Dear devs, when you first started making the Featured Episodes, your "dream" was to release a brand new mission for people to play every single week. Obviously that was easier said than done, but the foundry actually gives you a chance to realize that dream. Yes, picking a mission to spotlight every week is a nice gesture, but it simply isnt enough. There are 2 things you absolutely need to do:

1. Add real rewards to the weekly spotlight
2. Feature the weekly spotlight in the mission journal

Until you do those 2 things, I dare say the majority of your players arent going to play the spotlight missions.

Devs, I'm begging you; come to your senses. Quite ignoring what is right in front of you and start taking full advantage of the foundry. Then you can finally realize your dream of giving your players a new episode to play every single week.

+1
Foundry= infinite free content. Devs need to pull there thumbs out of there as*es and see the blatantly obvious.

There are many, many reasons to do this, and many reasons they shouldn't. We all know the reasons they should: Faster content, fill out KDF, open up possibilities for Romulan/Dominion factions, Etc.

But, when the foundry was first released, there was the fear that it would end up replacing main content, and becoming the focus rather than FE's, which would have kind of sucked. Granted, that was before Free to Play, so maybe it's time to give this some consideration.

Now, there are several other things that people need to be aware of: First, how is Cryptic going to compensate the players that make these missions? How is Cryptic going to reward players for making content of the game that they make money off of? As of now, there is only the "Tip" feature, if Cryptic starts making them part of the actual game, that wont be enough.

Second, will they still be part of the foundry with rewards? Or will they be actually part of the game? If the latter how is Cryptic going to convert the missions? One dev mentioned (I forget where) that they will be looking into 'freezing' a mission into place and bringing that into the main game. But what if the author wants to change something?

Third, should Cryptic 'edit' these missions? Clean them up? Make them prettier? Or just check for spelling? Or would that rub some authors the wrong way?

And Fourth, going back a bit to the first point, what is the legality of it? These authors aren't being paid, and likely won't be. What sort of deal would be good enough that it will make Cryptic comfortable with taking the hard work of the foundry authors, and the authors comfortable with Cryptic taking it?

Don't get me wrong, I would really want to see this happen as much, if not more, than you do. But there are a lot of hurdles that would need to be jumped first.

I think completing a foundry mission that is spotlighted should give 1 random item as reward with the item scaled to level so for level 50s it should be a chance to get mk XI or mk XII rare or very rare and maybe some extra EC or dil. I might actually do foundry missions besides the console missions if they do this.

Larger exposure = larger tips, which will easily translate into hundreds or thousands of zen.

Actually they said "copy and freeze". So it would be a copy, not the original, which the author could still edit.

That would be worked out before the decision to spotlight that mission was made. If there was a conflict then that mission would never be spotlighted.

They are already featuring spotlighted missions on the website, on startrek.com, and in a pop up in game, so it is obviously legal or they wouldnt be doing all of that. Simply adding rewards to the mission has nothing to do with the legality of it. And as I already said earlier, these authors will be getting hundreds or thousands of dilithium worth of zen in tips.

The best of the best foundry missions (ones with most 5 star votes) should be incorporated into official game content.

One of my favourite foundry missions to play was a loving tribute to The Fantastic Voyage. It was a heck of a lot better than most of the Cryptic-authored missions I've played.

Rating alone isnt enough to go by; people can simply have their fleet vote up their mission. The system they have now for the spotlights works just fine; suggestions are made by various community sources and then Brandon personally plays the mission before choosing it as a spotlight. They just need to add some real rewards to motivate most people to play them.

Again, I'm not against this, nor do I see it as impossible. I myself have asked for this before, those hurdles are just things devs have pointed out, and basic reason dictates.

Those solutions are all well and good, you just need to keep them in mind when asking for this sort of thing.

Foundry does not fit in a Lockbox therefore it is irrelevant.

Hate to be a Troll but, in all honesty, with the current management you really have to keep in mind that if it cannot be made into some sort of lottery that will get people to spend insane amounts of cash for a "chance" to win it then it is not really on their list of priorities.

Not trolling, just wrong. If Cryptic/PWE did not think the foundry was important they would not be putting so much work into it for Neverwinter. But it is unfortunate that they consider the development of their next game as more important than updating the foundry in their already live game.