mmo layers

The "living world" mmo remains illusive, but tempting.

Here is my little theory of what necessary ingedients are:

1. It has to exist and be playable (duh)
2. There needs to be something to do. it can be almost anyrhing but repetitiveness shpuld be limited.
3. There needs to be some long term goal, be it a big bad that needs to be defeated or something else.
4. There needs to be a social strucutre and gameplay that strongly encourages that it forms "naturally".
   e.g. wow classes complementing each other to make tedious or difficult things easy.
5. It needs real player interaction where playing with the same group benefits you for some reason hopefully without being locked in.
6. trading
7. It needs to give "enough" "real choices" in terms of how to build the character.
8. The whole thing needs a hook, like wow had the character build up of wc3.
9. Passing time and death are important story telling moments and turning points. if characters cant die, there is no risk and no tension.
10. (x.1) type variety introduces new problems of identification, valuation and selling