Brush the cobwebs off the Inifinity engine and make a Baldur's Gate MMO. I know some say the graphics suck, but I can honestly say I prefer its graphics to 3/4 of modern MMO's (including WoW). Additionally, it would allow me to manufacture the game in my basement :)

Mental note: must move to house with basement.

Ideas to fix what's been discussed here:

Bonus quest rewards, or progress towards a "master quester" title, for people who adventure with the minimap/compass turned off. This would have to be questing in a randomized area to prevent alt-tabbing to get a map from a website.

To compensate for the lack of features, you could give people a compass and the ability to mark their own map for the area.

Same goes for adding bonus rewards to run around without seeing little exclamation points or whatever over the heads of quest npc's.

That way it's an optional bar for people to jump through if they want to. Just being able to turn the minimap off for no benefit is a silly solution. If something is challenging it has to have an increased reward to match, or there's no point challenging yourself.

I'll reply here to what JB wrote in Gish's blog...

"The game would be following a chain whenever it showed a character's rating to you.  So if you rate Bob a 0.9 and Bob rates Mary a 0.9, then the first time you see Mary, you will be shown a default rating of 0.81 (0.9 * 0.9)."

I'm still not comfortable with this idea. Let's say I quested with Bob once and he seemed to know what he was doing, so I rated him a 0.9. And then let's say that Bob is actually not a very nice person, and rated Mary a 0.1 just to be a dick. So I would be shown a rating of 0.09 for Mary, even though I've never met her before. I would think "wow, she must have really annoyed some of my friends, there's no way I'm playing with her".

Additionally, I'm no psychologist, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was common for people to "copy" ratings. For example if I see Mary is 0.09, perhaps the slightest thing she does to irritate me will make me flag her with a big ol' zero. This makes it tough for Mary to get back into the good books.

I'm not saying the rating idea is bad, in fact I think it's quite good, but I'm not sure exactly how to implement it to avoid this issue.

"Groups are a problem, not a solution... When players chat, they only chat with their group.  When rewards are handed out, they are handed out to a group.  When a task is undertaken, it is a group-sized task.  And so on.  Two groups nearby to each other are aconsidered competitors, not allies."

This is deserving of a topic in and of itself, so I'll try to be brief. The cons that you mention can be overcome I believe, although some will require tweaks to existing MMO concepts:

i) Segregating groups so that they only talk to each other. I've never found this to be an issue, in fact, I am far more likely to be talking to members of my friends list and my guild/alliance then to be talking to random PUG's in my group.

ii) Group rewards/group-sized tasks/groups competing:

As long as the game design doesn't place people in competition for rewards, all a group becomes is a group of UI options to make interacting with your friends easier in a chaotic situation (for example, as a healer I may want to devote my energy pool to healing my friends preferentially - it needs to be made simple for me to do so, I don't want to tab through the other 50 people around me).

I've heard you advocate such a system in which individual players all work together towards a common goal. There's nothing to stop groups from flourishing under such a system.

The other thing to consider is instanced areas. I'm not talking about 40 man WoW raids, since they are just stupid. Instances should be designed and balanced for a particular number of players, say from 1 - 12 man content. You can't have an unlimited number of people able to join, or it becomes a zerg (that's what persistent world content is for). Instances are more refined. They require people to plan out beforehand what characters/skills/tactics they are going to take in to achieve a particular goal.

They require people to form groups.

"I don't want players given a fiction so that they can feel that they are hunting trolls to some purpose, while at the same time they know that they're actually hunting them for the loot and experience."

Who said anything about loot and XP? The system doesn't have to reward troll hunting in that way. In that case, people would hunt trolls because they like the combat against trolls, or because trolls particularly annoy them, or because they like the death squeal when trolls die, or because they like the look of wearing troll hides, or because they want to work on their "troll slayer" title.

Having said all that, yes, the "cooler" causes in terms of immersion for people to work towards are going to be the ones that further a particular faction, I was using a simplified example for troll hunting to get the idea across.

"I am of the opinion that games that permit treachery and deceit are severely damaging the health of their community."

Immersion is so much greater in those games. I don't want to create another UO, but the capability to be treacherous to *some* degree is almost a requirement to create conflict in a player-run community.

Diablo II hardcore is some of the best fun I've had in an online game.

Lessons to learn from that game to make permadeath work:

1) Make a separate server for permadeath, and allow characters to distinguish themselves (in D2 it was red writing under your name) as being hardcore.

2) Make levelling up, especially in the very early levels, really really fast.

@ Burtzum:

But how would you actually implement a game in which multiple people COULD all save the world, yet in different ways? Say you've got 1,000,000 players playing your game, you're going to have to come up with 1,000,000 different evil overlords/diabolic rituals/armies of doom/portals to hell/etc etc all in the same world.

That's one pretty f----d up world, wouldn't you say?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see an MMO where each player drives the story, but I don't see how it could actually be made...