Originally Posted by Malorn
Progression is not what keeps people playing. You don't need to give people handouts of power for playing their game. Gamers aren't a bunch of panhandlers waiting to see what minor carrots a game will give them and flock to it.
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World of Warcraft has actually used this reward model to sustain itself for years while lacking in any real forms of gameplay. There are a lot of people (one of my coworkers included) that enjoy the player progression reward model. It's also helped to keep many TF2 people playing the TF2 game.
Originally Posted by Malorn
Most of us played planetside for years and we didn't need that crap. The reason we stopped playing is typically because the game got stale, not because they didn't give us "progression". It's unnecessary if the game itself offers good compelling gameplay with variety and freshness.
If a game is fun to play, provides meaningful challenges and enough variety in the gameplay to keep you interested then people will keep playing.
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I agree. However, you really need to step back and look at it from a business perspective to see the reward model in action. If you give someone all the upgrades and certification choices when they first start playing then things will become "stale" much quicker. If you unlock those over time and keep adding more then it's going to keep people playing much longer. In theory at least. I'm hoping some of these certification changes have gameplay changing effects also thus they'll add more gameplay over time. So something you didn't see happening at the beginning of the game evolves into someone's specialized strategy.