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

Ask Slashdot -- What is the meaning of life?

[ni4882]

Seriously, what IS the point of MMORPGs? Ultimately, people are going to get bored of doing repetitive tasks to increase their hitpoints and get nifty new gadgets. After seeing my college roomate get totally sucked into Ultima Online, I haven't been able to touch any game in the genre. There's a whole lot more out there in life to do then sit down and get a monitor tan while playing Evercrack. It's like all these people have to live their lives through their game character instead of going out and actually experiencing life.

like this

[August_zero]

I think the first asheron's call had the right idea: create an epic storyline, with quests and events, and the base the outcomes on what the community does.

For example, in AC1, there was a period during which these shadowy beings began to invade. over a couple of months, these creepy floating fortresses started appearing outside towns, strange new monsters appeared, and new dungeons opened up. Over the coming months, quests and events precedeing the resurection of a demon-god began to appear. Some players swore to help revive the god, and others tried to defend the shirnes and prevent it. One server actually held back the march of darkness most of the month but finally fell and the entire world was assaulted by this devil.

I am simplfying it a lot but you get the idea. I had a lot of friends that started playing the game more than ever when this event was going on, and I think something like thisis the key to keeping your customers.

The "sandbox model" in which players are just let loose in a static world to kill respawning mobs over and over isn't appealing to about 90% of the potential MMORPG players (that is anyone that plays RPGs) If they want to grab that market, they need to make the game as interesting as a brandnew epic RPG every month. "new content every month? that will cost a fortune!" you say. But I say "whoever figures out a way to do it without breaking the bank or hiking subscription costs will be the one that comes out on top"

In My Experience...

[AngryLogic]

I don't think that the developer of these games really needs to plan something special for the long-term players as long as they make all your achivements scalible.

Now I have never played Lineage myself but from what I've read about it this is a good example of game that has such a scale. Once you have gotten a strong character you still have other things too look forward to, mostly Guilds. Once you have found a guild you can build your guild and capture castles.

Now these high up players may eventually own one of these castles but this still gives them many things to do; for example they must defend their castle, they must manage it, and perhaps they eventually get bored with this and go to capture a second castle?

Games should not have a definete ending for the players. The best online games I've seen are the ones that let the players fight against each other and put in balances so that no one power can ever overwhelm another.

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

A few thoughts on keeping players around

[Qzukk]

I've been thinking about this for a bit. Probably the number 1 reason I kept playing the MUD I was on in college, was because of the player-run quests. Anyone could take some time to prepare a quest, though the quests prepared by the heros and immortals tended to be more interesting and have better rewards since they could create special items and mobs. (Mortal quests typically tended to be quizzes or hide-and-seek games for random spare equipment)

In other words, player-generated content allowed the MUD to sustain its popularity. In the MMORPG world, it seems that many of the attempts to give players such "powers" have backfired, usually due to disgruntled players.

So I've been thinking... what if the game had "quest points". These could be earned by participating in a quest (not just by "winning" the quest, players would quickly tire). Players could then use these quest points in one of two ways.

First: expend quest points to create a quest of their own. Use a fairly high starting cost to make sure that players doing this have participated in enough quests to understand what they are doing in running one. That gets the player setup with a basic gofer quest (unique item is dropped somewhere in a given dungeon, find the item and win). More points can be spent to get special items created, special monsters created, or for enough points, a major plot inserted. (All of these are created by the player, and perhaps edited by the staff). Some restriction should be in place on # of simultaneous quests.

Second: after participating in a quest, a player can choose to donate quest points back to the player who created the quest. This will create a feedback system and allow the popular creators to host quests more often. To prevent people from hoarding quest points, establish limits where if they don't donate quest points to hosts, they will receive fewer and fewer points.

You could use donated quest points to establish a ranking scheme, where "newbie" hosts can only create certain types of quests until enough people have donated points to them for them to try for bigger quests.

Aside from this idea... the "Hero" idea from my MUD was pretty good incentive to keep playing and exploring. When you reached a high enough level you became a Hero and were given a few extra powers. However, as you gained levels, monsters would give less and less XP, discouraging people from fighting forever in one place, and requiring them to explore the area to learn more about it.