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The problem I have with player created content.
TheRealBanango
Member UncommonPosts: 89
My favorite games have always been those that feel like a world, It doesn't matter if it is a themepark or sandbox, I just want the fantasy world to be believable to me, which personally, heavily involves visuals. If there is a floating ship, make it have some wings, or a mechanism that can make it fly, heck all you have to say is "magic" but give me a reason to believe it can really fly.
All that is required to translate the feeling of immersiveness is to make me understand the world you have created, this is where my problem with player created content lies. I love the idea of being able to build a house, a town, or a castle with my mates within the world, but I also want the building to be believable to me in context with the world I am playing in. More often than not, players create, and abandon...or they create the most goofy looking buildings which for me ruin immersivness. Minecraft is a popular game, and I actually enjoyed playing it when I did, but this is the perfect example of what happens when you give players freedom to create the world...perhaps it is a reflection of human nature, but the worlds are often chaos.
How can devs give players the freedom to create their own guild towns/cities, while limiting the amount of absurd creation that usually happens?
I propose this idea for a sandbox type game: This game would fit into the F2P trend we are seeing now, but players have the option to buy land in the game world (this could be a designated area or the whole world) with real money, this is how the game would make its profit. Players would have a monthly fee for how much land they own so that if you want to pay 5 dollars a month for your own personal plot, you can, or if you want to build a whole city (split the cost between friends?), you would end up paying more. The concept of this is to deter players from starting the game and building whatever they want with no consequence, and hopefully leaving the players that want to create something meaningful to do so. It's the players choice to build or not, so a player that has to pay a monthly fee only to build a huge dick on the map (seen it happen) might not think its worth it.
thoughts?
Comments
UO essentially had this if you think of alt accounts as a real estate tax (since there was one house per account and players often wanted more than one account). You still had both good designs and bad designs (in part because houses were also your storage vault and safe zone, so aesthetic appeal was not always the primary concern, leading to a fair number of "borg cubes" dotting the landscape).
I like this idea a lot. One thing that always concerned me about player built buildings/towns, is how do you control which player(s) get to build? Do you assign build permits to guilds or something? Your idea, instead, limits building to the amount of $ spent. Good.
This does leave room for exploitation. Perhaps some 'whale' might decide to disrupt the server by buying a lot of land and do nothing and/or stupid stuff with it. Perhaps if the GMs had some sort of oversight committe.
The monthly fee also solves the problem of abandonment. Surely some player isn't going to spend money each month on something they abandoned.
Perhaps I'm feeling giddy because this statement just cracked me up.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
The point isn't to make something better than a developer, it's to filter out the people who care less than the people who are willing to spend the effort in creating something that looks like it could fit into the game enviroment. I think it goes without saying that a game that allows player created content is going to look less attractive than final fantasy...
However, I am excited to see what Landmark has to offer and how the builds will be chosen and implemented into EQN; and I agree that this is a great approach to the problem, but I am afraid that many players might waste time creating in Landmark only to have no success in EQN, let's hope not.
No thank You!
I have no intention of paying a one off fee & definitely not ongoing fees for crap like this!
To touch on a fee posts here...
The game that did player Housing and Towns the best is still SWG.
They had the preset designs that you where able to build so they looked like they belonged and the Mayor had the ability to give build rights out for an hour day week or perm to individuals to they can admin or place their house of choice. This gave you the flexibility who was able to build when and where. Now to eliminate the abuse that everyone was able to create cities and towns you had to put the effort in leveling up the profession in order to run it. This meant you actually wanted to do it in the first place, and again limited the abuse.
The system wasn't perfect and you did see the eye sores but they were at least limited, also they were only certain planets you were able to build the cities on and they had to be away from story cities.
All in all was a great system, just need to find a developer that would be willing to put that much effort into creating the world and most importantly able and willing to maintain it with out screwing it up.
I think a better example of builders gone mental is Active Worlds ...It's worth trying out just to see what a 3DVU looked like Pre-Second Life (plus it's free now). If you do have a look, Go to Alpha World, once you are logged in and just explore, with any luck you will see something you can't unsee inside of an hour (weather good or bad).
On the note of restricted creativity...the only way to keep things internally consistent within a theme is to template everything out. The houses must be prefab with elements you can change within reason. The items you can make and place must be the same. If you give users any room to deviate...they will, and in ways you couldn't have imagined. Because places where you can build are about pushing limitations and inspire us to do so.
Restricting space won't help either. Not if you restrict space alone. The real cost to hosting isn't the actual area a build takes up, but how much draw/render cost the objects that fill that space have. If your going to charge by anything, charge by amount of content (set limits like Second Life's prim weight or IMVU's kb threshold). Secondarily you can also charge by usable space. And, it's not a bad idea to do so. But, stand alone that does nothing.
The housing design system that I'd like to try would allow high freedom to create prototypes in a private space, but each faction/culture/guild would only have a finite number of design slots for house designs that their members could place in public. This means each faction would have to hold a competition to hand out the design slots. Once a prototype was accepted to fill a slot in the culture's roster of buildings, any crafter in the culture could learn the blueprint and build an instance of that design in territory their faction controls.
Shroud of the Avatar is doing something like I think you want. I personally don't like it and won't have a house in that game unless he allows us to get them with in game currency but if you actually want to buy and sell virtual real estate with real money, SotA appears to be your game...
Player freedom in building is always going to come at some cost to immersion. I think there's room for both types of games but really dislike the idea of having to buy land with real money in a video game.
The problem isn't just that people are going to produce crap, but that they are going to produce offensive crap. Most of the games where the players can produce things, you get piles of brothels and other really nasty garbage. Take Furcadia as an example, that place, at least the last time I looked, was choked with sex-related player dreams and even in areas where such things were not permitted, people put them up anyhow, made them private and violated the rules because nobody checked. They just couldn't call it "Mistress Wanda's House of Pain" but that's still what it was on the inside.
I don't trust players, even if they do pay for the privilege.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Housing isn't really content, it is just world clutter. The problem with player created content is no game has really been able to pull it off yet. Eve gives us player driven content. Some games allow players to make dungeons etc but they aren't part of the living world.
Anything is better than a static world though so even just adding world clutter to a game makes it better, as long as it isn't some silly zoned housing.
I actually like the idea of player created content.
However it MUST be done properly, I would do some my self, in NW, but sadly have not had much time due to study commitment and I have no desire to create half finished (garbage) content, so maybe over xmas.