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kylbox
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 2 Arc User
I have seen some videos on the foundry and I'm very excited about this feature. I had some questions..maybe these have been answered in other posts. I don't have beta access yet to experiment,but if you make an adventure, does it have to be accepted by cryptic neverwinter to have it go live? or can you create the adventure so a bunch of friends can run through the adventure..without it being published in the foundry. I think it would be cool to design an adventure for friends to run through. I figured if they allowed everyone to publish..all the adventures it would be overwhelming. any thoughts?
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The "Submit to Cryptic for Featuring" is a separate thing where they spotlight submitted and accepted UCG and promote it. When an item is "Featured by Cryptic" it become un-editable until you withdraw it from featuring.
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Also, your friends can find the mission, even before it has 5 positive ratings, via the "Dungeon Finder".
Finally, in my experience, the best missions are crafted not to be universally popular, but rather catered to a specific audience and set of friends. Those are my favorite UGCs of all, because they are catered specifically to you and your friends. It's my favorite thing about user generated content. I can target an adventure to a very specific and beloved audience of friends and collaborators.
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Hey Zeb, what is unacceptable content for the Foundry? Does all the content have to be Rated G or PG? I could easily violate any rating going straight to Rated R by say making something like children being kidnapped, enslaved and eaten by demons because of the "harm to children" part, with out a single swear, sex, or sexual situation. Have the terms of what is acceptable been spelled out in plain terms not subject to peoples differing morality and opinion for approval? For that matter what about Racism? There is plenty in the lore about Tieflings being discriminated against because of their demonic heritage.
I only ask you because, I know you have been creating a bunch in the foundry and might know the ins and outs of it.
(I have a lot more to say on this subject, but am holding it in until we get a Foundry forum... we needsss it precious
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
I think several hundred thousand quests is going to be quite and exaggeration. If I am remembering right STO had 50,000 at the 6 month mark and 95% of those in the first month or something like that. Now for the rest. I completely agree that it is going to be a daunting task. But it is my understanding that anyone can set the foundry to see "hidden" quests and rate them, there is just a disclaimer that you have to do it at "your own risk" and there might be "offensive material" in these quests. I am pretty sure it is not just a team of Cryptic people reviewing them.
It will work. UGC works out in several games now.
It will have problems at first, exploits will rise, bad content will slip through, but it's an iterative process, it will improve.
It will become one of the shining assets of this game. UGC is the future of gaming, particularly MMOs. There will be lots of bad content, there will lots of great content that nobody sees or realizes is good (and those authors will get frustrated and stop) and there will be some highly rated content that's cookie-cutter and almost exactly like Dev content (at which point, what's the point).
But for the most part, it will be a great and wonderful aspect of NWO.
Check out SHADOW on YouTube!
I would assume and consider that if it breaks the game's EULA and ToS, then it's a no no for the Foundry too.
You can report quests that violate the EULA and ToS. The system works great already and has been in practice for quite some time now with STO and CO. Neverwinter Online itself has incorporated new technologies and as well has a version of the Foundry System that is not used yet in STO or CO, so is far more advanced.
[ Support Center • Rules & Policies and Guidelines • ARC ToS • Guild Recruitment Guidelines | FR DM Since 1993 ]
Reread what he wrote. He was talking about the approval system not the whole UGC system.
So I guess that leaves "plain terms" out
--- Mind you, I'm writing this based on my Mission Architect experience - which had 300000 story arcs (roughly the equivalent of 750000 single Foundry missions) by the fourth month. There's no way a human-based quality control system can keep up with that. I think we can all agree that STO was sort of a niche game to start, and didn't mainly attract the sort of player that thrives on UGC -- unlike COH, which was very much about customization, and Neverwinter where UGC is a huge selling point and one of the main features of the game. I think Neverwinter will have much bigger numbers than even COH...
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Hey you might be right. I just doubt it. I guess we will see in a few months
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
A richer content system can fix this issue as all. Right now, the Foundry interface, including locating and rating, is pretty minimal. And as of yet there are no rewards attached to the Foundry, though there will be some added according to Cryptic. What they really need is a detailed system that promotes both players turning on the review of new content, as well as the general player base who can do a review on unhidden content.
Essentially, what needs to be done is reward players somehow to do quality reviews. Then to hepl facilitate this, there needs to be actual metrics out in the game that define a review. The current system of just a star rating followed by a quick paragraph of the reviewers thoughts is not enough.
There needs to be an actual standardized form that reviewers can optionally fill out (and this get credit towards these rewards). So on top of just the i'm in a hurry here is a quick paragraph of "good quest, needs more action", you have the option to do a detailed, category driven review that is standard. Stuff like story, level design, and more. This can then just all be put into a database and players can then then pick a quest to do based on several player determined factors. If they want an RP heavy, low combat quest, they can set up an advanced search and get a listing of quests that players reviewed and tagged with these specific qualities.
