Paragon, the NCsoft-powered development team that is running City of Heroes/City of Villains at the moment, offered players a very interesting tool in Mission Architect, which basically allows anyone to create story arcs, populate them with enemies, objectives and rewards and then share them with the community.

As it is always the case with user generated content, some of the players in the MMO quickly turned to using the power of the Architect in order to power level and generally break the rules of the game. Now, Paragon is ready to fight back, via a new system of bans for those who are exploiting the mechanisms of the game.

Matt Miller, aka “Positron,” who is the lead designer on the MMO at the moment, has stated on the official forums that “When we created Mission Architect, the goal was to have an outlet for players to craft cool stories, using our assets, that other players could play and participate in. Other players could rate those stories and the best-of-the best would rise to the top.”

Because Paragon aims to “keep the game fair, balanced, and challenging,” they “have to maintain a risk:reward ratio,” which means putting together a zero tolerance policy towards exploits. What this means is that power leveled characters obtained through missions will be taken out of the game, while the players using nefarious tactics will be considered for banning.

Those missions that are obviously exploitative will be disabled but they will continue to take up one of the slots each account has for user generated content. Those who have three slots occupied with missions that are no longer playable will not be able to create new content, under the assumption that they will again try to game the system.

It's quite a bold approach from Paragon, which aims to show that real content can be created by players with Mission Architect, as far as the bad apples are taken out of the basket.