In an open letter to the City Of Heroes community, Matt “Positron” Miller thanked players of the MMO for the outpouring of creativity steming from the release of Issue 14: Architect. When these tools were presented to the CoH community, they responded en masse, producing more content in one day than the developers have in 5 years.

“Like every system we design here, the Mission Architect system has been a labor of love that we have poured over every little decision on,” said Miller. “I feel like everything we have worked on has really been worth it when I see that within 60 minutes, we had 360 entire Mission Arcs (each containing up to 5 missions) available for other people to play. By midnight on day one, we had over 2,600 arcs, and exactly 24 hours after launch we were already at 3,800 arcs. We did some data mining of our own, and 3,800 surpasses the amount of content that we, the developers, have made for all of City of Heroes and City of Villains combined. In just one day our users did more than we could in almost five years.”

The update added the following features that can be utilized to create new missions and story arcs.

Create Stories – Present your story to other players in the game through the story title, description, and character dialogue. Stories can be as short as a single mission and as long as five.

Create Characters – Use existing characters from City of Heroes lore or create your own characters from scratch using the costume creator and a robust powers selection interface. Create individual characters which can be used as enemies, allies and contacts or create whole enemy groups to fill your missions.

Write Dialogue – Every character that you place into a story or mission has its own dialogue. Whether it’s the contact that directs characters to their mission, the hostages that you rescue, or the enemies that you must defeat, they all speak through text bubbles at various points during your encounters.

Define Objectives – Defend, collect, defeat, destroy, rescue, and more. Mission architects can string objectives together making missions as simple or complex as desired, using up to a current maximum of 25 objectives per mission.

Use Advanced Options – For characters and missions select alignment, placement, difficulty, animations, behavior and more. Every mission objective has multiple advanced options, allowing you to truly customize how you want your story to play out.

Test and Iterate Before Publishing – Take as much time as you want to create your content and test it by yourself or with others. Once your masterpiece is complete, you can Publish it for other players to enjoy and rate.

At the time of this writing the number of published arcs is over 20,000 with nearly 3,000 of them having recieved the highest possible community rating.  The update has also brought players back to Paragon City and the Rogue Isles to check out the new features.  Personally, I’m interested in returning to the game to see how the user generated content stacks up to the developer’s.

This is an exciting new feature in the MMO space and it will be interesting to see if any of the other MMO’s that are caught in World of Warcraft‘s shadow adopt similar features.