I do agree that ultimately players have to do the rating / reviewing themselves, since they're the only scalable part in this equation. But if the view/browse/rating interface is not up to the task (one of the most important questions is "how do you ensure all authors get a fair chance of getting their content played?"), this can't happen... see the two posts I linked above for some details. There ARE solutions -- actually the 'playstyle tagging' system I proposed isn't too different from what you mentioned here. Great minds think alike, etc etc.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
[ Support Center • Rules & Policies and Guidelines • ARC ToS • Guild Recruitment Guidelines | FR DM Since 1993 ]
The incentive system I was thinking of went along with how they mention doing the DM ranks. They mentioned maybe a special mount for so many quests made. I don't want anything that hampers the creation of quest. I am completely against any gating whatsoever in terms of the Foundry itself. However, stuff outside the Foundry, mounts, titles, trophies if the put in player housing, costumes, you know the typical fluff stuff, as well as maybe a more tangible reward in terms of Astral Diamonds for creating the best Quest of the week. And on the other end, maybe for every 10 quests you do a detailed review on you get a small amount of Astral Diamonds, or a goody package of portable alters and other consumables.
I too made a monster of a post about a Rating system that will allow for a powerful tool to fairly rate content, and then a better search tool that uses the new metrics to find quests for players based on what they want to play, rather then finding something with a high rating that is not too far down a list. It's really just a crude interpretation of what is floating around my head and obviously has it's flaws for many people, but it get a basic point across and illustrates how it can all work together.
Of course, the current option of just doing the basic star rating and short written review is available, but they will not get any credit towards these incentives (they want that snazzy mount, or some extra AD's you got to put in some effort and review the hard work other players did).
Further incentive will be for those who review under-reviewed content, as in, a quest that might be two weeks old, but only have 5 or 6 reviews, or a brand new quest that has only 1-2, are worth extra credit, in order to get a solid metric in the database of that quest.
It's also a cruel world, there will always be those that see the whole thing as unfair, because no one plays their content. But the key is to make it so the content that is underplayed is the genuine lower quality, poorly designed content, and the well written quest that only appeals to some of the playerbase, and therefore gets either poor reviews because 'its not my type of quest(see it all the time) or does get played at all because, because even if someone is LOOKING for say an Lore heavy, story driven quest with little content, they will pass right on by as ALL they see is a low rating by a handful of biased players. However, if a player, even biased, is given the chance to do a detailed review(again incentive is a powerful tool) then even if they hated the quest, they will hit the box that says "this quest is Lore heavy" or whatever.
Of course, none of this will happen anytime soon. If Cryptic wanted a more powerful review tool they would have made one, as a lot of these issues were raised in STO, which was their test-bed for the Foundry. Instead they made a slightly more streamlined Foundry browsing interface and left it at that.
Even the great lecture on the topic that Cryptic gave that someone posted, talks about how content generators crave attention and feedback, "that's their incentive", he says.
No, it's the incentive of those who crave attention for their stories, it's not what drives everyone who builds content. It's also not indicative, necessarily of good content. It's not that popular content isn't good, it usually is, it's just that so much content that never got attention, isn't bad. In fact, a lot of it is better than Cryptic realizes. The thing that made me wince the most about that lecture, was when the lecturer claimed there were 300,000 STO missions in their content creator, "but only 200 are any good".
That's just not true.
More accurately, only 200 got really popular and became considered good as a result.
I wouldn't mind, except that the way content gets popular can involve a lot of time and energy in self-promotion. You also need to coordinate players to play and rate your content within 24 hours of release. Because, it is time sensitive, because content with few ratings are generally displayed by the newest to oldest. So you need to get as many reviews and good ratings in 24 hours as possible, and if you reach a certain threshold (and your module is pretty good), you're pretty much set.
I don't know how you get around that. I really don't know.
But I think Cryptic shoots itself in the foot. It creates a system whereby you must continually self-promote and very quickly get attention to your hard work, otherwise it not only falls completely off the radar, Cryptic has the audacity to claim "it's not good".
They should study NWN culture. It's the variety that makes it strong, not the perceived quality based on populism. The fact you can refine your selection to something that matches your taste and style precisely, makes it good. A NWN server with just 20 players, but all of them are contributing to a world, that they want, makes that server awesome.
If the focus was not on how to show off the most popular content, but instead, provide even better mechanisms to tailor the content to your exact taste, UGC would be better off.
We need to stop thinking of this feature like a marketing person would and instead think of it more like a librarian would. A book that's only checked out twice a year, is invaluable if the two people who read it that year claim it is one of the best books out there on a particular topic.
Right now, what we have instead is a system that just shows off its best sellers, and then sits around and claims only the best sellers are any good. It would love "50 Shades of Grey" and dismiss Somerset Maugham as "not very good".
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This was a big problem in COH too. It is made worse by the fact that the entire review / browse system basically works on momentum. If you're there at launch (preferably even earlier, ie. alpha/beta/headstart) and make a decent mission, you'll have a shot at becoming a rockstar. If someone discovers NW a year after release and has to "break in" and get noticed next to the 200+ 'everyone knows this is awesome' missions and handful of household names (with all their GM leveling perks)... it's going to be rough. If the browse interface stays at it is, his chances of getting noticed (unless one of the 'old guard' actively promotes his work) are close to nil. The author community is likely to become a popularity contest anyway because of human nature -- don't reinforce it!
