Didn't they try this with Ryzom? Not that that's much of a gauge of success...

Well, it's already live and players are playing and enjoying it, so I guess it depends on what your criteria are for "working".

There's a fair number of farming missions (missions made just for XP gain) and people are trying to game the ratings system to exploit ranking, but on a more localized scale there are a good number of player developed missions, MA communities for finding these missions (like the coh_ma community on LiveJournal, or the forums) and honestly, some people (like myself) are just making mission archs for themselves and their friends to enjoy, sort of with a "put yourself into the story" agenda, to feel more involved with the canon of CoH. A fair number of players are making missions to explore the backstories to their characters, which is pretty awesome.

Well, it seems to be functioning as intended. But you can never tell if things like this work until the afterglow is over.

I am going to use the myspace example again. When people first started sharing music online with places like mp3.com it was exciting and new. A lot of good music could be found and you would hear a lot of things that the music industry wouldn't normally accept. Quite a few deserving people got attention that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and even a couple of my friends got published by reputable labels because of it.

Look at it nowadays. MP3.com doesn't exist any longer as it was, and the only people using myspace for musicians and similar sites are music people trying to get as large a friends list as possible. Nobody uses them to find exciting new music because they are too used to the same formulaic stuff.

Taxidermy, you're absolutely right!

It's not as though countless Gamemasters across the globe haven't provided fun experiences for their friends over the past 40 years ;)

Next: let's cut down all the character customization options in CoX; maybe a few of the players have come up with a radical outfit, but the majority are still conforming to the usual (MMO) molds anyway :D

Not saying its not going to work, just saying history has taught me otherwise.