Here's my idea for a space MMO...
First, looking at what has worked well and what has worked poorly in the past - it seems that people really enjoy being an avatar - a person physically wandering through the gameworlds, visiting planets, fighting monsters, and so on - because it allows them to more directly relate to their characters. In games such as EVE and PotBS (both of which I've played, and think they have some awesome elements), what people chiefly seem to complain about is that for most of your experience, you're not connected to your avatar but rather to a boat or starship. Since in either case this is something you will be replacing constantly, it's hard to form a connection with it (although I think the boarding combat of PotBS helps negate that feeling slightly).
What we've been long missing is a game where you can retain your personal avatar-like identity while being on board a ship.
Both Star Trek Online and Star Wars tOR plan to combat this through providing more away-team style combat and by giving you control over a group of people - so that you're controlling everyone who is important to the story, rather than just a single character, and therefore you're supposedly more closely tied in to everyone onboard the ship. While this concept works well in a single-player game, I think it pushes the MMO too closely to the side of a single-player game. After all, you're in an MMO because it is multiplayer - while sometimes you're competing with other players to be the most awesome or to control certain resources, it is regardless a social contract between gamers. The KotOR-like controlling of multiple characters is exactly the opposite of this concept, and it causes them to feel less human simply because they are. To have true social interaction with the other characters of your crew, they should be humans as well.
So for me, what would represent the ideal MMO experience is for every person (or at least - every major person) of a crew to be a human player.
As I considered this, I established a set of rules around which such a game could be created, and I will dispense those rules now:
Give players the ability to create their own spaceship communities. I do not necessarily mean guilds, although a guild taking control of a ship is certainly a possibility. But let's say you purchase a ship - you're a very high-level, very wealthy character who has moved up far enough in the world to buy a large ship, perhaps a freighter or some similar vessel. This would be an incredibly expensive purchase, so that few people would be able to ever buy and maintain one on their own. You now need to hire a crew, and you can actually open up contracts with live players from all over the world to fill various roles on your ship. You can also hire NPCs for these roles (and in fact, you'll need to hire NPCs, but I'll get into that in a bit), but the NPCs would not be quite as good at fulfilling a role and thus it would be vastly preferable for a captain to hire a real-life crew.
Now the captain doesn't directly fly the ship, but instead issues commands - Go here, fire on this, etc. Any crew member, PC or NPC, who has been assigned the active role associated with that command must now carry it out, and receives experience for how well they carry it out. For instance - the ship has been taking heavy fire, and one of the engines has gone offline. The captain issues a command to have the engine repaired, so an engineer PC receives the order and races to go fix the engine. Once he arrives, he has to determine what is wrong, resolve it (replacing parts, reconnecting parts, etc) and then starts the engine back up. Now the ship has engine power again. At the end of the battle, every command the captain assigned is available in a log, and he/she can go through the log and note how well the role was performed - so in our example, the captain thinks the engine was repaired quickly, so he/she gives a full five-star rating to the engineer who fixed it. The engineer gets the same experience either way, but when other captains are interested in hiring him for a job, they may see that he has an average rating of 4.5 stars, and choose an engineer with a higher rating...
The crew of the ship also gets to rate the captain, so others know how well this person did as a captain. If he was yelling at everyone the entire time, maybe they don't rate him so highly...
As players are rated by more and more captains (or, on larger ships, people in charge of them, with anyone in the command chain able to issue commands and rate the ones they issued), they can begin to serve in military vessels at higher levels. The level a person serves at in a private vessel is always determined by the captain or owner of the vessel.
Military organizations are controlled by the game, with players able to move up within the organization based on quests performed and efficiency with which the quests are performed, as well as ratings they receive from PCs in command roles over them. Thus, a person could eventually reach the rank of Captain and be assigned a ship by the game, and this ship would be given military missions to complete. Eventually, it would even be possible for a PC to move into an Admiral role, and at this point the PC determines the very course of the war the military factions are fighting...
As originally stated, private citizens could purchase their own ships eventually. These could be engaged in trade (freighters carrying resources across the universe), science, exploration, mercenary adventures (hired by militarys to carry out certain tasks without the banner of that military's flag), or even pirate activities. Regardless, the captain is the one who determines what quests crewmembers are effectively filling, and thus a PC becomes the questmaster for another PC.
So how, you may be wondering, does a person feel he or she is making an impact on the world? Well, part of it is the group impact - how the ship performs its functions directly relates to how the person performs his. If I don't get this engine repaired in time, and the ship is disabled and boarded, then my whole ship has faield. But part of it, too, are the stats I receive as I perform my role, and it's in my best interest to always try to receive the best stats, so I can become a more valuable player, a more powerful player, a more highly-paid player...
