"Well, if you manage to colonize the whole galaxy, you probably don't have to worry about defending it from external threats for quite a while."
Okay, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard.
Q: What's the biggest threat humanity has ever faced? A: Itself.
Creating thousands of splinter civilizations with no emotional investment in the species homeworld is a recipe for galactic war if I've ever heard one.
The whole "Paradox" is based on an unwarranted assumption: that all intelligent species would build automated probes to spread their species all over the universe.
Look at the one example of an intelligent species that we have: humanity. We can build automated probes. We haven't even seriously considered building extra-solar probes to spread our genes. It's not a priority.
Frankly, it's NEVER going to be a priority, because there is no emotional investment in sending a bunch of genetic material off into space with an uncertain destination. If you could slap a bunch of people onto a starship and zip them to a fresh world, then we'd see some drive to colonize. But automated probes? What's the point? What's the benefit to the society that sends them out?
The only thing I'd think that would provoke us into trying something like that is a Songs of Distant Earth-style ELE, that we can see coming 200 years in advance.
Otherwise, societies are too self-absorbed to dedicate those sort of resources to a goal that will have ZERO benefit to them or their descendants.
Travesty? Not really, and mostly for the reasons you described.
It's true that they weren't storing any IP. It's absolutely true. And if they'd done as bittorrent did and said, "Look, we're just a service, we don't have control over what people put up" they would have been in a MUCH stronger position.
If they'd made a token effort, if they'd said "If you give us specific instances, we'll pull them down" they would have been able to say, in court, "This is bullshit, we acted in good faith" even if they never implemented any sort of filter, and didn't bother to keep people from reposting torrents for copyrighted IP. That would have made a huge difference.
But when they turn around and cop this huge attitude, and gloat over the fact that they're facilitating "piracy" and that no one can touch them...You're just begging to be nut-punched by the long arm of the law.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that they lost. Courts of law do not work in such a way as to protect people who are gloating about violating the spirit of the law...You can violate the spirit, but you have to adopt this air of hurt innocence.
Both of you are off base on this one: the "drug" in question is in mass production, and is so common that you can literally buy it by the pound. Every american eats grams and grams of it every year. If it wasn't safe, we'd know by now.
I'd HOPE that they would treat this more like a saline IV or a compression bandage...A necessary part of triage, in appropriate situations, rather than withholding a treatment that could potentially be the difference between walking with a limp and learning to use a wheelchair.
You know why they call it the cloud, right? It's nothing as high flown as you might like to believe. It's because the area outside the local network, the great and terrible interwebs, is always represented as a cloud in network diagrams.
So the "cloud" is an obvious term for networking people. But at its heart, it's complete bullshit. All you're saying is, "Let's pull resources from the 'Here there be Dragons' portion of our diagram!"
In logic 101, when we were all amateurs, it was allowed in the test to use a "magic" operator to signify that there was some logical step needed to get from A to B, but that we didn't know what the fuck it could be. Kinda like showing your work in math. Ifyou were on the right track and missed something, you'd get partial credit.
What did the magic operator look like? Looked like a fucking cloud. People need to stop saying, "We'll export all our needs to the cloud!" because what they're really saying is, "We hope to god you don't realize that we have no idea where we're going to get the resources we need."
I can think of two or three ways that it HAS been done. Generally though, you can't just farm out the storage space, you have to virtualize the whole machine, and once you have a whole network of virtual machines, then you can set them up to migrate data and processes.
The reason most people don't do it that way is that hardware is wildly cheap, and that there aren't that many applications that can take advantage of the processing power (and I'm guessing that if you needed the cycles, I wouldn't need to be telling you this stuff). Likewise storage space: the problem with distributed processing is that your data is, by necessity, stored redundantly, so that 5GB that is being used is suddenly 25GB spread across a dozen machines.
Even if you export the OS and all the applications, you're still going to have to deal with data migration issues, and, depending on your network, and data volume, it may come back around to being cheaper to store and run everything locally.
The plus is distributed processing and redundancy. A machine dies, and you just put a boot cd in a new machine, and plug it into the wall, or hell, net boot it. Trivial.
Q: What makes this different from a Russian botnet? A: It's in Sweden.
Q: What makes this different from a Russian botnet? A: In Soviet Russia, botnet installs you! In Sweden, you have to install it yourself.
Q: What makes this different from a Russian botnet? A: When your machine is a part of a Russian botnet, it's taking money from the RIAA. When it's part of the new "pirate" bay botnet, it's making money for the RIAA.
