Player-Created Dungeons in MMOs

Recents posts from Tobold’s and Random-battle have sparked a discussion of sorts on the merits and demerits of player-created content in MMORPGs.

I’m very intrigued by this idea, as it’s always been very popular with many offline RPGs and, more notable, most of Blizzard’s games up to this point. The big problem with implementing this kind of system in a massively online game is the balance (most MMO problems are). Who’s to say that some punk won’t just make an instance with one room, spawn a monster of incredible strength and amazing loot, load it up and kill it 50 times a day. Of course, that’s a somewhat polar viewpoint, but it’s what you have to keep in mind when tackling this problem. Players want easy kills, easy loot, easy status. I swear that online games would be a gold mine for sociologists looking to study human behavior and status symbols. So what’s the solution? How do we keep players from ruining a system like this?

One of Cameron’s suggestions, from his article:

Hire someone to review the player made content and deny it if it’s too broken or farmable. The issue here is that with the size of the community, this would require at least a few full time employees and they would still miss stuff. It would be a time-consuming process to review anything and they’d be wading through a LOT of crappy scenarios. Plus something like this is highly subjective.

That’s an excellent summary of the pros and cons of the solution. Time consuming, subjective, and a waste (for the most part) of human resources which could be allocated to far better uses.

As another possible solution, I commented on Cameron’s original post with this:

[…] what about a place where player-created content is voted on? It doesn’t seem like it would be so hard to create a system where players make content, other players play the content with cloned characters (peeled from their real servers and made to play these beta instances), vote on said content, and then once the instance receives a certain number of votes or consistent traffic, that instance is plowed with a fine-toothed comb and made ready for mass deployment by the developers?

Among run-ons sentences and rushed ideas, I think there is a spark of something good in there. Tobold mentioned something similar in his article, but I guess when I read his I envisioned more of a website devoted to voting, rather than an integrated experience within the game itself. Each run through of the instances by the cloned characters could be closely monitored for loot and exploits, et cetera. The idea of cloning the character is integral to this situation, since we want the player to feel like they’re progressing their character to some degree (and though they can’t save their progress, they won’t lose anything they’ve gained on their main server by dropping a clone and learning an instance). Without permanent loot or experience until final approval, these players aren’t losing much except by way of time (but MMO players in general place a low value on time).

One problem we run into here is that it’s still very possible for players to create sketchy content with exploitation possible. A solution to this problem is to require preliminary approval from a dev before the “beta” process can begin, but that goes back on the entire concept to some degree.

So where is the happy median? Players love content, developers love balance, and player-created content will be unbalanced by definition. One way to provide balanced player-created content is to entice, with a “carrot on a stick” approach, players to create quality dungeons and maps by giving them hope that their creation could be added to the game if enough player approval is garnered.

Are there any other pros or cons to this discussion not present in these articles?