Lack of Content:
I don’t mean like a lack of quests or missions necessarily, though this may fall into this category as well. In this case we can see a lot of games that have a lack of content for character customization. The Final Fantasy 14 MMO is a good example of this, there really just wasn’t much to the game on it’s release. So little in fact that it changed the way the developers approached the release of this game.
If a world feels empty or like it’s missing something you’re going to have trouble attracting players, let alone keeping them for any long period of time. If your character looks a lot like other people who are running around you’re also going to have trouble tracking players. While quest saturation certainly plays a role in retaining a player base it is also important to have enough content where players can differentiate themselves from others. The Old Republic also suffered from this during it’s launch. Many players complained about the lack of armor, weapons and the customization of them. Bioware later introduces an update that gave players much more content, but to a degree the damage was already done and people had already started to leave the game.
