[quote=@Darkmatter]
[quote=@Arawak]By any chance have you noticed the cycle of intensive world building, progressive loss of thematic focus and eventually player drop out sprees that seems to affect sci-fi NRPs?

Interstellar Ascension is perhaps the most interest case study of such NRP cycle.
[/quote]

Old wounds cut deep. 
Though I agree, this cycle results in the death of easily 90% of the NRPs here. Myself and [@Terminal], by his suggestion, had been deliberating writing a guide on what causes this, how to avoid it and to just generally raise awareness of it. It is the number cause of death in the NRP section. 

If that work would possibly be better transferred here, then I'm happy to speak frankly and honestly about that particular RP, as a case study, as the GM.
[/quote]

One possibility, I've experimented with and enjoyed, is just to embrace the dynamic being bemoaned here. Alot of RPers seem to be very interested in world building- and frankly, the world building ideas of most RPers are more interesting (at least to me) than reading their prose. So just give the people what they want, and a framework to do it in.

Consciously spinning an NRP as a collaborative worldbuilding exercise and encouraging people to worldbuild to their heart's content has at least two upsides: 1) it's (apparently for many people) flat out fun, and can frankly be more fun than reading IC posts about what space-queens and space-diplomats or not-zergs are doing as written by amateur authors 2) worldbuilding can lend itself to fiction set in-universe, and can be a fruitful source of real collaboration as opposed to the ridiculous pseudo-RTS dynamics that so many NRPs fall in to (and which I think is part of what is being complained about here). In my experience it can actually help the IC side of things. I know that the most creative and successful I've been at writing science fiction or fantasy scenes or short stories has been in the context of collaborative worldbuilding. My most successful experiments with this dynamic have been in fantasy settings- NRPs which were extremely healthy for months and only failed because I could no longer GM for RL reasons, but the principle holds true for scifi/space opera as well.

Just my thoughts. If the people like worldbuilding, give them worldbuilding, and try to structure the worldbuilding so as to enhance the IC rather than compete with it.