Does anyone still care? Seriously? It was a good torrent tracker, now it's gone. End of story. They have no reasonable path to legitimacy, the trial judgment will sap the vast majority of their assets, and their userbase will vanish when they stop carrying illegal stuff.
Which would be useful for researchers, but not home users...By the time you'd exported the process to the "cloud" (I fucking hate the word "cloud" now, my god what an overhyped buzzword) you'd probably already be done with it locally. The biggest problem with distributing processing is exporting the right kind of processes...You don't want to lock up your whole cluster because it's waiting for input from some single machine.
And researchers already have a variety of free seti/folding/etc applications that take advantage of free cycles, so what real benefit can TPB offer?
Hell, Sony already went down that road with a vengeance when they put Folding@Home on the ps3.
Would they pay you what it's worth? That's the real question. I mean, you'll have to keep your gear on, and be okay with them maxing your bandwidth, you'll have to buy new drives when they thrash yours to bits, and chances are, they'll pay you pennies.
It's one thing to do something like Folding@Home where all they're doing is swiping cycles and some ram space...That's just a bit of electricity, little extra heat in your house. Actual magnetic storage is a whole different world.
I thought that the news was that they had stopped being one...Now that they're legit, they're just another torrent tracker for free/unencumbered IP that isn't hard to find a torrent for anyway.
Is their slow descent into irrelevance really deserving of multiple articles a day? They just posted the first satellite images of the Apollo sites, isn't that a bit more worthwhile?
Wow, that could be the worst argument I've ever heard.
If I made myself a chair, would that then be a slave chair, just because I owned it?
I agree that copyright has gone overboard, but I disagree that it is therefore a bad thing in general. In this particular example, Tolkien spent the better part of a decade putting together LOTR. It's fair that he should be compensated for that, for a reasonable period.
I don't agree that his kids should be able to hoard the IP for the rest of their lives, but I do think that copyrights on creative works that last for a few decades are acceptable. LOTR was written, what, 60 years ago? That's not cool.
While I despise Christopher Tolkien for shamelessly milking his dads work, I can't see how you'd blame him for suing when they didn't pay him a dime for the first three movies.
They made a deal, and, as with Jackson, they tried to claim that they didn't make any cash so they didn't owe him anything. Give me a fricking break.
I tend to use sentences, but instead of using a sentence like: "This sentence would make a crappy password."
I'd reduce it as follows: "Tswmacp." Capital letters where capital letters would be in the sentence, include punctuation, and there you go.
The biggest problem with it is that, in the english language, certain letters are unlikely to ever start a word, so it reduces the frequency a bit, and also, there aren't many numbers, even if you transliterate words like "to" to "2".
So I pull out quotations from books: "Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. Marcus Aurelius Meditations Book 2, 1st paragraph"
And you get this: S2yitem:IsmtiuvteumMA2,1
That one's pretty long, and commas may be verboten in your system, but you get the point. It's got a built-in mnemonic, and you can look it up in the book if you forget it.
Not really. There were all kinds of aliens in Fallout 2...Once you got to a high level, they'd attack you reasonably often in random encounters.
If anything, they're less common in Fallout 3. As it stands right now, I think there are a couple of "set piece" random encounters with alien stuff. This will just build on that.
Actually, I do. I think Eve has some pretty good ideas, but it's a bit too much like playing a spreadsheet.
The problem with Eve is that it's got a ridiculously steep learning curve, a high death penalty, and its only got one setting: hard core.
What I'd be interested in is a game that has a more moderate entry point, where you can play perfectly happily, and yet has the depth and potential that a game like Eve has.
I was thinking limited scope myself: the thief can break in, but they can't clean the entire place out (for whatever reason). If they could clean the entire place out, right to the ground, then it would completely suck to be a crafter. Or, as a crafter, maybe you could pay for theft insurance? I also think there needs to be some kind of diminishing return, so that it doesn't make sense for an upper level thief to grief the lower level shopkeepers.
There are a couple of ways it could be done, but I think the whole thing depends on that sort of arms race between the thief and the shopkeepers, where they're constantly expanding their efforts to stymie the other person. That's what would make it a cool game: if the thieves had a huge advantage, then it would be terrible to be a shopkeeper, and vice versa.
Balance is absolutely the challenge, but that's the case with every game.
