There was a time when I wanted to make a blog about video games, and this is that blog. I’m not really posting anymore, so there’s no point in this, but I can’t quite bring myself to closing this blog.
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. [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.
How quaint. You can be an MMO developer yet remain delusional enough to expect good things from your audience.