http://www.ryzom-ring.com/

It's in "alpha," but I guess this is to let Ryzom players design and test their own scenarios to be played. And yeah, this is a MMOG.

Ryzom was pretty "blah". I' not sure player created content is going to change that.

Yeah, they were showing Ryzom Ring at E3 last year, and we talked to Jessica about it a bit...it was interesting but I'm not sure how it's going to get vetted and implemented.

Yeah when I sat with her with Div she said their intent is to give players sort of a lego block type system to piece things together. I don't know where they are on that idea anymore and Jessica isn't there anymore (right?) so who knows how it will come out.

It should be interesting to see how they can manage the content so that people don't go wild and create Total gibbering malfunctioning sexual deviant havens or something ala Second Life.

Jessica left Ryzom? I swear, I am so behind since I had kids.

she was only on a 1 year contract I believe. Land would know better than I would.

Yeah, Mulligan's out and is apparently back in Austin, and is trying to get her own startup going. She's going about it fairly slowly, though. Surprised more people didn't know about this.

Others apparently responsible for this (in part) are Brian "Balseraph" Urbanek and fellow Ninjaneer Andy Mitchell (who was client lead on UO2 way back when.) Both have contracts with Nevrax that are about to expire this month.

Well, NWN proves that players CAN make good content.

Hpo do you filter it? Admitedly more of an issue, but if you can find volunteers to moderate your forums and to GM your game, you can find volunteers to weed the reasonable stuff from the trash.

At the AGC talk on player-created content, Sturgeon's Law got invoked pretty quickly. The only remedy for it is that with a greater volume of creators, that 1 percent of everything that isn't crap will in theory be in greater volume as well, and will be good enough for everyone else to enjoy.

But they also said, don't think player-created content is an excuse. Moderation is work. It's just a different kind of work. And running a MMOG is still a godly profession.

Couldn't player created content in a mmog be made optional? And distributed/recommended by players? I think of NWN and Morrowind, then I think of how patch day was optional in UO. I remember the best advice, I think it was from Einer, was never patch on patch day. Just log-in and watch everyone else's game go to hell. Then a few days later, once the bugs are fixed, you run the patch yourself.

Is it possible in this day and age to make player created content optional, and still have a functioning game?

Cheers

"Can it work?" is never a relevant question.

"Can it be taken for granted to always work?" always has "No" for an answer.

I was interested in the feature but the more I read about it the more I lost interest.

The biggest turn off is that you cannot even "plot the land", that is probably what I'd have liked more to toy about.

You can only use preset maps and then add buildings and NPCs with a very basic form of scripting. There's also a terribly low cap on the objects you can drop on a level, like 50 or 100.

So there isn't enough space to create a personalize something. The idea was good but the implementation probably failed to open those possibilities that were interesting.