If people were getting tired of spam they had the option of TURNING OFF GLOBAL.

NCSoft shot themselves in the foot with Architect, plain and simple. Banning players for creating farms is stupid, and deleting our chars or resetting us to low levels is asking for trouble.

I got tired of playing the same dev-created missions 50+ times and getting stomped because my char had no enhancements. After 3 years of playing I started to use farms to pump my newb chars up a bit to get a ton of cash, buy enhancements, then use Ourobouros to go back in time and do those tired-ass missions with a bit of muscle.

If NCSoft deletes a single char of mine, or reduces em in level, both myself and my gf will cancel our accounts, as I am sure many others will.

Nice work, Positron…you are clearly a forward thinker.

If that’s the case, and players would rather farm… it suggests to me that there’s more going on than a few nutters looking for exploits.

It’s clear that the consequences weren’t thought through properly, as it’s evident to everyone involved that players would do precisely what they have done. I’m disappointed in Cryptic for failing to prevent the abuses, then patching on the banhammer threat as a half-assed band-aid. Using the EULA to police player activity with player-created content is frankly asinine, when better design could have prevented the abuse in the first place.

Seriously disappointing.

Now, should they have looked the MA closer before they released it and removed the ability to make those types of missions? Sure. I don’t know why they didn’t. Perhaps it affected the functionality or flexibility of the MA, and they didn’t want to let a few bad apples (the exploiters) spoil the system for everybody else. Who knows? At any rate, it IS interesting to watch.

Any system can be exploited. MA had already been pushed back an issue. They (the Devs, but more likely NCSoft) wanted to get this puppy out the door. I didn’t read the post as reactionary at all – more like a warning shot across the bow. No one is forcing players to create this abusive content. In fact no one is forcing players to use MA at all. At least CoX players got the warning shot and not willy-nilly banning ala Blizzard. The EULA you sign every time you click the ‘Next’ button basically says don’t be a douche or you can get banned. They aren’t punishing players – they are simply stating that they are going to start enforcing what the players agreed upon when they logged into the game. It’s pretty amazing that people still get inflamed over voluntary content like this.

BTW – Things really didn’t work out for the Bounty crew after their mutiny.

http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com/2009/05/ncsoft-gives-finger-to-own-players.html

I want to get quality content, and not create quality content myself. I also put some trust in the developer to create engaging and fun content. This is what I pay for, after all.

It is a lazy way to make users work for free, this was their basic idea. Let users stretch content and provide themselves with content.

The sheer naivety, actually it is quite dumb, NOT to expect this or … pardon, they DID expect his, and still did it? This does not make sense.

This reminds me almost of Guild Wars, also part of the NCSoft family: Great ideas, extremely bad implementation.

I guess this describes NCSoft and their design studios best.

I dare to say: Remove the XP, and NOBODY will bother with the Mission Architect anymore at all.

This hints at a much more deeper design problem. People play the game for the “rewards”, not so much because the game per se is fun.

I actually think this is the core issue: CoH gets quickly boring. And this cannot be changed by a mission architect.

But on the other hand, they really should have set this up before the released the content. You can’t just start punishing people for laws that you create after the fact.

Wouldn’t the simple solution be to lower the amount of XP given from AE missions? Or maybe they give very little XP, until the mission is rated higher by other players who think it’s well done.