BioWare's Walton on Post-WoW MMOs

Gamasutra has up a piece covering BioWare's Gordon Walton's keynote speech at the Austin Game Developers Conference. Walton discussed BioWare, working on MMOs now, and the impact of the market.
Lesson nine

He then suggested something even more controversial -- "Let 'em quit." He warned of making promises for features in patches that would never come to fruition (or do so far down the line the promises don't matter anymore.) "COH taught me this before WOW -- a game that you finished and felt good and you'd re-up." But with other games "they quit because they'd stayed too long... the only way for them to escape was to demonize the game." His personal experience is that he'll drop in and out of WOW at a whim with no ill feeling. However, he didn't think it was relevant that WOW doesn't delete inactive characters -- the "namespace" freed by deleting characters makes them worth deleting. He warned gamers get dissatisfied "if it takes more than three tries before they can have a name that they want."