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The world needs ditch diggers too.

I agree.

The people who crave action (*cough*Troy*cough*) in a game are going to move on quickly. The people who want a deeper experience are the core audience you should be embracing.

All of these games that focus solely on the action have very small shelf lives. You maintain an audience through the building and crafting. Rust resets all their servers every month and people can't wait to jump on and start over.

Maintain the core audience and the action guys will come for the numbers.

Hmmmm..... like how UO had an entirely viable crafting game you could play? Too bad they killed it by catering to ONLY the crafters at the expense of the pvpers. They had a pretty interesting mix of chess on a basketball court there, for a while.

Agreed.

That came about because they allowed the RPers to consort with their devs. Huge mistake. Nerds started bumping uglies and the game went to shit.

I just like the ability to kill people and take their stuff. I like having to put skin-in-the-game. Same reason I like cash game poker and hate any other casino games.

Same reason most of what I play now-a-days are roguelike games on permadeath mode.

I like the building and selling aspects of those games too. I had vendors in UO in vanilla and post-EA shards that made piles of money.

But I totally agree with the article. MMOs where you are the hero from day one are boring as hell. I've never played WoW, mostly because of the no skin-in-the-game reason.

In EVE I remember having to scrape by in 0.0, trying for big-paydays and avoiding anyone in anything larger than a frigate. Good times. Coming up out of early-game skin-of-our teeth loot runs, gate camps and pirate encounters and becoming a force to be reckoned with was what made EVE fun for me.