To the development team, and anyone else intrested

[DarkSable]

Alright here, I have a couple questions. Know how lots of the d&d games have the ability for users to create scenarios and mods? Have you considered having a way to process user-generated content? Have a toolset separate from the main game which which serious developers could create quests / packs and submit them for approval. I am certain that, even if they were unpaid, you would have a LOT of people wanting to do this, simply for the fun of it or the prestige of having a quest with their name on it. There would be both talented and untalented developers, yes; but you could also have a user-based system of rating maps so the dev team would only have to look at the good ones. Not only would this be beneficial for you'all, but it would make your fans ecstatic; instead of having one new quest series once per update; you could have one once a week! A lot of the enjoyment for me, at least, is exploring new quests.

Going off of the enjoyment of exploring new quests, would it be ridiculously difficult to have procedurally or randomly generated content? I'm thinking something like a map made of of say, 20 tiles, in a 5X4 pattern. The tiles would have connections at different sides, with monsters, treasure, and quest objectives assigned to the tiles randomly. Even if it was only one quest; it would be different every time the quest reset, which, even using the same 20 tiles and the same set of monsters rolled from a list, would keep the feeling of exploration fresh. Just a couple ideas, if either of them are liked, I would be more than happy to donate time in figuring out more details in the way it would work and with working around the computers' logic blocks.

Can someone advise me as to the problems with these? I'm very interested in game design, specifically the intuitive side of it, but as I know little to nothing of programming, I'm unable to know what's feasible and not.

[Chai]

Problem 1-infinity.

XP assignment. How would this not be exploited and farmed?

Problem infinity +1.

Loot assignment. How would this not be exploited and farmed?

[Amber-Dawnn]

Even if it is a randomly generated quest it's still the same kind of quest so you could go in like a normal one and get the same -XP for going in too many times and for course the chests would ransack because it's the same chest just maybe in the different place.

Thats how it would work logically anyway...

[Four20]

Problem 1-infinity.

XP assignment. How would this not be exploited and farmed?

Problem infinity +1.

Loot assignment. How would this not be exploited and farmed?

no loot and no xp allowed in the quests.

i actually like this idea. it would be CRAZY hard to implement, but would completely separate DDO from the rest of the MMO community

[Nahual]

Yeah Im up for it hard to impement though.

Id do something like this:

Reach max favor reward your account can now download the
quest crafter thingy.

Create a dungeon. Have the players play it and vote on it.
If enough of them like it make it a part of the game.

Why have a max favor reward. Because I wouldnt trust fairly
new players to create the dungeon if they dont know the game.

[Seventh]

The problem here is that what you're asking for is essentially a whole new game. (One that exists, mind- heard of Neverwinter Nights?) You can't just slap a toolset onto a existing game. The Dev's may have their process for putting adventures together, but it's likely not anything the can just pretty up and give out/sell in the store...

[DarkSable]

@Chai:
Have the xp be assigned purely as optional objectives?
for example, psudo-slayer quests that reset - clear the entire quest and get a bonus, kill only half, and get some xp.
Just like the "Kill some X" objectives that are already in game. then have the quest objective be for minimal xp, for killing the boss, or somesuch.
Loot assignment - Have the treasure chests be the exact same, according to the game - just put in different places.
That way, the ransacking of chests still happens, and xp would still decrease according to the number of times run. Or perhaps have XP work in the same manner as ransacking - the penalty wears off after a while, so you can run it multiple times.

@Four20:
And that's exactly the thing. This would be the kick that pushes DDO to the very top. "You have a new raid? Cool. We have 12. And they're all different, every time we play them. Suck it, WoW."

@Nahwal:
I love the idea of the max favor needed, that way it's even more of a prestige thing, and it'll help keep jokers out.
perhaps set up a psudo-lamania, used for testing maps? just an idea...

@Seventh:
Yeah, that's the thing. The PGC could be done, I think, with some fancy flips of the wrist, but...
well, i'd need to look at how the devs build maps (though I'm drooling at the idea!) in order to figure out if it'd at all be feasible. However, there's a game I recall from the early 2000's, Titan Quest, by Iron Lore. (RIP, iron lore) It was not only an amazing Diablo clone, but it shipped with the same tools, unchanged, that the devs used to make it. They were horrible to figure out, but that was fine; once you did figure out how to use them, you were GOD. And you know, people interested in making maps, with maxed favor, would probably be willing to play around with the tools to get them to work.

