And the same for more "medieval" RPs. They need a greater goal, or maybe even smaller, multiple goals. I think the main flaw with those would be that the player is not truly entertained by running around and chopping down trees to get a minimal amount of money. There should be a number of mini-quests. For example, a ruby is hidden inside the "Enchanted forest". You go to the town square, check the quest board, and there is a flyer advertising the reward for the ruby. With many quests like this, players will probably get bored less easily.
Actually, for this, I would let there be certain goals - randomly generated quests, such as wiping out some bandits, retrieving some lost item from them or somesuch - as well as the persistent goals such as being able to trade between settlements, there being some form of possible reward from wandering the roads and the like. Other players may tie into these quests, if say they're a bandit themselves, or they could post jobs on the job board - perhaps asking for caravan guards so they can safely travel between settlements.
Another flaw in fantasy RPs would be the limited terrain for the players to explore. Some RPs have several 64 x 64 rooms in which there are different "areas", like desert, arctic, or a mine. These places rely on PlayerTransform events to get to, on account of them being closed off. Terrain in Blockland should be huge and flow together, to simulate a more natural feel. For example, instead of the grass cutting off and going straight into desert, the grass should turn into dirt, and then dirt to sand. Another example would be the mines. Have a cave, and make it a mine. None of this spawning inside a room to mine.
The main issue with this is population density, I think. If you have a large, flowing landscape, oftentimes there won't be anyone else in sight. While this is peaceful and somewhat surreal, towns should be bustling with life. Restricting players to smaller areas lets you know immediately who's around and what's going on, and simplifies things in that respect. If these rooms were, say, 512x512 or larger in size, and each one were a server (transporting players between each of these areas by reconnecting them to another server) that would allow for a nice hybrid system - especially if you could work out some kind of caching for datablocks to decrease loading times (and also if you ghosted the bricks to the client fully before spawning them, to prevent ghosting lag if applicable).
If the mod itself is nicely optimized, you could easily run 32 or more players on each server, giving the feel of a lively world. Of course, wilderness areas might be a considerably larger area, to give it a feeling of vastness while keeping the cities still lively.
I'm very interested in this particular idea, of server clustering. Global chat ("shouting" or general channels) could be relayed between servers, as well as some kind of alternate player-list used on these servers to let you see who is online on any server, as well as which server they're on. Chat could be managed as:
- Channels (inter-server chat, these include general chat plus guild channels)
- Shouts (in-server global chat)
- Say (small-radius local chat, influenced by punctuation also - for example "Hello!" might carry further than "Hello." and trailing off like "Hello..." would decrease the radius to a whisper. No /commands, just type like normal. This could appear as 'Clockturn says, "Hello. How do you do?"' or 'Clockturn yells, "God damn! You're such a tard!"'... or 'Clockturn whispers, "I'm going to rape you..."')
Oh and of course I personally wouldn't enforce in/out of character, however out of character chat would be provided using /ooc or just /o - with a clientside handler to prevent word limiting from being an issue with this, just integrating it nicely.