Player-made content: City of Heroes

I purchased City of Heroes so I could try out the architect edition.

Pros:

* Easy to create a mission. It's easy to create a plain mission. This gets your feet wet. This kinda leads to a con, its also easy to create a crappy mission with mispellings, omissions and the like.

* Takes time to create unique mission. It takes a bit longer to create a mission using your own custom characters. But that has always been the fun of CoH.

Cons:

* The maps are limited. Unless I'm missing something you only a few basic choices - cave, warehouse, cargo hold, bank and a few more. It is really hard to get truly creative when you're stuck to the basic maps. I did come across unique maps, but they were just modifications of the basic ones. If they somehow allow more creativity to user made maps that would be a plus.

* I didn't think about it until I was ready to create my very first mission that since EVERYONE is creating missions the odds anyone will bother to play yours is low. Yes the fun is in creating the mission, but at least for me, satisfaction is from finding out whether anyone enjoyed your creation. Now do you see why Blizzard may have wanted more than 1% of their player base to experience the original Naxxramas?

* I doubt the most creative missions are the most used. You can farm levels in CoH and the missions that allow for that are popular.

* The most popular missions are...the most popular missions. Yes it is great that the missions rated well can be filtered to the top. But guess which missions you're most likely to choose. One from the first page vs one on the 101st page. I'm sure the most popular missions are that way for a reason. But I'm sure that leaves some nuggets unearthed. No I'm not saying *my* mission is a gold nugget!

* The quickest path is a straight line. I think they did the game a diservice by allowing all of the player made creations to have a common portal. And easily accessible one at that. It is great that I have access to all of the player made missions from one access point. It is great that I can reach this access point with a short trip. I won't bother explaining why these 2 great things are horrible for the game.


How long with architect edition keep me occupied? Not long. After playing around with it to figure out how to create something I'm already a bit bored with it. Now it is just a matter of doing it all over again for another mission. That won't stay fun for long.

Essentially the boredom with creating the missions is due to the boredom of playing City of Heroes to being with. There's just not much to it. But since I don't want to play any game much anyway right now it's actually perfect.