MUD (the original Bartle/Trubshaw game) had a sort of natural stability. You could do anything you liked, pretty much. PK, stealing, etc., but the game sort of balanced out with the admins only stepping in during extreme cases of bullying or offensiveness. Usually, when a PKer caused too much trouble, the "goodies" would club together to kill 'em. The "society" rules were largely followed because the game was well balanced.

It was also, I suppose, a bit harder to "get into" than the modern graphical mmorpgs, deterring a lot of silly people from upsetting the balance.

Anyway, hey ho.

Wurmonline seems to be balancing itself fairly nicely. it has almost no NPCs, but that also makes the gameplay really dull. There are npc animals running around and that, but if you want a sword, you either open a mine, get some ore, smelt it, and forge the sword, or pay someone to do it.

I think that the main problem lies in the fact that players can't really do much to other players in MMORPGs. Sure, you can kill someone, but he'll just respawn. This makes law enforcement next to impossible.
What is needed for player run worlds is harsher penalties for dying. Permadeath may be a bit too harsh, but loss of all items (by being looted) will make most people think twice before griefing. At first this will lead to players being harassed by higer-level players a lot, but soon some osrt of organization will have to form to deal with these "highwaymen". While we're at it, power curve in most MMORPGs is too steep - most of the power should come from items and not from levels for this system to work.

Part of the problem is best summed up by Penny Arcade's G.I.F. theory:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

In any online game, there will be a huge amount of people who want nothing more than to ruin everyone else's good times and try to be as big a nuisance as possible. They generally outweigh the people who want to play as full-time cops by a huge amount. Cops isn't even a good term for it; it's more like being a babysitter for a bunch of retarded six year olds who just discovered a crate of hand grenades in the closet.

The second problem is scope. The main reason you can't sell cheesesticks in any current MMO (that I know of) is that the developers would have to put time and money into developing cheesesticks. There's no way any developer could put everything anyone could possibly want into one game. MMO's are already so huge and support-intensive that only the largest and richest of companies can successfully create one. Asking for something that has fifty times the art/codebase/staff of World of Warcraft is inconceivable at this time.

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Original post by nothing void No online game ive played has come close to achieving this, they are either total chaos, or incredibly strict & limiting rules.

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Original post by nothing void Hey yes I have played EVE - it gets a little closer to what I'm thinking. . but it still has so many rules, etc. restricting gameplay. - corporation structures are dictated by the models they have in place rather than created simply in the minds of the players.

This makes me think you don't really know what it is you want. Total player freedom IS total chaos. For example, in Eve, you don't have to join a corp; you could create whatever group structure you want by just chatting with some people and having them agree to it. I would guess the reason you wouldn't want to do this is because it would be "total chaos", and nobody would do what you want them to do since the game wouldn't be forcing them to, but then you're back where you started.

In general, I feel like too many people think of this "free world" from the point of view of what they'd like to do, not what others would like to do to them. Your game sounds much less fun if you change it so it reads:

Want to get murdered? Too bad! It will happen anyway!

Want to get arrested and put in jail for a year for crimes you didn't commit? Too bad! It will happen anyway!

Want to have someone steal all your cheesesticks and ruin your months of hard work in an instant? Too bad! It will happen anyway!

Want to have a group of nutcases with guns kill you and start re-enacting Unreal Tournament over your corpse while you're trying to RP with your friends? Too bad! It will happen anyway!

OK Id like to enter a new question..

Is there any way to keep the wankers out of your game?

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Original post by nothing void OK Id like to enter a new question.. Is there any way to keep the wankers out of your game?

This is actually a fairly important question. MMO's deal with this by first setting up rules to limit just how badly wankers can ruin other people's game, and secondly by having a full-time GM staff to ban them when they get out of hand.

However, a better method in my opinion is to not go MMO if you don't need to. I am a really big fan of Neverwinter Nights because it allows people to create persistent worlds that are essentially "mini MMORPGs", but allow the administrators to require applications to let players join, and to monitor the players and kick abusive ones more quickly. It also allows many different flavors of worlds for different audiences, since everyone's definition of wanker will differ. Plus, the NWN servers are free, so there's much less reason for admins to let wankers stick around since they're not gaining anything from them.