Setting rules and expectations for your users from the beginning is crucial. If you skip this step, you'll spend a lot of time and money wishing you had. The developers of City of Heroes found this out the hard way.]]>  

Photo Credit: dreizehn28

I haven’t spent too long in the gaming world, but one thing I learned right away is this: everyone thinks they could design a better game. Practically every time a trailer or game gets released, someone makes a comment about how they would have done something different/better. I suppose it’s just human nature.

So it seems pretty natural that a company would allow users to create their own levels in games. They can make, tweak, and play their own levels to their hearts content. It’s a happy marriage of gaming and user generated content. Right? Well, don’t get out the rice and bubbles just yet.

According to boingboing and Elder Game, users aren’t designing complicated, creative levels. They’re designing incredibly easy levels to get themselves lots of rewards as quickly as possible. 

 When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few “developer’s favorite” quests, it’s very hard to find the “fun but not exploitative” missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity.

This was not what the designers hoped for. Somehow they had convinced themselves that the number of exploiters would be relatively low — certainly not the vast majority of the users. But they were wrong, and now they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. They feel they must counteract these abusive quests, “for the sake of balance”. But how? Well the first step is to ban people who make cheaty content. But what’s cheaty? Do they explicitly list every possible exploit condition? What if they miss one? Nah, then the problem would start all over again. Instead, how about if they just issue blanket threats that they’ll ban missions that seem “exploitative”, without actually explaining what is and isn’t “exploitative”? They went with the latter.

Even with the mis-judgment about the type of levels that would be created, there’s another lesson here that’s applicable to everyone creating a space for user generated content. And that’s rules. Call them rules, standards, guidelines, or whatever else you like — setting the expectations for the user at the beginning of the content engagement is crucial.

Even if the developers only thought that a few people would design exploitative levels, having rules in place at the start that laid out what was acceptable and what was not would have eliminated a lot of hassle. Of course, some exploitative content would have been created anyway, but it could have been dealt with quickly, effectively, and consistently. The middle of a crisis is no time to be thinking about your guidelines and rules of engagement.

Setting the ground rules from the start is good for your users, good for your community managers, good for your moderators, and good for your community as a whole. We want to believe that people will always behave appropriately, but any community manager can tell you that that’s a pipe dream. Don’t wait until the crisis happens in your community. Get your rules in order now.