I'd happily play with the Character/Costume Creator, as a finely polished piece of software, and download content updates as they become available. I would even join in the Beta-crushing of the thing, to squeeze all of the bugs out of it.

Be Well!
Fireheart

I agree with Lothic. Given that the Avatar Builder is planned for release long before we'll actually be able to play CoT, there are bound to be changes before the City opens its doors. As far as I'm concerned, the early release of the AB is kinda just a long public beta where we can test the heck out of the kind of things Lothic mentioned above.

Whatever the devs decides is the best way to roll this kind of stuff out works for me.

Not me, but I did hear about one or two creative people that did so. It might be cool if some of our community artists could submit skins and tweaks for official validation and redistribution.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Empyrean wrote:

Probably stupid idea:
Is there a reason not to allow people to ad skins and weapons and such and maybe even sell them in the ingame economy? It's kind of like the discussion about farming--legalize it and then monitor and police it.
I mean, a huge part of the game is that you create within the game. Of course someone will do something stupid like make a skin covered with genitalia or phallic hammer something equally sophomoric, but then someone always will.
But if it's not too much work or a bad idea to make making skins a part of the game, it would ad lots of costume option content with less work than making it yourselves. I suspect there are many ways this could backfire, but I thought I'd put it out there.

I think you answered your own question as to why it'd probably be a bad idea to allow players to upload their own items directly into the general game without initial Dev/GM oversight. Mods that only you can see on your own client are quite a bit different than being able to instantly add content that everyone could see.

But as Doctor Tyche mentioned there are plenty of players who can (and will) create with their own cool mod items that might otherwise be perfectly acceptable for inclusion into the baseline game. If MWM can come up with some kind of workable "submission for approval" process then maybe players will be able to help the Devs add to the options available without fear of people trying to inject naughty/questionable things into the game.

It has also been brought up, in previous discussions, that any costume items that are added to the game, whether they were designed by MWM or players, would have to go out in a patch. Otherwise you face the possibility of flying into a busy area and not seeing costumes or costume pieces at all, or being hit with a streaming download as your client grabs the missing content.

We may never see such a thing because there are not enough people who are interested in or capable of submitting work of an appropriate quality. It strikes me as wasteful to create an official submissions and approval process for half a dozen or so skilled modders.

That almost sounds as though you are suggesting that this would be untrue if the resultant costume pieces would not be available in-game. If there comes a time when there are enough people and/or contributions to make it worthwhile to create an official pipeline to make those costume pieces available to all players, I am certain MWM will consider it. Always assuming that the effort does not outweigh the benefit, of course.

5 OClock Shadow wrote:

I really don't want there to be player made skins. The graphics need to be consistent throughout the game. Otherwise it'll be a Wreck It Ralph (though I enjoyed the movie) scenario with bubbly cartoon characters fighting next to space marines. I am all for fully customizable outfits where you can alter nearly every inch. Like designing my katana--if I can edit the length, width, depth, color, texture, pattern of the blade, cross-guard, grip, pommel, and scabbard from a massive list of options, that's what I'm talking about, but the art needs to thorough through and through. I don't want people running around like their tights where made in Paint. I'm fine with someone running around with a neon green shirt, and bright pink pants with an absurd story that says they were struck by lightning, suddenly they control lava, and now it rains when they cry as long as it's MWM's graphic art.

I'd have no problem with "player made skins" asumming that they'd all be vetted/approved by MWM first before they're added to the game. Not only would this ensure that no naughty/offensive content made it into the game but it would also make sure that any player generated items also met the quality and artistic standards that MWM would be confortable with. I'd trust the Devs' ability to reject anything that would be too "weird" or inconsistent with the overall artistic style they wanted to promote.

And as for Darth Fez's concern that there might not be enough player contributions to make having an official channel for player submissions worthwhile I think I'd be possible for the folks at MWM to organize a system in such a way that'd be easy enough for them to manage regardless of the amount of player input. As the final arbiter of what either goes in or stays out of the game I think MWM could allow player submissions to be uploaded at any rate that was least impactful and/or most workable to them. So whether they only get 5 worthy submissions a month or 500 it would still ultimately be a net gain for the game as a whole.

