Late last week NCSoft announced that they’ve now thrown the doors wide open on City of Heroes’ Mission Architect system.  The free to subscriber’s update, or Issue 14 as it’s officially titled, marks the first time in MMO history that allows players to create and share their own custom missions and story lines.  In doing so, NCSoft has presented players with an unprecedented and virtually limitless amount of user-generated content for the City of Heroes community.

“We are very excited for City of Heroes to be the first-ever MMO to offer this revolutionary new system to our players,” said Brian Clayton, general manager and executive producer of the franchise. “Within two weeks of opening the beta version of Mission Architect to our community, players published an astounding 5,000 custom stories, representing up to 25,000 user-created missions. Such a steady in-flux of fresh content offers the capacity for endless adventures to City of Heroes subscribers.”

Not only will players now be able to utilize thousands of previously existing game assets but also be able to use Mission Architect to personalize their stories by creating their own characters and enemies within the City of Heroes’ Character Creator system.  And this isn’t a ‘one time and it’s over’ format, as players can create and save up to three different story arcs.  These arcs can contain up to five missions, which in turn may contain up to twenty-five individual mission objectives.  Got all that math?  3 arcs + 5 missions + 25 objectives = 375 potential actions.

These stories will then be displayed to all other players across all servers in the Mission Architect system.  The Mission Architect system will then allow players to play and rate each other’s creations.  Highest rated story arcs will then be featured, earning creators in-game rewards for creating excellent content.  Not wanting to be left out of the fun, City of Heroes game devs will also be playing users’ creations and hand selecting the best of the best and given an esteemed “Dev Choice” award.  This award then grants the creator of this story arch with an additional slot to create even more custom stories.

While I’m quite sure the technology and development work behind something like this is quite intense, but let me just throw this out there – what if something like this existed in a free-to-play title?  Secondary Market (peer-to-peer) trading is already something more and more free-to-play producers are starting to take a look at, and something like this could only further secondary market offerings.  Imagine users being able to create their own missions or quest chains, and then offer them up on the secondary market.  In this situation, I’m guessing that quality missions would spread like wildfire through viral praise, and therefore appropriately reward the creator of this quest line.

Oh, and did anyone happen to notice how NCSoft casually slipped a recruitment tool into City of Heroes?  If there are a few designers that rise to the top, wouldn’t it be a wise idea for NCSoft to contact these players directly?  If not for a job, at least a cup of coffee and a ‘Hey…ever considered storyline design as a career?’