Editable user data

[lennard]

I'm preparing a new rev. of Real E$tate Empire that will let users build their own towns. Currently the graphics for a town are built by feeding a text file that describes .TGA files into a compiler. The other town data comes from a series of readily editted text files. This is a pretty easy system to clean up and then maintain but I'm a little concerned that if I don't wrap the whole thing into a user friendly WYSIWYG editor that people are going to be flummoxed. But I'm bad for under estimating end users - anybody have any real world feedback on this topic?

[DoctorJ]

Just a thought: if users have trouble getting things to work, they will likely be contacting you. However much time you spend responding to their problems could probably have been better spent developing a better interface in the first place.

[Archmage]

I would guess that creating a more friendly interface would certainly give your users more incentive to create their own content. That would be especially true if your user base consists of more casual gamers, who probably would not take the time to learn anything other than an easy to use WYSIWYG editor. Most people won't even read the manual for the game, let alone any documentation required to understand an editing tool. Not to mention WYSIWYG editors almost always provide much better turn around time for content producers, resulting in more and better output from the people making the content.