Bahaha. I know people on BYOND don't like me, but things are getting silly now. You basically said "ignore what he said, it is probably useless, but follow my advice, which is exactly the same".
Actually, I was referring to your comment to 'add everything I said and people won't get bored as fast', coupled with the fact that your post basically said nothing. I have nothing against you at all.
I was also referring to the wide, sweeping generalizations you make that seem to indicate that there are very specific ways to solve boredom. My post doesn't say the same as yours at all, the only thing we both mention is the fact that content takes a long time to create.
My point was that there is no end-all advice, there are only situations to avoid and situations to encourage in game design. By virtue of 'standard RPG', you've already doomed the game to being boring. Hence, I advocate not taking your advice at all.
I pretty much know in this case I am right. If you don't want people to get bored of the game you need to give them things to do. A storyline to follow, quests to do, dungeons to explore, challenges to try (such as bosses), events for them to take part in and so on. The more of these you add, the longer people will play the game for.
I'm sorry, but thats just not true. You can't just bloat a game with endless amounts of content. It has to do with way more than that. The majority of players who try a game will not complete it, but will leave before that occurs unless you have such a staggeringly small amount of content / no timesinks at all.
Of course, adding content is a good thing. But content isn't going to solve bad game design at all. If quests involve combat and combat sucks, adding quests won't help diddly. The core concepts of the game are obviously flawed to some degree, and until that is corrected then nothing else really will do much for player retention.
There is obviously other things to take into account, but these depend largely on the type of game (in a Roguelike, forcing someone to remake their character and losing all of their progress if they die is fine, that is the nature of the game. In a MORPG where a player can spend days, weeks, even months making progress, the same system of permenant death would put of more or less any player). But most of those other things to take into consideration are pretty much common sense anyway.
So is what you've mentioned (More content means more things to do). But there is an important distinction to make here: More of the *same* content doesn't increase playability until a player has exhausted the previous content in that area. If I add 2000 quests, but players don't bother after 200 then I've just wasted time creating 1800 quests no one will be doing anyway. They might get bored because the quests are too bland, or the combat sucks, or other areas of the game are boring, or GMs are abusive or whatever. Playing a game is an experience and everything from social atmosphere to GUI to introduction to game pace matters.
Bahaha. I know people on BYOND don't like me, but things are getting silly now. You basically said "ignore what he said, it is probably useless, but follow my advice, which is exactly the same".
Oh yeah. I've played his game, and my advice was clearly geared towards that.
His game is a standard RPG, in which case content is one of the most important things he can add to the game which will keep players entertained (it is also something his game is currently lacking, drastically at that).
Oh yeah, my game was pretty much in the same boat as his about 3-4 weeks ago. Pretty much everyone that played it said "one of the (if not the) best BYOND games/RPGs around", despite that most of those people played for a few days to a week. Why? They simply ran out of things to do.
I pretty much know in this case I am right. If you don't want people to get bored of the game you need to give them things to do. A storyline to follow, quests to do, dungeons to explore, challenges to try (such as bosses), events for them to take part in and so on. The more of these you add, the longer people will play the game for.
There is obviously other things to take into account, but these depend largely on the type of game (in a Roguelike, forcing someone to remake their character and losing all of their progress if they die is fine, that is the nature of the game. In a MORPG where a player can spend days, weeks, even months making progress, the same system of permenant death would put of more or less any player). But most of those other things to take into consideration are pretty much common sense anyway.