I keep thinking of a PW with scripted areas where damage cannot be inflicted and attacking is disabled, pretty much leaving the rest of the map outside of that a no man's land unless you say it's your land style would work.
The only rule that would actually be necessary to enforce via adminship would be if a large enough clan like (insert obvious troll faction here) would purposely blockade every spawn point to the max to grief the server.
And even then if the map was edited with this in mind the spawn points would have a minor working economy all to itself. Capable of producing low tier but effective weapons and armor. So should a clan commit to this action, they will just be eventually killed and eventually be forced to retreat or lose.
Couple this with limited banks (like 50-100k limits) and a constant blockade simply wouldn't work for too long anyways. Also the clan would have to spread out between all the different spawn points. Making it an unmanageable situation.
No more corrupt ****minship and no expectation of adminship except in absolutely necessary cases eliminates... well, the ****ty and corrupt adminships prevalent on most PW servers.
In order to try and fix the economy further, I would have a script where you can sacrifice items to the gods. Depending on your religion, Pagan, muslim, christian, you would get difference temporary bonuses. The strength and length of time the bonus would last dependent on how valuable your sacrifice was. With gold bars obviously giving the biggest bonus.
Pagans would gain a temporary strength and athletics increase.
Christians would gain a temporary ironflesh and shield skill increase.
Muslims would gain a temporary increase in Agility, and since the average PW player is apparently too much of a ***** to deal with horse archers, muslims would also gain an athletics increase.
Commoners and outlaws can be any religion they want.
Factions must choose a religion. Religions for a faction can only be changed by the king as usual.
Instead of money from a fief being spawned in the chest, the money would be split by default evenly through the entire kingdom, except for the king who would receive 25%. Not really a big deal but the money spawning in chest thing is just stupid and a massive pain in the ass if you pay wages.
I could keep going, but I'm not about to put in the work to try this out and it's mostly because I'm not capable of it, so I'm pretty much pissing in the wind. But a lot of this is already possible so
tl;dr
1. Safe zones around spawn points with low tier economy and goods inside it. Able to also make horses up to saddle horse.
2. 50-100k Bank limit.
3. No rules.
Death should last longer, 1-2 minutes. After reading Osviux's post I agree an increase respawn time would be beneficial.
I'm trying to think of a system to discourage killing anyone and everyone you see.
Only thing that comes to mind is making you lose your class on death, forcing you to retrain it every time you die.
I fear it becoming repetitive however...