After much thought I have arrived at the thought that people should look to the natural world for solutions.
Everything dies.
Everything is born.
Everything grows.
Everything functions in cycles.
What major drawback have all video games always faced?
I might say "limited cycles" as an answer.
What cycle is PCRPG on?
Are these limited things?
In other words:
Content creation, delivery, alteration, continuity, etc. are all cyclic entities.
WoW has taught us some thing:
Go back and look at all the old quest areas for level 50's that require groups of 6-12 people to play through... they are empty. Nobody does those areas any more, even with their new characters. The content cycle of those areas has outlasted it's life cycle.
I don't like the "grinder" style of play for First Person games any more which WoW has epitomized, but I also think that it's content alteration system is the most interesting.
Thus... the most I can think for this game would be to add multi-tiered systems of creating and altering content in some sort of cyclical system.
An example might be a 38 day year in the game. Each day has a whole different set of quests. As each year cycle passes, it puts the different quests on different days of availability through out the week. Doing this creates objectives for each player to complete at each level of advancement.
Building on a system of time, each player could be afforded a certain length of time to live, possibly modified by a random dice roll or a bit of their skills in magic or endurance or something. A player could choose their starting age of say... 23-28 years old, then progress from there until they have lived through 20 in game years. This would give a real world time of just over 2 years. After that, the character might retire to some kind of arena area where their character might be limited to... thus still enabling the use of that character in a less serious and perhaps more entertaining dueling area.
I suppose what I am saying, over all, is that there needs to be a limit on time cycles of some kind, either by quests, by age, or by both, or other means.
Those are the insane ramblings for today. Peace!