Game Idea

I was thinking about writing an MMO where you can be any character in the MMO. The only NPCs would be the animals/monsters around the world that you could kill (or not kill, if that's how you choose to play), and while there would be an in game currency, how much things are worth is entirely up to the players. So the player can be the blacksmith that repairs weapons, or the hunter that collects pelts, or the banker, who stores items and holds onto currency (though they would have to gain a lot of trust first).

Players start out completely from scratch, and they can choose to join a village, or build their own up (by gathering the materials to build buildings, and then attracting other people to come to their village). Everything would be entirely player-enforced, if someone stole something from another player, it would have to be sorted out between the players (who may decide to involve people from their village to help them resolve it).

The most important part, is that players wouldn't have to be players, they could choose to be the boss NPCs in games. One of my biggest hates about MMOs with PvE (player vs environment) encounters is that after someone has figured out the encounter, it's easymode. Instructor Razuvious was a wall for a lot of guilds in Naxx, as he one-shot all the tanks, until someone realised you could mind control his students, and use the students to tank. After that, any guild with enough geared players to clear the trash up to Razuvious was smashing him.

If you had player controlled raid bosses, then it wouldn't just be a matter of "At 60 seconds, X casts Supernova, so everyone has to move to this side. Then 45 seconds later, X summons a skeleton that has to be killed right away." It becomes a bit more like PvP where the person you are fighting is unpredictable. They might be good, or they might be terrible, but it isn't just like dancing to the same music over and over again. They will cast stuff to target the weaker players, so it won't be as easy to be carried if you suck.

I want it to be somewhat like the Anubian guards in AQ40, where you don't know which skill they have until you are fighting them, and then everyone has to quickly prepare themselves based on which skill the guard has. So each "boss" can choose which skills they are going to level, and if there are enough skills, no encounter should be the same (although I get the feeling that people will start posting "optimal builds" and so eventually you will end up with cookie-cutter bosses).

Although, raid bosses aside, I think the game resembles too much of real life. There is too much of a grind to be able to do anything. You don't start out with any money, so where will you get money from? You sell stuff to people who have money. But where do they get money from? I'm not sure if it would go so far as to have someone who is the mint and they mine metals in order to turn them into money, and people trade their goods in exchange for the coins. What if a village has no miners and no mint - does that mean they can't have any money?

Also, what happens when people go to sleep for the night? This would only work if you had a huge number of people playing at the same time. It would suck if you traveled for half an hour getting to a new village, only to find out that all the merchants are asleep, and there is nothing for you to do there now.

I realise this game sounds a lot like Minecraft with an economy and raid bosses, but I want to add that I've never played Minecraft and I did come up with this idea before. The success of Minecraft means that my game could work in theory, as people seem to enjoy building stuff, but I don't know how I would handle griefers, which seems to be a big problem. Would people enjoy being able to raze another village? Well, if you're a griefer, obviously the answer is yes, but if you just wanted to play the game, I doubt a lot of people would be able to build up the motivation to rebuild a village if the first one got destroyed so easily.

I like the idea of being able to take on roles other than the role of the adventurer/hero, but I don't really want to play Eve Online, which a lot of people have recommended to me. I played a bit for Pandy when he went to China and had no Internet access, and the game didn't really appeal to me (well, the fact that Pandy didn't let me go anywhere in case I died might have had something to do with it, but the game itself and the mechanics don't really sound like my thing).

I've always want to play a game where the things you do actually have an impact on the world around you. I like how in Baldur's Gate II, there is a mission where you can save some people (depending on your class), and then you gain control of a headquarters and can make decisions for the people living there. I like how people react to you differently based on the things that you have done. There is no real punishment for being an asshole in MMOs. Sure, people can spam chat/forums that you're a ninja/moron, or put you up on wowjackass.com, but there are so many people playing that even if some people refuse to group with you, it's not that hard to find someone else to group with.

Probably needs a bit more thought before it is a playable game though.