The biggest challenge here is the limitations of the client. CCP would have to not only provide the tools, art assets, and design documents, they'd also have to specify all of the different limitations that go into designing things to work with their game. Polygon counts, textures limits, etc. Furthermore, there would need to be a vast amount of tweaking done by CCP itself before any map could make it in the game.

Ideas aren't the problem, optimization and development time is. In the case of maps, I'm not sure how much of either would be saved by letting players design maps. Particularly with the socket system, there's unique implications there as well.

I'd actually love to see a lot of these assets opened up, but more for the purposes of making fan art, third party tools, and doing studies of things. A ton of people would surely love the map assets from DUST in order to make better maps and diagrams than we can with the ones that CCP posted for us, for example.

so, going with the original idea, but in a different direction that could be more doable/likely.

PC districts should be customizable by owner from the client. have the main socket locked based on the facility, but allow the other sockets to be chosen by the corp CEO or ground architect (new role), these include things like those CRU emplacements, as well as provide set locations for supply depots and turrets, but allow the choosing of whether it will be a depot, or turret, and what kind of turret it will be at those locations.

this should come at a corp wallet cost of course. something reasonable. 50-100 million isk redesign fee?

The biggest challenge here is the limitations of the client. CCP would have to not only provide the tools, art assets, and design documents, they'd also have to specify all of the different limitations that go into designing things to work with their game. Polygon counts, textures limits, etc. Furthermore, there would need to be a vast amount of tweaking done by CCP itself before any map could make it in the game.

Ideas aren't the problem, optimization and development time is. In the case of maps, I'm not sure how much of either would be saved by letting players design maps. Particularly with the socket system, there's unique implications there as well.

I'd actually love to see a lot of these assets opened up, but more for the purposes of making fan art, third party tools, and doing studies of things. A ton of people would surely love the map assets from DUST in order to make better maps and diagrams than we can with the ones that CCP posted for us, for example.

so, going with the original idea, but in a different direction that could be more doable/likely.

PC districts should be customizable by owner from the client. have the main socket locked based on the facility, but allow the other sockets to be chosen by the corp CEO or ground architect (new role), these include things like those CRU emplacements, as well as provide set locations for supply depots and turrets, but allow the choosing of whether it will be a depot, or turret, and what kind of turret it will be at those locations.

this should come at a corp wallet cost of course. something reasonable. 50-100 million isk redesign fee?

[quote=Ultra Boomer3]

As for the OP:

Assuming they could just hand us the tools right away without having to sit down and prepare stuff for us, it probably wouldn't be worth it because of the effort of going through all the submitted maps. Sure, some people in the community would spend time making maps that are actually good, but then there'd undoubtedly be some people who make terrible maps, either because they don't know better, suck at map making, or are just trolling.

Then CCP would have to hand several employees the task of sifting through all the spammed duplicates by that one guy who thinks that people REALLY want to have a map that's completely flat and empty except for two sniper towers, all the remakes of maps from other games, and all the just normal bad maps to get to the few good ones.

They'd either need new employees, current employees who are so enthusiastic they wouldn't mind slamming two bricks together for the entire work day if they were told it'd help the Dev team, or have some current Devs take time off from working on other stuff to look through all the maps. (Or have them do it in their free time.)

As for WHO would do it, They could hire a couple unpaid interns for a job like this. After that, it can get kicked to a development team member if it passes basic muster.

in future it would be a good idea but as it stands there just to much limiting dust at the moment