I also volunteer for a text based online game (the link incase people are too lazy to look in my sig is: www.trollscantsing.eu) I'm a writer/quest/monster admin though I'm whats affectionately known as a floater with the ability to support on all other departments at need aside from the code department (I do not write in PHP and MYSQL which is what the game relies upon)

The game over the years started out with a small base and grew a lot but back then we all had 3 characters so it was increasingly difficult to tell how many actual players there were (once you add in the fact that some people will always claim 3 isn't enough and create more than 1 account) we dropped the characters to 2 a few years back and now we're in the process of dropping to one char per account (well more, per server since the main server which is free to play, Stax is the one which used to have 3 chars per account the other servers Lambe and Dro are donation based servers, where after a fixed amount you can play 1 char)

However over the years and for all the fluctuations in it I believe something that has kept myself and many other players as players (even when several admins became corrupt and often abused the players and the game, thankfully they're all gone now and the new team complete with me are determined not to let the same happen again) was the freedom of the game. We've got such an open world where it literally is "create a character, choose any skills from the x many we have and go for it who you are, what you do is entirely up to you" if you decide to betray your race and join the De's in the east fine so go do it but everyone who you meet in the world apart from a few pre-set NPC's are players and they have a long memory and some a lot of skill in the years they've played. Some claim catching up the big guys is impossible I say it takes around 12 months, I've seen it done where people, new people are almost as skilled as I am in it.

The problem I find when I go shopping for console games ect is we get a lot of re-hashes of the older games or similar titles same with PC games. Everything these days is either the sequel to this or the re-make of that. I'm seeing very little ingenuity sure it's nice to see an old favourite get some serious facelifts but I've learnt as a text based game dev, theres no necessity for it. I get bigger rushes out of an unexpected PvP fight on the game I work for than I do from playing Halo 3 on Legendary when I'm offline. So therefore I don't think the smaller text based games will disappear, they'll have a place providing something new and experimental until some huge company like EA comes and steals their ideas. As for pay to play/free to play servers I reckon whilst WoW does do well and it's got a huge player base games like GW are much more accessible no messing around trying to pay the bill for it, just buy that pack or download it and away you go.