Neverwinter new pics - OH GAWD ITZ HEAVAN

[Zetor]

There'll be a handful of good adventures to start, but eventually the system will be overwhelmed by farms and stories by new authors won't be played at all. Just as it happened with City of Heroes' MA (which was active for much longer than STO's Foundry and produced a lot more content).

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

There'll be a handful of good adventures to start, but eventually the system will be overwhelmed by farms and stories by new authors won't be played at all. Just as it happened with City of Heroes' MA (which was active for much longer than STO's Foundry and produced a lot more content).

Just saying, that's a pretty diva way of thinking.

 

[Zetor]

I think you meant to say "realistic". There were 600000 COH storyarcs (each storyarc is a set of 1-5 missions) by Dec 2012, so it highlights scaling problems much better than the STO Foundry.

IF Neverwinter becomes a successful game with a large author-base (and at this point I'm not so sure), they'll have to do something about the Foundry rating and search systems. Without a way for players to reliably find content they like, everyone will just keep playing the 200 stories on the front pages, and the system will become stale (for the players) and a frustrating mess where nobody plays your content (for the authors). It's happened in COH MA, it's happened in STO Foundry, it'll happen here.

 

[Zeriel]

Having zero familiarity with how this whole system worked in their other games, I thought this was pretty neat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxKBOo062mw

Taking the tedium and immense amount of time investment out of making tolerably looking 3D levels is fairly cool, lets decent writers put out okay content at a fairly quick pace. Admittedly everything will start looking the same after a week or so, but still, better than the alternative. In my fantasy world, this type of easy-to-use toolset with muscle and power under the hood would be the industry norm, especially for always-online games as a way to leverage that massive online community and actually do something with your goddamn DRM other than piss people off.

I do feel like the basic qualities of the MMO other than the foundry system are really going to decide this one, though--F2P has that inevitable aura of "goddamn this is all going to die in a few weeks, isn't it".

Zetor

What would your solution be to that? It seems to me like the only obvious one is just for Cryptic to have more people whose job it is to comb through all the shit to find the diamonds, but admittedly that isn't so much of a solution to the problem as coping with it, and a F2P model doesn't exactly suggest they want to invest lots of money on something so trivial. I suppose you could invent some sort of basic system that makes an itemized list of things that tend to correspond with quality mods (non-error-spitting dialogue with lots of conditionals, and/or a certain threshold of editing beyond basic templates) and have the system automatically vote said mods up under the hood, but all of that is about as exploitable and prone to abuse as search engine metrics.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well, a lot depends on how the outdoors maps provided at the start are. I'd say it's safe to assume there's a same degree of XYZ placeables for instanced maps as there are in STO Foundry, which would allow for a fair deal of variety on the players end (assuming there's several styles and types of buildings, plants, rocks and the like) to keep the maps useful for multiple purposes.

I do feel like the basic qualities of the MMO other than the foundry system are really going to decide this one, though--F2P has that inevitable aura of "goddamn this is all going to die in a few weeks, isn't it".

I take it you didn't hear about the kind of dosh STO is raking in these days?

 

[Zeriel]

Well, a lot depends on how the outdoors maps provided at the start are. I'd say it's safe to assume there's a same degree of XYZ placeables for instanced maps as there are in STO Foundry, which would allow for a fair deal of variety on the players end (assuming there's several styles and types of buildings, plants, rocks and the like) to keep the maps useful for multiple purposes.

I do feel like the basic qualities of the MMO other than the foundry system are really going to decide this one, though--F2P has that inevitable aura of "goddamn this is all going to die in a few weeks, isn't it".

I take it you didn't hear about the kind of dosh STO is raking in these days?

I didn't mean it as a slight to F2P, but more of an admission that there are two tiers to F2P: the 99% of titles that sink super-quick and never gain traction, and the mega-hits like League of Legends that somehow manage to capture a bigger market than World of fucking Warcraft. I have zero experience with Cryptic other than playing City of Heroes for a day years ago and finding it not fun at all, though.

Also, on the content side, as a snobby nerd who takes his fictional worlds seriously, Forgotten Realms and the Drizzt Do'Urden Coast more specifically are kind of a lead anchor holding down an otherwise amazing system. While we're on the topic, since you seem knowledgable, I noticed in the video they were talking about players flagging and removing explicit content. Does that mean anything objectionable (i.e descriptive writing of violence/lots of swearing), or just the usual sexual verboten topics?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well, a lot depends on how the outdoors maps provided at the start are. I'd say it's safe to assume there's a same degree of XYZ placeables for instanced maps as there are in STO Foundry, which would allow for a fair deal of variety on the players end (assuming there's several styles and types of buildings, plants, rocks and the like) to keep the maps useful for multiple purposes.

