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Developing Online Games Book Reviewed
Thanks to Frictionless Insight for putting up a review of Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Patrovsky's new book, Developing Online Games, a New Riders-published title written by two veteran MMO creators. The review mentions, in particular, that "..the central theme, the nail-it-to-your-face, tattoo-it-on-your-forearm message of Developing Online Games is that persistent world (PW) games, like EverQuest, aren't a product, they're a service. It is a failure to understand this unassuming statement that has caused such trouble for the PW genre." There's also an excerpt from the book available on the FI site. Update: 06/26 15:29 GMT by T : Here's Peter Wayner's review of this book from April.
You don't think the existing MMOG's already do this? I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of adding content that is balanced and interesting. EQ has been adding content since its inception, and perhaps you could argue that it has a fan base that does not leave, but you also have a fan base that gripes about how badly balanced the new content is and how the new content isn't geared towards them and how easy the new content was to master, etc. So simply having any content is obviously not sufficient, it has to be good content. This is partially what is to blame for the typical content power-spiral, as each newly released batch of content needs to outdo the last and the easiest way to do this is to make it bigger, better, more powerful than it was before.
Also, having so much content that one can't possibly do it all isn't nearly as important if you know from the outset that the content is simply more of the same level treadmill over and over. This means your content has to be involved, which takes both more time and more skill to develop as well as more quality control work.