An Idea: Player Created Dungeons

[Selastan]

So I was in Scarlet Monastery the other day, and I was thinking that Blizzard's old school dungeon making system was pretty modular, similar to games like Subnautica's, No Man's Sky's, and Fallout 4's building systems. So in theory all it would take is a decent interface and players could use old assets from the game to create their own dungeons. Perhaps in clearing the Sunken Temple you had a chance to loot something like [Dungeon Blueprints: Troll Hallway 1], or in Scholomance you had a chance to find [Dungeon Blueprints: Spooky Candle 3]. Players could create fun and challenging dungeons either for their friends or even for immersive roleplaying and designing tough bosses to train their raiding skills. It would be a fun diversion with possibilities to grow every expansion, as well as a reason to go back to old content. Thoughts?

[Radaney]

Cool idea but unfortunately worth about 60 raid tiers.

Also I feel inserting a dungeon boss 'generator' or 'builder' into WoW could be extremely difficult and it'd be hard to keep player created dungeons fresh as they'd have to reuse assets. The technical side of it in a game this massive would be incredibly difficult.

[Deleted]

Too many technical issues, would never work.

[Lady Dragonheart]

Sounds like Neverwinter, which was actually rather fun to play player-made content.

[Krawu]

The tools for developing environments and such already exist, they could easily tweak them in such a way that community members who are experienced in that kind of stuff can use it to create their own instances. Then have one PTR where players can run those community created dungeons, then vote for the best 3 or so every six months or once a year. Then have their devs merely touch up the winning entries and release them into the live game.

I never understood why they don't source at least some content from such a dedicated community. People would jump at the chance to create their own instances and win, say, a lifetime subscription of WoW or some unique mounts or something in return.

User generated content can reach some incredible levels of quality and at times even surpass the original game, think of the Long War mod for XCom or MOBAs in general. Time they started to make use of that.

EDIT: I just remembered that Roberts Space Industries did such a contest once, though only for a single ship model. But they came away with some mind blowing work:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZffXKdokPwA

[Krawu]

I don't know what's wrong with MMO-C lately but, some linked videos just don't at all show up for me :S

No worries, I'll leave the link in my original post.

[Redroniksre]

The dungeon assets themselves aren't very modular, many of the old dungeons are loaded in their entirety minus clutter like furniture. I would love Blizzard to give some kind of user created content to WoW, would be hard to reward players though since people tend to make farm dungeons like in Neverwinter (also Neverwinters big problem with user stuff having almost zero reward because of that). I doubt Blizzard would do it, but i would love to get involved in making custom content for WoW again and not just for me and my friends.

[Shampro]

Could happen in a completely new engine. WoW's even though very refined/improved over the years, is still ancient. So nope, won't happpen. This engine doesn't seem to be build to basicly modify and build Voxels on the fly. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel )

[Silver Forte]

They have this in Neverwinter: DND and it works fine. That game isn't that much different than WoW.

[Surfd]

because it would 99% unfeasible to implement.

First, you would have to overcome Sturgeon's Law, which pretty much guarantees that the vast majority of submissions they get would be crap. It would take a decently large, dedicated staff just to sort the crap from the non crap. Second, every "non" crap submission would have to be very carefully vetted to make sure that someone didn't hide a digital penis or something similar somewhere in the dungeon. So, yet more man hours involved. Third, a huge swath of them would be stupid shit like "one long hallway, filled with 50 hp bosses that have legendary loot tables", which sort of ties back to 1.

In the end, I imagine about 0.1% of all submissions they got would actually be up to blizzards quality standards, which brings you then to the problem that, in a game that is largely story driven, where do you put "random dungeons that might not fit logically anywhere" into the game?

Also, anyone who thinks dungeon creation is "easy", probably never even tried to make one on any currently existing tool-set for any game, ever. There is a reason they have entire teams of people working for years just to crank out a few raids / dungeons every few patches. That shit is hard if you want to end up with something that actually looks good.

[Eleccybubb]

No thanks. Most of the players would end up going Super Mario Maker on that crap and making them nigh impossible or just plain stupid. However if they were carefully moderated by a team at Blizzard which well let's face it these days anything community related isn't then I'm all for it.

[Sentynel]

A fact: This engine won't ever support an Editor.

[Surfd]

A fact: This engine won't ever support an Editor.

Fact: It already does. Or do you think the Devs put this shit together in notepad by handwriting the code?

It will just never support a publicly available Editor tool.

Which actually brings up another interesting point: Does anyone here honestly think that Blizzard would EVER give players access to an editor capable of building a complete dungeon? I mean, consider for a second. If you were going to allow players to build a complete dungeon, then the editor would have to allow you to do the physical layout, which isn't a big deal, but it would also have to allow you to place mobs, set loot tables, and most importantly, design or script boss fights. I don't know about you, but I can't, in a million years, see Blizzard ever putting anything into the hands of the public that would pretty much be required to give players access to server script information.

[ReleaseDay]

I like the idea, but blizz would never allow it.

[Dug]

I mean it could be a cool idea but it would be a pretty huge undertaking by Blizzard to create a user friendly editor for players to mess around with. Probably something like a main expansion feature... 2-3 xpacs from now at Blizzard's pace. Either that or an entirely new engine with that built from the get go.

There's so many factors to consider not just dungeon lay out and mob placement.

[Imnick]

Fact: It already does. Or do you think the Devs put this shit together in notepad by handwriting the code?

WoW has a "terrain editor" but it is by no means anything that anyone but a vanishingly small amount of the player base could possibly achieve anything with.
It's not the modular "snap-together" tool that the OP is asking for.

[Squigglyo]

Ok lets see what this random players dungeon is like...

aaaaaaaaand its another dungeon with everything placed to look like a dick...

[hulkgor]

No. I expect quality and polish from World of Warcraft content...

It works on some games (Starcraft has buttloads of player created content, Fallout has thousands of mods and user-created stuff), but i wouldn't want that on World of Warcraft.

[Silver Forte]

A lot of games that have level editors are using editors that were made specifically for the purpose of players making content. Like Forge for Halo, the devs don't use Forge to make the maps in the game. There's no real argument against this other than it would take time away from raids and other content we're used to getting. There would obviously be a system in place to prevent stupid shit like those automatic Mario Maker levels or swastikas from going live and player feedback could lead to makes that are too hard (or whatever other negative) dropping in ratings to the bottom of the list, and good maps rising.

[ge0]

This would work with battlegrounds and arenas.

Nothing else.