Quest editor / player made content

[Ooblagato1]

I've been playing DDO since shortly after it became free to play. I really enjoy a lot of aspects of it, but I often wish there was more variety in quests. In fact when I was a newer player the lack of variety almost made me quit as I didn't like having to run the same content over and over in order to progress.

So as the title suggests, I think giving players access to tools to design quests and generate content would add a ton of interesting content with the benefit of making DDO live up to the customizable nature of its namesake(D&D). In addition, it would be a great opportunity for developers to optimize tools they use for quest creation so they can create content more rapidly in the future.

Obviously the implementation would need to be structured in a way that promotes fun cohesive quests and prevents quest designs that are exploitable, incoherent, or offensive.

I'd suggest having a single entry point that leads to any quest/public area that has been registered. It would be made clear at the entrance that the content is player submitted.

Registering a quest would cost a decent amount of DDO points and would only last a set period of time, considering data storage and server costs something like 1000~2500 ddo points for 1 month time should strike a decent balance and prevent players from submitting half-baked quests. Perhaps even cost being based on the data size would add encouragement to optimize quest performance.

Moderator(s) may be necessary to ensure no offensive content is registered. There are 3 major options here, player volunteer moderators, paid staff, and/or public reporting after content has been registered.

Quest rewards would be severely limited while at this player submitted stage. DDO staff could monitor player interest/rating of quests and decide to turn select content into official content, and in doing so polish the quests and add balanced rewards.

All in all, I think this would breath some new life into DDO and allow for rapidly expanding content in an affordable way.

[droid327]

1. That's legally tough to do. There's a reason very few mmos incorporate player created content...you'd think companies should happily accept people working for free, but intellectual property law makes it tough to just sign away all your rights to your work for free and waive any future legal claim on it.

2. It's probably more work to vet all the quests they'd get than just to build it themselves. Also a lot harder to maintain and QA quests against future changes when no one on staff is familiar with how they were coded.

3. WotC would likely shoot that right out of the water, since they're really protective of their IP.

[GeoffWatson]

It sounds cool, but it's a lot of work to create quests. The players would probably have to reuse current maps and monsters as it would be too hard to make original stuff.

The main problem is that some players would make quests that are too easy and too rewarding - eg pull a lever, gain a million XP and a thousand of each raid rune.

[janave]

Always liked the idea of a content builder toolkit, i think it is much less bad as presented, user scripts can be scoped and limited, validation tools can be built to filter out a lot of potentially bad stuff.

It sounds cool, but it's a lot of work to create quests. The players would probably have to reuse current maps and monsters as it would be too hard to make original stuff.

The main problem is that some players would make quests that are too easy and too rewarding - eg pull a lever, gain a million XP and a thousand of each raid rune.

These are very simple really, prevent users setting reward directly and set a generic REWARD_OBJ_EXP and REWARD_OBJ_LOOT... and let the system sort it out based on quest level, or Devs can do a quick swoop and set it by hand. Can also limit and script validate the number/type of REWARD_OBJECTS...etc.

There would have to be rules for how fast an instance can be completed for sure, I would set the minimum for 5 minutes for regular quests, and about 10 minutes for raids. Dev team could add more rules, stuff that prevents macroing optionals and stuff like that. There would have to be rules for performance ( could also use generic spawn points of ELF_ARCHERS, ORC-SQUAD, ELF-RANGER-SINGLE-PERCH, HUMAN-WIZARD) stuff like that, then the Dev side build tool replaces those with quest CR appropriate values. I would expect AI behaviours set in a similarly generic fashion.

They could also isolate these into some sort of Event ( aka Beta Tests), then collect data, ask feedback before dropping the content into the game for permanent, or just keep it as an actual temp event, and that way rewards are set by the DDO team entirely.

[John3000]

1. That's legally tough to do. There's a reason very few mmos incorporate player created content...you'd think companies should happily accept people working for free, but intellectual property law makes it tough to just sign away all your rights to your work for free and waive any future legal claim on it.

2. It's probably more work to vet all the quests they'd get than just to build it themselves. Also a lot harder to maintain and QA quests against future changes when no one on staff is familiar with how they were coded.

3. WotC would likely shoot that right out of the water, since they're really protective of their IP.

Not sure about that. Tabletop D&D allows for custom questing... It's not like the people creating UGC (user generated content) are making money out of it. Just look at all the UGC on youtube. Opening up questing to users is a very cool idea. You'd be surprised at the amount of non ssg devs that play D&D or DDO and could definitely make some interesting + original content. Sandbox it so it doesn't interfere with SSG/WotC campaigns/content.

