[silvarilon]

I, too, prefer the carrot to the stick.

My game has some maintenance needs, but they are unintentional. As in, I want to give the players something they can earn, and to keep the game in balance, those "extras" have to be something they continue to put in effort to keep the edge.

But I attempt to specifically avoid giving the players a feeling that they can't walk away from the game. When someone goes absent for long enough (about a week) most systems that require maintenance will "freeze" so the player isn't punished (and therefore they only have to do maintenance while they're in the game anyway) - and most maintenance has to be done less than once a week.

I was including the point more for completeness on ways to keep players sticking with a game. In your example, the maintenance game *did* encourage you to keep returning. Their flaw wasn't the maintenance, it was that you felt the items made your character unique. If the items were only a small part of the character, you might have still returned to maintain them, but after giving them away still kept the character and occasionally visited. Best of both worlds. Assuming you want to stop the players from walking away from the game.

My findings are actually that keeping players is easy. Keeping good players is hard. I find the players get so invested in the game that they get burnt out, which makes them stop having fun, which means we have a game with players that aren't having fun, which means they bring down the other players. I'd much rather encourage them to take a break and return only if they're going to enjoy themselves again.