I'd like to see a Foundry Server set up (much like Tribble) with the "best" (judged by whatever criteria/mechanism) content being moved to Holodeck. Anyone would be able to log in to the Foundry Server and try any of the player generated content, even the "worst of the worst" (maybe a Fleet Event equivalent to a B-movie night?) but anyone would be able to experience the "best of the best" on Holodeck.
There are also terms to not rig the system for pushing through your own content, to not be purposefully ganking other people's missions out of spite, etc.
There are also terms to not rig the system for pushing through your own content, to not be purposefully ganking other people's missions out of spite, etc.
Even if there is, theres pretty much no way to enforce something like that making it essentially meaningless.
Reviewers should be a single member taken from each fleet in-game. There are enough fleets that the crazies would be balanced out by people who are serious about the game, and there aren't enough people who are over zealous about STO to push the non-canon missions out an airlock.
It can also provide some validity to the fleet construct.
That's not a huge concern either as Cryptic can (and probably will) monitor and adjust UGC XP constantly.
In City of Heroes, NCSoft monitors and adjusts the # of Merits given for their Task Force missions. Quite a few TFs had Merits reduced because players found ways to do them faster.
There were some players that wanted to fudge NCSoft's data mining by taking longer on TFs but the vast majority of people ran them as fast as possible and the rewards got reduced nonetheless. We can expect the same behavior with UGC. MMO's are always full of impatient people.
You can be sure Cryptic has some Data Mining Algorithms already set up to detect this sort of thing.
Um, 48 month CoH vet (who also was closed betaing CoH back in December 2003); and:
We're NOT talking about Dev made task forces that Paragon and NCSoft have adjusted due to datamining. We're talking about a situation similar to what happened when Paragon launched the 'Mission Architect'; and who were WARBED by myself and others of the MASSIVE potental for abuse during its beta testing phase; let it go live with NONE of that addressed; and within a week, had a schathing post from Positron abiout how he was AMAZED art the level of exploitation - that Paragon would be DELETING chlaracters that were PLed to 50 in under 3 hours as a result.
Paragon and NCSoft are NOT the entities you want to mention to calm down people regarding UGC; as their failure to control their inplementation on a player created content system is the entire reason a lot of us who experienced Paragon's mistakes DON'T want to see Cryptic make these same mistakes.
The automated Mission reward mechanic related to time spent in a mission has the potential to be exploited/abused (as described); and it in fact may be that they found a way to monitor what the players do (ie it logs the actual amount of time they are doing something - ir firing weapons, etc.; and doesn't just look at how long they sat in a mission map); BUT, if not, and it just looks at the amount of time a player was on a map; that could allow for easy exploitation by those who want to make STO PL maps.
Again, I hope I'm wrong and that 'The Foundry' works as the Devs intend - obvious exploits are curbed, an d that they manage to release something that works well, and brings more folks to STO in the long run; BUT, after seeing what former Cryptic employess (who became Paragon) did with their implementation of a UGC system; and how it did destroy a LOT of the CoX community; and also took of MAJOR amounts of Dev resources as they continually attempt to fix exploits, etc; and further, how their community reacts to any 'Mission Architect' nerfs or option removals - I DON'T want to see STO go down the same path Paragon and CoX's 'Mission Achitect system did if they can avoid it.
I haven't seen this asked - what level of anonymity will there be for mission authors during the review process? There have been for as long as these forums have existed, been members of the community that have made enemies. It would be a horrble shame if they were to get consistently low reviews simply because of their forum reputation, instead of the true quality of their missions.
I think you got me all wrong. If you guys haven't listened to the interview you can download it here.
Fast forward to 20:25 - this is the Q&A about the "Reviewers" who will make the initial call on whether new UGC missions can be played by everyone else in the game. Mike Apolis says these "Reviewers" actually sign a Separate EULA in order to be a "Reviewer".
The post from DStahl in this thread addresses "Raters" which everyone will be automatically. He does not address "Reviewers" at all in his post. Mike Apolis' description of this reminded me of the Player Council where a few players will have more influence over the game than others.
Something like this can be abused which concerns me. Maybe this has changed since Mike's interview. I'm actually waiting for the UGC FAQ (per DStahl's comments) so we can learn more about this.
