Yep, me too. I think I'll go and start the download!

Of course it'll take a while to separate the wheat from the chaff, but player created content is what made Neverwinter Nights such an awesome experience for me - there were some superb modules!

Hopefully there'll be a decent website to provide player ratings for the content, so you can actually choose the best ones and avoid the crap.

I just finished a trial - the game is great and the freedom you get for character creation is just amazing.

I personally couldn't get used to the controls - it's perhaps a petty reason, but I just couldn't get hang of the way the camera/mouselook/-buttons work so movement was really frustrating - which pretty much spoiled the (otherwise great) gaming experience.

I really liked it, but sadly it would seem "it's not a game for me"

Didn't they try this with Ryzom? Not that that's much of a gauge of success...

Well, it's already live and players are playing and enjoying it, so I guess it depends on what your criteria are for "working".

There's a fair number of farming missions (missions made just for XP gain) and people are trying to game the ratings system to exploit ranking, but on a more localized scale there are a good number of player developed missions, MA communities for finding these missions (like the coh_ma community on LiveJournal, or the forums) and honestly, some people (like myself) are just making mission archs for themselves and their friends to enjoy, sort of with a "put yourself into the story" agenda, to feel more involved with the canon of CoH. A fair number of players are making missions to explore the backstories to their characters, which is pretty awesome.

Well, it seems to be functioning as intended. But you can never tell if things like this work until the afterglow is over.

I am going to use the myspace example again. When people first started sharing music online with places like mp3.com it was exciting and new. A lot of good music could be found and you would hear a lot of things that the music industry wouldn't normally accept. Quite a few deserving people got attention that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and even a couple of my friends got published by reputable labels because of it.

Look at it nowadays. MP3.com doesn't exist any longer as it was, and the only people using myspace for musicians and similar sites are music people trying to get as large a friends list as possible. Nobody uses them to find exciting new music because they are too used to the same formulaic stuff.

Taxidermy, you're absolutely right!

It's not as though countless Gamemasters across the globe haven't provided fun experiences for their friends over the past 40 years ;)

Next: let's cut down all the character customization options in CoX; maybe a few of the players have come up with a radical outfit, but the majority are still conforming to the usual (MMO) molds anyway :D

Not saying its not going to work, just saying history has taught me otherwise.

P.S. there is a rating system built in. You rate each mission as you finish it. When others go to play missions you can search by ratings (as well as author etc.). The mission selection screens are very well thought out. The whole thing is put together exceedingly well.

I don't agree. The developers simply have to put their focus on providing a decent toolkit to allow people to tell the stories they want to tell. In many ways providing a decent set of tools that can keep up with peoples' imaginations is more demanding than pjust providing the content.

Jack,

So you're saying that if Blizzard added a "Mission Architect" to World of Warcraft it would never get to the point where there's more player-made content than developer created content? You don't think there's any bugs or changes that could be made in WoW?

I think you've had too much Blizzard-laced kool-aid.

World of Warcraft success is not from its volume or so-called perfected content, but purely a marketing juggernaut. It's the McDonanlds of MMOs. I don't know about you but my taste is little more upscale.

They try. But the only XP rewards you get in missions are for kills, and the value of those scale to the difficulty, so you're still better off running normal missions for XP gain. The exception is for people with specific builds, who like missions populated with specific badguy types so they're easier to beat, but even that advantage is debatable.

Most of the rewards inside the Mission Architect are badges or merits (think skeeball tickets at an arcade) that can be cashed in for goodies.