Fricking WoW has been trying to balance it's handful of character classes for years now, and they're not getting anywhere. There is always a "most powerful" class/spec combo which all the hardcore people are using, and every major patch sees some class get nerfed or buffed.
It's amusing, because when I first wrote that rant, it was in reaction to the utter cock-up that CoH made of the player generated content thing.
In CoH they let people generate their own missions, and they rewarded people based on how well OTHER PEOPLE liked their missions! What the fuck? What was the cost to the player when 100 people ripped through their level-farming mission like a fat guy through a door made of bacon? They were rewarded.
Oh god, could you do anything worse than that? What content did they think was going to be created?
In my system, the player gets benefits from building buildings/dungeons/whatever, and loses benefits when other players run roughshod over their stuff. The player would have a strong motivation to protect his stuff, and make it as hard as possible to beat.
It's not just about crafting either. Say you want to set up a dungeon full of bandits who raid nearby player junk. Why not? Player housing that gives bonuses based on the junk you've got in your house. You raid someones mine and trash it, and the miner gets pissed of and pays some thieves to loot your house, killing your bonuses.
It's about making the content created a needed and good thing for the character, and giving them bonuses/money/skills/whatever based on what they've got, so that they have an incentive to expand it and protect it.
Shrug. Some people like playing crafters, and you can add a frickton of strategy stuff to it.
I'd love to see a crafting system than was complex and open-ended. Hell, make it so that you have some sort of skill-based mini game (like Tetris?) that effects the quality of things you're trying to craft, so it's not just about the level of grinding you've done on the skill, but also on actual skill.
On top of that, you have the whole "defend my stuff" part of the game, which moves toward traditional strategy elements. You're recruiting and training units, you're building defenses. You're making alliances with other players to defend each others stuff.
That sounds a hell of a lot more fun to me than just another MMO level/loot grind, where crafting is something you do when you're tired of killing stuff, and has very little actual effect on the game. I'm so tired of that I can't even convey it.
Those guys pretty much exist to sell ads, and with the exception of Google, their revenues have been shrinking for decades. Additionally, with the traditional media sources, your ad revenue was augmented by regional local advertising on which you hold a geographic monopoly: that does not hold true for the internet, so the ads are much less lucrative.
Google makes up for it with an extremely high ability to target the ads, and by doing insane volume. Other sites have slim pickings in comparison.
I think the best way to do dynamic content in an MMO is to build a static framework (e.g. a world) and allow people to expand and create content from there.
Now, in my world, it would go like this: Your class, relative wealth, and profession would all have attendant properties and buildings. Some of them you could purchase for limited money generation: you're a smith, you need a smithy and a mine. You build the smithy, because you have to have one to make items, and then you prospect until you find a good spot, and you buy/build a mine, because it's cheaper than buying all your own ore.
Now, obviously, these buildings are vulnerable. You put the smithy and a shop (to sell your wares) in a big player-run city, where everyone who has buildings pays taxes that pay for NPC guards and defenses, so that's taken care of, but what about the mine? The mine is (obviously) outside the city, and not protected by the city guards. So you skim off some of your mining profits to pay NPC mercenaries to defend it.
Voila. You have player cities with guards, and dungeons with mobs, all at once. Make the shops able to be stolen from, and you have room for thieves, and let the players put in traps, fancy locks, etc. There is tons of stuff you can do. Obviously you're going to want to strike a balance. No fun to be a shopkeeper if you get cleaned out all the time. No fun to be a thief if it's too hard to break into a shop, and then there is nothing worth stealing...But that's just fine tuning.
See how logical and easy that is? And the person who built the buildings has a vested interest in keeping them going, paying for upgrades, replacing guards, etc. Everything can expand from that. Different types of buildings for different types of benefits to different groups. Military buildings for military bonuses, commercial buildings for commercial bonuses, etc, etc. You can throw in some PVE content: military group builds a building on the border with a non-human race, and kicks off a war with the orcs, or whatever.
Limitless possibilities, and everything that you do in the game matters. You clear a dungeon, it's gone, or empty, until someone rebuilds it, and then it won't be exactly the same...Depending on who builds it it could be completely different. You'll have done something unique, and how often does that happen in an MMO?
Slashdot Mirror
"Well, if you manage to colonize the whole galaxy, you probably don't have to worry about defending it from external threats for quite a while."
Okay, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard.
Q: What's the biggest threat humanity has ever faced?
A: Itself.