At this point I'm more concerned about the Diminishing Returns system simply because leveling a Klingon with PvE is pretty damn boring without the same level of content that Feds have. Devs have marketed UGC as filling the content gap but that is not possible if you only get XP for 2 missions per day.
Hi guys,
Let me try and clear some things up here.
1) Let's talk about "The Life of a Community Authored Mission".
To start with, the author will create the episode using The Foundry for Star Trek Online Mission Authoring Tools. Once the episode is complete, and the author is satisfied with the content of the episode, he or she will publish the episode.
Once published, the episode is available for play by all community members who have signed up to be reviewers. Anyone can sign up to be a reviewer of Community Authored Episodes, by clicking a button, and then agreeing to a new EULA, which essentially states that while reviewing new content, it is possible that users may experience objectionable/offensive material.
The newly published episode will need to be played through by X many reviewers, who will then after playing through the complete episode, be able to rate it. Essentially, these people will will say, "This mission does not violate any Terms of service and isn't offensive/objectionable," or will say, "This episode is inappropriate."
If it passes the "review board" it will then be made available for all members of the Star Trek Online Community to play. If you play through it, and find that it has objectionable material in it, then you'll be able to report it, and it will then be reviewed again by Cryptic Staff.
I'll check in on the XP concerns and get back to you all in a little bit.
There is no council. That was a bad choice of words - or pure fan speculative paraphrasing.
Anyone who loads up the Foundry tools (and accepts the EULA) can rate content.
When you make a mission, it can be shared with friends and they can play it and test it.
The new remote contact window has a separate tab for Player Authored Missions that returns a list of all available player made missions. The search results can be filtered by a bunch of different criteria.
In order for a mission to show up automatically in this search results window, it must first be played and completed x number of times (this is the only gating feature to prevent a published mission from showing up randomly for any player). This means that players who use the Foundry must play it through first to ensure it can be completed and doesn't have a thousand vulgar jokes in it.
So think of it this way - before we "push" any new player authored mission to any random player, the community must play test the mission first. You can't just hit publish and instantly have it appear in game. That would lead to abuse fast. We fully expect there to be players who enjoy playing and rating new content but because we (Cryptic) have no idea what could be in the mission - you must agree to a EULA stating - play at your own risk first. (this is very similar to other sites where you can't just post a video and expect it to show up instantly online - and it must be watched by people who have agreed to potentially see something objectionable first).
If a player finds something objectionable or in violation of the authoring policies, they can flag the mission. If a mission is flagged as inappropriate, it is pulled until the issues is addressed.
Rewards are still very much TBD and even once we go into beta, will most likely be tweaked and tuned many times as our biggest concern is preventing abuse and ensuring that missions have fair rewards.
1) Let's talk about "The Life of a Community Authored Mission".
To start with, the author will create the episode using The Foundry for Star Trek Online Mission Authoring Tools. Once the episode is complete, and the author is satisfied with the content of the episode, he or she will publish the episode.
Once published, the episode is available for play by all community members who have signed up to be reviewers. Anyone can sign up to be a reviewer of Community Authored Episodes, by clicking a button, and then agreeing to a new EULA, which essentially states that while reviewing new content, it is possible that users may experience objectionable/offensive material.
The newly published episode will need to be played through by X many reviewers, who will then after playing through the complete episode, be able to rate it. Essentially, these people will will say, "This mission does not violate any Terms of service and isn't offensive/objectionable," or will say, "This episode is inappropriate."
If it passes the "review board" it will then be made available for all members of the Star Trek Online Community to play. If you play through it, and find that it has objectionable material in it, then you'll be able to report it, and it will then be reviewed again by Cryptic Staff.
I'll check in on the XP concerns and get back to you all in a little bit.
I hope this helps to clear some things up.
Thanks,
Stormshade
Thanks for the info. It basically sounds like you guys are simply making players of ugc missions click a disclaimer, and that they have no special status as some kind of review council, other than a resource pool like tribble testers.
I do hope that Cryptic better defines what is and is not inappropriate. I would hate to see things like "This mission is inappropriate because it violates established canon of episode 134 of Voy!" or "This episode is offensive because it involves a openly TRIBBLE character and an interspecies marriage!!"
