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Here's an idea for Cryptic. Foundry contests!
It's very simply really. Every month, Cryptic Devs will come up with challenges for the community. For example, create a mission where the player dances with Orion Slave Girls in a dance club. You know, simple stuff at first.
Cryptic Devs can collect these ideas and just post them on a thread for the community to join in and post their project-ID's. Then, Cryptic can choose the solution they liked the best for the challenge and give the winner special prize on Holodeck, a special Green title for example. This prize will last for a month, but the player/author who won it will go on record in a Foundry Hall of Fame.
I think this can generate interest in the Holodeck community regarding the Foundry on Tribble.
Thoughts, comments... popcorn?!
It's very simply really. Every month, Cryptic Devs will come up with challenges for the community. For example, create a mission where the player dances with Orion Slave Girls in a dance club. You know, simple stuff at first.
Cryptic Devs can collect these ideas and just post them on a thread for the community to join in and post their project-ID's. Then, Cryptic can choose the solution they liked the best for the challenge and give the winner special prize on Holodeck, a special Green title for example. This prize will last for a month, but the player/author who won it will go on record in a Foundry Hall of Fame.
I think this can generate interest in the Holodeck community regarding the Foundry on Tribble.
Thoughts, comments... popcorn?!
Post edited by Unknown User on
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I'm sorry to tell you this, but that's how kids learn and start developing. They all start by attempting the same task.
Then it'd be even easier to separate the lame missions from the cool ones.
Heck, it may even allow Cryptic to direct us in helping them QA different Foundry mechanics, especially once triggers and state-transformations are introduced.
Right on!
FYI, by randomly I didnt mean like the lottery. I meant they should play missions and pick whichever they like best, regardless of subject.
Why would you be sorry to tell me that? Its common knowledge and common sense. But that has nothing to do with creating interesting missions. People arent going to want to play hundreds of missions with the same thing over and over again just because people were trying to win a contest. Also, which aspects of development do you think should be set aside during the time they are going through missions to pick a winner?
How is that exactly? Do you think the "monthly" mission submissions will be a different color from the rest of them so its easy for people to see which ones are all alike and which arent?
The point isn't really to create interesting mission, but rather for Cryptic to challenge us authors with creating interesting gameplay sequences, not entire missions.
People already are playing hundreds of missions where all we do is shoot enemies, interact with objects and run/fly around... how's that any different exactly? I think it's probably inevitable that authors will start to adopt and adapt ideas they've seen in another authors' mission with or without Cryptic's involvement.
During lunch, you know? Boot up STO, get on Tribble and play a sequence mission. Should take like 10 minutes while they eat... I know I'd love to be able to do that during my lunch break.
Of course they'd be different because they'd be unpublished right after they've been inspected by a Cryptic Dev so only the author can access them again.
It seems like you're stuck on the term mission when instead my emphasis is on sequence. As an example, consider the video tutorials Kirkfat made. What if Cryptic said, "guys... make us a sequence where you have to disable the defenses of a space station", and whoever came up with the most liked sequence wins. After a decision on the winner was made, all the submitted projects simply get unpublished. The winning author is then contacted and perhaps even asked to create a tutorial for their sequence which can then be added to the Foundry Walkthrough thus turning it into more of a How-To knowledge-base.
EDIT :: Also, I suppose Cryptic could add a special Boolean flag to published projects so they could be considered "for Cryptic eyes only".
I think that may be a simple thing that would motivate folks.
Make a mission that includes; X
It might be, something that says
" make a mission that includes a specific location. "
" make a mission that involves your ships interior in some way "
" make a mission that highlights/uses X feature within foundry "
yea, I can see that helping to 'point people in the right direction;.
I'd like to see it come from a specific dev, that is have a given Cryptic employee come up with their idea, post it, sponsor and elect the winner. Totally subjective but thats it. That one dev gets to assign the winner and reward and then it moves onto someone elses turn.
As for 'when' and worries about them setting aside dev duties -- seriously, you think they dont play the game they develop? Of course they do. And having a specific developer come up with an idea they would life to see in a mission would just make it that much more motivating for them to look at the list.
I think the Devs should also avoid picking a best mission per month as well. It is nice to make a good mission with the intention of a widespread audience but I think this should be handled by the community and moderated by the Devs as they work on their own content and Fixes to the game.
i.e. A far more ... intricate ranking system which would feed into a new filtering system (by rank, location, designed difficulty, species ala Undine front etc, diplomatic, combat orientated etc, mystery, series, arcs, randoms, etc - anyway - ranking system which would result in a community pushed "Mission of the month")
This mission would be featured on the home portal - a great lure for new players surely. However, a mission/series can only earn that Mission of the month status once - but is forever tagged in it's description page as being mission of X month Y year and feature on a community page in a list of previous featured content - much like the Developer weeklies are.
Rewards? I would shy away from ingame items, even limited duration. I think something special like a title ingame AND on these forums. A special color. "Mission Creator, Content Artist, Director of Fun" who knows...
Furthermore, in relation to the OP point on learning people the ropes etc - I can foresee community sites like UGC wiki and perhaps Foundry Academy fleets being created in the future to address that, Youtube is already exploding, and so far the foundry on beta v0.3 is pretty handy to use once you get stuck in and test your changes.
This could also be added to their website and other areas to really excite the players into playing those missions. This would help support the efforts of the UGC community, permit Cryptic to maintain a "hands-off" reason for choosing the missions and ultimately, not push one mission over another.
Since each mission is so varied and appealing to different players alike, you must understand those selecting just one or two a month wil not permit the rest of the Foundry to really get their mission listed. If this is to be truely community authoried content, the goal is to get players to vote. Cryptic can assist in this process but sohuld not be seen to favour one ission over another.
Getting people to play the missions is the harder part.
I think having a better search engine for Foundry is a big part to fixing that.
Let people search, not just for whats hot, or by player names, but also by type of mission. ex- Low combat, species grind for accolades, high combat, high RP, species specific missions.
I think that would help people in getting their content played.
Also I think the greatest tool for getting your game out is:
1. Fleets are always a good source of early ratings
2. Video Mission trailers are a GREAT way to get some exposure. It also shows that you've put time into your mission and they get to see some images from it.
In terms of contests, I think independant groups like Starbase UGC, Stoked and the like could be a great place for them.
Frankly the devs just don't have time to play. We hear that every time they give an interview. It would be cool though if the independants made a deal to have a dev play the top three missions from their contests. That would be a cool reward I think.
Both points I think are entirely true and valid. The search engine for UGC needs to be a bit more robust and allow for flagging of missions in content specific ways. There are times when I don't want to have to grind through enemies endlessly in order to complete a mission, sometimes I do actually like the softball of 'scan these 5 anomalies.' As with anything, people would potentially be able to misflag missions to get attention, but that is where the reporting system comes in as well.
Additionally I think it is a much better idea if outside organizations handle the 'heavy lifting' of setting up UGC contests, but there still does need to be input from at least from some sort of community liaison. In this way we would be able to get some sort of award status for the chosen mission, be it an awarded accolade to the player. a title, a uniform, or something entirely different. Now that isn't to say that you couldn't perhaps have a 'championship' where the various winners from the contests couldnt be judged on by the Dev team and have a periodic contest they judge.
This is exactly why I developed the foundrymissions.com site so that players have a way of adding their missions to the site and being able to search for the missions they are interested in playing.
I've also compiled a full list (kindly reproduced with permission from Darrenkitlor) that lists all the missions found on the forums - http://foundrymissions.com/?page_id=190