[EDIT: I realized it wasn't cleary who I was responding to, who the "you" I was addressing was. It's Hawkeye.]
I don't really know UO's demographics, I don't really know the literature on why people play video games or what they are looking for in video games.
Based upon your posts, however, you don't know the literature either. You are extrapolating based on guesses.
EA has people who work on these issues. Whether or not their answers are correct is another matter. But the point is that they have specific numbers upon which to make an analysis.
If you want to just argue from anecdotes, I could construct an argument --thin but not much thinner than yours-- that UO actually is getting new players, who are attracted to a game that stresses content over graphics. And does not require an investment in a video card that requires its own power supply, as at least some high-end, modern video cards do. No one thinks UO is getting a lot of new players. Those days are gone for us.
But exactly why is an existing player base not enough, even assuming we're getting no new players, which we appear to be? Are we all dying? Is our gameplay timing out?
None of these appear to be the case. Not from the
very small amount of hard data that we actually know (and "know" doesn't mean "I read on the MMORPG Chart"), and not from anecdotal evidence that's rationally collected and looked at. "All my friends quit years ago" is not rationally collected anecdotal evidence. "This game is full of Trammies who don't PvP" is also not rationally collected anecdotal evidence.
Let's examine the key paragraph in your post, point by point:
The number of players who are exploring, going on adventures, visiting dungeons for reasons other than artifacts and rewards, is close to zero.
When people hunted Ogre Lords for gold and Fame and to gain Parry and to look for Vanquishing weapons in the chests, what do you think they were doing? Looking for artifacts and rewards. They were just
called something different
You can easily comprehend this when you watch what kind of dungeons players are visiting. Anti Virtue Dungeons have been deserted when Peerless were introduced.
I bet someone said something similar when The Second Age came out and The Lost Lands were introduced.
Also, this hasn't been my experience. I see people using the Dungeons of Sin to train characters, kill time, and hunt moderate amounts of gold in comparative silence. An RP expedition to Despise last in 2009 encountered several people who were just there and were a little surprised to see a bunch of people wander in.
This has been my experience on GL and LS. I can't claim to speak generally for the game.
Peerless activity has decreased when people got valuable artifacts in Doom.
Hmm. Doom predated Mondain's Legacy.
Today, Doom is almost empty cause people hunt for imbuing resources in the Stygian Abyss.
Less activity than when it was the highest-end PvM in the game? Surely so.
Almost empty? Not on LS before I left, in any meaningful sense, and not now on GL, especially now that global chat was introduced.
This game is 95% about items, and the reason for this development is the lack of fresh players and the superiority of veterans who want their characters to be beyond perfect.
Actually, the reason for that would be the release of Age of Shadows, which was almost 7 years ago and it's really high time we vets started to get used to it.
*shrugs*
I'm just stopping there....Too much time, energy, and thought spent going in circles. Almost all of us are arguing from different premises and different standards of evidence from one another. I've tried to generally keep my posts grounded in what can be known and mindful of the problems in the kinds of evidence available. But honestly it's hard to see the point of that.
-Galen's player