Better be precise on your definitions of "offensive."
First, thanks to Stormshade and Dan for replying here. That said, my main question at this point is how long do you expect it to take, on average, for a mission to be "approved" and go live? A day? A week? A month? Obviously its kind of hard to tell right now, but what do you EXPECT? Or how long do you WANT it to take? And what is to gaurantee that every published mission actually gets tested, and not ignored or overlooked?
While I wouldn't have a problem not dealing with vulgar words... what words do you rate a vulgar, and which ones are not. Can the maker give it a rating? For Example PG, PG-13,or R ( in the case T for teen, Or Rated M )
I ask what the rules are because there might be some missions were a minor vulgar word or two might work better for the story. ( for an example of this I point you to the Siege of AR-558 A good episode that shows the effects of war on the federation. )
First, thanks to Stormshade and Dan for replying here. That said, my main question at this point is how long do you expect it to take, on average, for a mission to be "approved" and go live? A day? A week? A month? Obviously its kind of hard to tell right now, but what do you EXPECT? Or how long do you WANT it to take?
We (Cryptic) will have little to nothing to do with a mission getting "approved". That is entirely up to the community play testers. A published player author mission is playable immediately to anyone who has signed up to play test player authored content. Once the mission has been played TBD number of times and has not been flagged for inappropriate (i.e. violating policy) text then it will show up in the remote contact list for anyone.
Until then, only players who have agreed that they could have their "minds warped" by playing something that no one else has looked at yet will see the missions.
The only part Cryptic/CBS plays is in setting the policies and ensuring the rating features work properly.
While I wouldn't have a problem not dealing with vulgar words... what words do you rate a vulgar, and which ones are not. Can the maker give it a rating? For Example PG, PG-13,or R ( in the case T for teen, Or Rated M )
Considering STO is rating Teen by ESRB but carries the "online experience may change" moniker, it will most likely be up to the community to comment and tag missions that may contain objectionable language. This is a grey area that the internet has to find a way to manage. There are certain vulgar word filters that we have in place such as in names and text that will for the most part prevent most words that are deemed inappropraite to our rating.
We (Cryptic) will have little to nothing to do with a mission getting "approved". That is entirely up to the community play testers. A published player author mission is playable immediately to anyone who has signed up to play test player authored content. Once the mission has been played TBD number of times and has not been flagged for inappropriate (i.e. violating policy) text then it will show up in the remote contact list for anyone.
Until then, only players who have agreed that they could have their "minds warped" by playing something that no one else has looked at yet will see the missions.
The only part Cryptic/CBS plays is in setting the policies and ensuring the rating features work properly.
I completely understand that, and thanks again for the reply. However, my question is the same. How long do you anticipate it to take for the community to approve a mission? How long do you personally think is a "reasonable" amount of time? And again, what is to ensure that every published mission actually gets tested and not ignored or overlooked for any number of reasons?
First, thanks to Stormshade and Dan for replying here. That said, my main question at this point is how long do you expect it to take, on average, for a mission to be "approved" and go live? A day? A week? A month? Obviously its kind of hard to tell right now, but what do you EXPECT? Or how long do you WANT it to take? And what is to gaurantee that every published mission actually gets tested, and not ignored or overlooked?
Yeah... good question, there. One I forgot to ask above.
The system sounds good on paper but it's completely dependent on the community to provide active and continually interested reviewers. I mean, lets get down to it... reviewing isn't going to be all fun and games. It's like being in beta. You're not there just to play... you're there to do a job. The appeal of such a thing will fade over time. And frankly STO doesn't feel like it has many players to pull from for reviewers to begin with.
If people aren't interested in reviewing, the system will fail. And the viability of the system has a close tie to the game population. As the population increases or decreases, the efficiency of the system will likewise increase and decrease.
And quite a few people have already pointed out that a lot of people will be more interested in creating missions than playing them, let alone doing the "job" of reviewing.
The one thing i wanted to check on is if my user generated mission happens to have characters from star trek in them. ie date, worf, janeway etc. is that acceptable?
i know there are licensing rights and such which is why we have seen do few characters in the game so far but if i make a bald guy called captain picard who is involved in the mission somehow, is that violating some rule and would get the mission taken out?
