It's something I opted into trying during a downtime in PK or lull -- unless I was with a group it wasn't going to happen. I think we did it once because we were in a group and PK died and then we just decided to do it. On several occasions in similar lulls, we simply didn't have the numbers to do it. Not a complaint, but just a fact. I recognize it's tough to strike the balance between something that's accessible in downtime vs. farmed like it's an occupation.
I think an Accepted had some fun to read roleplay with the corpse in the Tower (unless that was something different, I'm not super plugged into that), but other than that, I don't really think we're good at using set pieces, as a playerbase. This is an issue that's not exclusive to the things you've described here, but even things like Elysia trying to catalyze political engagement between different factions (CoL, Tower, Lancers) based on things that members of those factions did or didn't do unprompted and prior to that effort by Elysia.Over the course of the tinkers event we rolled out a couple different narratives of storyline for with the hopes that people could use some of these aspects of storytelling and integrate them into reasons to roleplay about our world. From Timmee’s master quest and the rock in the gap to the corpse of a Black Ajah in the White Tower, to the tinker camp, the emptying of the tinker camp, and the expanded patrols throughout the area, we were hoping that these pieces put into play would give reasons for players to interact from their own either political or gaming interests to have a more direct roleplay engagement and in-game impact.
Our hopes were that we could generate content and promote activity and facilitate more DM experiences rather than prescribed gameplay and outcomes by allowing player activity to influence the narrative through roleplay, events, and activities.
Messaging in WoTMUD is more asymmetric than it seems and assumes everyone reads everything. I personally only had vague ideas what any of these things were. Lokras was kind of annoying at times, but something like that, which presumably checked in on 'the horde being awake', was at least prompting that made you go "oh yeah, that's something i could do". Think if every 5th log on or something triggered something like that (judiciously), you'd see more engagement. It's not that I need everything to be ultra rewarding or that reading is hard, but just thinking of it in the moment when I log on without any specific thing in mind is less likely than responding to some sort of prompting. Reading the posts isn't hard, but there's so much competing stuff that if it's not something you log on with a mind to do, you're probably not looking up the specifics.The quests for dark side in particular (Kreeza quests for generating gold, the dreadlord patrol quest)
Same for the light side. In particular the quests from Joar and Raed seemed to have limited engagement.
What stops limited time quests like this from being done? Were they too difficult?
What would have influenced your gameplay to approach the game differently? Any thoughts in general on a content-based approach for WoTMUD?
Random thoughts:
Min-maxing, which includes opportunity cost, is just in the DNA of players at this point. I don't recommend running several things at the same time, especially things that are highly rewarding with things that are meant to be flavor/engagement with the world.
I didn't entirely understand the point of the holiday gift stuff. Freebies are nice, but would rather low effort (and well described!) quest lines to get stuff like that instead of a free-for-all assuming you're willing to just wait 5 minutes per alt for 50 million alts.