[MUD-Dev2] Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent]

[Michael Hartman]

cruise wrote:
> I'm playing through it because it's fun. The actual activity involved in
> "subduing" the various opponents is, for me, inherently enjoyable. I
> couldn't care less about the XP. I still play my maxed level 50 in
> simple zone sweeping. Purely because it's fun, even after 3+ years.

But it wouldn't be any less fun for you if the reward was commensurate
with the time invested.

They have a total monopoly on an entire genre (that happens to be very
popular right now thanks to a panolpy of hyper successful movies) and
yet they hover around 100k subscribers tops.

They have an excellent engine and interface, easy to get into gameplay,
a very gradual learning curve, and pretty graphics.

There have to be some good reasons why their userbase isn't in the
millions, given the above.

The excrutiatingly repetitive gameplay is probably one of the biggest
reasons.

The shame of it all is that they have the power to remedy it in an
almost instantaneous manner. All the variety in their game is based in
character creation/development. They actually could inject a lot of
variety into their gameplay simply by encouraging (and enabling) people
to make tens if not hundreds of characters. The current grind
effectively prohibits this, unfortunately.