I completely understand that, and thanks again for the reply. However, my question is the same. How long do you anticipate it to take for the community to approve a mission? How long do you personally think is a "reasonable" amount of time? And again, what is to ensure that every published mission actually gets tested and not ignored or overlooked for any number of reasons?
There's no real answer for TBD at this point. This is entirely community driven. We will watch and adjust where needed, but it is really up to the players who sign up to rate content. If there are bridges to cross, we'll wait until we see them.
My question for Dan, since you're looking and all is this: Say I have a mission idea that takes place on your own ship, firstly will this be possible, secondly; if it is; will I be able to have the mission take place on that person's actual bridge? Since we all don't use the same ones, or will it just be a generic bridge lay out?
Um, 48 month CoH vet (who also was closed betaing CoH back in December 2003); and:
We're NOT talking about Dev made task forces that Paragon and NCSoft have adjusted due to datamining. We're talking about a situation similar to what happened when Paragon launched the 'Mission Architect'; and who were WARBED by myself and others of the MASSIVE potental for abuse during its beta testing phase; let it go live with NONE of that addressed; and within a week, had a schathing post from Positron abiout how he was AMAZED art the level of exploitation - that Paragon would be DELETING chlaracters that were PLed to 50 in under 3 hours as a result.
I played CoX for 2 years, mostly Villains. I'm familiar with the whole Architect fiasco and the implications it had on CoX. As soon as UGC was announced, I was one of the first to warn Cryptic about the mess NCSoft's Mission Architect made.
The example I gave about CoX TF's was an example of using data mining to adjust rewards (b/c a poster doubted Cryptic could do the same). NCSoft also reduced "Tickets" from Mission Architect because their data mining revealed people were earning them too fast (there's apples to apples for you).
It might just be as simple as making a thread in the "foundry" forum that will go up, saying hey this is me, here are my missions, heres what they're about test away.
This is just my opinon, but once these tools come out, Alot of people are going to want to play these missions. I myself will be testing everything I can. I think most people will do the same. I doubt you'll get a solid answer to that question.
There's no real answer for TBD at this point. This is entirely community driven. We will watch and adjust where needed, but it is really up to the players who sign up to rate content. If there are bridges to cross, we'll wait until we see them.
Well, thanks again for the response. Like you said, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I just hope that there is some plan in place to ensure that every published mission actually gets tested rather than some just being overlooked, ignored, or forgotten and never having a chance to go live.
1) Let's talk about "The Life of a Community Authored Mission".
To start with, the author will create the episode using The Foundry for Star Trek Online Mission Authoring Tools. Once the episode is complete, and the author is satisfied with the content of the episode, he or she will publish the episode.
Once published, the episode is available for play by all community members who have signed up to be reviewers. Anyone can sign up to be a reviewer of Community Authored Episodes, by clicking a button, and then agreeing to a new EULA, which essentially states that while reviewing new content, it is possible that users may experience objectionable/offensive material.
The newly published episode will need to be played through by X many reviewers, who will then after playing through the complete episode, be able to rate it. Essentially, these people will will say, "This mission does not violate any Terms of service and isn't offensive/objectionable," or will say, "This episode is inappropriate."
If it passes the "review board" it will then be made available for all members of the Star Trek Online Community to play. If you play through it, and find that it has objectionable material in it, then you'll be able to report it, and it will then be reviewed again by Cryptic Staff.
I'll check in on the XP concerns and get back to you all in a little bit.
I hope this helps to clear some things up.
Thanks,
Stormshade
I think that this is going to be a major bottleneck right here. What you seem to be describing here is a popularity contest-the folks who advertise their episodes on the forums or elsewhere are going to get their episodes pushed public faster and in larger volumes than the ones who do not.
If other attempts at UGC's in other MMOs are any indication, there could very easily be thousands of episodes created by the player base. It's well and good to say that a review board will rate the episode and determine if that episode should be made "public", but I'm dubious that there will ever be enough people doing the reviewing to get to a random person's episode. I can easily envision a period of months before a given episode by random player X gets enough reviews to get pushed out.
This in turn could have a chilling effect on people even bothering to try to put together quality episodes-what's the point if nobody ever plays it?
