I think there's a deeper link between the kind of players who play hardcore MMOs and the mechanics of the game itself beyond the lack of games in this genre. The allure of real loss/real displays of skill draws naturally competitive people. Sure, you can pubstomp in TF2 but at the end of the match, what changed? Maybe someone has a new hat. In EVE you can blow up someone's structure that took them hours of space work or real money. There's no real "risk&reward" when the risk is basically nothing, no matter how great the reward is. What kind of person is drawn to this kind of gameplay? Sociop^H^H^H^H^H^H Competitive people.

This is it really. I've tried a few such games over the years and it felt like a majority of people were just trying to get powerful enough to kill & loot other players a little under their strength and then repeat the process to bootstrap themselves higher & higher. Players that want to play that way are attracted to such games, and they inevitably drive out players who want the balance shifted a little in the other direction.

I don't see how game design can easily shift this balance because it's more about attracting a different balance of players than in how you design the game itself.

In WoW, for example, everything revolves around combat - and any secondary skills (mining, enchanting, etc.) are support for combat, or require combat to advance.

several options, tweak values to taste:

- Give defending players a boost/advantage against attackers until the winnable spoils are too lame to be worth the effort.

- Let there be a magical force which returns 90% (x%) of a loser's stuff to their magic box. Therefore the winnable spoils are too lame to be worth the effort.

- Allow "titling" of real estate and expensive personal possessions. Upon death, the title would be transferred by pre-set rules to someone specific, or in estate court to next-of-kin (respawned player). NPC Shops call the guards if they see mis-titled sales. Guards do random searches at the city gates and confiscate mistitled items. Those are then eventually returned to the next-of-kin/etc.

- Provide an option for mutual "yes lets fight!" where no taxes/boosts/etc are applied and winner takes all/most. (maybe they could agree on custom % of spoils too).

I agree that it's curious that newer games don't offer the sandbox model though. Instancing is so boring and UO's land ownership concept remains fairly unique.

I'd like to experience something completely new that focuses on being a world first.

It has its warts, but as far as full loot sandboxes go, I enjoy it more than any other I've tried.

When somebody else will pay for this.

I participated in one uo group, we gather money, buy powerful server, paid for hosting. All this based on big enough group with positive economy.

Exist games which cheaper than uo in terms of need server power, but they are much less fun.

But first, remember Eternal September; basically it will never be like it was back then, even if it is exactly the same. See WoW Classic.

Anyway, I think people are experiencing the same things nowadays in games like Runescape, Minecraft and Roblox, where in especially the latter two there are a number of servers offering MMO-like gameplay, including heaps of weird bugs. I wouldn't recommend them for people looking for an UO experience though. I never played any of those myself.