Creating thousands of splinter civilizations with no emotional investment in the species homeworld is a recipe for galactic war if I've ever heard one.
The whole "Paradox" is based on an unwarranted assumption: that all intelligent species would build automated probes to spread their species all over the universe.
Look at the one example of an intelligent species that we have: humanity. We can build automated probes. We haven't even seriously considered building extra-solar probes to spread our genes. It's not a priority.
Frankly, it's NEVER going to be a priority, because there is no emotional investment in sending a bunch of genetic material off into space with an uncertain destination. If you could slap a bunch of people onto a starship and zip them to a fresh world, then we'd see some drive to colonize. But automated probes? What's the point? What's the benefit to the society that sends them out?
The only thing I'd think that would provoke us into trying something like that is a Songs of Distant Earth-style ELE, that we can see coming 200 years in advance.
Otherwise, societies are too self-absorbed to dedicate those sort of resources to a goal that will have ZERO benefit to them or their descendants.
Travesty? Not really, and mostly for the reasons you described.
It's true that they weren't storing any IP. It's absolutely true. And if they'd done as bittorrent did and said, "Look, we're just a service, we don't have control over what people put up" they would have been in a MUCH stronger position.
If they'd made a token effort, if they'd said "If you give us specific instances, we'll pull them down" they would have been able to say, in court, "This is bullshit, we acted in good faith" even if they never implemented any sort of filter, and didn't bother to keep people from reposting torrents for copyrighted IP. That would have made a huge difference.
But when they turn around and cop this huge attitude, and gloat over the fact that they're facilitating "piracy" and that no one can touch them...You're just begging to be nut-punched by the long arm of the law.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that they lost. Courts of law do not work in such a way as to protect people who are gloating about violating the spirit of the law...You can violate the spirit, but you have to adopt this air of hurt innocence.
This isn't aspirin. Aspirin is sold in child-proof bottles because an overdose could hurt you.
This is commonly added to candy and weird colored kid beverages. It's a whole different ballgame.
Both of you are off base on this one: the "drug" in question is in mass production, and is so common that you can literally buy it by the pound. Every american eats grams and grams of it every year. If it wasn't safe, we'd know by now.
I'd HOPE that they would treat this more like a saline IV or a compression bandage...A necessary part of triage, in appropriate situations, rather than withholding a treatment that could potentially be the difference between walking with a limp and learning to use a wheelchair.
You know why they call it the cloud, right? It's nothing as high flown as you might like to believe. It's because the area outside the local network, the great and terrible interwebs, is always represented as a cloud in network diagrams.
So the "cloud" is an obvious term for networking people. But at its heart, it's complete bullshit. All you're saying is, "Let's pull resources from the 'Here there be Dragons' portion of our diagram!"
In logic 101, when we were all amateurs, it was allowed in the test to use a "magic" operator to signify that there was some logical step needed to get from A to B, but that we didn't know what the fuck it could be. Kinda like showing your work in math. Ifyou were on the right track and missed something, you'd get partial credit.
What did the magic operator look like? Looked like a fucking cloud. People need to stop saying, "We'll export all our needs to the cloud!" because what they're really saying is, "We hope to god you don't realize that we have no idea where we're going to get the resources we need."
I can think of two or three ways that it HAS been done. Generally though, you can't just farm out the storage space, you have to virtualize the whole machine, and once you have a whole network of virtual machines, then you can set them up to migrate data and processes.
The reason most people don't do it that way is that hardware is wildly cheap, and that there aren't that many applications that can take advantage of the processing power (and I'm guessing that if you needed the cycles, I wouldn't need to be telling you this stuff). Likewise storage space: the problem with distributed processing is that your data is, by necessity, stored redundantly, so that 5GB that is being used is suddenly 25GB spread across a dozen machines.
Even if you export the OS and all the applications, you're still going to have to deal with data migration issues, and, depending on your network, and data volume, it may come back around to being cheaper to store and run everything locally.
The plus is distributed processing and redundancy. A machine dies, and you just put a boot cd in a new machine, and plug it into the wall, or hell, net boot it. Trivial.
Oooo! Oooo! I got this one!
Q: What makes this different from a Russian botnet?
A: It's in Sweden.
Q: What makes this different from a Russian botnet?
A: In Soviet Russia, botnet installs you! In Sweden, you have to install it yourself.
Q: What makes this different from a Russian botnet?
A: When your machine is a part of a Russian botnet, it's taking money from the RIAA. When it's part of the new "pirate" bay botnet, it's making money for the RIAA.
