Incentive To Keep Playing MMORPGs?

Thanks to RPGDot for their opinion piece discussing why gamers would want to continue playing MMORPGs over long periods of time. The piece asks: "What is the best way to keep a player in an MMORPG? Reward their effort? Players will never have enough rewards to satisfy them for long periods of time. Remove all advancement limits? Players will complain that there is no goal. Reward their patience? Sure, but the gameplay has to be pretty engaging, if skills are gained through time instead of effort", but concludes without a definitive answer, begging the question - is there one?

Comments

Let players contribute to worlds and run servers

[agentk]

The best thing, IMO, is to let players start running their own worlds/servers at some point. The company could even move on to something else, and just keep selling client software (or not). It could even move into the new world of independent servers and sell game items and services, or contract tools and services to the people running independent servers. (On the other hand, maybe they would just be putting themselves out of business, I don't know :)

This is generally where I'd like to see online gaming/entertainment go, maybe a mixture of free and commercial software, but with low barriers on people who want to run servers. This is how the Web happened :)

reed