Problem #2: Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town

In addition to being the title of a book by Cory Doctorow that I really enjoyed, this is how I describe a problem that I see as one of the worst ones a persistent online game may face. People come, try it, and then leave never to come back. Or they join it to stay but only a couple of days before it is scheduled to end or after all the empires are all built up and the game experience is completely different from players who started the game together.

Board game players don't face this problem nearly as much. Sure, people get called away for emergencies on occasion, but the social convention is that if you're coming to play that you'll stick with it until the end of the game. Board games tend to have fairly short lifespans compared to PBBGs though. With timeframes of weeks or months their games are much more likely to have people quit because of something coming up or losing interest. What happens to those players? Are they a zombie that sits there unresponsive while the player is gone? Do they become a computer controled character when the player is away? Do they fade away as though they never existed?

New players are more easily dealt with. They can be shunted off to a newly opened game in order to keep them from joining too late. Or, if you design an open-ended game then perhaps it won't matter when they join. Most MMORPGs are constrained to their world needing to exist in a kind of weird stasis. Yes you obliterated that dungeon full of bad guys yesterday. Today, it's all put back together so someone else can go do the same thing. You're living in WestWorld and Yul Brenner's gunslinger will be just fine as soon as we repair him.