The “Break it Down” Blog

LittleBigPlanet owners are quickly getting upset by the “moderation” occurring on user created levels.  The current “moderation” occurring is essentially complete deletion of levels without warning.

Kotaku has a good recap of what is happening:

There’s a growing clamor on the LittleBigPlanet forums about level ‘moderation’ — if by ‘moderation’ one means ’summary deletion.’ Without warning. It doesn’t have to involve innuendo creations or anything blatantly offensive, either. Just create a level that references anyone else’s IP, and you’re at risk of losing all your work on the spot. Considering some people are spending standard workdays on these things, keep that in mind before you plunge into your Metal Gear Solid tribute.

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It’s not a case of removing the offending content and republishing the level. One’s it’s taken down, it’s gone for good. One user posted a strategy for keeping a copy of a level offline and republishing it in case it gets deleted. But there are instances of unpublished levels getting “moderated” too.

However, it seems that Sony has heard the numerous complaints and will work on having a better moderation method.  PS3Fanboy got a hold of Sony about this issue.

“We want to ensure that creators’ levels are only permanently removed if they warrant it. In most innocent cases a simple tweak to the level may be required and that’s what we’re working on communicating,” said Sony. Simply telling users what to change and giving them an opportunity to fix their mistakes is a far better alternative to unwarranted deletion. We’d be devastated too if one of our levels just disappeared.

I’m not sure who over at Sony thought it would go over ok to just delete levels without warning or chances for correction, but that guy needs to be fired.  Developers and publishers should be going out of their way help their supporting gaming community but instead Sony has done probably the most upsetting thing they can think of.