Topic
XP, time, and epic scale
Maybe xp points should have phases, in other words, you don't accrue experience points in exactly the same way if you have been playing for month or years vs. days or weeks.
I can't imagine myself playing this game for years, no matter how much I love it, and no matter how many friends I make while I play. I remember losing entire days in Flickr (or name-your-favorite-game-or-social-site-here) at first, but gradually, it takes on a kind of ennui and then a kind of near-hatefulness and I have to just go away and let it get (somewhat) fresh again. That may make me a lightweight, but I know I am not alone.
So what would it take for me to play Glitch for years? Well, it has to change in my experience of it, not just the environment, not just the art I am looking at. My way of having an impact in the game needs to change over time.
I think firstly that new players xp should have the biggest impact on the Big Measure (which I am assuming does exist, based on what I have seen in other threads), while older players xp should have an impact in other ways. In that way, I can actually come to the game and play in a different way, and it stays fresh for me. Maybe my xp as an older player changes based on my interactions with other players, like new players, rather than being affected by knocking over yet another quest in yet another cool setting. Maybe for older players, quest or acquisition XP becomes harder to accrue over time, while karma xp (or whatever it would be called) eventually becomes the more active kind.
I also think that if my playing or not playing affects the game in real time (like a sim game), if for some reason I leave or stop playing for a while, I need a way to freeze the impact that would result in my absence (unless the aggregate is so very aggregate, it doesn't matter). I don't want to come back and find a bunch of cockroaches running around my house, a la Animal Crossing.
