I\'ve never played an mmorpg before so I\'m not sure how this\'ll go over, but while watching my friends play FFXI I thought this might be cool - wars.
I figure people could go out and start their own cities, and become kings of that city. Over time they would grow and gain inhabitants, and be a bustling little town, sort of like the ones premade by the developers, except these are controled completely by the players/king. Then I was thinking someone else built their own town not too far, and decided to take over this one. So this other guy asks people to join his army, and whoever joins gets matching armor, new weaponry, perhaps some training. Then one day the attack is mounted and the army marches toward the town. The other town had word of an amasssing army so they too built their own, and then you have this big war going on for who knows how long, but eventually one town is going down/getting taken over, or an armistis is called or who knows what. Perhaps there could be catapults and battering rams involved. People could also hire assassins to maybe infiltrate the enemy town and try to take out the leader. I dunno... just my 2 cents.
Dynamic worlds. My friend who played/plays EQ said it starts to stagnate and get boring after awhile because there are places he can\'t go because of his race/religion and there are so many rules on pvp.