The concept is quite simple really. A sandbox game which restarts lets say every 3 months. Fresh and to some extent random gameworld is brewed for every round. Everyone starts with a clean slate every round. A round would play out much like any Sid Meier game where players are ranked at the end according to their achievements during that round. Persistent leaderboard could be also tracked which extend over all of the rounds the player has participated.

This type of game could have a unique business model charging for the box and for every round player participates in. Every round could even be a new expansion (although the lenght of one round would have to be much more than 3 months).

Thoughts?

One problem with resets is, what about people who can't play that often?  Games that never reset may let you do over the course of a year what someone else may do over the course of a month.  But that doesn't work so well if it resets every three months.

A Tale in the Desert got around this by saying that there were a bunch of different things that you could pursue, and you didn't have to do everything.  So someone with a lot more time to play might get really good at a lot of things, while someone with less time would only get good at a few things.  But he could still get good at a few things, and then after the reset, pick some different things to get good at.

Travian and ATITD do the same thing. Each round is longer than 3 months in those games however.

I'm sure there is an audience for it.  Other games use such a model.

Not for me though.  I can play a single player game and reset whenever I want.  I play mmorpg's because the world is persistant (and of course because there are other people).

this would only really work on a browser style mmo i would figure. given how time consuming full time mmos tend to be with the learning curves and grinding aspects. a game that resets in 3 months wouldnt be very popular. as most games would require 3 months just to get to the mid range of level gap. 

browser games tend to be alittle easier on the grinding and learning curve.. so a reset wouldnt be as harsh i would think..  but the main issue i would have with this, is a p2p/f2p game would have the complainers who hate spending X money on the game just to reset. UNLESS the money is readded to the account. 

so if you pay 10 bucks for XP potions, and it resets the next "game" you have your 10 bucks to respend.  but then you have issues of people who spend 100 bucks once and just feed off that with each reset.