TL;DR:
I'd like to make a plea for some way -- not necessarily at the outset, mind, but eventually! -- for users to create theme-park style dungeons for other players to run. Given adequate quality controls, a few dedicated users can produce a ton of rich content.
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Long version:
For many years, I was an enthusiastic member of the Active Worlds community. Active Worlds was a very early shared world (circa 1997; I joined in '98 and kept at it for a decade).
User-created content was the primary attraction. You could stake out a claim in any of several virtual worlds and build anything you could imagine using the fairly flexible building tools. The largest open building world, Alphaworld, was a little larger than California.
Anyway! AW has been essentially moribund for years now, but what it taught me was that if you give users the tools to create their own environments, they can turn out some AMAZING work. The greatest limitation was the super-arcane, severely limited scripting language, which didn't even have any way to make an "if" statement.
User generated content is meant to be a large part of Pathfinder Online, but it so far sounds like nothing but pre-fab buildings. And I can see that -- if you had totally open building, you'd run into the same problems as Active Worlds or Second Life, namely many people would start vast projects with half-baked skills, get frustrated, and wander off, leaving the landscape littered with half-constructed buildings hanging in mid-air, roads that go nowhere for a very long time, and random sculptures of genitalia. That kind of thing is obviously incompatible with the level of quality control required in a project like PFO.
But, that said, please consider eventually working out some way to let your more intense users become dungeon builders. Pick a few people who have shown themselves upstanding members of the community and give them:
- a private space separate from the usual world for development
- a selection of fairly generic pre-made objects for building with, and the UI for building
- a moderately robust scripting language for adding interactivity
- documentation of the scripting language
Then sit back and see what they come up with. A few of them will knock your socks off, and those dungeons could then be joined to the usual game world, enriching it for everyone.
Take a look at Diane Duane's novel Omnitopia Dawn to see how this might play out in terms of community procedures. The corporate espionage and self-created AI-run-amok can be safely omitted.