All in all, these ideas really would call out that turbine IS powered by it's fans. They'd be getting free content, which in turn would make their fan base ecstatic with the new content, and it'd give a goal to the players. Kinda like, aaright, you made it! Now guess what? You can help make the game as a legacy.

[dunklezhan]

Quite apart from all the valid reasons I've seen above, there's also a fairly massive question around how the infrastructure would actually deal with it. There's no telling how much it would take off, how the dungeons would be created, uploaded and then accessed by the community, even if they were to create a dedicated server or set of servers purely for home brewed content they'd have real problems planning for expansion & load balancing etc, there'd probably have to be some very lengthy community quality checking process before it could be allowed on any live servers which might not be able to cope with the number of dungeons being submitted. There's the question of the IP in all directions (player who created it, Atari, WoTC, Turbine) etc etc freaking etc.

Lid off, worms everywhere.

I'd love to see this, I really would, but with the inherent difficulties in trying to do this in an MMO, I think the solo game Neverwinter Nights with its DM module is about as close as you're going to get. That let you create dungeons that up to 6 players plus a GM could access, LAN style (thought it worked over the internet with the GM hosting). But really, an MMO is a whole other thing and I don't think the existing technologies are ready for it yet.

[DarkSable]

@dunklezhan:
Okay, yeah. I see your point, it would be insanely hard, logistically. (no matter how amazing it would be)

However, the more I think about procedurally generated content, the more I think that it could TOTALLY be done.
- Start out small. I know that dungeons are based on the same style "bricks," such as the curve with a small pool of water / acid / lava in the inner corner. (you should all know what I'm talking about, they have them absolutely everywhere.) Providing some simple, one-layer blocks, have a set of, say, 24 different blocks. Here's the thing, they don't all have to look different... 10 of them could be split into 2 sets of 5, with traps, but the traps would be a different type and placed differently in all of them. (Basically a fancy pallet swap.)
- Then have a quest with say, a 20 block grid, 5X4. One block, the entrance, is fixed. The other blocks are reset every time the quest resets. When they are reset, the game basically rolls 1d24 to determine each slot, rolling 1d4 to determine which way the face, with a few banned (there has to be one entrance facing a tile next to it that has already been placed) so that areas can't be isolated. [If working out a way to prevent isolation is insanely difficult, provide switches in the rooms that rotate the room 90 degrees. It'd be like the puzzles, but bigger. (And would encourage group play.)]
- Then have, perhaps 3 (although to start with, 1) quest options. They might all be 'find and kill the boss,' but they would have different flavors of monsters. If we were doing low level stuff, I would suggest kobolds, skeletons, and something weird, perhaps maggots or head crabs. (just something strange and _novel_.)
- The monsters (and treasure) would also be placed randomly about the dungeon, akin to if somebody had shaken a duster. The only rules would be that anything flagged as, say, 'objective' (chests, bosses, ect...) would have to be at least 2-3 slots away from the entrance.
- Have experience assigned both for the main quest, and for killing / exploring X number of rooms (85%?). Also, have exp degrade as normal, but perhaps have it work more like ransacking a chest; after a while, you can go back and get exp again. (The attraction of the quest, after all, is it's re-playability and novelty, right?)
- Chests are easy, just treat them the same way as normal, ransacked chests. Just have a set of three of them, any 1-2 of which are placed each time, and all three of them can get ransacked like normal.
- If you started out with a low level proof-of-concept, this would be the perfect solution for the calls for high level content; make an epic only dungeon, which is large, has not only a large variation in tiles, but multiple tile sets it could use, and 2-3 different quest types, along with monster flavors... Well there you go, it's a lot of work, but it would have nearly infinite high-level re-playability. Throw in just a few nice items that show up rarely, and people would love it. Please, consider it. Even if it does take a bit of work, it's the equivalent of adding 3-4 quests, but it lasts longer. (especially with epic-quality impressive bosses and boss rooms.)

[Shade]

Problem 1-infinity.

XP assignment. How would this not be exploited and farmed?

Problem infinity +1.

Loot assignment. How would this not be exploited and farmed?

