I have similar idea

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/5844139#Comment_5844139

RPer's would love it though, wouldn't they?
Not me. I played Star Trek for a little while. Got my ship, crew, did some missions. Some quest i found one day took me from system to system, planet to planet. It had shooting, some plot twists, planet surface exploration and even beach party. When it was over, game asked me to *rate* the quest. What the hell, i thought. Created by another player, it turned out.
I had no idea such feature even existed and felt cheated, like my time and my character's story was just wasted in some fanfiction.
Yeah, game probably warned me that the quest isn't really official, but if i didn't see it, then the message wasn't very clear. So uh, if ZOS somehow decide to implement it, i'd really like it to be obvious even for the newest of newbies.
(I don't play modder created quest in single player TES games, by the way.)

For roleplayers, this would be fantastic. At the moment, if we want to do any kind of adventure RP we essentially have to scout suitable IG locations (of which there might be none) or use the housing tool to create maps (which have no mobs on them).

As a long time STO player and author of over 40 missions, the closure of the foundry was the last straw for me and my wallet is sealed shut as far as that game is concerned. The OP covered the basic reasons for closing it and if folks are interested here is Cryptic's actual excuse:

https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/11102923-foundry-sunset-april-11,-2019

It boils down to the fact that as soon as Cryptic went F2P they fired all the people who had created the foundry, some left of their own accord and then left it in Beta right up to today. The only reason it failed is because Cryptic were not interested in maintaining it.

It was, however, very successful, with over 100,000 missions added, and many of these were superior in terms of writing, than anything Craptic could come up with. It's not surprising really, with a pool of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people playing in the past, that there would be plenty who would exceed the abilities of the employed devs.

They were never superior in terms of effects, cutscenes and voice-overs as all of those functions were missing from the foundry tool.

So, yes, the foundry idea can work, and work very well indeed, to provide an enormous boost in story driven content to any game. Yes, it has to be reviewed for obvious reasons, some stated previously by others, yes it has to be a system that would not allow exploits, yes it has to be a tool that can provide voice over facility and easy asset management and placement on a 3D editor. It must support teaming and must be instanced.

In order to provide this level of quality and control I would estimate you'd need a team of full time foundry managers and coders, probably 20 people at least, Cryptic had about 5 working on it in 2010/11 and clearly was nowhere near enough, and ESO is a much larger game.

It would be a considerable investment for Zenimax and here's the rub, it's almost impossible to monetise, if it wasn't you can be absolutely sure that Cryptic and their greed gods PWE would have done so within minutes of the acquisition! Ok, slight exaggeration, but it would have been done, for sure. Players will not pay to write missions and players will not pay to play them as they are not official content.

I am sure that any MMO developers out there are well aware of the foundry tool and what it can do, a wonderful addition to player retention and immersion, but it costs too much and the return is foggy, very hard to measure ROI on something like that. Having seen it being killed off on STO and Never Winter I'm pretty sure they would conclude that the days of this particular experiment are over.

Final point, when the foundry or something like it, has become embedded and entwined into your player base and game for 8 years like the STO foundry, suddenly removing it and thereby removing the very reason for many of the games fleets (guilds) to exist, tears the community apart. The loss of goodwill to STO is massive, we have seen a drop off in logins of 50% and the cost of their ingame currency is rising as less people are buying it. I doubt it will be the end of STO, I sincerely hope not, but it will and is a huge disappointment to their player base who had for so long grown to love the foundry.

So any company that introduces a system like this had better think long and hard what the ramifications could be if they have to remove it a few years down the line.

So OP, this is not going to happen, sadly, in the real world it is far too costly and ultimately dangerous, and in any case, ESO has 20 times the number of quests that STO has, and that's just main quests, content in ESO is not something I can say is sparse as it is in STO, so the need for a foundry doesn't even exist as it did in STO's early days.

Minyassa wrote: »

I wish. That would involve privately hosted servers, yes? Which would basically be my dream game, just playing with people I want to play with. I'd pay a lot of money for that.

It's nothing to do with privately hosted servers, I haven't played STO but in Neverwinter the Foundry quests were on the standard servers.

It won't happen in ESO as it's a massive investment adding something like that to an established game that wasn't designed with it in mind and which doesn't generate any return. It's also unwarranted in a game that has quarterly updates as there is no lack of new content. It's also prone to abuse.

As other people have said user created content is hugely variable. Look at fan fiction, sometimes it's as good as (or better than) the source material, sometimes it's literally incomprehensible nonsense. Most of it falls somewhere in between but trying to sift through all the "and then he saved everyone because hes so awesome and hot and all the girls realised he was hot and they were all so happy a really hot guy had saved everyone they were really happy" to try and find stories worth reading can take more time than actually reading the good stuff.

I see no reason user created quests would be any different (that's certainly been the case in other games where users can create their own NPCs and quests through mods), but then you add in that level of variation in everything from the basic plot to the writing to zone layout to rewards....the chances of one person doing a good job on all of that, or an amateur team being assembled with people who are actually good at all the different aspects and work well together is even lower. Again it can, and does, happen. But the bad stuff typically outnumbers the good 10 to 1.

IF ESO did add a system like this I'd certainly want it to be optional - something players have to enable before it shows up in their game (ideally enabling each user created quest/area individually) and clearly labelled so you know when you're going from official content to a fan edit.

I'd be very curious to see how well the playerbase actually does at creating balanced combat encounters for a variety of classes, builds, and roles. I suspect we'd find its harder than it looks.

neverwinter had some really nice player made content. there were no rewards gearwise for completing such shortly after due to exploits. as I stopped playing about this time such rewards might have changed back.

one instance was very memorable as the "muffin man" boss in the bakery was very well made. Beware of the Muffin Man he will eat you if he can.

other mmos I played had player made content but most just never caught on as it was time consuming with no rewards for making such.

Umm developers get paid for creating content.

Play testing used to exist as a career until companies started to get this done free by gamers.

Bringing in this type of system will only see more people being taken out of work.

Not that, but we should have gotten something similar with Dark Brotherhood which should have allowed players to perform the Black Sacrament to put hits out on other players.

I'm still mad about this @ZOS_RichLambert you betrayed us all.

I can only imagine how horrifyingly dysfunctional this might be, should ZOS ever decide to try it, I mean nothing works as it is now let alone adding this Haha.

Linaleah wrote: »

do you want to guess what happened even with all the limitations in place?

"Push da button?" Yeah, I'm cheating. I remembered that from STO. The requirement was they had to have a certain number of objects in the map, which they did, but the scripting was tied to interacting with a single console. Everything else was optional, and pointless.