City of Heroes Mission Architect Exploits Detailed

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Written by BuckGB on May 14th, 2009

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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.

So now, any user-created mission that is (exploitative) will get deleted, and users who played it will get their XP retroactively lowered, or even lose their character. So what counts as exploitative? One or two of the (exploits) are pretty obvious, but it's really unclear where the line is drawn. Their forums are struggling with this very problem:

Are all-boss maps ok? Are all-AV maps ok? Are custom enemy groups with only one mob ok? Two mobs? Three? Five, but with no minions?

Or do we not get to know before they sack us?

Bingo. You don't know if you're breaking the rules until you get punished. So the developers are creating a chilling effect on their own content generator. Now it's risky for players to even use user-created quests. What if some customer service rep decides the quest is exploitative? You'd retroactively lose your XP. It's best to just to stick to the old dev-made quests, the ones you know won't get you punished.

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