I do feel like the basic qualities of the MMO other than the foundry system are really going to decide this one, though--F2P has that inevitable aura of "goddamn this is all going to die in a few weeks, isn't it".

I take it you didn't hear about the kind of dosh STO is raking in these days?

I didn't mean it as a slight to F2P, but more of an admission that there are two tiers to F2P: the 99% of titles that sink super-quick and never gain traction, and the mega-hits like League of Legends that somehow manage to capture a bigger market than World of fucking Warcraft. I have zero experience with Cryptic other than playing City of Heroes for a day years ago and finding it not fun at all, though.

Also, on the content side, as a snobby nerd who takes his fictional worlds seriously, Forgotten Realms and the Drizzt Do'Urden Coast more specifically are kind of a lead anchor holding down an otherwise amazing system. While we're on the topic, since you seem knowledgable, I noticed in the video they were talking about players flagging and removing explicit content. Does that mean anything objectionable (i.e descriptive writing of violence/lots of swearing), or just the usual sexual verboten topics?

Offensive content is one thing, meaning obscenity, hate speech, and so on. Secondly it's IP violations, ie making Lord of the Rings content or the like or having copyrighted characters appear as NPCs. I can't say anything specific until I've read the Foundry TOS, but it's probably the same as the code of conduct in a usual forum or in their public chat, so no /gd/ adventures.

As for the Cryptic and F2P thing, Neverwinter is largely riding on their huge F2P success. Champions was the first superhero MMO to go F2P which made the game ten times more profitable within a month and gave it a brief golden age eventually (currently there's only a skeleton crew because everyone's been moved to work on Neverwinter), while STO is the biggest F2P MMO around with 2 million active players right now.

 

[Zeriel]

Obscenities is kind of unfortunate, since "fuck" is basically a comma for a lot of people in real life (and no, people were no different in the past, I fucking love the inscriptions Roman centurions left talking about their commanders' gaping anuses, et cetera). Oh well!

Anyway, I'm cautiously optimistic for this, as a guy who likes custom content creation and is not utterly allergic to MMOs.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well, in terms of gameplay I'll only warn that the Shield Fighter class is pretty lame compared to the others, with Wizard and Rogue having the most fun so far.

 

[Jarpie]

What I tested NW on weekend it seems that it doesn't have big overall map or maps where players can roam freely, instead they seemed to go for map transitions and smaller areas which basicly kills any kind of exploration and running around which are usually one of main attractions for me.

 

[Zetor]

Zetor

What would your solution be to that? It seems to me like the only obvious one is just for Cryptic to have more people whose job it is to comb through all the shit to find the diamonds, but admittedly that isn't so much of a solution to the problem as coping with it, and a F2P model doesn't exactly suggest they want to invest lots of money on something so trivial. I suppose you could invent some sort of basic system that makes an itemized list of things that tend to correspond with quality mods (non-error-spitting dialogue with lots of conditionals, and/or a certain threshold of editing beyond basic templates) and have the system automatically vote said mods up under the hood, but all of that is about as exploitable and prone to abuse as search engine metrics.

There are a few solutions, and I've actually prepared a megapost on this subject which I'll drop in the NW Foundry forums when they open. First step is accepting that:
- The system is symmetric instead of asymmetric (like a mod community, book reviews, whatever) -- low barrier-of-entry tools and F2P means a lot of people will mess around with the system.
- 90%+ of the content in the system will be crap. See also: Sturgeon's Law.
- The overwhelming majority of players isn't interested in story-heavy content, they want hack-and-slash or farming, mostly farming. Farming in this context means max reward with min effort.
- There's too much content in the system for a simple 5-star system to cover effectively. Anything not in the first 10 pages may as well not exist.
- There's WAY too much content in the system for hand-picked "dev choice" and player review solutions to work as anything other than highlighting a tiny slice of the entire thing. It doesn't matter whether cryptic has 4 people or 40 people doing this, or even if there are 50 trustworthy community members wasting 2 hours at a time to review / vet content (in COH, by month 4 there were 300000 player-created campaigns with 1-5 missions each; there were a little more than 500 reviews of these campaigns total. This was during the 'golden age' and the reviewer community shrunk quickly after that, fwiw.)
- Players have different tastes, and these tastes are often directly opposed (someone who wants farm missions will downvote stories; someone who likes fighting will downvote stories with lots of text; someone who wants challenging missions will downvote mystery and 'talky' missions).
- lots of other issues that I don't want to detail here: voting cliques, upkeep problems, disappearing authors, ratings momentum, insignificance of forums and other community sites, blah blah blah.


