I always thought there should be a reward for good leadership or to show experience other than level. There are a couple ideas in here so I will try and walk through it methodically.
Although less true today than in the EQ time period, coordination is hard. Getting 4-6 people to work together is a challenge and 25-40 can be damn near impossible. Over the years lots of help has arisen from Ventrillo / Teamspeak to group and raid mods, but still leading and coordinating is hard. Back in EQ I had a phenomenal raid / guild leader and he played a backup healer. On his own he was great and in a group fantastic, but in a raid he had too much to do to focus on his game play. Again, less true today but still an issue.
In armies there is a chain of command, the more you coordinate the less you focus. I always thought there should be a leader class or role that designers wouldn't count toward damage / healing or whatever. This person could spend there time coordinating battle in a raid or other large scale events. You could envision all sorts of specials they might be given but ill talk about that later.
Not everyone makes a good leader. I, for one, am terrible. I think I make an excellent soldier and even better with good leadership. Good leaders should be recognized.
I thought there should be, perhaps in addition to normal xp progression, an MMO would have ranks or some way of distinguishing leaders. The progression could be done by accomplishments, votes or the like. Clearly any system could be exploited, but I think actual leaders will rise and should be rewarded.
What could be the reward? The idea came to me from Games Workshop. In many of their table top games if you have units near leaders benefits or inspiration can be gained. What if leaders gained auras? I want to write an entire entry on buffs, but in addition to that I think a leader "role" should have passive effects so they can focus on coordination. Progression as a leader in my mind would yield more or better benefits.
Anyone of any class could be a leader. Perhaps the leader wouldn't even have to progress along normal xp if they didn't want to. One who progressed far along the leadership path could have extra abilities. These abilities would be stronger the more people are being led. Solo, no effect. Small group, minor effect. Raid level, large effect. Alliances, huge effect. A balance between leadership and primary class skills needs to be made, but I thought this was a nifty idea to further distinguish good leaders in a virtually anonymous world.

PvP and PvE, Never the Twain Shall Meet

In the beginning there were PvP MMOs (Doom, Quake etc...) and PvE MMOs (UO, EQ etc...). The PvP games had PvE content and PvE games had PvP options. It was good, but could it be better? If I recall correctly, which I probably don't, DAoC was the first major MMO to try to combine them. I never actually played DAoC but it boasted realm verse realm conflict via sieges, artifacts and the like. From what I understand, it was good. Several others also tried this, successfully, one being L2.
My milestones in history may be off but as it is known to me WoW was the first MMO to really have PvP and PvE both be progression paths. Now is not the time to go on about WoW but in its most simple form WoW is progression through gear. Eventually you could do this in many ways.
I think as you twist these two types of progression and try to reach a common end it leads to a weaker MMO. I understand that gear can be an excellent way to try and balance PvE encounters and PvP. While I think PvP can be an great part of a game, the ultimate goal or even a means for creating a dynamic world, making it an alternate means of progression leads to imbalance. I don't want to specifically talk about imbalance here but let's just its not all bad. In my humble opinion progression should be all PvP or all PvE. If it is all PvE I don't see any reason why things like objectives or open PvP can't exist with the content in harmony. In short I'm not a fan of a PvP grind for anything other than the sake of PvP.

Grinding

I will try like hell not to make this a rant and more importantly not degenerate to my opinion on specific games or players. For the uninitiated, some history for you. Grinding by definition is the slaughter of mob after mob for either xp or drops, basically not for quests or other similar rewards. The definition has been applied to quests as in "go grinds quests in x location" or "grind y repeatable quest." For me and here I'd like to talk about it as just killing mobs over and over. There is also the perception that eastern games are more grind oriented while in the 2nd half of the last decade western games have moved away from this progression model or tried to.
I have always enjoyed grinding. I like the predictably and the planning associated with consistent mob grinding. I can find a type mob or an area where I know I can kill x per hour to gain y. It wasn't till L2 that Damijin pointed out to me the greatest attribute to grinding, it can be very social. I don't want to touch instancing in this post but let's imagine a static spawn world for grinding. When you get a group together and hunker down in a location to either pull mobs to or work around for hours it gives you a chance to be social. Damijin and I, along with our friends would often talk about the most ridiculous and fun things spurred on by the repetitive nature of the task of progression. Where is the skill in grinding? Well its not each mob or each pull or even each encounter. The skill is setting up the grind and more importantly and fun dealing with mishaps.
There are other means of progression, questing of course comes to mind. Often questing can tell a story but many times it is grinding in disguise. I will admit, go grind 100 mobs or x mob to collect y items makes grinding go faster in my head but I think it often can remove the social aspect. This of course is all just my opinion. I do think an MMO is and should be a huge time investment. Without commenting on progression, I think there are many people who enjoy sitting back either alone or with friends and grinding interesting mobs, in interesting virtual locations in different ways. I for one will be sad if the majority of MMOs either remove grinding or relegate it to end game (another topic).

Greetings

I am Qynt, also known as Token. Like many, while playing games like the gold boxes I yearned for what would become known as an MMORPG. When I went off to college back in '96 I finally got internet! As a slap in the face, so did my parents... to email me. I was introduced to MUDs. Fantastic, but I like pretty things and although colored text helped, where was my angry dragon breathing fire!? Then Blizzard North announced Diablo. Holy crap! Yes! Then UO came out. Fast forward a few years to me getting a high speed connection and maybe Ill try this Everquest thing. Bam! 3 years later a year of my life gone. Oh 400 days /played, who knew camping my VP key would be so time intensive. I guess anyone who has camped a VP key. Without going through too much detail I played a wizard in a top tier guild raiding 8+ hours a day. I loved it. I enjoyed seeing content first, but hated being SOE play tester. Week after week throwing ourselves at an encounter while they tweaked it. So after PoP I quit. Then I picked up L2 for a little over a year. All of this while in grad school. Research on one computer MMO on the other. Yes, I am that nerdy. In L2 I met Damijin and our clan had a blast ruling the server, making sure everyone was "safe." At the time I had a 73 warlord (legitimately leveled) but was scared to do anything because death meant the loss of tens of hours grinding, not to mention putting a group together. Then I played WoW for four years, which I will no doubt rant about at some point. At this point my experience is no longer unique or interesting (I could totally start a rant here!) and I will write about it some other time. Now I play Aion, mostly because I miss L2... What will be next?