I noticed this somewhat intuitively when patch 2.4 of WoW rolled out and everybody and their mother went up to the Isle of Quel’danas to do the new dailies. All I was doing was running around doing quests but I was having more FUN than I had in quite a while, just because there were people of both factions everywhere. The world just felt more alive. It then occurred to me that everything in the game hinges around streaming players into small sets of content so that they can experience a live world and find groups for group content. That’s why badge epics were brought out, leveling sped up from 1-60, etc.

Just my 2cp

I really find that these are the spots where I start thinking about trying something else because it’s grown kind of stale. It’s not exactly easy to push yourself through stale gameplay (more for the lack of other players generally than the game itself being worse) with little to no outside interaction and leveling at a slower pace than you have been just for the hope that it’ll be better on the other side.

Expansions that increase the maximum level and focus on that level range only go to increase this gap. I’m not a WoW player myself but from what it seems as expansions come out the goal is to get people more powerful gear quicker so they can more easily make it through these soft spots and get to the “real game” after you’ve stopped “leveling up” (real game and leveling up simply meaning get to the part of the game where you level up your gear instead of your character ;)).

This very effect is what eventually killed FFXI for me. Don’t get me wrong I still love that and have fond memories of it. It did some things very well and others rather poorly in retrospect. But once past a certain point the world kept getting bigger and bigger, and the population stayed about the same which had the effect of making it seem less and less populated. With attendant problems in finding parties – and the cookie cutter parties that resulted (less parties mean that less people were willing to experiment with different party setups or play styles). Then I discovered EvE. Took 8 months but eventually I canceled my FFXI account, thereby killing my 3 year old level 73 red mage (unlike other mmo’s after 3 months away they erase your char info).

I imagine freedom of movement between servers would alleviate part of the problem here. Allowing players to self regulate population levels would avoid the issue on a game-wide scale. You would see servers falling below critical mass and eventually being shut down as appropriate, but with the option to move to greener pastures it would be a positive for the player base as a whole. There are a number of downsides including (possibly) weaker community ties and a more easily gaugeable subscription number size, but there are many advantages to this idea that are probably worth of their own blog post. In fact I’ve deliberately cut this comment short to leave myself something to write about =)