Hard but not impossible to allow user created quests to have loot and xp, while also being balanced.

First - Dungeons start off and give loot and XP, but at the end of the quest if the dungeon was not "approved" the loot and xp is removed from the player.

1. Create a leaderboard for best designed and balanced dungeon.
2. After a dungeon is completed by a player, he is given a quick survey popup. Rating: fun, challenge and xp/loot balance.
3. Every week, the top 5 quests (voted to be fun and balanced xp/loot/challenge wise) get review by turbine staff to determine if they are fair and balanced quests. If approved, they get XP and loot enabled. (The loot and xp are enabled as initially set by the designer) To keep the review process simple and fair - there are standerized rules setup such as:
XP per minute - Can only be X based on average completion time, while also noting the fastest completions times.
Loot levels - won't be great, slightly lower then the quest level, but you at least get something.
Challenge - overall rating needs to be at least X to enable loot level X.

Something that will never happen in DDO.

But it's at least a dream.. That might come in a future mmo.

[Darkrok]

Hard but not impossible to allow user created quests to have loot and xp, while also being balanced.

First - Dungeons start off and give loot and XP, but at the end of the quest if the dungeon was not "approved" the loot and xp is removed from the player.

Even better yet, xp is based on the difficulty of the dungeon based on the CR of the enemies, their density, trap difficulty, etc. You could also limit the trap/cr&mob/number of chests/etc available in the toolkit to mitigate these issues.

Finally, if you want to really lock things down have the developer of the toolkit select the level for the dungeon and have the cr/mobs/traps locked in based on that level selection. Have the loot as randomly generated items only set to the appropriate level for the dungeon.

My fear is that given the lack of complexity these would have they would unfortunately be fairly boring. You couldn't make anything complicated available without creating the opportunity to exploit terrain but you can't make the map interesting without making it look like there's some sort of variance to the terrain.

[Gratch]

If you listen to the DDOCast ask the devs in December they said: "If you had infinite money/time, what would you add to DDO?"

Fernando and others answered that user created content would be THE BOMB.


Based on what I've heard of the dev process, there's currently no completely-niced-out editor for DDO. They have very complicated scripts and scenery and it's all tied to a probably 6 year old initial engine design and hooks.

Neverwinter Nights is your best example of a complicated quest D&D style game that allowed user created content and even a DM to run the games. Sadly that content was 95% for single play or large created world play. I tried a number of the small group multiplayer modules and most still kind of felt single player designed (and others can come along and do a skill check here and there). Many were pretty buggy and got wedged all over the place and this was AFTER the first 80 plus patches to the NWN game. It just didn't work well. Very few user created content modules have QA. TRUTH.

Otoh, it does appear French-Eurogames-Atari via their Cryptic porting-City-Of-Heroes-Engine-onto-every-license-they-own is making a 4th ed DnD game that will have user created content. I'm gonna guess the complexity allowed will be very low. But maybe enough for some enjoyment. Like every cranked-out Cryptic game... 10 hours of interesting (first 2 in the character creator) followed by insane repetition and sadness.

[dkyle]

Even better yet, xp is based on the difficulty of the dungeon based on the CR of the enemies, their density, trap difficulty, etc. You could also limit the trap/cr&mob/number of chests/etc available in the toolkit to mitigate these issues.

Automatically rating a dungeons' difficulty would be nearly impossible. For example, suppose the designer puts in 7 Epic Pit Fiends, but they're all in a closed room, that the adventurers don't pass through? Or how about putting tons and tons of Frostmarrow skeletons in, of high CR, but that can be annihilated by a single Firewall?

Shade's suggestion would be a good way to do it: people rating dungeons based on their actual experience in it.

[Kaeldur]

Truly great idea. Very hard to implement and highly susceptible to flaws and exploits, but it would be very neat if they actually got to this.

There was recently an MMO based on user created content. Quests, dungeons and whatnot. The whole concept of the MMO was based on players creating and inviting friends to crawl the dungeons they made... I don't remember the name though, if someone could fill in the blank...

[Talesin]

Personally I would probably nix the whole randomly generated content idea seeing as I like the idea of all of the quests being personally crafted.

The user generated content idea however has some merit. As with all user-created content and mods you'll have a mix between a lot of medicore (or all out garbage) content sprinkled with several gems that make you wonder why Turbine wouldn't hire their makers on the spot.

