[SnowTroll]

I know you think you mean well, but this thread is just going to appear to everyone like yet another rant about how much you hate your former mud, disguised as a general topic for constructive discussion.

This problem is actually a really simple one. Whatever the system, a mud involves doing a lot of the same stuff every time we log in. Whether we kill things, harvest things, craft things, roleplay, or chat out of charater, we're doing mostly the same sorts of things each time we play, with generally the same crowd of people. Even if a game's staff is super active and runs all kinds of creative events and adds new content all of the time, that can get old, too. New races and classes are really just different combinations of the same abilities, restrung with different text, that don't offer that much in the way of different gameplay. New areas aren't really so different from the old areas. You go through them and kill stuff or find stuff like you would anywhere else. Game events, after awhile, become a little mundane, too. Prompted by the admin, the players kill something or roleplay about something. That can get old.

It's that simple. What people found interesting and fun when they first played a once favorite mud gets old. So they get bored and do something else with their life. Maybe they come back, maybe they find something better, maybe they don't but still don't come back. Very few people quit playing a game they like because there's something wrong with it that they can't forgive or come to accept. People learn quickly that there's no such thing as a perfect mud, because everybody's version of perfect is different. The little tweaks I might make to my favorite muds would make them less fun for a bunch of other players, while there's a whole mess of little things they would change if they could that I wouldn't like.