[dentin]

I agree, and would say that in fact it's far from hopeless. There are a lot of games that are challenging past the first year. There's probably half a dozen muds on the first two pages of mudstats.com that would fit that bill, even if you're being pessimistic. The median player age on Alter Aeon is approximately a year, even though we're in a big growth phase, and ignoring character restarts (which resets the character creation date.)

On Alter Aeon, we've tried very hard to make the initial gameplay simple and easy to learn. The complexity gradually ramps up as you gain levels, when you start needing secondary classes more.

In a lot of ways, 'emergent' behavior is a large part of how AA stays interesting. There are so many options and interrelated skills/spells that people are always finding new or unusual ways to get things done. There is also a cultural element - if a player finds a way to do something more effectively, it's usually something to be congratulated instead of 'fixed' (extreme cases aside.) We don't try to force players to play the game "as the gods intended". As builders, we provide the world, and largely let the players make of it what they will.

What you describe here is one of the most difficult concepts for players to understand. No player will play forever; no amount of content can hold a player's interest forever; remorting won't fix a boredom problem. Each addition to hold a high level player's interest has an expiration time, after which another addition is required, and another. By their nature, these high level, powerful additions can dramatically impact gameplay, and even crater the game completely.

Over the years, I have resisted countless calls to add mechanics to "reduce boredom". Remorting might gain us a few months, at the cost of a player power increase; races would gain very little, unless the race system was comprehensive enough to be considered new content; quickly adding more levels would just result in more powerful players, buying a couple of months at most, at the cost of drastically increased player power.

Instead, we have tried to focus on areas and game content. We have 196 visible "endgame" areas, each averaging about 90 rooms. This has been a much more effective way to assauge boredom than simply adding high level spells and skills.

None of the above is to say that one can completely ignore high level mechanics - rather, I wish to say that one must be slow, methodical, and careful when implementing them. Raising the level limit is a good example - since 2006, we've raised the max level from 31 to 35, at a rate of about one level every year and a half. This allows us to really take a good look at what each expansion gives, address the problems, and help ensure sanity for the next. We've also got new classes in the pipeline, but we expect those to also be separated by years of development time. Rash decisions and long term goals do not go well together.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD