The designers of the multiplayer game City of Heroes thought it would be a wizard wheeze to let users design their own scenarios.

However while some got into the spirit of the thing and invented some quite imaginative ideas, most designed adventures that basically gave their characters shedloads of gear and cash.

It turns out that players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These have blighted the game by becoming the most popular missions and the "developer's favorite" quests are getting poor ratings because they are too hard.

It seems that the developers have now got their own back and are banning games which they say are too exploitative. Unfortunately this means that they have not come up with a philosophical definition of what constitutes a cheat or an unbalanced game.

Now users feel that some of the games they might have banned were quite good and are feeling miffed according to Boingboing.