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Old 12-18-2007, 10:38 AM   #13
Muirdach
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Home MUD: Karinth
Posts: 64
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Re: 4 Dimensions is moving on

It may not kill them, but it could seriously harm the game. A dedicated player could play upwards of 5 hours a day. A week of downtime means that the player is spending those 35 hours on something else - probably another game, or at least searching for other games. That in itself is already quite an investment that would allow you to get pretty far in most games - they could well find something that they like just as much, if not better. The longer it goes on, the less likely they are to come back, as at some point when they have found another happy place and don't even know for sure if their old game will ever come back (this happens fast, people are impatient), they'll stop checking.

Players expect loyalty to go both ways. They expect, rightly or wrongly, that if they are loyal to the game then that game will always be there for them to play. If there is regular downtime, they start feeling that they are not wanted enough for the owner to spend some time and effort to make sure that the game is available in a stable manner. Game or no game, dedicated players spend several thousand hours on each character. That's years of someone's leisure time, spent in the expectation that their character will continue to grow, or at the least that they will be able to continue as a player for an indefinite amount of time. Maybe it's an unrealistic expectation for the average small hobby game, but they care enough to spend that amount of time, and time is money.

One of the things that MUDs have a real advantage over graphical type games is the persistence - if you like the text genre, it never becomes dated or obsolete, as long as development continues. People play MUDs for the future, not the present. They expect to be playing and able to play, 2, 3, 4, 5 years from now. If they didn't believe that they would be, there would be a lot fewer players, guaranteed.
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