collaborate on foundry missions in game is something the devs are actively interesting in implementing and are working on a system to make it able to be done.
STO has a site called starbaseugc that hosts foundrycentric podcasts, as well as mission listings(mostly story based), and even a chatroom. I can tell you that there is a similar site planned for Neverwinter(and it even already exists in preliminary form), but I'm not sure that the website's name is public information as it is still very much a work in progress.
As I understand it, for foundry missions, what you've stated is not the case. The way in which they determine "difficulty" and reward for the quest is strictly through average play time. In that way a storycentric mission and a combat grinder give you the same XP and chest rewards. This is also the case if there's 5 people in your group or 1. In that way I guess its better to run foundry missions that are combat grinders with large groups as you can clear them faster without affecting the average play time too much(as you're just one group of potentially thousands.) If you have specific information to the contrary, I'd love to read, see it, because I don't think I've seen it in anything I've read/heard.
Now as far as "end bosses" are concerned. They don't exist in the foundry as such. There are only mob types. One of these mob types is an "elite" mob(or some such, not sure the actual title). These mobs have better drops but are harder. It doesn't matter if you kill 100 trash mobs before you kill one or 0. They still drop the same stuff, which is based on the individual mob's difficulty(which is a combination of its mob difficulty level and creature type.) Now of course these mobs can be placed in mob groups which have difficulty set based on types of mobs contained within, but that's the only situation where a mob's drops are based on other mob's, when they are in a group together. At least this is how I understand it to work, again if you have specific information to the contrary I'd love to hear/read it.
Neverwinter Official Wiki - http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/
If the reviews are static, I can see this problem with early content getting the most plays. But what if the rating was time-based. Ie: "The past 2 months, this content has been played by HAMSTER players who avaraged 3.5 with a spread of 3 and 5. The mean etc etc".
Would that solve one of the problems stated above?
The Cryptic team could simply label it. exploit, story-arch, wipe-fest, etc. Then we could choose what area we are searching in.
I am sure that many players will opt for a moderator role and will police the UGC as much as possible. But I agree that story-archs should be highlighted. As I posted somewhere else, cryptic could have monthly competitions to highlight new authors to counter-balance the persona-cults that will invariably grow from a system like this.
This would be a great idea.
Map of the Month for example
PvE Enthusiast.
The problem is that this'd just highlight the early birds (see my earlier post for specifics). Also, ironically, most of the Hall of Fame arcs (999+ plays, 5-star average) were story-less farms... which shows what most people actually used the Mission Architect for. Again, I have no problem with farms, just showing that "beware what you wish for"!
---- Not a bad proposal, but the snowball effect of just having the arc on the first few pages during that time cannot be underestimated. The term 'four-star hell' in COH was very real; in fact, 2 years after the MA's release, even having a 5-star average with less than 40 plays (basically impossible unless it was a super-popular farm or you had a massive group of friends to play it) relegated you to page 50+, aka "nobody will ever see this" land. Even if the mission/quest is going to sink back down unless it gets new plays regularly (which is what you are suggesting, if I understand correctly), just the fact that it's still in the first ~10 pages is going to get new players to play it instead of the "no-name" missions on page 50... and this effect will snowball through the forums / other venues with people recommending just these missions to everyone else. Still, it could be a start.
Labels are a must, and they must be used intelligently. Labels should not just be about things like 'solo friendly' (though that should be included too), but should also highlight what kind of playstyle the mission is aimed at: story, dungeon, challenge, achievements (if achievements are indeed possible to get in Foundry, there are going to be a ton of quests focusing on getting them as efficiently as possible), etc.