Conclusion: the ingame browse tool needs to be enhanced to allow players to find content they'd like (or probably like). I'd go as far as to say that a 5-star rating system doesn't work at all, but since it's not going to be changed at this point, it may be better to just improve it instead.

Some early solution ideas based on the COH MA community's 3+ years of efforts (again, not too many details here):
- A complex tagging system that can be used to identify missions based on playstyle (farm, story, combat-heavy, solo-friendly, etc), types of enemies, location, length, etc. Needs to support boolean operators and it should also allow players to tell what THEY think a particular content can be tagged for (ie. creator thinks the quest is solo-friendly, but it turns out it isn't at all)
- The ability to create and share favorites lists of content, and automatically see friends'/guildies' lists when browsing.
- Generating recommendations ("if you liked this, you may also like" / "you might want to try") for the player based on tags/keywords and their past preferences (if you vote 5 on a lot of drow-related quests, you'll see more drow-related quests pop up). This system should prioritize lesser-played but high-quality content for generating recommendations, too.
- Various improvements to the rating system such as vote weighting / normalization, vote accountability, ability to vote on votes ("x of y people found this useful"), etc. Plenty of examples on Amazon and similar websites that work.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

(and no, people were no different in the past, I fucking love the inscriptions Roman centurions left talking about their commanders' gaping anuses, et cetera).

Link plz :D ?

 

[Kirtai]

(and no, people were no different in the past, I fucking love the inscriptions Roman centurions left talking about their commanders' gaping anuses, et cetera).

Link plz :D ?

Search for "pompeii graffiti"

 

[J1M]

Zetor, they could also give people bonus XP/gold/whatever for playing adventures with under 100 plays. (That have been listed for at least a week so as to prevent people from spamming short adventures with no content into the system.)

 

[Zetor]

Zetor, they could also give people bonus XP/gold/whatever for playing adventures with under 100 plays. (That have been listed for at least a week so as to prevent people from spamming short adventures with no content into the system.)

Yeah, there are ways to incentivize less-played adventures. Adding rewards is always dangerous, though.

Even with a 1-week delay, this'd get abused like crazy (if the reward was significant enough) or it wouldn't be a good enough incentive for people to actually try playing less-known content that is pretty likely to be bad (if it wasn't). You'd have a group of people make 20 quests in an hour or so, let it simmer for a week, and they'd just play those over and over while making next week's batch... Actually, come to think of it, you wouldn't even need a group of people, just a single person making an army of sockpuppet accounts and levelling them to 15 to churn out foundry missions for his own use (he'd only need to do this once, and levelling 1-15 takes like 2 hours right now, probably even less if you know where to go).

I kinda like the concept of rewarding players who play less-known content, as long as exploiting it isn't incentivized... could maybe give something like badges or achievements or other cosmetic rewards instead of physical stuff. You'd probably still have people littering the Foundry with thousands of empty missions they made just to get the rewards, though.

 

[Zeriel]

*Snip*

Conclusion: the ingame browse tool needs to be enhanced to allow players to find content they'd like (or probably like). I'd go as far as to say that a 5-star rating system doesn't work at all, but since it's not going to be changed at this point, it may be better to just improve it instead.

Holy shit that really just revved up the Negativity Overdrive in me, I now am pretty much convinced this is doomed. Still, I suppose it then falls into the category of NWN 1 & NWN 2, where you personally know or find good authors, and just kind of follow them because you know they put out stuff you like. Admittedly, that eventually becomes a lot of work, and I imagine after a while forums will be of more use in finding what you like/the best people than the actual in-game tools.

 

[J1M]

Zetor, they could also give people bonus XP/gold/whatever for playing adventures with under 100 plays. (That have been listed for at least a week so as to prevent people from spamming short adventures with no content into the system.)

Yeah, there are ways to incentivize less-played adventures. Adding rewards is always dangerous, though.

Even with a 1-week delay, this'd get abused like crazy (if the reward was significant enough) or it wouldn't be a good enough incentive for people to actually try playing less-known content that is pretty likely to be bad (if it wasn't). You'd have a group of people make 20 quests in an hour or so, let it simmer for a week, and they'd just play those over and over while making next week's batch... Actually, come to think of it, you wouldn't even need a group of people, just a single person making an army of sockpuppet accounts and levelling them to 15 to churn out foundry missions for his own use (he'd only need to do this once, and levelling 1-15 takes like 2 hours right now, probably even less if you know where to go).

