Dungeons And Dragons Online: Dev Spotting

The DDO guys are busy on their forums again, and have brought up a couple of interesting points in some threads. The first thread has Xundau talking about touch-ranged healing:

This particular choice has absolutely nothing to do with our ability to code the rule, and everything to do with gameplay -- as Nik stated above, we did in fact code and test touch-based healing, and the end result was that it was virtually impossible for clerics to get a heal spell off during combat. Not fun for the clerics.

Makes sense, especially if you've played games like BG2 with friends. Sometimes it's just impossible to get a heal off on a buddy that's trying to run from certain death.

The second thread has Nik Davidson discussing the problems with implementing player-made content in a MMORPG:

First, we'd still need to do just as much content ourselves anyway. Even if the tools are out there, the game needs to be "complete" out of the box.

Second, there are some messy legal issues. If we're charging a subscription for the game, and other people are creating assets and content, and we're not compensating them... trouble. We're not going to let people just have our proprietary server software, so player-run servers aren't in the cards. We talked to our lawyers about it, and it's not an easily resolved dilemma.

Third, there is a MAJOR cost in vetting player-submitted content. Doing an editing/bugfixing/quality checking/engine performance test on a piece of content takes a lot of work, to the point where it's not a savings of time versus just doing it ourselves. And of course, the signal-to-noise ratio of submissions in the first place. For every featured player-made NWN scenario, there are hundreds that didn't make the cut. I can't stress enough how big an issue this is. The more freedom you give the player to create, the more it will take to integrate it. If you reduce the integration to a reasonable level, you remove enough freedom to negate the attractiveness of the feature.

You can read the thread in its entirety right here, and see some other pros and cons of the idea.