Left Behind in a Persistent World

Some video games have a persistent world where you, your friends, and sometimes strangers can hop on and off whenever you want, playing in the same shared world. Even when no one is offline, it’s still there, waiting for someone to join.

You want to play with your friends at the same time, but sometimes they’ll play without you. They might complete a dungeon raid without you, they might experience a new event for the first time without you, they might progress in the game without you.

Some people don’t mind that, they can just catch up or try it again together.

But for others, it afflicts them with intense FOMO. It can make them feel forgotten, abandoned. It can demoralize them from even playing the game anymore.

When a game’s persistent world is accessible 24/7, people can play anytime they want, and people don’t all have the same schedule. People also have different interests that wax and wane. They might be too tired after work to bother playing games. So how do you solve that?

MMORPGs Solved This Already#

Yeah there’s no beating around the bush here lol

If you want to ensure you and your friends don’t do important stuff without each other, schedule it! And if you schedule it at a consistent time each week, it makes it easier to integrate it into your schedule. You can discuss what would be the best time for everyone involved, though this becomes less effective the more players there are.

So the real question then is, why am I talking about it?

I had read a blog post by Kett titled How Minecraft fails to captivate me, specifically, where they go into the multiple facets that ultimately sour their experience of Minecraft. I believe that even if you solved four of their issues, * Being made to host the server, never playing vanilla, using a huge broken modpack, and the players killing the ender dragon. it’s the bullet point about being left behind that can kill someone’s motivation to keep playing.

You could schedule to only play on the Minecraft server at a certain time, but if you’re hosting the server you can just… shut it down off schedule! If you’ve ever watched Minecraft civilization videos they do exactly that; one or two days a week where it’s only up for a few hours.

This prevents players with way more open schedules from grinding dozens of hours when others are busy with work or school. It also makes it significantly more likely that you’ll be playing at the same time as other people; it’s a social game afterall!

I don’t think this is the silver bullet that would make Kett like Minecraft, but I believe it’s the most important factor, and something I will be taking into account when I start up my own Minecraft server.