I'm trying to do different challenges NOW... got a problem? need a work-around? drop me a PM and I'll see what I can come up with...

In my opinion Cryptic asking for "Themed" missions would be bad. It will only result in many similar missions which may contribute to rage over ideas stolen and for what?

I think the Devs should also avoid picking a best mission per month as well. It is nice to make a good mission with the intention of a widespread audience but I think this should be handled by the community and moderated by the Devs as they work on their own content and Fixes to the game.

i.e. A far more ... intricate ranking system which would feed into a new filtering system (by rank, location, designed difficulty, species ala Undine front etc, diplomatic, combat orientated etc, mystery, series, arcs, randoms, etc - anyway - ranking system which would result in a community pushed "Mission of the month")

This mission would be featured on the home portal - a great lure for new players surely. However, a mission/series can only earn that Mission of the month status once - but is forever tagged in it's description page as being mission of X month Y year and feature on a community page in a list of previous featured content - much like the Developer weeklies are.

Rewards? I would shy away from ingame items, even limited duration. I think something special like a title ingame AND on these forums. A special color. "Mission Creator, Content Artist, Director of Fun" who knows...

Furthermore, in relation to the OP point on learning people the ropes etc - I can foresee community sites like UGC wiki and perhaps Foundry Academy fleets being created in the future to address that, Youtube is already exploding, and so far the foundry on beta v0.3 is pretty handy to use once you get stuck in and test your changes.

Apple have a neat way of ensuring that "Staff Picks" are well received and also nominated in both the media and iTunes store. It could be a collection of played missions form the Cryptic team, ratherh than specifically just 1 mission being nominated.

This could also be added to their website and other areas to really excite the players into playing those missions. This would help support the efforts of the UGC community, permit Cryptic to maintain a "hands-off" reason for choosing the missions and ultimately, not push one mission over another.

Since each mission is so varied and appealing to different players alike, you must understand those selecting just one or two a month wil not permit the rest of the Foundry to really get their mission listed. If this is to be truely community authoried content, the goal is to get players to vote. Cryptic can assist in this process but sohuld not be seen to favour one ission over another.

The BEST way to excite people about the Foundry (even though I'm pretty sure their excited already) is to make awesome missions that people will want to play.

Getting people to play the missions is the harder part.
I think having a better search engine for Foundry is a big part to fixing that.
Let people search, not just for whats hot, or by player names, but also by type of mission. ex- Low combat, species grind for accolades, high combat, high RP, species specific missions.
I think that would help people in getting their content played.

Also I think the greatest tool for getting your game out is:
1. Fleets are always a good source of early ratings
2. Video Mission trailers are a GREAT way to get some exposure. It also shows that you've put time into your mission and they get to see some images from it.

In terms of contests, I think independant groups like Starbase UGC, Stoked and the like could be a great place for them.
Frankly the devs just don't have time to play. We hear that every time they give an interview. It would be cool though if the independants made a deal to have a dev play the top three missions from their contests. That would be a cool reward I think.

Both points I think are entirely true and valid. The search engine for UGC needs to be a bit more robust and allow for flagging of missions in content specific ways. There are times when I don't want to have to grind through enemies endlessly in order to complete a mission, sometimes I do actually like the softball of 'scan these 5 anomalies.' As with anything, people would potentially be able to misflag missions to get attention, but that is where the reporting system comes in as well.

Additionally I think it is a much better idea if outside organizations handle the 'heavy lifting' of setting up UGC contests, but there still does need to be input from at least from some sort of community liaison. In this way we would be able to get some sort of award status for the chosen mission, be it an awarded accolade to the player. a title, a uniform, or something entirely different. Now that isn't to say that you couldn't perhaps have a 'championship' where the various winners from the contests couldnt be judged on by the Dev team and have a periodic contest they judge.

This is exactly why I developed the foundrymissions.com site so that players have a way of adding their missions to the site and being able to search for the missions they are interested in playing.

I've also compiled a full list (kindly reproduced with permission from Darrenkitlor) that lists all the missions found on the forums - http://foundrymissions.com/?page_id=190