In this day and age user-created content is quickly becoming an accepted and successful strategy for games. So can user-created content be used to enhance Monster Hunter and make it more popular outside of Japan? I think it can.

Weapons and armor are a big aspect of series. Your character is always trying to find the best combination to use in each situation. Instead of Hunters all running around with the same weapons why not allow the user customize their weapons.

By that I mean allow the user to take a weapon they have and use materials to refine a weapon to better suit their needs. For example, let's say you have you're use an Aka based weapon which only goes up to green sharpness. Allow a player to refine the weapon and add more sharpness by using materials. In this case a Ceantuar Claw or some such. To balance this you could either lower weapon attack , elemental power, or only allow a set number of refinements. It would be a neat way to let players change the way they think about weapon choice. I could refine a weapon for more elemental power, high sharpness levels, high sharpness (think sharp sword skill) , more attack, better critical rate, etc. This lets someone retool their weapon a bit.

Now for bowguns you could allow a small amount of elemental power to be infused so that all ammo that isn't elemental got a slight amount of element added to it. You could also refine the gun to do more damage with a particular ammo type at the cost of lowering overall attack, or eliminating other ammo types.

Now let's take this a little further. Outside of improving a weapon's usefulness, people like to have something unique to call their own. Let's allow hunters to make color dyes. They can use the dyes to customize the color of weapons to their liking.

These come together to allow weapons that are simliar but different enough for hunters to call them their own.