Community-made parts?

I had a thread on this a while back, and some people liked the idea, so I'v decided to start a new thread to prevent Necroposting:

How would you react to the idea of player-made costume parts being submitted and given/sold to players?

As I see it, the Pros are:
*People could make the parts they've been begging for for years instead waiting for the devs to make them.
*Artistic members of the community could actually see their ideas make it directly to the game.
*It could help fill some gaps in existing themes. (Captain Fluffy: "Hey, where's my PANCAKIN' shoulder parrot?")

Cons:
*It'd be hard to coordinate: What file types? Maximum size? Maximum polygon count? Allowed textures/surface types? Baked-in colors? Model size?
*With the volume of submissions, they'd probably need a single dedicated staffer to look through them all!
*Possible IP issues?


Overall, while I would love to see costume parts made by the community, I wonder if it would be practical? What do you guys think? (Both the idea, and its feasibility.)

I had had a similar idea - but how do you prevent theft? How do you prevent people from stealing work from other people online (Daz3D, Renderosity, etc.) How do you maintain quality control? What file type do you use?

Years ago VZones, which I used to actively play, started a commission artist system and they had some pretty strict guidelines and they only maintained so many artists - and your work had to sell.

But that was in 2D (still, it was a friggin nightmare.)

Don't get me wrong: I love the idea. I know that CoH has a wildly gifted talented pool of players but I do not think it is feasible for PS to handle such a "community artist" program.

Would be nice though.

All of these. Plus, how to you stop people from exploiting problems with the game rendering engine.

Years and years (and years and years) ago, I was in a Quake2 clan. One of our guys turned us on to a mod that was "meh", but was mildly entertaining for a while.

Anyhoo, later on, after he'd moved off to one of our rival clans, his skills seem to take a HUGE increase, completely out of proportion with his previous showings.

We figured he was cheating, just couldn't figure out HOW.

Anyhoo, my buddy and I are on the server alone one day and he's squatted up in a hole in the map (nice sniper point). Normally, people who do this are visible and after a couple ambushes, get blasted.

Well, I approached him every way I could think of. And he could have sworn I saw him.

Nope.

So we start going through textures and models.

Turns out the "crouch" model for that particular mod was a cheat. All the polys were zeroed out. So when you crouch, you appear to go all "Ant Man" and shrink out of existence. But you can still fire. Just, nobody can see you.

We basically videoed and screencapped the entire thing. Then swapped the model for the default Quake model and a gaudy "Here I am SHOOT ME!" skin.

He pretty much fell completely off the standings that month for our server cluster. We then advertised what he'd been doing to everyone on the server.

So this, in addition to the devs being unwilling to expose the workings of the game client to players would pretty much make this a "no".

Besides, all players would have to have the assets for anyone to see them. Otherwise you would have the appearance of a broken model, as the game doesn't have a default skin or pieces if you're missing things.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Again, all valid arguments, but... if these parts were included in the game, they would still be referenced in the code like any other part, just a few kilobytes in the costume data. It would just be a costume part like any other.

I wonder if the Dev's couldn't do it as a contest. Monthly have player's choose their top 10 (more is fine with me, but pick a manageable number for the Dev's). Then the Dev's would implement the desired pieces to code.

It would be the items most wanted by paying players. If the players knew what they were doing then the pieces could be already close to ready to be put into game code-wise. If not then the piece would have to be translated to code.

With ten (or more) a month you get a rate of pieces added to the game that is controllable, so the Dev's could decide how hard it was to verify the pieces were not copied material. The new pieces would be added in with the next patch, patches come much more often now, but it wouldn't be a player side view only. Everyone could see what your character looked like.

This could also be a baby step towards a more player designs every piece of clothing for their toon from head to foot. But a manageable way to move in the direction.

But COH was the first to do AE, so they can think along these lines and this might be the type of idea that could be fleshed out.

Sounds like one possible way to do it.