My COH experiences underline this pretty sharply, too, and I've been on both ends of the "unknown"-"popular" axis. To reiterate: the #1 purpose of the ingame Foundry browser should be to let people experience content that THEY personally would like, and not just have everyone play the top 200 over and over. There are ways to do this; I posted a few ideas that coalesced from the COH MA community over the years in the thread I linked, and hercooles just posted an idea above that has promise as well.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Yes, well said. Momentum is really key and you have to kind of literally engineer it too. Which is to say, you have to coalesce a group of people to play your mission shortly after you launch it and be sure that every review is 5 star. At that point, if your mission is good, it should catch on.
But if you don't have the network to pull those first 25 reviews in within a few hours after publishing, there's a really good chance, you'll never see 2 or 3 people play your module, no matter how good it is.
This doesn't frustrate me as much you might think. I am not starved for accolades. I'm starved for RP and collaboration. I don't need a million hits on my website and I don't need to have the biggest, most popular module out there.
What I want is to connect to players who have similar tastes as me. To connect to their stories, have them connect to mine, so that we eventually collaborate and build a gaming experience tailored to our taste.
Not only does the system not accommodate that very well, Cryptic doesn't even recognize that as a need, or even a potential strength to their system.
It still doesn't fully understand what UGC can really develop, which is a culture, a community. There own research seems to have missed this. Look at Minecraft, NWN and Doom. The tools were great, the content was wide and varied. You weren't lauded by how popular your content was, you were lauded by providing new and interesting variation, because everyone realized that only strengthened the culture.
Cryptic sees their UGC as a free way to get more content in their game. Then they get frustrated that it takes 300,000 modules to produce just 200 "good" modules, that they can promote as genuine content. That's a narrow view. A very old view, like that of a book publisher, or a sales manager.
Your UGC is a tool set for creativity, not just populism. A really great tool, can take a vanilla game and expand it in directions you never thought of, enhancing the diversity of your player base and inspiring even more creativity in a beautiful iterative loop.
But all this stuff is still so new. If MMOs were film, were still in the late 20's. Some very avant-garde stuff has been done, but we're still a decade away from Wizard of Oz and decades away from Stanley Kubrick.
We're all still thinking about this stuff with some rather archaic points of view. Like the early years of television, we haven't realized the power, scope and potential of the very medium we're working with.
To me, as great as that lecture was from Cryptic on UGC, that's very much apparent when you hear them talk about this topic.
Check out SHADOW on YouTube!
Here's one who has definitely read them...
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I understand the Foundry was invented/created for Neverwinter and then ported over to STO, which makes the NW version the superior, technical-wise (as it's far more advanced and the other MMO's are only using parts of it).
My main problem with the STO foundry is there is no branching that can affect end-goal/mission success or failure.
Okay, there is pseudo-branching (side-by-side goals can be assigned and some even made optional). What I'm referring to is an "if this then that" (or if you remember BASIC: "if, then, else" statements). I've always wanted to create a story where the player has an option, a choice and the resulting mission is based on that choice. Think "two paths to end goal based on player choice". In Foundry-speak: option A success/next goal is A (reach a map point); if option B then next goal is B (reach a different map point) and whichever is the next goal, the other is ignored/not required to be met (right now BOTH map points must be reached at some point).
So, if I ask a question and player chooses option A (through the advanced dialog system) - then they must reach goal A (or, for example: bad guy horde appears) and outcome of mission is based on that, or goal B if they choose the other option (reinforcement good guy horde appears). As it is right now the mission outcomes are always going to be the same (end goal to create mission success).
I know this can be "faked" to a small degree. But there is always only one final goal for mission success. I'd like to have two final goals, with the completion of only one of them creating a mission success (because mission "failure" kills it and player must replay from most recent spawn point and map).
QUESTION: will the Neverwinter Foundry have any kind of branching that will allow authors to create decision-based outcomes; as in two or more "final goals, where only one is required for mission (quest) success?
If not, please consider it a badly needed/requested feature!!!
(Apologies to anyone who has never used the STO Foundry, I know what I've described make not make any sense to you!)
I very, very much want this as well. This is an essential feature to making interesting adventures.
I'm gonna back up angrysprite on this one and support the ability to make choice based missions. I also saw that quite a few people were complaining about how linear the dungeons are. I would like to see how well I can make a hub map with multiple objectives that can be done in any order, but the order chosen causes changes in the other branches.
That is the concept I want to get working on whenever Foundry becomes available to me.
I ran a successful FR tabletop game for well over ten years and the party formed a guild after a couple of years as a handy way of allowing them to retire characters and bring in new ones. It worked quite well. They created a 'guild quest' that all new aspirants had to go though that required them to make certain choices in order to be accepted into the guild.
My question, and I can't find the answer in this thread (although this thread kinda skirts round it, so the best place for me to comment I thought) is whether I can create a Foundry quest that can ONLY be viewable and undertaken by certain people? Either race based, guild based or something like that.
There would be no point in me creating the old guild entrance quest for my guild if the quest could then subsequently be played through by other people who would downrate it because they didn't understand the content that my guildmates (my old tabletop players) would. If that makes sense?