I am not so skeptical. Player-based content creation has been a huge driving force of PC gaming for well over a decade and a half. Certainly, you get some shit out of it, but you also get Natural Selection, Counter-Strike, DOTA, and numerous other innovations. Now, that may be a bit too far for what EQN is aiming to do, but just look at Team Fortress 2. It is the same type of system except you have hats instead of blueprints. It is a highly successful game as content generation is heavily performed by players. Custom maps, custom hats, custom taunts, all those things create a game that can last almost eternally. Look at Skyrim, and the literal thousands of mods that have added new interesting stuff to do.
In the end, a developer will never, ever out-develop the player base. And players who love a game are going to be very active in trying to build stuff in that game. The best thing a developer can do, as Valve has said, is to give the players the best space, and the best tools, to generate their own content which other players can consume.
If SoE can do it right, it will be a damn good thing not only for MMORPGs to get out of the Quest-Themepark paradigm we're stuck in, but it will be healthy for players who want to do more than exhaust content in a few weeks, as was the case in WoW.
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