They are bored because at the moment the game is little more than a 3D presentation of Runescape - only alot better. This is not an insult - it's just a fact. The limited time and such allowed by the dev team to develope planeshift means that there are many more complete and playable games out there that are just as free.
You enter the game and unless you can find roleplay all the time, you will spend most of your time just mining, or killing mobs, endlessly - and even that has no interaction.
Games now usually have combat interaction at least - eg: you don't simple sit there and watch your character run through a stock animation until the mosnter is dead, you have "actions" or "powers" etc that you can click on which create a certain effect, be it a debuff or whatever. For instance if you train in the way of an axe in a game, you come up with a skill line which give you abilities to do with your weapon. people usually get incredibly bored with mining, crafting etc because after a while you feel like an enibriated carrot, sitting ther clicking at the ground for so long.
the inbalances in the game, the lack of updated loot tables, the lack of gameplay. The quests will only keep people going for so long. I hate to compare Profesionally developed games and such to an indie developer and I by no means want to draw much of a comparison - I just want to make small point about gameplay.
The new hype on Age of Conan is so large because of the innovative real time combat which doesn't make use of stock animation, click attack buttons etc. This is why so many people turn towards real time things. Shadowbane too has, to an extent but it's not nearly as big, the more interactive game play. The gear creation is not a big thing and what the game focuses on is the gameplay itself, allowing players to mold the world they stay in. Look at games like "savage: the battle for newerth" which is an old game now, it's a realtime FPS/3rd person combat game with stategy elements and such, but what has kept so many players invoved in it is the aspect of skill based gameplay, this is why alot of games like that retain a decent number of fans after other games have moved on and developed. Core gameplay aspect.
I in no way want to turn planeshift into an fps or whatever, I don't want to insult it and I know full well that the development team are part time and are not a company of dedicated people getting paid etc.
What I was trying to do there was to answer your qestion. I hope it helps.