I would like to see a similar system what Shade mentioned. Maybe have a portal at a statue (similiar to that one in the harbor with all the names on it) that would bring up a menu of available user-created quests. The quests at the statue wouldn't actually give you new loot or xp that you could keep but it would show you at the end of the quest how much xp you would have got and at chest it would show you what loot you would have gotten. Ideally it would be nice to award players for testing with festival tokens or something like that.

Each update would include the last update's best 5 or so user created dungeons after developers had taken a quick look through them to make sure they are balanced for xp and loot.

-----------

As far as IP rights would go their only two ways to manage something like this that I can think of.

1. All creators forfeit thier rights to the creation as part of using the creation software and the user created quests would be free content.
This would make the most sense.

2. Turbine could bundle the best user-created quests into reletaively cheap adventure packs and share the profits of that pack's sales with the designers.
This would bring in some highly talented armchair mod designers keen on make a little bit of profit from their hobby but would be a pain in the butt to manage.

[donfilibuster]

[QUOTE=DarkSable;3557898]Have you considered having a way to process user-generated content?[/quest]
They have. Some time ago the devs have entertained the idea of user dungeons, but in concept only.
That was by the time there was talk about the upcoming guild housing system, and the system that won was the airships.

Having user dungeons will require a brand new system, unlike the one they use, but they have hinted is not impossible.
However, as fun as it sounds, many of us would agree that amount of work may be better used on something else and only after fixing the longtime bugs.

(say, if you'd list the various things people want like epic levels, druids, etc. user dungeons are probably not too high on the list)

[muffinlad]

This is actually why I was not totally opposed to PvP when it first came out, I assumed it would lead to User Generated Content (UGC).

Here are a few of the ideas I find appealing.

A) Even without an SDK, or set of tools, for the near term, Turbine could ask for user submitted adventure ideas. When they chose the top 4-5, those individuals could further work out the additional content (subject to editing) as how it mixes with Stormreach. The Dev's could then implement the dungeons, assign values, have them Mornlands/Lam tested and roll them out. This is one way they could show user involvement, and offer an ingame credit/title/monthly cost offset for compensation.

Like Kargon's tasty hams, but on a much larger scale.

B) Once tools exist, users could submit the layouts for dungeons in much the same maner. The best would be chosen for "official play" etc.

C) Those not chosen for Official Play, could be turned into "Player GM" stocked dungeons. The player could stock a chest with items they have gleened from other adventures, have controll on how much loot someone could access (if any), and have a range of Monsters they could call on to fill up the dungeon. Initially at lower levels, it would be more like training missions. As the GM gained "favor" or "DM Exp" they could have tougher and tougher monsters. The rating of the GM, and a description and a loot status (yes, no, sometimes) would give people a heads up. These dungeons would not give character exp, or perma damage items, but could be great places to show tactics and have general fun.

Just some thoughts,

muffingm

[voodoogroves]

A) Even without an SDK, or set of tools, for the near term, Turbine could ask for user submitted adventure ideas. When they chose the top 4-5, those individuals could further work out the additional content (subject to editing) as how it mixes with Stormreach. The Dev's could then implement the dungeons, assign values, have them Mornlands/Lam tested and roll them out. This is one way they could show user involvement, and offer an ingame credit/title/monthly cost offset for compensation.

I'm pretty sure they use some in-house tools. The question is whether or not they can mock them up for public-use.

[Uska]

Been asked for dozens of times and I think its a bad idea devs would have to take time away from making content to weed through submissions for ones worth playing then dig through the ones that made it through for bugs and exploits. CoH did it and it was a nightmare and even though its not a mmo NWN did it and only one it 100 was maybe even worth playing and maybe 1 in 1000 was actually good.

[Seikojin]

Problem 1-infinity.

XP assignment. How would this not be exploited and farmed?

Problem infinity +1.

Loot assignment. How would this not be exploited and farmed?

The tool to make quests would generate points to 'buy' monsters, traps, challenges, puzzles, chests, etc. The point total would be determined by a few options; level of quest on each difficulty, and legnth of quest. Then the rest is restricted, so the designer couldn't make quests too easy or too hard.

Make all user created quests timer limited.