Two good ideas

What if the game became increasingly difficult for every consecutive rerun, unlocking new quests, NPC:s, followers, areas, items and level caps each time? That's replayability if anything. Like you're capped at the regular lv50 cap the first time you play through the game, and the next rerun you keep this character and may advance him/her to, shall we say, lv70? This way you could continue to advance your character for like three runs in total and reach the nice and round cap of 100 (this would require a phletora of new skills and abilities to dump the points at though - perhaps you should be able to specialize in existing disciplines even further. Needless to say, each rerun should unlock new caps of skill levels.)

And, of course, you could have better and better endings depending on how many times you have beaten the game with that character. Devotion counts!

 

Well, yeah. Sorry. Guess I got a bit carried away there, but the topic seemed to take a turn from multiplayer into singleplayer and I just hooked on. However, isn't that how it's supposed to work? Seems pretty fair to me that the guy who spends the most time on his character comes out as the most powerful.

The idea could still be viable in multiplayer though:

Perhaps if there were different realms you could go to - say there were dungeons that you could only enter if you were between the levels 10-15? And then, of course, there would have to be safe zones. And unsafe ones were everyone, regardless of level can venture. Other than that, there could be a penalty system like in some MUD:s - if a too high-level character slays a newbie unprovoced, he has to face the consequences, like gaining less XP and getting a setback in his skills, and the dismay of all other regulars, who now will rape him to death on sight.

You may or may not like those ideas, and I understand you if you don't - I'm not really into online RPG:s´...

 

Sorry, I was incoherent. What I meant was that you would receive a penalty when gaining xp after you've slain that n00b. So, in your next fight, you get like 90% of what you should had got if you weren't such a munchkin. Of course you shouldn't receive any XP at all being a lv50 character raping a lv2 ditto.

Well, that's the way it worked in the MUD I played a long time ago. In the list of commands I saw the "decapitate" command, and being young and dumb as I was I thought: "k3wl! L37s 7ry 7ha7 0u7 ye@! 1337 d00d!".

So, I punched that newbie all bloody and then I decapitated him (which was like a permanent kill) and that immediately resulted in a setback in all my skills, a penalty in all xp gained and the outrageous dismay of all other players, for whom I was now Something Awful. There were ways to make amends for such a crime, but I never bothered, mostly because I was sought up and beaten the bleedin' tar out of as soon as I logged on.

That was a wee bit too strict I believe...