You'd need to hard code things to an extent.

Icon builder games are often what this is about, but they are usually ripped and aren't payed attention to well enough for them to become decent games.

DoOmBringer wrote:

Creating a player run world. Is it actually possible? With the limitations of coding and open ended availiblity of games, is there anyway to make a game truly player run?

I think I've solved the problem, but I'm not going to go talking about my ideas until my game is published.

The problem with that is kill-stealing or having a group and letting them do the work, then taking the credit by getting the head or something. If you use a player managed system where they can vote on the honor then it will change it a system of popularity.

You mean like, the mafia? That shows organisation and players working together just like a player-run world should. If you have a mafia boss in your game, bravo!

I've put some thought toward this subject quite a few times, but I've honestly never really felt comfortable enough with any solution that I've ever come up with. Basically for a completely autonomous world, you'd probably have to mimic our "real" world pretty closely. Limiting the available resources would force players to place value on various items (wood, stone, gold, etc.), however, if you limit it TOO much, you wind up frustrating players, since they cannot afford the raw materials that they need. Allowing killing among players provides possible consequences for infractions (stealing, harrassing, etc.), however, unless you level the playing field by taking away ANY advantage that players would have over each other in battle, you'll most likely wind up with powergamers who live to kill everyone they can. Building things should take time, so as to give a sense of accomplishment, and to provide reason for charging rates OVER the cost of materials, however if they take TOO long to build you wind up taking the fun out of playing. Skills are a definite must, and should affect the quality of resources procured as well as the final products, however, you will most likely run into problems with people who do nothing but macro skills all day and all night long to level them up. Here you run into problems with hard-coding skill gain caps, and may wind up screwing over legitimate players who want to specialize in a certain skill. Also, how you take care of how long structures last and who is allowed to destroy them can be a hassle; you don't want players to build a whole lot of usesless stuff, and then die or leave the game, and not allow other players to remove it, but at the same time, many players will get frustrated if someone walks over and starts tearing up the house that they've been building. That aside, if you could manage to balance everything perfectly, you'd probably wind up with something VERY interesting. You could most likely watch the natural evolution of civilization on a sort of micro-level, spanning from wandering individuals to gathered "clans" to small towns to sprawling kingdoms to autonomous countries.