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.