I feel that this game would thrive better if the community was more or less REQUIRED to work together in some way shape or form.
I still find it very silly that it's possible for players start with trade skills, grind up and gather all the goodies to support a combat character to the high levels and then remake to a combat character instead of growing with the community, etc.
Now this can be slowed by lowering the experience rates, etc of usages and combat rates but then you get the non-stop whining and moaning of players that the exp rates are too low. And I fully understand where they're coming from as the lower the experience rates are the more grinding and redundancy that is required to get to the point needed.
I haven't given much more thought into solutions for this, yet so I'm moving on to the next subject which ties in a little to this anyway.
At the moment trade skills are pretty... sub-par in the ways they can be used together. I feel they should have some kind of genuine combinations that make it more fruitful to having skills trained that work well together. Compared to the plans of dual wielding which could potentially bring a whole new variety of play-styles such as using a dagger with a spear or something silly like that I think trade skills could benefit in a benefit as well, maybe.
For example, lets say the skills that are commonly trained together, such as alchemy and farming, could in some way shape or form offer a benefit to eachother more than just supplying resources for eachother.
Lets say if you're farming plants to be used in alchemy the player who harvests/plants, whatever the materials to be used in the potion making would receive a slight increased number of potions output while using materials harvested by someone else would provide more experience instead or something.
Same general concept with mining and blacksmithing, or cooking and farming/fishing, etc.
Instead of ann increased number of items produced with blacksmithing with materials gained by the blacksmith themselves they could make a slightly better quality item, and if using materials obtained by someone else they would gain slightly more experience, etc.
I believe it would also make sense to have things less grindy but not leveled so quickly that people reach endgame content within a few days or weeks or the first month, etc but again I'm not 100% sure on how that could be accomplished. . .
And in terms of endgame content, It would be pretty neat if it was made possible for an admin to more easily add more overall content to the world aside from new walls and quests, etc. Things that can make the player feel like they are playing a more timebased roleplaying game.
Lets say a month into the world, NPC's in town start speaking of things like, "Did you hear? The whole town is talking about a new kind of plant that was discovered! It's said to..."
Maybe new 'materials' and such as well, like maybe 'someone' discovered a new "element" (metal/ores other than meteors).
It'd be neat also to maybe make it so the world can be fairly easily expanded in overall size...
"A volcano has errupted in the ocean to the south... it seems a new mass of land has been created"
Anyway, enough spitballing for me tonight, I'm off to bed.