This isn't idle speculation. The example being thrown around here a lot is the City of Heroes Mission Architect, and I can tell you there are missions published over there that haven't seen a single person playing them (much less rating them). If they had the same hurdle as what is being described here, maybe there wouldn't be as many exploit missions released to the public...but a very large portion of valid missions created as the producers intended would also never see the light of day.
This may be a requirement handed down from on high to the developers here-which they've got no choice but to accede to. But this makes the Foundry a far less attractive option to use. Putting something together for an episode-spending a great deal of time on the design and flow of it-for no return is going to very quickly become "not worth the effort". And that could make the whole Foundry project not worth the effort, either.
My question for Dan, since you're looking and all is this: Say I have a mission idea that takes place on your own ship, firstly will this be possible, secondly; if it is; will I be able to have the mission take place on that person's actual bridge? Since we all don't use the same ones, or will it just be a generic bridge lay out?
You can design a ship interior and bridge for your mission to take place on, but you cannot yet use other player's "variables" to change the set of your mission. You cannot make a mission that says "i don't know what your bridge will look like - but here is where the bad guys are" ... because you will not know in every instance where valid locations for those bad guys will be yet. It is a long term goal that we have (as we want to be able to make these types of missions as well). We just needs some additional mission logic worked into the system first.
As far as the actual process of rating missions, will players be running around tribble looking for content, or will there be an interface that simplifies the missions for us? Will it be an extension of the Foundry program? Will there be a download time on each of the missions or will they be uploaded to your servers? Finally, will missions be removed after a quota of ratings has been reached?
I think that this is going to be a major bottleneck right here. What you seem to be describing here is a popularity contest-the folks who advertise their episodes on the forums or elsewhere are going to get their episodes pushed public faster and in larger volumes than the ones who do not.
If other attempts at UGC's in other MMOs are any indication, there could very easily be thousands of episodes created by the player base. It's well and good to say that a review board will rate the episode and determine if that episode should be made "public", but I'm dubious that there will ever be enough people doing the reviewing to get to a random person's episode. I can easily envision a period of months before a given episode by random player X gets enough reviews to get pushed out.
This in turn could have a chilling effect on people even bothering to try to put together quality episodes-what's the point if nobody ever plays it?
This isn't idle speculation. The example being thrown around here a lot is the City of Heroes Mission Architect, and I can tell you there are missions published over there that haven't seen a single person playing them (much less rating them). If they had the same hurdle as what is being described here, maybe there wouldn't be as many exploit missions released to the public...but a very large portion of valid missions created as the producers intended would also never see the light of day.
This may be a requirement handed down from on high to the developers here-which they've got no choice but to accede to. But this makes the Foundry a far less attractive option to use. Putting something together for an episode-spending a great deal of time on the design and flow of it-for no return is going to very quickly become "not worth the effort". And that could make the whole Foundry project not worth the effort, either.
This is pretty much my concern. It sounds like only the most "vocal" people on the forums will get their missions tested, and anyone who DOESNT use the forums will pretty much never have a chance.
I think fleets are one of the greatest potential problems of the system. They could lead to unequal and bias reviewing, to say the least--especially if the number of approvals are within a fleet's capacity to give; content might be approved regardless of quality, simply because it's made by a fleet-mate.
So far the system sounds like majority rule with no "individual rights" to guarantee authors their content will be reviewed promptly or fairly.
This is pretty much my concern. It sounds like only the most "vocal" people on the forums will get their missions tested, and anyone who DOESNT use the forums will pretty much never have a chance.
A double-edged sword. If the author has a negative reputation on the forums, their content might be that much more ignored. A popularity contest, for good or for bad.
You can design a ship interior and bridge for your mission to take place on, but you cannot yet use other player's "variables" to change the set of your mission. You cannot make a mission that says "i don't know what your bridge will look like - but here is where the bad guys are" ... because you will not know in every instance where valid locations for those bad guys will be yet. It is a long term goal that we have (as we want to be able to make these types of missions as well). We just needs some additional mission logic worked into the system first.
Ignoring the Bridge for a moment. What about the other rooms that have standard layouts across all maps?
