Since the cat is out of the bag…

I’ve always liked the idea of giving the community the ability to create their own missions — whether they’re done as solo vanity projects, within a Klan, or as a democratically voted and/or wikified group effort. One day (perhaps after Episode 3 is complete) I would love to see this become a reality.

However, there are several issues with such an concept, beyond those of quality control.

The obvious one would be the hugeness of the infrastructure needed to create a comprehensive “questbuildr.” A mission is more than just a chat. There’s the mission description, NPC profile and avatar, follow-up tubmails, reward items, bumociated attacks, etc.

Now, if you were to just hand in a well-formatted conversation, as druss suggested, that’s another story. And to be honest, I was thinking of holding a contest along those lines in preparation for Episode 3. Even so, it’s not that simple. Someone (me) would want extensive revisions and edits before manually porting it over to our conversation editor. From there, I’d have to create all the other mission aspects described above.

And only then could ET begin to program the mission, which could be simple or very complex. In the case of Falcon****er case, the BlindedWithRage attack actually took a lot of programming — not the animation, but just making sure it worked in the context of the mission. With everything else he’s got to work on, it’s not a task you can take on lightly. He’d have to be completely devoted to getting all this content up and running.