Alathon wrote:

This is an incredibly broad subject touching on the elements of Game Design.

What you need to do is to not take The Magic Mans advice. What works for one game doesn't necessarily work for another, and solving 'boredom' isn't a question that you can answer per se.

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.

Alathon wrote:

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.

There is very few RPGs I would not consider "standard" just so you know. Definately none on BYOND, and probably none made in the past... 8 years.
The only reason I even continued developing, or releasing Generiquest for people to play was to point out that INNOVASHUN (originality) does not determine how fun a game is. And it is a stupid thing to even judge a game on in the first place.

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.

I was going under the assumption that people were using COMMON SENSE.

But most of those other things to take into consideration are pretty much common sense anyway.

Call me crazy if you want, but I would assume it is common sense to understand that a bad game will be bad regardless of how much stuff you add to it, until you address the issues that make it bad.

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.

Common sense again. And I would personally consider 200 quests that are all the same (collect [x] amount of [item], or kill [x] amount of monster are the most common) to be a form of grinding.

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.

Common sense AGAIN.
The reason I didn't mention things like this is because I would have assumed people knew about things like quality over quantity. (Personally, I would rather have both)

Also, if I cannot have quality, I at least want quantity. 2000 Bland quests is better than 10 bland quests any day of the week, but I'd rather have 10 good quests (or even better, 2000 good quests).

Start thinking a little bit more :[ Obviously you need a fun game to prevent boredom, but regardless of how fun a game is, if there is nothing to do people will get bored of it (this is what happened in my case).

You keep mentioning common sense, yet most of what you mentioned might not be common sense to the person you're talking to. And some of what you mention is either very, very game-specific or your own version of what you think is common sense.

Which is exactly the reason its not common sense at all. This also happens to be the reason that (as Stephen alluded to) the OP question is bad.

If you want serious discussion on your game, then you need to post information on the general premise, the problem areas and the solutions you've thought about or attempted.

Not just 'How to fix boredom kkthx'. There is no formula. Common sense doesn't apply to theoretical design discussions beyond the very obvious, because we're talking opinions here not facts.

The Magic Man wrote:

The question asked was "why do people get bored of games after a while?". In which case it is safe to assume that before getting bored of it, people were entertained with the game, which makes it reasonable safe to assume there is no major issues with the games design, or any major parts of it being dull/boring.

Completely incorrect. Being entertained for a short while is not mutually exclusive with major design flaws in the basic elements of the games engine/systems. In fact, its almost the exact opposite - Players are more willing to bear with glaring flaws in the beginning because everything is new. After the newness wears off, the bugs and game engine issues kick in and start mattering a whole lot more.

In which case is is safe to assume that the reason people are becoming bored of a game after playing it for a period of time is because they are running out of new things to do, which can be fixed by adding more new stuff.

Invalid due to the above being completely incorrect.

You're right that how boring a game is cannot be pinned down to one single thing, as such you cannot say "do this and your game will not be boring anymore". But in this case I would say my advice of giving players more new stuff to play around with is fairly good advice, since they are probably getting bored with having nothing new to do.

But thats the exact thing you said, 'Do this and your game will be less boring'. And that statement was based on an incorrect thesis that ultimately lies in either not having enough experience with playerbases or just not thinking the chain of happenings through all the way.

Maybe you misread the question that was asked, but I'd assume it is common sense that the main reason people are getting bored of a game after a while of playing it is largely due to them having run out of things to do, and giving them more things to do would fix that.

I really dont know where you got that idea. But its just plain out wrong. This isn't an opinion, this is just 100%, completely and utterly incorrect. Hence my initial post: Do not take this advice.

Alathon wrote:

Completely incorrect. Being entertained for a short while is not mutually exclusive with major design flaws in the basic elements of the games engine/systems. In fact, its almost the exact opposite - Players are more willing to bear with glaring flaws in the beginning because everything is new. After the newness wears off, the bugs and game engine issues kick in and start mattering a whole lot more.