It would be nice to have an encounter take place in a ship's Lounge / Mess Hall, using the trophy customization of the player, and then have the player walk to another room on their ship, along their corridor layout, for another encounter.
As long as the encounters are confined to the rooms, mob positions would just need setting twice. (One for Federation layouts, one for Klingon)
Comments
Unfortunately.
UGC Mission of the Week?
Just a thought,
-Auspice
Edit: product of the public education system
That too
Very good, excellent point.
Even if there is, theres pretty much no way to enforce something like that making it essentially meaningless.
Good point, the only way to really curb that is to eliminate...or severly
reduce EXP on unpublished private missions.
My personal view <just me> is that private unpublished missions should give no exp.
That might slow down some of the exploiting.
It gets reported. Devs look.
If there's a history, the person loses all reviewer rights - just like naughty forum posters.
that's called enforcement, for lack of a better term.
It can also provide some validity to the fleet construct.
Um, 48 month CoH vet (who also was closed betaing CoH back in December 2003); and:
We're NOT talking about Dev made task forces that Paragon and NCSoft have adjusted due to datamining. We're talking about a situation similar to what happened when Paragon launched the 'Mission Architect'; and who were WARBED by myself and others of the MASSIVE potental for abuse during its beta testing phase; let it go live with NONE of that addressed; and within a week, had a schathing post from Positron abiout how he was AMAZED art the level of exploitation - that Paragon would be DELETING chlaracters that were PLed to 50 in under 3 hours as a result.
Paragon and NCSoft are NOT the entities you want to mention to calm down people regarding UGC; as their failure to control their inplementation on a player created content system is the entire reason a lot of us who experienced Paragon's mistakes DON'T want to see Cryptic make these same mistakes.
The automated Mission reward mechanic related to time spent in a mission has the potential to be exploited/abused (as described); and it in fact may be that they found a way to monitor what the players do (ie it logs the actual amount of time they are doing something - ir firing weapons, etc.; and doesn't just look at how long they sat in a mission map); BUT, if not, and it just looks at the amount of time a player was on a map; that could allow for easy exploitation by those who want to make STO PL maps.
Again, I hope I'm wrong and that 'The Foundry' works as the Devs intend - obvious exploits are curbed, an d that they manage to release something that works well, and brings more folks to STO in the long run; BUT, after seeing what former Cryptic employess (who became Paragon) did with their implementation of a UGC system; and how it did destroy a LOT of the CoX community; and also took of MAJOR amounts of Dev resources as they continually attempt to fix exploits, etc; and further, how their community reacts to any 'Mission Architect' nerfs or option removals - I DON'T want to see STO go down the same path Paragon and CoX's 'Mission Achitect system did if they can avoid it.
Time will tell.
Hi guys,
Let me try and clear some things up here.
1) Let's talk about "The Life of a Community Authored Mission".
To start with, the author will create the episode using The Foundry for Star Trek Online Mission Authoring Tools. Once the episode is complete, and the author is satisfied with the content of the episode, he or she will publish the episode.
Once published, the episode is available for play by all community members who have signed up to be reviewers. Anyone can sign up to be a reviewer of Community Authored Episodes, by clicking a button, and then agreeing to a new EULA, which essentially states that while reviewing new content, it is possible that users may experience objectionable/offensive material.
The newly published episode will need to be played through by X many reviewers, who will then after playing through the complete episode, be able to rate it. Essentially, these people will will say, "This mission does not violate any Terms of service and isn't offensive/objectionable," or will say, "This episode is inappropriate."
If it passes the "review board" it will then be made available for all members of the Star Trek Online Community to play. If you play through it, and find that it has objectionable material in it, then you'll be able to report it, and it will then be reviewed again by Cryptic Staff.
I'll check in on the XP concerns and get back to you all in a little bit.
I hope this helps to clear some things up.
Thanks,
Stormshade
There is no council. That was a bad choice of words - or pure fan speculative paraphrasing.
Anyone who loads up the Foundry tools (and accepts the EULA) can rate content.
When you make a mission, it can be shared with friends and they can play it and test it.
The new remote contact window has a separate tab for Player Authored Missions that returns a list of all available player made missions. The search results can be filtered by a bunch of different criteria.
