One way I like to come up with new ideas is by adding arbitrary constraints to an existing well known design and seeing what the consequences would be. For example, what would an FPS look like if you weren't allowed to have weapons? If you go down that line of thinking it raises a lot of obvious questions, like:

* In what setting would being helpless make sense? (Horror?)
* What are the player's tools for survival if they don't have guns? (Stealth, objects in the environment?)

If you keep going down that line of thinking you might end up with something like Amnesia, which is, you know, awesome. It's not the only way to get there of course, but it's a nice hammer to have in your toolbox.

MMO's are really interesting to do this with, because a lot of the conventions that exist in the genre came about more as a reaction to managing griefers and social issues, not because they added a lot of fun to the game (ie, "safe zones", opt-in PVP, etc). Ralph Koster's postmortem on UO gives a lot of insight into how a lot of the genre conventions came into being.

At the core of the issue is how do you provide players with more agency (ie, the ability to have meaningful choices that affect the world), without the entire thing falling into chaos?

Well, here are some ideas. I'm going to start lopping off aspects of MMO design I don't like and see where it goes. I don't know this will result in anything that works (probably not), but hey, being an armchair game designer is free.

The most common way of addressing griefing is just to make certain behaviors impossible. If there's an issue with level 60's going around crushing level 1's, we put the level ones in a magical safe zone where the 60's can't use their weapons. We're not going to do that, because it ruins the coherency of the game world, and a coherent game world is what I want. I'm defining "incoherent" as "has rules imposed on the world that don't mesh with the fictional reality". Or something like that. If we need to police something, it can't be from meta-rules like "when you walk into towns your weapons just stop working".

How do we discourage griefing? Maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe a better question is: how do we turn griefing into part of the fun? How do we let some players play the villain, without it getting out of control?

First off, we get rid of levels. There shouldn't be a level sixty and a level one; we can't let player's be exponentially more powerful than each other. It's too divisive, and it creates too much of a hierarchy. MMO's have levels because it's a very easy way to create a compulsion loop, but they aren't the only way.

We still need some other mechanism to give the game our addictive secret sauce; but that's ok. You don't see any levels in Sim City, do you? The compulsion loop there is in the building of things, and the acquisition of stuff you need to build more things. The key is that you need to give players some way of advancing that doesn't turn them into invincible battle tanks. I can think of a few ways -- let them build things (buildings, forts, items, towns), let them build connections (ie, use friend counts as a scoring system -- hey it worked for facebook when they started), let them acquire stuff/resources (people always want more stuff).

Another interesting aspect of allowing players to build things, and making it a core part of the gameplay, is that you also solve the content problem. That problem being that you have to continuously be creating content (quests, items, etc) or players will grow bored and leave. Content sucks. It's expensive to make, and players can only experience it once before it becomes stale. Modern MMO's are about the consumption of content, but it strikes me that it would be more economical to make them about the creation of content. We've seen that building things can be a very powerful compulsion loop, and it automatically creates quests when you throw in limited resources and resources that interact in interesting ways.

We still need to address griefing though. I think that griefing often occurs because players feel disengaged from the world. I doubt most players are sociopaths -- rather, the combination of anonymity and boredom turns people into jerks.

So what if you take away anonymity? What if you had to play with your real name from your credit card? I'm not saying that's necessarily a good idea, but, I suspect people would be a lot more civil towards each other.

Another possible solution is to reconsider what the "massive" in MMO means. What if the world size consisted of 150 people instead of 3000? And what if the world itself was a very dangerous place -- you need the help of others to survive long term, because you're weak. Since we've taken out leveling, your connections with others, and the things you build, become very important if you don't want to die regularly. If you were a griefer you would become very quickly known and outcast, and your gameplay experience would consist of lurking around in the woods trying not to get mauled by grizzly bears. Sounds about right to me.

I think, all the same, you want griefers. It should be viewed as a valid play style, but it should also be a very difficult play style. If you're having people building worlds, you want people who occasionally come through and wreck 'em, otherwise things get stagnant. Creative destruction. Griefers provide a real service in that context. You just need to keep them down enough that the creation part can happen before the destruction part does.

So that's how I would fix the MMO. I'd remove leveling, premade content, let griefers run free, and remove the massive part. So basically, not really a MMO anymore. HA! Not sure if it'd work, but I'd like to play it.