I wonder how much of this recent malaise with spawned characters is caused by the new spawning algorithm. My theory is this:
The well established towns are established because they've been around for a long time, have pretty much all of the resources and facilities they'll ever need, and have settled into doing busy work to maintain food and stocks. The people there in charge have been around for decades and have established a nice stable status quo. The town centers essentially become social circles and people hang out to mostly just chat in RP persona while doing their busy work. Because there's a lack of urgency for survival and little opportunity to advance the towns, there's a lot of inertia for change.
Add in the new spawning algorithm that heavily favors dropping spawns into towns with lots of conversation. That means most spawns end up in place described above. The big towns have become kind of meh about their newspawns, because so many of them lose interest and die. Players don't really want to invest in forming new relationships until the spawn shows that they going to hang around and add some color. This culminates in the
point to the bucket and let's see what you got greeting.
It's become a death spiral. Too many spawns in big cities mean low investment in the spawn because of low life expectancy. Too little attention on the spawn causes the player to lose interest and abandon the character, thus fueling the first issue.
The solution is to provide less spawns to the established towns. Make them rarer and something that the towns will have a vested interest in. That higher level interaction will entice more players to keep their characters there. Meanwhile, more spawning into the frontier areas will give players a different set of survival goals and hopefully increase their desire to stick around. Those that want to be in bigger towns can do enough to gather basic survival gear and then find a way to a bigger town. At that point, they've invested enough in these characters to keep them alive once in the larger town.
To summarize all of this with a practical suggestion, I think there's essentially a few different preferences for players starting new characters:
- I want to spawn in a thriving place where I can focus on RP with an active group
- I want to spawn in a small town where there's much to do and a few people to do it with
- I want to live on the edge and spawn in place where I've got frontier level work to do just to survive
- I want to roll with what life throws me, so totally random
So here's the crazy idea. Give the player a choice between those options at character creation time. Then the algorithm can find a fitting spot. This works because part of RPing your character is to define the type of setting that they want to start in. We already typically preselect things like names, life goals, back story, personality type, etc so picking their spawn setting isn't a stretch. Also, by allowing the player to pick, that reduces some of the cases where a player doesn't like the spawn situation and abandons the character because of that.