In order for a mission to show up automatically in this search results window, it must first be played and completed x number of times (this is the only gating feature to prevent a published mission from showing up randomly for any player). This means that players who use the Foundry must play it through first to ensure it can be completed and doesn't have a thousand vulgar jokes in it.
So think of it this way - before we "push" any new player authored mission to any random player, the community must play test the mission first. You can't just hit publish and instantly have it appear in game. That would lead to abuse fast. We fully expect there to be players who enjoy playing and rating new content but because we (Cryptic) have no idea what could be in the mission - you must agree to a EULA stating - play at your own risk first. (this is very similar to other sites where you can't just post a video and expect it to show up instantly online - and it must be watched by people who have agreed to potentially see something objectionable first).
If a player finds something objectionable or in violation of the authoring policies, they can flag the mission. If a mission is flagged as inappropriate, it is pulled until the issues is addressed.
Rewards are still very much TBD and even once we go into beta, will most likely be tweaked and tuned many times as our biggest concern is preventing abuse and ensuring that missions have fair rewards.
Thanks for the info. It basically sounds like you guys are simply making players of ugc missions click a disclaimer, and that they have no special status as some kind of review council, other than a resource pool like tribble testers.
I do hope that Cryptic better defines what is and is not inappropriate. I would hate to see things like "This mission is inappropriate because it violates established canon of episode 134 of Voy!" or "This episode is offensive because it involves a openly TRIBBLE character and an interspecies marriage!!"
Better be precise on your definitions of "offensive."
How many playthroughs are required by the reviewers before it's made available to everyone?
And is it majority rule as far as "appropriate" and "inappropriate" goes?
Are reviewers anonymous in their ratings to the general player base?
Are reviewers anonymous in their ratings to Cryptic?
Is there a limit, either in terms of time or reviews done, to how long a person can be a reviewer?
If UGC is considered inappropriate, is it then handed back to the author to make changes and republish?
Is there an appeals process to Cryptic for authors who feel their content is repeatedly and incorrectly flagged as inappropriate?
While I wouldn't have a problem not dealing with vulgar words... what words do you rate a vulgar, and which ones are not. Can the maker give it a rating? For Example PG, PG-13,or R ( in the case T for teen, Or Rated M )
I ask what the rules are because there might be some missions were a minor vulgar word or two might work better for the story. ( for an example of this I point you to the Siege of AR-558 A good episode that shows the effects of war on the federation. )
We (Cryptic) will have little to nothing to do with a mission getting "approved". That is entirely up to the community play testers. A published player author mission is playable immediately to anyone who has signed up to play test player authored content. Once the mission has been played TBD number of times and has not been flagged for inappropriate (i.e. violating policy) text then it will show up in the remote contact list for anyone.
Until then, only players who have agreed that they could have their "minds warped" by playing something that no one else has looked at yet will see the missions.
The only part Cryptic/CBS plays is in setting the policies and ensuring the rating features work properly.
Considering STO is rating Teen by ESRB but carries the "online experience may change" moniker, it will most likely be up to the community to comment and tag missions that may contain objectionable language. This is a grey area that the internet has to find a way to manage. There are certain vulgar word filters that we have in place such as in names and text that will for the most part prevent most words that are deemed inappropraite to our rating.
I completely understand that, and thanks again for the reply. However, my question is the same. How long do you anticipate it to take for the community to approve a mission? How long do you personally think is a "reasonable" amount of time? And again, what is to ensure that every published mission actually gets tested and not ignored or overlooked for any number of reasons?
Yeah... good question, there. One I forgot to ask above.
The system sounds good on paper but it's completely dependent on the community to provide active and continually interested reviewers. I mean, lets get down to it... reviewing isn't going to be all fun and games. It's like being in beta. You're not there just to play... you're there to do a job. The appeal of such a thing will fade over time. And frankly STO doesn't feel like it has many players to pull from for reviewers to begin with.
If people aren't interested in reviewing, the system will fail. And the viability of the system has a close tie to the game population. As the population increases or decreases, the efficiency of the system will likewise increase and decrease.
And quite a few people have already pointed out that a lot of people will be more interested in creating missions than playing them, let alone doing the "job" of reviewing.
i know there are licensing rights and such which is why we have seen do few characters in the game so far but if i make a bald guy called captain picard who is involved in the mission somehow, is that violating some rule and would get the mission taken out?
