Ragnarok, and the end of worlds.

[beardhat]

Someone made a good post recently comparing a PvP game they play (or had played) that had regular resets, but was such that one or two groups could start snowballing a victory after week one.

Much like the past experiment with a world reset event, someone is going to troll everyone else and say a big "fuck you" and prevent the reset OR find out everyone else is still building up and not ready for it, and end it way too early.

Just to be clear, I am not advocating for players to end the world manually.

What I am advocating is for an end of the world event so that players have a long term goal to keep grinding and preparing for, to help stave off the lethargy that happens when playing this game long term.

I mean how many people just flat out quit when a new world is announced? Or a world is 9+ months old and no one really logs in except diehard players?

[TerraSleet]

There is one fundamental problem with that: Nearly all of the fun is in the 'building up' phase of the game. Once you have everything you want, things become a lot less interesting.

Be careful with making objective statements from subjective opinion, not everyone finds early game progression fun though it seems a majority do. Some are here for the PvP, for the community and the drama, for the "anarchy politics" for lack of a better term, or for the challenge of the survival setting. Personally, the idea of becoming a self sufficient and powerful hermit that can hold their own against raids and take on even trolls is a big driver for me, the building up phase is just a small step in that challenge.

You say the resets are a band-aid, but I think that instead any 'endgame' content is just a bandaid. You could make the endgame interesting in some other way, but even if you were to succeed it would be a different kind of fun than the progression from fresh spawn to having a base with everything you want, and that latter fun is what seems to attract most players to haven (as evidenced by the playerbase shrinking once things become more stable).

I agree, I don't think people are quitting because of lack of endgame, there is plenty of endgame content out there for the people that love the grind or want to be competitive. But I think they're quitting because of other reasons.

My guess is on PvP issues - after a few months there's not much incentive to fight anymore, because the power dynamic between factions ends up so lopsided. One faction pulls ahead, they succeed in raiding the others who then fall behind, the others quit, the main faction pulls even further ahead, they get bored because nobody is fighting them, so they quit too (or they spend their time clubbing sprucecaps and flexing their power, because what else is there to do?) The #1 faction is always the #1 for almost the entirety of the world's duration. Also notice it's not the same group of people every time either - there's not a huge skill gap between them.

The fact that things "become more stable" in a game that's inherently a survival PvP game where at any moment you can lose everything to raiders or poor decisions, doesn't sit right with me. I think that fear and adrenaline of losing everything is a big part of what brings people here, not just the progression from camp to settlement - there are tons of other games that do that already. Obviously villages should be in a more stable position than hermits, but the hyper competitive factions shouldn't snowball and become indestructible. Botting / alt spamming are part of the problem, they make the power gap even wider.