Does anyone still care? Seriously? It was a good torrent tracker, now it's gone. End of story. They have no reasonable path to legitimacy, the trial judgment will sap the vast majority of their assets, and their userbase will vanish when they stop carrying illegal stuff.
Which would be useful for researchers, but not home users...By the time you'd exported the process to the "cloud" (I fucking hate the word "cloud" now, my god what an overhyped buzzword) you'd probably already be done with it locally. The biggest problem with distributing processing is exporting the right kind of processes...You don't want to lock up your whole cluster because it's waiting for input from some single machine.
And researchers already have a variety of free seti/folding/etc applications that take advantage of free cycles, so what real benefit can TPB offer?
Hell, Sony already went down that road with a vengeance when they put Folding@Home on the ps3.
Would they pay you what it's worth? That's the real question. I mean, you'll have to keep your gear on, and be okay with them maxing your bandwidth, you'll have to buy new drives when they thrash yours to bits, and chances are, they'll pay you pennies.
It's one thing to do something like Folding@Home where all they're doing is swiping cycles and some ram space...That's just a bit of electricity, little extra heat in your house. Actual magnetic storage is a whole different world.
I thought that the news was that they had stopped being one...Now that they're legit, they're just another torrent tracker for free/unencumbered IP that isn't hard to find a torrent for anyway.
Is their slow descent into irrelevance really deserving of multiple articles a day? They just posted the first satellite images of the Apollo sites, isn't that a bit more worthwhile?
Wow, that could be the worst argument I've ever heard.
If I made myself a chair, would that then be a slave chair, just because I owned it?
I agree that copyright has gone overboard, but I disagree that it is therefore a bad thing in general. In this particular example, Tolkien spent the better part of a decade putting together LOTR. It's fair that he should be compensated for that, for a reasonable period.
I don't agree that his kids should be able to hoard the IP for the rest of their lives, but I do think that copyrights on creative works that last for a few decades are acceptable. LOTR was written, what, 60 years ago? That's not cool.
While I despise Christopher Tolkien for shamelessly milking his dads work, I can't see how you'd blame him for suing when they didn't pay him a dime for the first three movies.
They made a deal, and, as with Jackson, they tried to claim that they didn't make any cash so they didn't owe him anything. Give me a fricking break.
Palin is a punchline. Trying to add something on top of that would be redundant.
The short story was in Skeleton Crew , and first published in Gallery magazine (no link because it's a porn mag).
I tend to use sentences, but instead of using a sentence like: "This sentence would make a crappy password."
I'd reduce it as follows: "Tswmacp." Capital letters where capital letters would be in the sentence, include punctuation, and there you go.
The biggest problem with it is that, in the english language, certain letters are unlikely to ever start a word, so it reduces the frequency a bit, and also, there aren't many numbers, even if you transliterate words like "to" to "2".
So I pull out quotations from books: "Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. Marcus Aurelius Meditations Book 2, 1st paragraph"
And you get this: S2yitem:IsmtiuvteumMA2,1
That one's pretty long, and commas may be verboten in your system, but you get the point. It's got a built-in mnemonic, and you can look it up in the book if you forget it.
Not really. There were all kinds of aliens in Fallout 2...Once you got to a high level, they'd attack you reasonably often in random encounters.
If anything, they're less common in Fallout 3. As it stands right now, I think there are a couple of "set piece" random encounters with alien stuff. This will just build on that.
Actually, I do. I think Eve has some pretty good ideas, but it's a bit too much like playing a spreadsheet.
The problem with Eve is that it's got a ridiculously steep learning curve, a high death penalty, and its only got one setting: hard core.
What I'd be interested in is a game that has a more moderate entry point, where you can play perfectly happily, and yet has the depth and potential that a game like Eve has.
I was thinking limited scope myself: the thief can break in, but they can't clean the entire place out (for whatever reason). If they could clean the entire place out, right to the ground, then it would completely suck to be a crafter. Or, as a crafter, maybe you could pay for theft insurance? I also think there needs to be some kind of diminishing return, so that it doesn't make sense for an upper level thief to grief the lower level shopkeepers.
There are a couple of ways it could be done, but I think the whole thing depends on that sort of arms race between the thief and the shopkeepers, where they're constantly expanding their efforts to stymie the other person. That's what would make it a cool game: if the thieves had a huge advantage, then it would be terrible to be a shopkeeper, and vice versa.