There's no real answer for TBD at this point. This is entirely community driven. We will watch and adjust where needed, but it is really up to the players who sign up to rate content. If there are bridges to cross, we'll wait until we see them.
I played CoX for 2 years, mostly Villains. I'm familiar with the whole Architect fiasco and the implications it had on CoX. As soon as UGC was announced, I was one of the first to warn Cryptic about the mess NCSoft's Mission Architect made.
The example I gave about CoX TF's was an example of using data mining to adjust rewards (b/c a poster doubted Cryptic could do the same). NCSoft also reduced "Tickets" from Mission Architect because their data mining revealed people were earning them too fast (there's apples to apples for you).
This is just my opinon, but once these tools come out, Alot of people are going to want to play these missions. I myself will be testing everything I can. I think most people will do the same. I doubt you'll get a solid answer to that question.
Maybe fleets just got a little more important?
Well, thanks again for the response. Like you said, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I just hope that there is some plan in place to ensure that every published mission actually gets tested rather than some just being overlooked, ignored, or forgotten and never having a chance to go live.
I think that this is going to be a major bottleneck right here. What you seem to be describing here is a popularity contest-the folks who advertise their episodes on the forums or elsewhere are going to get their episodes pushed public faster and in larger volumes than the ones who do not.
If other attempts at UGC's in other MMOs are any indication, there could very easily be thousands of episodes created by the player base. It's well and good to say that a review board will rate the episode and determine if that episode should be made "public", but I'm dubious that there will ever be enough people doing the reviewing to get to a random person's episode. I can easily envision a period of months before a given episode by random player X gets enough reviews to get pushed out.
This in turn could have a chilling effect on people even bothering to try to put together quality episodes-what's the point if nobody ever plays it?
This isn't idle speculation. The example being thrown around here a lot is the City of Heroes Mission Architect, and I can tell you there are missions published over there that haven't seen a single person playing them (much less rating them). If they had the same hurdle as what is being described here, maybe there wouldn't be as many exploit missions released to the public...but a very large portion of valid missions created as the producers intended would also never see the light of day.
This may be a requirement handed down from on high to the developers here-which they've got no choice but to accede to. But this makes the Foundry a far less attractive option to use. Putting something together for an episode-spending a great deal of time on the design and flow of it-for no return is going to very quickly become "not worth the effort". And that could make the whole Foundry project not worth the effort, either.
You can design a ship interior and bridge for your mission to take place on, but you cannot yet use other player's "variables" to change the set of your mission. You cannot make a mission that says "i don't know what your bridge will look like - but here is where the bad guys are" ... because you will not know in every instance where valid locations for those bad guys will be yet. It is a long term goal that we have (as we want to be able to make these types of missions as well). We just needs some additional mission logic worked into the system first.
As far as the actual process of rating missions, will players be running around tribble looking for content, or will there be an interface that simplifies the missions for us? Will it be an extension of the Foundry program? Will there be a download time on each of the missions or will they be uploaded to your servers? Finally, will missions be removed after a quota of ratings has been reached?
This is pretty much my concern. It sounds like only the most "vocal" people on the forums will get their missions tested, and anyone who DOESNT use the forums will pretty much never have a chance.
I think fleets are one of the greatest potential problems of the system. They could lead to unequal and bias reviewing, to say the least--especially if the number of approvals are within a fleet's capacity to give; content might be approved regardless of quality, simply because it's made by a fleet-mate.
So far the system sounds like majority rule with no "individual rights" to guarantee authors their content will be reviewed promptly or fairly.
A double-edged sword. If the author has a negative reputation on the forums, their content might be that much more ignored. A popularity contest, for good or for bad.
Ignoring the Bridge for a moment. What about the other rooms that have standard layouts across all maps?
It would be nice to have an encounter take place in a ship's Lounge / Mess Hall, using the trophy customization of the player, and then have the player walk to another room on their ship, along their corridor layout, for another encounter.
As long as the encounters are confined to the rooms, mob positions would just need setting twice. (One for Federation layouts, one for Klingon)
Is this possible?