Keeping the Peeps

[Chessrook44]

With WoW's sub numbers declining and other MMOs going on, I wanted to start a discussion of such talking about the ways MMOs try to keep people coming back to their games. Not what draws them, but what keeps them. And perhaps we can even figure out what the best option for getting people to stay would be. I may not be an expert, but here's all the methods I can remember...

EXPANSION PACKS
The oldest method and the most well-known. Every couple years, or every so often, the game would release an expansion pack, containing large amounts of new content. Whole new continents, new weapons, new classes, new races, new quests, raids, dungeons, levels, more more more! It takes a long time to make usually, but it contains so much that surely it would take players months to see everything, plenty of time to work on the next one!
But the downside to this is the, usually, long production time. With months at best and years at worst between expansions, many players do tend to complete the content before the next expansion, leaving a great deal of time between expansions where numbers will slip, income will fall, and the company has to focus on other ways to keep the players in.

PVP
Conflict is great, and people love it. More or less. A strong PVP community, with fun gameplay will keep the competitive players coming back for more, always fighting to be the best like no one ever was. Adding in fighting factions or even wars should only make it better, as it will bring more into it and make more people come back, for revenge, to conquer, or just to have fun!
Sadly, this only caters to the PVP crowd, which is only HALF of the people playing your game. Focus on this to the exclusion of all else and numbers WILL suffer. It gets worse if the PVP isn't as good as you expect, or gets repetitive and samey.

COMMUNITY
Now while a good friendly community is important and will bring people back, that is not what I'm talking about here. What I mean here is when the community is what shapes the world, what creates the stories, what brings people back. A mixture of good and bad community, working in a unique sort of harmony that just makes people want to come back for more.
Sadly, this is very tricky to get, and almost impossible to force into being. I can think of only one game off the top of my head that has this, and that is EVE. Even though I'm not a fan of the gameplay or progression, I'll admit that the stories I've heard of massive corporations going to war have been some of the most fascinating things I've heard in a long time.

SKINNER BOX
Right, completed my daily objective! I'll be back tomorrow to do it again!
Yeah this is pretty blatant, easy to implement, and manipulative. I don't need to get into it too much do I?

MINICONTENT
While I don't think there's a name for it yet, as I've only seen it in one game so far, this is basically the opposite of the Expansion Pack. Instead of one massive surge of content every year or so, this is lots of very small bursts of content released very quickly. As Guild Wars 2 has been doing, they provide bursts of content every 2 weeks. New regions show up every few months, but every few weeks brings in festivals, bits of story, new weapon skins, activities, content, and so forth.
The good side is that with a constant stream of content it tends to solve the "Do it now as fast as possible" crowd. The downside is that quantity often comes at the cost of quality, and handled poorly the frequent updates could put a strain on the dev team, and thus the content will not be as well received by the playerbase.

That's all the methods I can think of off the top of my head. If there's any other ways I missed mention them, and tell me... what do YOU think is the best way to keep your players coming back for years onwards?

 

[CloudAtlas]

You forgot two major things: User-generated content and random/procedurally-generated content. And those are, I think, the only things that work in the long run - for people who are looking for such content in the first place, that is, and do not find their fulfilment in tedious dungeon grinds and what not. Developers will never be able to generate fresh content fast enough to keep even the average gamer entertained. Only the community can do that. And if user-generated content for games like Minecraft, Skyrim, or good old WarCraft 3 are any indication, you can expect them to build whole continents for your MMO if you give them the proper tools, provided your game is popular enough in the first place.

You mention EVE's community, and the stories you heard about it: Those are essentially user-generated content, and content that can only exist in sandbox MMOs, like EVE is. A problem here is that, although virtually everbody can participate in low-key shenanigans like robbing your corporation or leading some small fleet into an ambush, a lot of the truly interesting stuff is out of reach for "average" players.
PvP, too, is, to a large degree user-generated content, and systems could be designed that attract many more people who are less inclined to do PvP. Real fighting armies need not only soldiers, but food, weapons, material, transport, engineers, doctors, and what not, all those non-combat roles are woefully underrepresented in most MMOs. At least I would imagine it would be more motivating in the long run to do tedious resource gathering, crafting, or building to support your mates in the trenches, instead of doing it's some quest for some NPC. Of course it would help if gathering and crafting is somewhat interesting in the first place, but then again, since we're already talking about EVE, people are willing to do excruciatingly boring tasks for pretty much the same reason in EVE too for hours and hours, so maybe that's not even necessary.

But yea, if your intention is to keep users, and keep them happy, without resorting skinner-box-like practices, I think you have to rely on user-generated content. Maybe work hand-in-hand with the community, help them a bit with implementing more ambitious projects, help them with balancing, create a user and/or developer-approval system, integrate the good content in the "real" gameworld for everyone to enjoy and admire, not just in some separate, instanced places, and so on.

Edit: Isn't random and user-generated content pretty much what Everquest Next is doing? I'm not really into MMOs anymore because, well, they just can't keep me entertained, but I think I read something along those lines.