Generally, I suggest that increasing the level of player emotional and functional investment (beyond creating the character at the beginning) in the game will pay off the best. This issue of 'flighty' players has repeatedly been a subject of discussion in the forums with most advice coming down to what Lex and GenKitty suggest (Trialling, Auditioning) as well as checking each candidates profile page to see how many games and time they've spent on the site. Personally, I think if a rating system might be prone to abuse, how about a system that shows how often a player has appeared for a game using a combination of the campaign calendar and the player actually joining the game. I think this would be a useful data point for potential GMs to filter out players they don't want to waste time with and it's purely factual information. The fundamental problem here is the asymmetric emotional and functional investment in the game between GMs and Players (yes, I know GMs are players too, but bear with me). The GM invests a lot of time and energy into their campaigns and creates a strong emotional investment in their creation. During game play, they are responsible for adjudicating actions and also just the functional setup of the game. Many things simply cannot be done by players and HAVE to be done by the DM as they have sole control. It's the way the site is setup. I'm not just bitching here -- I honestly think this is the crux of a repetitive problem and describing the problem is the first step in solving it. I think GMs can do some things to make that emotional investment by the players last past the first session (which usually comes from creating a character). Some ways of doing this are related to the game you play -- some systems like Numenera specify a connection between your character and one other which not only creates characters with richer backgrounds, but a stronger emotional tie to the other players (as a weak secondary effect). Some ways to increase this emotional investment that occur to me is to involve the players in actually creating the campaign world. Though I've not played it, I believe that is one element of Spark ( <a href="http://www.genesisoflegend.com/products/spark/" rel="nofollow">http://www.genesisoflegend.com/products/spark/</a>). I'm interested in others' thoughts on that. As for functional investment, this is something the site/devs can help with in the future. It would be great if players could be given more control over their characters (and there are suggestions in the Suggestions Forum you can upvote if you agree). GMs could allow a co-GM, or perhaps give some GM control to players to help find music, tokens, backgrounds, character token setup, etc. This somewhat lines up with creating the campaign world suggestion above. Until the sites capabilities change to reduce this asymmetry there's not much to be done to spread the workload around within the system. I would assert that the Auditioning and Trialling approaches is simply a way of gauging this kind of emotional investment (or a snapshot of it) on the players part. Or, more accurately, their willingness to make that investment. Anyway, sorry for hijacking your thread, this subject has been on my mind lately. Maybe there was something useful in that...
