Re:What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?
by lostcolony on Monday July 14, 2014 @02:27PM
(#8032387)
I don't think you can have players voting. At least, not being the final arbiters of what gets included.
If you open up everything for players to code with, you need the devs to vet it, else you open up people creating exploits, opening up, say, tier 9 equipment for defeating a tier 1 level boss, or similar, and players may vote to allow such things even though it would lessen their enjoyment, and break the longevity of the game (thereby also reducing subscription profits).
Now, create a sandbox server, allow limited betas of content (so as to avoid everyone already being familiar with it if you adopt it), give the players a place to give feedback, but leave it to the devs to ensure it's balanced, the lore is consistent, etc, and you're onto something; that would be really cool.
It seems like the big developers are willing to a degree (HUD coding, add-ons, interface wrappers) but not direct creation of content. Admittedly, its a lot of modularity and tools you'd need to both build into the main game, and find a way to make intuitively accessible to your players. But, that would probably drive some neat language development as well, since you'd either need to require they learn something like Lua or Python, or develop a very smooth way to write valid in-game code.