Balance is absolutely the challenge, but that's the case with every game.
Fricking WoW has been trying to balance it's handful of character classes for years now, and they're not getting anywhere. There is always a "most powerful" class/spec combo which all the hardcore people are using, and every major patch sees some class get nerfed or buffed.
Does that mean WoW isn't a successful game?
It's amusing, because when I first wrote that rant, it was in reaction to the utter cock-up that CoH made of the player generated content thing.
In CoH they let people generate their own missions, and they rewarded people based on how well OTHER PEOPLE liked their missions! What the fuck? What was the cost to the player when 100 people ripped through their level-farming mission like a fat guy through a door made of bacon? They were rewarded.
Oh god, could you do anything worse than that? What content did they think was going to be created?
In my system, the player gets benefits from building buildings/dungeons/whatever, and loses benefits when other players run roughshod over their stuff. The player would have a strong motivation to protect his stuff, and make it as hard as possible to beat.
It's not just about crafting either. Say you want to set up a dungeon full of bandits who raid nearby player junk. Why not? Player housing that gives bonuses based on the junk you've got in your house. You raid someones mine and trash it, and the miner gets pissed of and pays some thieves to loot your house, killing your bonuses.
It's about making the content created a needed and good thing for the character, and giving them bonuses/money/skills/whatever based on what they've got, so that they have an incentive to expand it and protect it.
Shrug. Some people like playing crafters, and you can add a frickton of strategy stuff to it.
I'd love to see a crafting system than was complex and open-ended. Hell, make it so that you have some sort of skill-based mini game (like Tetris?) that effects the quality of things you're trying to craft, so it's not just about the level of grinding you've done on the skill, but also on actual skill.
On top of that, you have the whole "defend my stuff" part of the game, which moves toward traditional strategy elements. You're recruiting and training units, you're building defenses. You're making alliances with other players to defend each others stuff.
That sounds a hell of a lot more fun to me than just another MMO level/loot grind, where crafting is something you do when you're tired of killing stuff, and has very little actual effect on the game. I'm so tired of that I can't even convey it.
Those guys pretty much exist to sell ads, and with the exception of Google, their revenues have been shrinking for decades. Additionally, with the traditional media sources, your ad revenue was augmented by regional local advertising on which you hold a geographic monopoly: that does not hold true for the internet, so the ads are much less lucrative.
Google makes up for it with an extremely high ability to target the ads, and by doing insane volume. Other sites have slim pickings in comparison.
I think the best way to do dynamic content in an MMO is to build a static framework (e.g. a world) and allow people to expand and create content from there.
Now, in my world, it would go like this: Your class, relative wealth, and profession would all have attendant properties and buildings. Some of them you could purchase for limited money generation: you're a smith, you need a smithy and a mine. You build the smithy, because you have to have one to make items, and then you prospect until you find a good spot, and you buy/build a mine, because it's cheaper than buying all your own ore.
Now, obviously, these buildings are vulnerable. You put the smithy and a shop (to sell your wares) in a big player-run city, where everyone who has buildings pays taxes that pay for NPC guards and defenses, so that's taken care of, but what about the mine? The mine is (obviously) outside the city, and not protected by the city guards. So you skim off some of your mining profits to pay NPC mercenaries to defend it.
Voila. You have player cities with guards, and dungeons with mobs, all at once. Make the shops able to be stolen from, and you have room for thieves, and let the players put in traps, fancy locks, etc. There is tons of stuff you can do. Obviously you're going to want to strike a balance. No fun to be a shopkeeper if you get cleaned out all the time. No fun to be a thief if it's too hard to break into a shop, and then there is nothing worth stealing...But that's just fine tuning.
See how logical and easy that is? And the person who built the buildings has a vested interest in keeping them going, paying for upgrades, replacing guards, etc. Everything can expand from that. Different types of buildings for different types of benefits to different groups. Military buildings for military bonuses, commercial buildings for commercial bonuses, etc, etc. You can throw in some PVE content: military group builds a building on the border with a non-human race, and kicks off a war with the orcs, or whatever.
Limitless possibilities, and everything that you do in the game matters. You clear a dungeon, it's gone, or empty, until someone rebuilds it, and then it won't be exactly the same...Depending on who builds it it could be completely different. You'll have done something unique, and how often does that happen in an MMO?
It's because ad supported doesn't actually work for any decent-sized service.
TANSTAAFL. So suck it up and pay something if you enjoy it.