>>* A huge trade and crafting/gathering system, with fishing, hunting, smithing, tailoring or horse breeding
>> RUNESCAPE
Stopped reading entire thread right there. Ewww. Just Ewwww.
Sounds like I wanted to do with Oblivion. Everyone gets these fantastic "OMG MMO of X! WITH NO NPCS JUST PEOPLE!!!" ideas then fails to realise how damn complicated that **** is. Quite frankly it's ridiculous because:
The playerbase will NEVER be big enough to support that
Assuming you had enough playerbase, your server would have to be godmode engage since they'd all have to be run on one server
Every griefer and their pet griefer dogs would dive on an undertaking like this. I suppose you could consider it free beta testing if you like, just remember that when "L337HomBoi3" haxxes your **** and breaks everything.
A myriad of other stuff that I'm too lazy to address and probably has already been looked at.