Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End is based around this model for the future of games.

Just like 2nd life it will attract pirates and copying as well, but that’s always a problem with everything anyone produces. Games with more robust watermarking and anti pirating measures will attract more content developers.

I think it’s mainly a technology hurdle. After all the 90% of everything is crap rule applies to everything not just content created by users. If that were a reason to not do something, then we wouldn’t have any games at all, or books.

And the said truth is, users will always exploit and play the system to the fullest.

So you have tons of exploitive and tons of very unimaginative content. So much about user created content for MMOs. This is not an offline game, in a MMO customer created content is very hard to do.

I wish they would rather support player run events than this.

I see player content as particularly unlikely in LotRO because it’s licensed from a group that cares enough about lore integrity to forbid PCs with tattoos (Floon IIRC dropped that on the forums; canonically only Evil Men had tattoos).

Galaxies is licensed too, but let’s be frank — Lucasarts has been moving its eggs to SWTOR’s basket for years. That will be their focus and their canon. Galaxies will left afloat for exactly as long as it feeds Lucasarts money, and they’re being given a longer leash to graze for whatever they can find.

Overall, my experience in CoH with the Architect )the user-generated content tool) has been quite positive, both as a player and as a designer – the tool is easy to use, fun to play around with, and a Goddess-send to the roleplaying-inclined, allowing you to generate custom content tailored to the needs of your friends/supergroup. There is also quite a bit of solid, fun ‘public’ content, especially if you’re willing to take a little time to read reviews on the forums or one of the Websites that focus on them. No sign as yet the addition has turned the devs lazy – there’ve been two Issues (think LotRO Books) since the system went live, with another in the works, along with a paid expansion. I think my favourite thing they’ve done with the system is the ‘Guest Author’ program, bringing in people like Bill Willingham (of Elementals/Fables/etc. fame) to write guest arcs.

Best part of user-generated content? Being able to bypass zones you find boring (I’d kill to be able to skip the Lone-Lands and North Downs completely).

The process hasn’t been without its pitfalls – on initial release there were a *lot* of xp-gain exploits, most of which have since gotten fixed, which put a lot of people off the system (some because they were frustrated that for a while public channels were saturated with exploit-abusing teams LFM, some frustrated because they couldn’t hit the level cap in four hours anymore).

However, when you dig down into what “doing it right means”, it gets harder to see user created content being worthwhile at all:
1. Restrict to access to UCC to those who have accomplished grind X like reaching a certain level or simply the creation of an annoying grind
2. Hire employees whose purpose is to play UCC, remove the ability to create said content if it is exploitable and close extremely bugged quests
3. Add a rating system for users to spotlight the actually good content and to make it easy for users to avoid the poor content
4. Hope there is enough good dungeons to warrant the cost

Turbine has already came out and said that UCC is something extremely expensive, requiring an incredible number of hours of work and testing to close all the security dangers and to make their tools somewhat accessible to their user (remember the numbers of bugs Orion cam upon during his coverage of Garth Agarwen?). Then, you have to add the cost of the upkeep (the moderators).

All of that for a chance to hopefully get enough content to warrant the cost?