>The single aspect that this displays is that time spent vs fun
>gained is VERY important. There is a huge audience out there
>for players who dont want to spend 10 hours grasping the game
>and 50 hours before they start getting fun out of it. They
>want to be able to start playing for a hour or two then stop
>during which they would like to have spent that time getting
>fun from it.

By the same token, there are some players who enjoy achieving "difficult" goals. Make the goals easy and they cease to enjoy achieving them. To take a page from my personal history, I really enjoyed playing Ultima III on the Nintendo. Once "solved" it failed to be enjoyable, but until that point you couldn't tear me away. It helped that I'd rented the cartridge rather than buying it, but basically I played it about 10 hours a day for three days before solving and returning it. For many CF is like that, but without a definitive "solving" point. There's almost always something about each character that could have "gone better", regardless of what metrics you use to evaluate characters (role-play, pk, etc.) There's almost always some part of Thera which each player hasn't explored. Some class/race/cabal combination they haven't played. Etc.

>Carrionfields started off like that, it took two days for me
>to learn how to play it. I think the smugger record was 19
>hours for hero. Once hero'ed it was a nonstop cabal raid.

To me, that sounds boring. It sounds like Nhiala's mortal life towards the end. Log in. Read notes. Raid/retrieve. Defend. Repeat. Got rather repetitive. Group fighting, in general, doesn't appeal to me, which is what cabal wars often involve.

>No one cared about
>equipment or dying because you knew that it would only take a
>week before you had another hero running around kicking arse
>again.

Again, this sort of setup seems like it would get old rather quickly. If gear is essentially worthless since everybody's dying left and right and replacements are easy to obtain, where's the "risk" involved with PK? What is there to cause tension? What gets your blood pumping if there's nothing to lose?

>This was why cf was so popular and so fun. It took very little
>time, you could log in for a hour have fun and log out.

This is a rehash of what I said above, but I think one of the reasons CF retains any playerbase *whatsoever* is that it's *not* quick and easy. It takes time to learn maps, learn the abilities of classes, learn what gear is valuable and what isn't, figure out where preps are, etc. It takes time/effort to hero. It takes time/effort to perfect skills. If every new character was a hero with perfect skills and the exact same set of gear, all you have left to entertain people is role-play and game-play. Like it or not, people are attracted to incremental achievement. Even people who mock MUDs (re: Progress Quest) are clued in to that fact.

>Introduce character age death linked to real world time, not
>game time (make this say 4 months)

I wouldn't necessarily object to this. One problem is that it shafts characters who don't play much per day. It also necessitates that ranking/empowerment/induction be quick, since if they're not then you've spent a substantial percentage of a character's life waiting to really "arrive". I might lengthen it somewhat, since a character who plays 1hr/day 7days/wk could conceivably play for a year and a half before age death.

>Introduce 1 character per player restrictions. (started with a
>player purge)

This I can support. The problem is enforcement. Would you want to be required to provide a credit card number in order to play? I certainly wouldn't. IP address analysis could help, but there are some pretty obvious problems with that.

>Reduce the ammount of time required to prac (remove the need
>to spam prac, yes blah blah will continue at **)

Believe it or not, some people enjoy perfecting things. Or, at the very least, watching them go up. It's the whole incremental achievement thing. There's also a player skill aspect to practicing that I might not want to axe. Out of curiosity, how would you feel if skill percentages were rigidly attached to a character's rank? This would completely do away with spam practicing. If the idea doesn't appeal to you, why not?

>Reduce the time required to level (yes increase how fast one
>can xp, perhaps even enable more solo xp - larger group size
>xp)

I'd expect this to lead to a huge clump of heros and not much else. Why does one have to hero in order to enjoy the aspects of Carrion Fields you mentioned earlier? Distention?

>Introduce command flow stacks, execute 1 skill (enter another
>and get instant reply that your allready delayed from 1
>skill)

Interesting. Though, this might tend to remove some of the "skill" involved in PK, since panicky spamming would be relatively impossible to do. One of the hardest aspects of PK for me was to restrain myself from spamming skills, whether it be "flee" or "bash".

>Introduce melee range based on room exits. 1 exit 1 foe (back
>to the wall, 2 exits 2 foes etc, this could also include
>spells>on])

This would be a huge change to the way combat works, and would impact game balance in any number of unforsee ways. What about area spells? Bard songs? Can directed skills be pointed at anyone in the room? What about things like cutoff, will they work if the pole-spec isn't directly in combat? Etc. Too many things to consider. For what it's worth, the change to lag re: gangs is a step in this direction.