Regarding contests and such: IMO the biggest caveat is that any process that involves actual manual effort from Cryptic's side to qualify ALL content is bound to fail. It's just scaling -- there's no way to cope with tens of thousands of story arcs (admittedly most of them being half-finished / unmaintained / just plain bad... see also: Sturgeon's Law). There were yearly (sort of) official Mission Architect competitions in COH where the main MA developer decided on a theme and some other restrictions (such as "a level 1-10 mission about someone losing their superpower"), authors submitted their arcs, the dev(s?) played through the arcs, and finally came up with the winners. Now, this was enough to highlight maybe 5 arcs per year (along with some minor attention on the others due to forum activity) out of a pool of 500000+. Plus, even though the MA developer had the best of intentions, it's still only one person (or maybe a few colleagues) that may not necessarily find the same sort of content good as the majority of the playerbase. Indeed, in later contests there was some bitterness between MA authors about some authors "pandering to the judges"... I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Yep this is depressing. They really need to jump in on this one before game launches to make sure all new content created has a decent chance to be noticed.
I suppose promotion through chat channels / forums / guilds should help out here.
I understand your point though.
PvE Enthusiast.
As for me, I have much higher hopes for the Neverwinter Foundry than the COH MA because it's a much more integral part of the game... this is independent of its actual capabilities, which look pretty promising so far. I'm sure the same applies to the STO Foundry. Yeah, promotion was always sort of a touchy thing in the MA.
Forum advertisements were the standard, and they didn't count for much (I got barely any plays as a result of advertising my story arcs in the various threads dedicated to this). If you poured a lot of extra effort into it and made video trailers / comic covers and such, it'd probably get noticed a lot more; this isn't within the means of most authors, though. Getting good reviews in reviewer threads got a bit more attention -- from other authors. Ditto with unofficial contests, podcasts and the like. Some people actually paid people in-game money or items to play their arcs (either directly or by holding a trivia contest where you had to have played the arc in order to know the answers to the questions), which was sort of a grey zone IMO; I would never do it, but it was probably a lot more effective than other paths. Finally, if you had a strong community presence (this goes back to the cult-of-personality bit), you'd probably get a lot more forum dwellers playing your arcs.
Anyway, the main problem with forums and fansites is that most of the players won't even know about them, much less actively contribute. They're great for getting feedback from other authors and active community members, but honestly, that's a really really really small minority of the playerbase.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
PinkSugar, lvl 60 CW.
Baby Cakes, lvl 60 GWF.
*******, lvl 60 TR.
Premium Juicebox, lvl 60 CW.
Pink Exxxtacy, Ranger
There is NO pvp in Neverwinter.
What this means is that the reward/work ratio for foundries is always going to be lower than if you just wander around an appropriate level area and kill everything in sight.
Having said that...this thread was really dead a long time ago and no need to resurrect it.
I generally do not run any foundry quests let alone the daily foundry. Why? There isnt really any point to it. I am afforded two hours per night to play, if I don't split that time with another game. Currently I need to get my dailies done because I want to progress through the campaign. Leaves me with 1.5 hrs or so currently. So then I can go after the 4 foundry missions for the daily but I'll choose the same one or two that i know are super quick, just to get the carrot at the end..the AD once I complete four runs.
For me, there is no completing foundry missions for the sake of the playing for fun. And the reward at the end of a single foundry misison is always utter junk.
It would be beneficial if there was something useful at the end of a foundry mission. Even if you aren't doing the daily, and just wanted to run a foundry mission. It would be great ifthere was a nice time vs reward at the end. If I spend 15 minutes in a foundry, I should get low amounts of reward. If I spend 45 minutes in a foundry, I should get a lot more. But then how does one prevent exploiting this? I could easily start a 15 minute foundry mission, kill almost everything, run around literally in circles for 40 minutes and open the chest at the end for great loot.
Overall, something needs to be done to help the foundry. If there was a podcast that explained changes, I missed it. But I would like a risk vs reward, time vs reward experience and I want to be rewarded for doing foundry quests outside of the daily foundry. I want to DESIRE to do these foundry quests because some of them are great. But sadly, outside of the four each day, theres no point. And theres no point in doing any foundry mission longer than 15 minutes.