Though this can be true, it's not always true, and saying that it is "completely incorrect" to assume people can get bored of a game because they have ran out of things to do. Assuming otherwise is... Well... Completely incorrect.
Also, I only speak for myself when I say this. But I will not play a game with major flaws, issues and/or bugs for any amount of time, regardless of how new it is. I have stopped playing games within minutes due to issues like these, even if I have paid to play them.
If you ask me, anyone who is willing to play such a game just because it is new is crazy :[

In the case of Generiquest this was exactly the case. More or less everyone that played the game for more than 20 minutes was commenting on it being a good game. A lot of these people were still "playing" 1, 2, even 3 weeks later.
They were playing the game, but not doing anything, because they had nothing to do. There was no issues, flaws or bugs that were stopping them from playing the game, or that made them quit playing the game, they just had nothing to do, and were waiting for new stuff to be added.

I will make a bet with you. I will make 2 RPGs, they will be the same in every single way, except one will have 3 hours worth of content, the other will have 30 hours worth of content.
$500 says that people will get bored of the one with 3 hours worth of content a lot faster than they do of the one with 30 hours worth of content.

It's one of my dreams to make an ORIGINAL game. I wouldn't have made Metaverse if I didn't think it wasn't at least different.

Admittedly, the alchemic system could be compared to a rather specific final fantasy, but how it's implemented in this game, it may be quite original.

Boredom is a fact of life. Even I, who tries to rarely have emotions, sometimes has boredom. And indeed, it has to do with personal opinion.

My game; however, is still being developed. Infact, the main places of the game are still being developed. Only 3 of the 15 intended planets are made, and not much of those planet's areas are used yet.

My point was that a complex, intelligent and meaningful (i.e. not just "random") content generator should be able to keep a player entertained forever (or for at least long enough until they're kicked out of their parents' house for being a 30 year old waster who just plays the same BYOND game all day).

Go play DF then come back to me and say that.

Any programmer (so basically everyone on here) would agree that writing a good world/content/whatever generator is far more creative than coming up the content yourself!

Developous wrote:

I bet you don't even half the experience I have making games.

Of course, you have to realize that every game you make is only, what? 1/16 the experience everyone else would get from making one game? Most people release their games when their at least in beta, a lot when their polished. You on the other hand...

To be honest, Dwarf Fortress gets fairly dull, fairly fast!
Adventure mode is probably one of the worst Roguelike games I have played. Yay, miles and miles and miles of empty maps! I've been exploring this randomly generated world for 6 hours, and ran into absolutely nothing! (Maybe not 6 hours, but I did play it for a while before realising there is absolutely no point in playing because the world is pretty much devoid of all life)

Fortress mode isn't that great either. And it is not the random content (which there is basically none of, except for a randomly generated map) that makes it a fun game. What makes it fun is the fact that it is a sandbox type game, you can do a lot of crazy stuff in it.
Also, whenever I play Dwarf Fortress I either play an older version of the game (where there is no randomly generated map), or specifically on a map that people have recommended. Why? Because 99.9% of maps in Dwarf Fortress are really dull. They are totally devoid of any noteworthy features, and have nothing to spice the game up. I'd much rather play on a map with some features in it even if it is just a goblins lair, than an empty map.

If you ask me, random content generators, even ones proclaimed to be the best around are rarely ever fun or good.
It's not that they cannot be fun, it is just that due to the nature of them being randomly generated they commonly are very bland and dull (since it is hard to make a computer measure "fun" something is).
What makes it worse is that after playing with them for a while they become increasingly dull. Since a random content generator will always generate certain things in a certain way, and it becomes much to predictable, and already dull content that is highly predictable is just not fun at all.

Personally, I would much rather have decent, premade content than content generated by the best random content generator ever made.

The only "creativity" a random content generator offers over premade content is to the person making it. But to most other people (IE. The people playing it), the content is going to be delightfully droll at best.
Biggest example of this I can think of is Spore. Will Right was hyping it's content generation up like crazy, saying how awesome, creative and innovative it all was. The actual game though, and any content it generated (on it's half a million planets with billions of species or whatever it had) was really dull, and it was all in all a boring game.

Not saying that randomly generated content is bad or anything. But it really does not offer any sort of advantages over premade content when you think about it. Unless you do something amazing with this randomly generated content, I'd say why bother? Why not just make a good game instead?
Example of this is Nethack. Excellent game, but it's not the random content generation which makes it excellent (it'd be just as excellent with premade content). What makes it excellent is how difficult it is, how it requires a lot of stratergy, and how strangely indepth it is about a lot of things. (Random content generation gives it replayability however, but I still get bored of it before long).