A bit of real talk, something that I've been thinking about and that I'm sure has been discussed before: are we placing too much pressure-to-perform on ourselves?
Don't get me wrong; you guys are incredible writers, and I really do love reading your material. But at least from my experience, the pressure to keep up with you all and live up to my own standards means I end up taking longer and longer to get posts out, and I start to develop a mentality of "no post is better than a bad post." That starts becoming a whole negative-feedback-thing, where I feel bad for not posting, so I start writing a post, and then I burn myself out trying to make it perfect, then I end up not posting it, and then I feel bad for not posting, etc.
While I'm not suggesting we lower our standard of quality, maybe we reduce the expected quantity. Say, five to seven paragraphs per post, something you can knock out relatively quickly and keep the pace going (and make it easier to post multiple times per day). That would hopefully reduce the pressure of feeling like one has to write a chapter of a novel every time one logs in. It'd also hopefully encourage more interaction and collaboration, getting everyone out of the proverbial gates a lot faster, and might allow for more emergent storytelling rather than feeling like we need to have whole complex plots laid out from the start.
I'd also kinda like to see a more focused scope, having all of the player-characters be in roughly the same place at the same time. If, say, everyone's already a denizen of Gotham City, or a member of the X-Men, or what have you, it might be easier to jump in and start jamming with each other than when everyone has to spend weeks or months establishing their particular lore before venturing out to cross paths. More often than not, that leads to less of a group roleplay and more of a collection of individual fanfics with the occasional crossover.
While I'm always gonna be the type to hyper-obsess over how I'd reimagine every detail of Superman or Spider-Man (even though you bastards never pick me when I apply for them), I'm also seeing that the familiar approach pretty much always leads to me burning out fast and then feeling bad about getting burned out. Once upon a time, those of us who came over from the old Superherohype forums were able to sustain games for a year or more at a time, and a lot of that was a more rapid-fire output of short-form posts only punctuated with the occasional big one. I think the key to sustainability is the ability to make something a routine, and I think recalibrating to shorter (but still high-quality) posting would be a lot easier to make a routine out of.
Retired,
Half Pint,
Hound55,
Cyberlad,
mickilennial,
Ezekiel,
Master Bruce,
PrinceAlexus,
Pilatus,
Chronic