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

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