Player vs. Everything: Should MMOGs allow modding?

When Diablo first came out, I was a huge fan of it. It was pretty much all I played for months. Then, after a while, I got bored. Even with randomly generated dungeons and enemies, there are only so many loot runs you can do. When Hellfire was released I got back into it again. But with time, the newness of that wore off too. I put Diablo on the shelf, satisfied that I had done everything interesting there was to do with the game. A few months later, I was bored and looking for something to play. That was when I stumbled onto a random website and discovered my first Diablo mod.

Someone had taken the game I knew and loved, and changed it -- it was like playing a whole new game while keeping everything I loved about my favorite game intact. This experience spurred a long-standing fascination with the modding scene for me, and I've since downloaded and enjoyed mods for most of my favorite single-player games. It's amazing what people can do when developers hand them the keys! In fact, I would argue that it dramatically improves both the value and shelf life of your computer game if you make it easy for the modding community to get their hands on your game. Case in point: Morrowind is still an amazing game that looks great and has tons of content, despite being almost six years old at this point. That wouldn't have happened without the support of modders. Given all of the cool things that you can do with modding, shouldn't developers let us tweak their MMOGs, too?

The obvious answer here is, "No, Cameron. That's a terrible idea. You're a moron and I never, ever, ever want some random guy monkeying around with my favorite MMO." The problem with modding in an MMOG is that there's no way to only mod your client. You can't play in a shared, online world if everyone's world is slightly different. Also, mods are very personal things. You might think it's hilarious to add oversized genitalia to all the woodland animals in the game, but most players wouldn't be as appreciative of your particular sense of humor. If an MMOG were as fluid as a wiki, it would quickly devolve into a big, tangled mess, as hundreds of players tried to pull the game in whatever direction suited them. Another problem is that vast majority of modding efforts are pretty lacking when it comes to quality. You have to be willing to dig deep for the really good ones (especially when there's no convenient community to rate and evaluate them). For every 50 bad mods out there, there might be five good ones.

However, that doesn't mean that modding is a waste of time. There are some really great mods out there made by people with real skill and talent. Modding is also a good way to prove that you have some skill if you're looking for a job in the games industry. In fact, the modding community can be a source of inspiration for developers -- why limit yourself to internal ideas when you can also cherry-pick the best amateur ones? I can guarantee you that the Oblivion team took at least some inspiration from some of the most popular Morrowind mods when deciding what features to put into the game. Modding has the potential to add new items, new monsters, new classes, and new zones to any MMOG, at no additional expense to the developer, while dramatically increasing the lifespan and scope of the game.

So, if you can't allow players to mod the live client, how do you capture all of those benefits of modding for MMOGs? Well, just because client modification is bad for MMOGs doesn't mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you start getting into the mindset of player-created content, you can see some possibilities. City of Heroes is going to start letting players design their own missions. Pirates of the Burning Sea lets players design their own sails. The Ryzom Ring in Saga of Ryzom gave players almost complete control to design their own areas of the game before it was shut down. There are other examples, and there are plenty of ways to allow players to experiment with design without flooding the live client with trash. If you let the community self-select the best mod efforts, it becomes easy to skim the cream from the top of the mod barrel and examine whether it's worth including in the live game.

One of the biggest complaints that you hear from MMOG players is over a lack of content. It's always the same problem at end-game: There isn't enough to do. The designers of a game simply can't keep up with the demand from players to consume new content. Allowing players to design content for each other kills two birds with one stone. It keeps some of your most hardcore players busy either designing new content for each other or testing the content of someone else, while providing your more casual players with a steady stream of tested content made by fellow players. All of this extends the life of your MMOG considerably and gives you a significant competitive advantage over companies that don't offer a constant flow of content. With a vibrant modding community, traditional games would start to seem stagnant by comparison. While there's a laundry list of potential problems with the idea, the potential rewards are astronomical for both developers and players.

You can already see the signs of change as companies are waking up to the potential of tapping their own communities for creativity. City of Heroes could just be the tip of the iceberg. If the idea takes off and becomes wildly successful, who knows what could happen? Maybe they'll open the power sets for tinkering next. Maybe other games will jump on the bandwagon. Maybe we'll finally be in a position as players where new content comes out for our favorite game world faster than we can possibly consume it. At the very least, major MMOG developers would be more willing to let their community take an active hand in development.

Open games in the hands of players -- imagine the possibilities.