I kinda like the concept of rewarding players who play less-known content, as long as exploiting it isn't incentivized... could maybe give something like badges or achievements or other cosmetic rewards instead of physical stuff. You'd probably still have people littering the Foundry with thousands of empty missions they made just to get the rewards, though.

Make it so you can only earn said bonus once a day/week and make it moderate. It's not intended to be a or the reward for doing the mission, it is there to move people from "maybe I should try this but I can't tell if it is any good" to "alright, I will hit load".

 

[Zetor]

*Snip*

Conclusion: the ingame browse tool needs to be enhanced to allow players to find content they'd like (or probably like). I'd go as far as to say that a 5-star rating system doesn't work at all, but since it's not going to be changed at this point, it may be better to just improve it instead.

Holy shit that really just revved up the Negativity Overdrive in me, I now am pretty much convinced this is doomed. Still, I suppose it then falls into the category of NWN 1 & NWN 2, where you personally know or find good authors, and just kind of follow them because you know they put out stuff you like. Admittedly, that eventually becomes a lot of work, and I imagine after a while forums will be of more use in finding what you like/the best people than the actual in-game tools.

That's pretty much how it went down in COH, yep. It then becomes a problem of "how do I become a known author when I'm a newcomer 2 years into the game's life?" and accepting that even if you win some player-run contests and become somewhat famous, your stories will probably never be played by more than a handful of players.

 

[Zetor]

Zetor, they could also give people bonus XP/gold/whatever for playing adventures with under 100 plays. (That have been listed for at least a week so as to prevent people from spamming short adventures with no content into the system.)

Yeah, there are ways to incentivize less-played adventures. Adding rewards is always dangerous, though.

Even with a 1-week delay, this'd get abused like crazy (if the reward was significant enough) or it wouldn't be a good enough incentive for people to actually try playing less-known content that is pretty likely to be bad (if it wasn't). You'd have a group of people make 20 quests in an hour or so, let it simmer for a week, and they'd just play those over and over while making next week's batch... Actually, come to think of it, you wouldn't even need a group of people, just a single person making an army of sockpuppet accounts and levelling them to 15 to churn out foundry missions for his own use (he'd only need to do this once, and levelling 1-15 takes like 2 hours right now, probably even less if you know where to go).

I kinda like the concept of rewarding players who play less-known content, as long as exploiting it isn't incentivized... could maybe give something like badges or achievements or other cosmetic rewards instead of physical stuff. You'd probably still have people littering the Foundry with thousands of empty missions they made just to get the rewards, though.

Make it so you can only earn said bonus once a day/week and make it moderate. It's not intended to be a or the reward for doing the mission, it is there to move people from "maybe I should try this but I can't tell if it is any good" to "alright, I will hit load".

You'd need some pretty hefty rewards to get people past that threshold. I played Random Arc Roulette in COH (as did many others, usually as an experiment), playing random unrated story arcs and the result was ALWAYS ALWAYS bad. Yes, there's a 1% chance you may hit on something good, but chances are that random story you're playing is going to be an abandoned mess, an incomplete something that can barely be called content, or a forgotten farm mission.

Anyway, like I said, I like the basic concept (some sort of incentive for less-known content).

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Zetor, they could also give people bonus XP/gold/whatever for playing adventures with under 100 plays. (That have been listed for at least a week so as to prevent people from spamming short adventures with no content into the system.)

Yeah, there are ways to incentivize less-played adventures. Adding rewards is always dangerous, though.

Even with a 1-week delay, this'd get abused like crazy (if the reward was significant enough) or it wouldn't be a good enough incentive for people to actually try playing less-known content that is pretty likely to be bad (if it wasn't). You'd have a group of people make 20 quests in an hour or so, let it simmer for a week, and they'd just play those over and over while making next week's batch... Actually, come to think of it, you wouldn't even need a group of people, just a single person making an army of sockpuppet accounts and levelling them to 15 to churn out foundry missions for his own use (he'd only need to do this once, and levelling 1-15 takes like 2 hours right now, probably even less if you know where to go).

I kinda like the concept of rewarding players who play less-known content, as long as exploiting it isn't incentivized... could maybe give something like badges or achievements or other cosmetic rewards instead of physical stuff. You'd probably still have people littering the Foundry with thousands of empty missions they made just to get the rewards, though.

