Algorab wrote: I don't disagree with some of that, but I would argue that game mechanics which overly advantage players that put in disproportional amounts of time compared to most players starts to discourage people unable to put in that amount of time from putting in any time at all. Eventually, that limits the potential number of low usage players for high usage players to find advantages against, advantages they likely didn't need to begin with, making it less worth the time investment to begin with, and creating a negative spiral that way as well.
It's a tough balancing act for sure, but just to put things into perspective. The prospect of hundreds of active player hours in a jail cell still isn't enough to keep some people from farming law NPCs to drain the coffers of opposing countries. The benefit is minor and the punishment is more than enough, even clearly extreme in some cases, to stop the vast majority of people from doing so, but we still have people willing to do the crime, and get crushed by the time and being upset about it. The outcome was clear from the start, but those extreme jail punishments being known as possible doesn't make the punishment itself any less extreme, it just means when you give people options, some people are likely to choose the other option no matter how negative the potential repercussions.
Nothing happens in a vacuum and while time sinks are important, the most successful ones will look more like bell curves if you look at time invested/benefit gained, with a rapid uptick to encourage completion, a nice fat enjoyable top end, and just as rapid downtick on the other side to encourage you to do something else eventually. I agree with your conclusion, which I bolded in the above quote. Ironically, the closest thing SK had to that was enchanting, which you also didn't seem to like on account of its other flaws. For what it's worth, I shared the same frustration with much of enchanting's flaws.
I will say that you are misinterpreting bounty NPC farming. You seem to have the stance that people purposefully got outlawed and racked up extremely high crime lists for the purpose of farming bounty NPCs despite the severe punishment of getting jailed for 1000 IRL hours. However, in my experience players typically did not become outlawed on purpose just to farm bounty NPCs, they were forced to farm bounty NPCs after they got banished from their very first successful PK in a city. Once you're banished from a kingdom it's virtually impossible to PvP or even farm any NPCs/gather gear in that kingdom unless you're a Harlie or you drain the coffers. Bounty NPC farming wasn't fun and really didn't provide you any distinct advantage against others at all, it just made the game slightly playable at a huge investment.
Quote: Having had the distinct displeasure of watching many a player ignore things going on around them just to keep enchanting their gear, while I agree it was a larger sink of time, I don't really think it was an overall negative to limit it. If anything, it may further point out that it was overly leaned on as a time sink to begin with.
In the interest of encouraging discussion, does anyone have any suggestions for interactive or otherwise enjoyable time sinks? Brief note: You can't fix the human condition that if there's something to grind, there's always going to be someone who ignores other people for the sake of grinding that thing. Also, muds are often played semi-afk, so someone might choose to do something with minimal interaction when they know they aren't going to be able to do anything fun with others.
To your question though, I I can think of two ideals for a time sink that encourages online activity.
1) Something that you can do alone, but that also can be made easier as a group even if overall less efficient per player.
2) Something that has a bell curve of usefulness as you described. It's always useful to do, even if minimally rewarding.
These things do that now.
Farming gold
Gathering gear
Enchanting gear
Gathering limited items
Herbing
Brewing
Scribing
Recharging
Practicing skills
The "problem" that's typically been true of SK is that most of these features are very difficult, if impossible, for certain classes yet very accessible for others. Classes with access to locate and gate have a much easier time gathering gear, classes with raw physical damage and high carrying capacity (or charms) have an easier time gathering/selling gear, and of course only certain classes can brew, herb, or enchant.
It -used- to be that as a non-enchanter you could gather 5-10 extra pieces of "decent" gear with the plan of eventually getting them to an enchanter later, but the anti-hoarding code makes that impossible now. The same is true of enchanters who used to be able to gather up weapons for their friends and enchant them: That's a lot more difficult now with the hard low limit on extra wearable items being stripped when you log out.
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Undermines the whole purpose of the hoarder code. Someone could farm loyalty tokens on a main character to continue hoarding items on an alt. If you're not playing your character you should let unique items return to circulation. It's already too easy to meet minimum hours.