The moment you hear anything about user-designed content affecting an MMORPG world, then, chances are, someone's going to find some way to abuse the system. Today it was no different with City Of Heros' Mission Architect, which offered players the opportunity to design their own missions and create some really cool stories for their heroes. Unfourtunately, players quickly discovered a way to quickly powerlevel themselves by creating 'meow' missions - user created missions that involve luring large groups of enemies to explosive crates, and then detonating the crates to easily dispatch the enemies.

Today, Positron has posted an outline of Paragon's hard-line stance they will be taking against these exploiters, beginning now. Players who have abused the Mission Architect may find themselves losing access to their characters and rewards, and other players may find themselves unable to publish story arcs if their missions get flagged or banned too many times. Read Positron's full set of stipulations below!

When we created Mission Architect, the goal was to have an outlet for players to craft cool stories, using our assets, that other players could play and participate in. Other players could rate those stories and the best-of-the best would rise to the top.

While we have accomplished some of those goals with the initial launch of Mission Architect, some have found ways to abuse the system we put in place. We are not blind to this happening, nor did we not expect it. However, it is time to take action regarding it, so please be aware that we are about to implement a zero-tolerance stance on the extreme abuse we are seeing in the system.

One thing was made clear to me when I interacted with the players on our Anniversary. It was that you guys really don’t like the powerlevelling that is going on with MA. The constant spam of MA PL teams forming, requests for “Meow” missions, 5 star badge cartels, and the inability to find quality content in the Mission Architect listing are all things I heard complaints about over and over while I was logged in on Tuesday.

So here is a list of things that are going to happen:

• Players that have abused the reward system egregiously may lose benefits they have gained - leading up to and perhaps including losing access to the characters power-leveled in this fashion.

• Currently, some badges are being modified, and some may be removed from the game entirely. The list of changes being made to the MA badge system is not final yet, but you will be made aware when we have a concrete plan.

• Players who knowingly use an exploit when creating an arc, run the risk of having access to MA suspended, or worse- depending on the severity of the action, their account banned.

• Players who have a story arc banned for any reason, will have it continue to use up one of their publishing slots. Players will NOT be able to unpublish this slot without Customer Service’s help. This sets up a “three strikes and you’re out” policy. If an individual gets three story arcs banned, they will no longer be able to publish since their slots will all be used up with banned arcs.
•• This lock will not take place on the first level of “complaint banning”, where an arc has received a larger number of complaints. Players will still have a chance to fix the arc.
•• If Customer Service looks at an arc and determines it was banned in error, they will mark it as “unbannable”. At that point the arc can not be banned for any reason. The unbannable flag will reset if the player makes any changes to the arc at that point, and the arc can be banned again.
•• Remember, publishing slots are account wide, so players will not be able to log in another character on their account and use their slots instead.
•• Players are urged to avoid using common farming terms in their story title and/or descriptions. Even if it’s a joke, DO NOT run the risk of having an arc banned and requiring Customer Support to grant you your publishing slot back.

Some of you have taken the stance of “how does powerlevelling hurt the game?” and “shouldn’t I be able to play the game the way that I want?” What we want to make clear is in order to keep the game fair, balanced, and challenging, we have to maintain a risk:reward ratio. This is a ratio we’ve spent years attempting to achieve. Mission Architect is not immune to this, and we are taking swift action to see that the problems players are seeing and are being exposed to are remedied.