UGC exploitation?

No rewards = problem solved.

Ah so there are no rewards at all with mission architect? No xp or loot is gained from the NPCs?

No, this is one of the system's rabid detractors spouting their battle cry again.

Seriously, while I could go on at length on the system, its uses and misuses, I'll tell you up front: this thread is yet another AE Flame War waiting to happen. There are people who LOVE the system, and people who HATE the system. And they are...

Never

Going

To See

Eye-to-Eye

Ever

Primarily because there are too many children-in-adult-clothing on both sides who've allowed themselves to become emotionally charged over the whole thing.

But, in the interest of actually providing you SOME insight, before this thread is consumed by a whirlwind of ire and vitriol, I will say that yes, there were and remain rewards for running the missions built with it, and yes, in the early days, people found ways to abuse the system. Since it was largely the first of its kind, this didn't really surprise, or even upset, anyone with a modicum of sense. The developers have since taken numerous incremental steps to prevent blatant abuse, but PLers will be PLers. If they can't or don't use the MA (Mission Architect) for it, they will still find a way... largely by resorting to most of the methods they used prior to its existence.

I personally enjoy the MA. I support the idea behind the UCG (yes, I play STO as well, and you can look me up there as @Captain_Thiraas ). I enjoy telling stories. Such tools allow me to do so. The mileage of others will, of course, vary... vastly. You won't find many here who choose to calmly weigh the pros and cons.

I appreciate your response. You mentioned that the Devs have taken some steps to prevent blatant abuse. Could you elaborate on what those are and how they have worked?

I don't have the hard data that the devs do, though some players have ferreted that data out out. A good player to possibly PM about this would be Arcanaville. She's the generally accepted Quintessential Numbers-Nut around these parts.

However, generally speaking, there were changes (reductions) in how xp was awarded for custom enemies (to prevent players from creating and filling mishes with flightless melee enemies and then air-ganking them) and general "faction structure" (for example a faction composed entirely of bosses).

Known bugs that were corrected (iirc): certain standard (non-custom) enemies were awarding incorrect, inflated xp (Zig Prisoners and Rikti Comm Officers come to mind).

Just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head, but I don't keep track of every change that's been made.

No Rewards = Even less people use it than they do now

No Rewards = Less authors because most won't bother writing content that few people will play when they have so much other content that does give rewards.

Basically put: you can not make a custom enemy who gives more than 40% reward (XP and Inf and Tickets) if they do not have at least one ranged attack. This is required to prevent people from recreating the old Werewolf farms from years back where enemies didn't have ranged attacks so players would just hover out of reach and blast them from above.

If you try to make a melee-oriented custom enemy and remove the ranged power, the reward will cap at 40% no matter what. Now it only requires 1 ranged power to get past that, from either the primary or secondary. An example is a Martial Arts/Dual Pistols enemy: you can take away the Shuriken from Martial Arts (which normally would drop the reward to 40%) but the presence of the ranged powers in Dual Pistols will still satisfy the "must have at least one ranged attack" requirement.

There is an issue right now, and that is that it is fairly easy to hit 100% reward with a custom minion (and most lieutenants) without having to add an obscene number of powers (most canon minions/LTs only have 3-4 powers) but it's currently very hard to get 100% rewards on a custom boss, especially for a melee-oriented boss, without making them obscenely powerful. This is because the either values on the powers that determine the max reward are not adding up properly, or the 100% threshold is set too high, or both.

Also there is no way to exceed 100% by making a custom harder than normal canon enemies. You can make a boss who is tougher than many archvillains but he still will not give more XP than a typical boss.

It is possible for you to make a custom enemy group populated with non-custom enemies. The exploit was that people were filling these groups with enemies who either give abnormally high XP (like the Zig Prisoners) or enemies who have no attacks at all (like Cimeroran Surgeons). Rather than fixing the XP numbers or making it so you cannot make a group of just this kind of enemy the Devs chose to simply remove them from AE entirely, probably because it was much easier than the other option and they needed a fix right there and then.

Then there were things that never should have been allowed in AE to begin with, like the Hamidon Mitos.

So, what you're saying here, is that the devs lack common sense, because they seemed awful surprised & upset that anyone would even think of using the system to generate maximum rewards. Especially Positron..

It came as no surprise to the devs, seeing as they warned folks not to beforehand, but I was referring to the players.

If anything the devs were upset that their warnings were ignored, and maybe they were surprised when people complained about being banned for doing the things they were warned not to do.

Personally I was upset because more people weren't banned, and now I'm surprised that people are still debating this issue as if everything about it wasn't crystal-clear from day one.