Personally I think the best solution to rewards would be to have the devs assign special rewards to any and all hand-picked UCG they find to be especially good. In STO they've got the Foundry Spotlight, and I expect there's plenty of good stuff there (I've only played one Foundry mission that wasn't a farmer, and quite enjoyed it). The problem is the death knell for Foundry audiences: STO has a lot of Fleet-based farming, meaning only mega-sized Fleets have lots of time to spare which doesn't need to go towards efficiency. Most people simply don't have the time to play Foundry content besides farmer missions if they're part of a Fleet that doesn't have several hundred members.

Which is why I sincerily hope the level of resource investment needed in NW lategame is closer to that in Champions: You can get top-tier gear in six hours total.

 

[Zetor]

Personally I think the best solution to rewards would be to have the devs assign special rewards to any and all hand-picked UCG they find to be especially good. In STO they've got the Foundry Spotlight, and I expect there's plenty of good stuff there (I've only played one Foundry mission that wasn't a farmer, and quite enjoyed it).
(snip)

That falls into the "handpicked stories" bit, which doesn't work when you have hundreds of thousands of stories. How will the devs select the spotlight that doesn't involve "ok, let's just look at high-rated missions" or "look at what the hot buzz is in the forums"?

e: anyway, I ended up just posting my entire mad bomber manifestodebate starter material over in the NW beta forums -- http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/sh...n-the-Foundry-challenges-and-solutions-(long)

 

[Zeriel]

*Snip*

Conclusion: the ingame browse tool needs to be enhanced to allow players to find content they'd like (or probably like). I'd go as far as to say that a 5-star rating system doesn't work at all, but since it's not going to be changed at this point, it may be better to just improve it instead.

Holy shit that really just revved up the Negativity Overdrive in me, I now am pretty much convinced this is doomed. Still, I suppose it then falls into the category of NWN 1 & NWN 2, where you personally know or find good authors, and just kind of follow them because you know they put out stuff you like. Admittedly, that eventually becomes a lot of work, and I imagine after a while forums will be of more use in finding what you like/the best people than the actual in-game tools.

That's pretty much how it went down in COH, yep. It then becomes a problem of "how do I become a known author when I'm a newcomer 2 years into the game's life?" and accepting that even if you win some player-run contests and become somewhat famous, your stories will probably never be played by more than a handful of players.

Then again, that only adds to your egotistical snob factor. You can be the David Lynch of NWN! "Oh, I was into Cockgargle Elfraper's prestigious modules before they were even available to the public. Peasant!"

Incidentally, don't modules allow you to write descriptions and see said descriptions before you play them? Isn't this a good way to root out the worst of the roulette picks? I'm imagining a situation like pitch letters to literary agents in the publishing world. Sure, it's not perfect, but 99.9% of novels agents get sent don't even get read because the pitch letter is bad.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Incidentally, don't modules allow you to write descriptions and see said descriptions before you play them? Isn't this a good way to root out the worst of the roulette picks? I'm imagining a situation like pitch letters to literary agents in the publishing world. Sure, it's not perfect, but 99.9% of novels agents get sent don't even get read because the pitch letter is bad.

Yes, and if the search engine is anything like that of STO it'll search both the names AND the descriptions of the modules.

 

[SCO]

Personally I think the best solution to rewards would be to have the devs assign special rewards to any and all hand-picked UCG they find to be especially good. In STO they've got the Foundry Spotlight, and I expect there's plenty of good stuff there (I've only played one Foundry mission that wasn't a farmer, and quite enjoyed it).
(snip)

That falls into the "handpicked stories" bit, which doesn't work when you have hundreds of thousands of stories. How will the devs select the spotlight that doesn't involve "ok, let's just look at high-rated missions" or "look at what the hot buzz is in the forums"?

e: anyway, I ended up just posting my entire mad bomber manifestodebate starter material over in the NW beta forums -- http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/sh...n-the-Foundry-challenges-and-solutions-(long)

I just regret i have only one brofist to give. It's rare one sees someone that is not a computing expert or academic who realizes the pitfalls of review systems.

BTW, recommendation systems are huge-big money 'social-computing' stuff. A few years ago there was a MILLION dollars prize to improve the amazon recommendation system just by 1 percent. AI researchers, mathematicians, sociologists and statisticians in seventh pig-heaven.

/considering such a system would be worth probably dozens of millions, maybe even billions to Amazon, they got robbed but whatever.

 

[Norfleet]

The STO foundry is filled with pretentiously wanky and useless bilge. The only good foundry missions are the ones made by those from #Farmville. I would sooner gargle my own diarrhea than play half that "Spotlight" crap. I have great difficulty imagining that the NW foundry will work differently in that regard.