/signed

[Carpone]

To support player generated content requires building the engine from the ground up to support it, as well as have processes to review the content, etc. It's never going to happen with DDO.

[Gljosh]

The Challenge Engine would create some nice guardrails and should be able to get around IP issues as those quests are fairly self contained.

So you could use the Rushmore Mansion quest but change the enemy types, just imagine all the Bosses are undead, demon, or quori-forged.

Or the Arena quest, but instead of Fire you have Ice/Acid.

That way you have a designed XP formula, semi-defined items, and settings.

[mikarddo]

Balancing xp and loot would be a nightmare.

Having user created content in a game thats hurting from lag due to unknown reasons would be completely irresponsible.

[TekkenDevil]

There's so much lack of understanding you show by suggesting this. You simply have absolutely zero idea about multiple aspects of game development if you think this is a viable suggestion.
You need to put more thought into these things than just "hmm, what would be cool?".

Yeah, man. Why don't we build a base on Saturn?
Because Saturn doesn't even have ground to build on, first of all.
"But bro, you don't get it, it would be COOL and USEFUL."

To support player generated content requires building the engine from the ground up to support it, as well as have processes to review the content, etc. It's never going to happen with DDO.

This guy gets it.
You can't just simply flick a wand and WOOSH you have an ergonomic, player friendly creation suite built into the game with UI that anyone can use. At BEST, SSG might release a streamlined version of their own devkit and I guarantee you, you wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it if you'd see it.

But then what? Who's going to host your custom content? And why would SSG hand their job over to you on a platter?

A much more feasible idea is that when DDO eventually shuts down, we ask the devs to release all the tool kits and server code so that (capable and qualified) fans could try and keep DDO alive unofficially.

[John3000]

There's so much lack of understanding you show by suggesting this. You simply have absolutely zero idea about multiple aspects of game development if you think this is a viable suggestion.
You need to put more thought into these things than just "hmm, what would be cool?".

lol... Ok, whatever. No need to shoot the OP down to the ground for making a suggestion.

Who says the two systems have to be interconnected or even on the same server ? It's not like it's an open world. Unless you have inside knowledge on how the game was made and it's questing system was designed or not designed, the OP is free suggest ideas.

cheers

[Ooblagato1]

I see two major concerns from the comments so far. Difficulty of implementation, and reward balances.

The simple answer for reward balancing is, if there's not a good programmatic way to handle it, make it not give rewards and be purely for measuring interest until it gets picked up into official content. Ultimately something that's scaled to be lower end reward quests based on the time fastest completion time anyone achieved would probably be fine. Not going to go into too much detail on other possibilities as there's too many plausible approaches to this.

As for difficulty of implementation, most of us probably don't have inside knowledge of how the DDO team develops their quest scenarios. If they have a setup similar to Unity or something, it may be surprisingly easy to make a user oriented version. Even if it's not something they have now, the teams may be able to start with working on something internally to improve their own productivity.

[janave]

As for difficulty of implementation, most of us probably don't have inside knowledge of how the DDO team develops their quest scenarios. If they have a setup similar to Unity or something, it may be surprisingly easy to make a user oriented version. Even if it's not something they have now, the teams may be able to start with working on something internally to improve their own productivity.

It was hinted before that often an quest/raid has a single developer assigned ( the one who links up all the assets, builds the map geometry, adds logic/scripts, sets monster templates? places map markers, sets event triggers, and so on ...). This takes them 1-2? update cycles and probably some pre development, getting the artwork done, the quest writing/plot, and other stuff the content designer needs to compose the final quest.

Assuming wild things like they work 5 days a week, up to 8 hours a day, based on these assumptions i would say the tooling has to be at least reasonably good, probably have most of the tools some GUI already, scene builder, some asset db, template/game obj. manager, maybe even a project navigator to quickly grab a section from one project into another.

[Annex]

If such a feature were added to DDO I would probably spend 90% of my time creating custom dungeons, at least until the allure wore off.

Each time this subject comes up, most players fixate on the rewards. Leave them out. Include a single point in the game world to access all created dungeons. Clicking the point brings up a list of all such dungeons, sorted by player rating. When a player finishes a created dungeon, allow him or her to rate it, once per account. Over time, high quality created dungeons will rise to the top of the rating list. If the developers really enjoy a particular created dungeon they can fix up any problems, add in rewards, set Favor, and make it a full fledged quest. The system can automatically remove created dungeons with low ratings on some schedule.

Most created dungeons will suck but talented designers will come to the fore, in time. Players who enjoy one off challenges and stories have much to gain.