Alright guys, discussion has been moved. If you want another title for that, let me know. I didn’t follow the whole discussion 
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I think this works. Thanks.
Upfront, I belong to the category of players who like MMORPGs as well as single player RPGs. That said, they don’t have to focus on the same aspects and each genre should play its strengths instead of trying to please all possible consumers.
While I agree, that some innovative thinking wouldn’t hurt the game type of the MMO, many just gather well known/working mechanics and cook them together into a new game where the setting is usually the area where most of the innovation went.
But the naming feature of allowing massive but most importantly varying numbers of players to participate, is also its limiting factor. For storytelling the persistence of the world is the biggest problem, which prevents the game from allowing player/story caused changes without workarounds of often marginal immersive quality (instances, hard story walls) - that and aligning quests to fit different progress and/or groups by scaling and repeatability. Also since you can’t “load a savegame” they prefer to have nothing unchangeable bad happening to a character.
These things alone make me enjoy a nice story driven single player game and not really wishing a MP mode for them. Sure you miss on some of the advantages of MP games, but as I said each game should play its strengths.
As for the combat style in MMOs vs the proposed one here. There is a historic reasons for the combat style in network dependent combat systems - minimizing the influence of network latency/lags. While this isn’t as big a problem now as a few years back, developers probably still are vary of its influences and try to avoid something which requires too much instant interaction.
just my 2c, setting-wise I could imagine like this for an MMO, but not mechanics-wise.
Precisely my point; that is not innovation and players have been noticing for a while now (some more painfully than others, admittedly).
[quote=“Asgo, post:23, topic:17833”]
But the naming feature of allowing massive but most importantly varying numbers of players to participate, is also its limiting factor.[/quote]
Not sure I agree here; I mean, think about it… it is quite unrealistic to expect a world not to change just because you went to sleep. It is equally unrealistic to think that everyone will have every opportunity, forever and ever amen. Personally, I think this is where the MMO got it most decidedly wrong… reputation and status should have both historical and personal meaning. An example of it being done right? EvE Online history of the first titan class ship.
There are options, they’ve just never been explored. I personally like the idea of epocs of time; at the end of X period, some cataclysm hits the world and destroys it. The surviving players must pick up the pieces and go on… rebuild from scratch. This is both an excellent opportunity to introduce an “act” or an expansion or just reset the world to the begin state.
It is also a great way to introduce still more reputation and status by allowing certain perks/benefits to those who “lived through” and “rebuilt” that entirely new players will simply never have. Kind of like real world, which is the point.
Upshot: These are just a few options that would be truly innovative for the MMO space. And, frankly, there are considerable numbers of players who have LONG lobbied for things like “perma-death” as the ultimate consequence for poor choices (be they a string of them, or one, epically bad one).
It IS possible. I know the “old schooler” MMO players in particular have all but given up hope of ANYONE ever as much as TRYING.
I’m a bit of a stubborn thing… I continue to hope.