5 OClock Shadow wrote:

I care more about quality than the risk of someone having genital scale armor. We all know a fleshy body suit wouldn't fly for a second anyways. Plus anyone who attempts to submit these things would have their license revoked, so that's fine. You have a point as far as MWM approving everything that fits their art style, and I'm all for that--especially since it would increase our customization capacity. It's the mediocre design that'll leak its way through I'm worried about. Above all, the art team needs to focus on making the best product as possible, and preserving it. Having all these extra submissions from people who think they can design isn't worth the effort if the team is constantly pumping out a variety of costume pieces on a regular basis. If there's a shortage of costume designs from the art department, then open the gates if that time comes, but CoX did just fine without submissions. No matter what, the consistency won't be there most of the time, and I don't want to be staring at some jerk's costume that doesn't fit. As a graphic designer/writer, I would most likely design the skins for every character I make. I'd do my best to match the art style. However, I wouldn't want to share any of the designs with other players to use because I'm selfish like that.

I understand what you're saying about the possibility of having "mediocre" player created items slip through. But I still believe that with the review/acceptance process under the absolute total control of the Devs that we'd only end up with the subset of player submissions that met the highest standards of quality that they would expect from their own official artists - the "cream of the crop" so to speak.

Remember that MWM would be under no obligation to upload any player submission that didn't pass whatever approval process that would be required. This means that if only 1 in a 100 player submissions were good enough to be in the game then that's all we would get. I'm all for the idea of the in-house artists producing so much content that they wouldn't have to rely on player submissions at all - we can only hope that'll be the case. But if the Devs of this game can get high quality submissions from players that would allow them to release more for the game with less overall development work then I see no reason why it shouldn't at least be considered as a viable source of new game content.

As we all know CoT is being produced as a grassroots effort by a collection of highly devoted and dedicated fans of CoH. The reason CoH managed to avoid accepting player submissions was that it was fully backed (and thus fully constrained) by corporate support. I would argue that CoH was actually limited by that corporate business model and I suspect it could have given us far more new costume content than it ultimately did via regulated player submissions. One only has to look at [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life]Second Life[/url] to see that player creativity can far surpass any amount of effort a fixed in-house art team can produce. If that creativity can be harnessed into a well-structured approval process then the potential for huge amounts of high quality content seems ripe for the picking.

Radiac wrote:

Although to be honest, there's a problem with only havign one winner, that being that the many, many costumes that got voted on but post end up on the cutting room floor. This not only disappoints the people that voted for that costume set but also creates a potential problem when the Devs decide to design something similar and sell it. As such that idea probably won't work.

The idea of making player submitted costume items be tied into some kind of contest is not a completely horrible idea, but like you said it might introduce more problems than it'd be worth.

To keep it simple for the Devs they'd just need to establish some ground rules for how candidate items would be submitted for approval. If you didn't follow those specific rules precisely then your items would be automatically disapproved. Once submitted the Devs would have sole authority to approve or disapprove any submission. Even if approved the Devs would have full discretion over when (or even if) any of the items would ever be uploaded to the game. If approved then full ownership rights for the artwork would be implicitly transferred to MWM to do with as they wished. This would allow them (if they desired) to charge other players to buy those items with no expectations that they'd have to pay the original creator anything for their efforts. Basically the understanding would be that the artwork creator would be "paid" with the satisfaction of knowing they got their items uploaded into the game for everyone to enjoy.

For what it's worth I was briefly involved with client-side modding back in CoH. Based on how many good items people produced for the game even back in the 2004-2005 timeframe I feel confident in saying that the modding community for CoT would easily be large enough to make it worthwhile for the folks at MWM to seriously consider.

dvirbl wrote:

i certainly have no problem with 'installments'.
in fact that was what i expected all along, we'll have a basic creator at first and content updates for new things, bug fixes and the like, after all like it was aid earlier if they wait until all the costume parts they talked about are done it will take ages to get out.
it will give us something to play with and it will help finding the bugs quicker and hopefully the fixing of them faster :)

Ditto.

From what I've been reading it might be 2016 before CoT gets released. It would be nice to have a character creator to play with in the interim.