If there were a campaign creator/editor. Where you could make mini campaigns for other players to play. You could allow people to vote on which ones they like and rank the campaigns. This would allow the better player created campaigns to appear higher on the list of player created campaigns. Also, you could actually give out rewards to players for completing the campaigns if the campaign has at least a certain rating or higher. (Got to try and prevent exploiting a very easy and short campaign)
The only way i see this working is if the rewards for completion are shown upfront, a selection of items you can choose from if you win. The maps creator chooses what items can be won, and they must be selected from his inventory, so he literally has to give people his own stuff. In return, if a player completes the dungeon he can then give it a rating, dungeons with high ratings garner rewards for the map creator. This encourages players to finish maps for specific rewards, and creators to offer inciting rewards and good maps to maintain a high rank. Might cut back on potential abuses, making super easy maps is useless if you dont have enough good loot to offer. And not just one item but maybe between 1-8 different items, the more variety to your loot the more groups you'd attract, if someone else beats the dungeon before you do and get the item you wanted, oh well ! Having high ranked dungeon could also unlock more dungeon/monster options for the map creator too. Be a good meta-game element. Should probably be some kind of score for number of attempts done on your dungeon based on the players score before they lost, that way your map can still accrue rank without requiring people to beat it, encouraging you to make it hard as you can so no one actually wins your stuff
I like the dual reward system. Reward the map creator for making a great map and the player for playing it. It just looks like fun to design campaign levels. I would do it for the game if they'd let me
We agree! We've discussed Dungeon Master mode a few times before; though in this case you're talking about just creating campaigns in general, DM or no. The specific "Let players stock maps with their own surplus loot" idea, just like everything else on planet Earth, was brought up by mightymushroom in that second thread. The loot question continues to be the big one; again, in that second thread, Jon said this on the matter: Now . . . demand? Yeah, after PAX, multiplayer in general was bumped up their priorities list by popular DEMAND. Will it mean we get to edit and share campaigns from the get-go? We don't know that.
Player created campaigns is a great idea. It's one of the major things that keeps me interested in simple games like Battle For Wesnoth. The core game modes are fun but having a plethora of player-created modes is always a treat... some aren't so good but the occasional great ones make up for all the bad. But as far as rewards are concerned; I would probably be against rewards given for completing player-created campaigns. I wouldn't want people creating really easy fights and giving out really good loot. But even if the loot could be balanced somehow I think player-created campaigns should be viewed more like challenges you do after you've earned the things you want from the core game; something you do after your characters are already pimped out. If that's the case, which I think it should be, loot becomes completely unimportant and the reward is simply the ability to say "I did it."
Well, what should be considered is the fact, that some players would create very easy maps/campaigns to get items/XP.. Some turds are too narrow minded to accept the fact, that game is fun when you have to earn something without cheating
Balancing is always an issue when it comes to user created content, and there's really no correct way to go about it, as it depends on the game in question and how the content creation system works. One way to balance what loot is given would be to have the type of loot be determined from the contents of the map/campaign. Say a map with only a fairly challenging encounter will give common loot, while a map with a really challenging encounter might give rare loot. Loot would be randomly decided. However this would require some finagling to get working properly.
No matter what kind of monsters you put into the map, it cant account for the map layout itself, they could be put in a bad position so they are easy to defeat. Customization could be extremely limited, like using pre-set rooms and arranging them, but that'd be kind of lame. Dungeon Creating/DMing would need to be a whole meta game aspect, collecting monster cards in your travels that are required to use the monsters in your dungeon (perfect cash shop items too). Placing monsters would require a certain amount of space and your space is limited by some kind of dungeon creator level. In the end, the videos mostly show us rooms with some monsters in them, then another room with monsters in them, would need something more to spice up a player created dungeon.
Actually, with some clever design/coding, you can. That is why I used the word encounter. You can take into account monster spacing, monster spawn location relative to player spawn, how close a particular monster is to a wall at start (standing next to a wall is generally more secure than standing in the middle of a room, while standing in a corner is not), monster formation and presence of- and proximity to various environmental hazards. It's true, though, that quantifying what constitutes as more or less challenging is difficult, at best. So while it is doable, it might not be worthwhile. If custom dungeons were to not include loot, I say give users free reigns and see what the community cooks up. I was also toying with the idea of dungeon creation being its own little game. The more people play and complete your maps, the bigger and more challenging maps you can create. But I think that would be discouraging towards newer players, as well as limiting (obviously), since most maps created by newer players then would all be very similar.
Yeah i kind of touched on that with my last post, requiring a certain amount of open space to place a monster. Not sure what kind of traps/hazards and other environmental affects can be put in a map though. In the end it just seems like its all baic rooms with a few monsters though. I wonder if at any point a dungeon might actually split into segments and you start choosing a path like GW2 explorables.
Eh, why not just let players create whatever adventures they want but don't allow them to attach any reward to completion. Blue Manchu could then go through the created content at their leisure (perhaps with some prompting from us as to where to look) and "validate" well-made content, adding their own reward structure to the end of it. The first play through you might not get anything, but if it's good enough to get validated and have a reward tacked on then I doubt it would be a chore to play through again. It would be more work for the devs, but... well, that doesn't bother me.
