*snip*
Now you might say this is not a bad story, this is kinda like EVE the little guy was thrown out but he can organize in another place do some plotting and fight a rematch in the end.
And you would be right, like I said before Sandbox games are a simple concept except I left something out, and that is the mind numbing tedium. It's boring!
Crafting is boring, building is boring, mining is boring, its all boring grinding of skills. You go through all that only for a couple of seconds of combat. You go through all that only to watch it all burn.
What you have in a "themepark" of fighting some monsters and bosses for loot, it was fun killing things then. That is PvE.
The things is that is precisely what we don't have in a Sandbox MMOs, we don't have the budget for it and even if we did we would enter the pitfall of themeparks. Why we wanted user generation was to escape from this.
Now a hybrid approach might theoretically work leaving the PvP be the sandbox experience on top, but that is not what I want you to understand, what I want you to understand is the user generation itself, because that is the key.
What Sandbox fail to do is give proper user generated content form the start.
There have been many types of games exploring many types of gameplay that can be used as a basis for interesting interaction between players both competitively and cooperatively.
But I will focus on the 3 most fundamental types of gameplay for Sandbox games:
*snip*
Your post is too long. You're lucky if anybody read beyond the first paragraph.
(I'm addressing what you wrote about sandboxes.)
Every since I played UO, I discovered an interest in sandboxes. It has stayed with me. When I played Wurm Online in 2012, that was my next big sandbox experience. I've played off and on. It has been amazing. Nothing really compares.
What I specifically want to address is this part:
It's boring! Crafting is boring, building is boring, mining is boring, its all boring grinding of skills. You go through all that only for a couple of seconds of combat. You go through all that only to watch it all burn.
I don't know how else to say this, but maybe it's not your kind of game? What you describe as an "answer" is more an anti-answer. I get the impression you're just trying to rationalize your own personal likes--not acknowledging they're personal. And sandboxes aren't exactly "simple concepts". It's just like anything. A lot more thought goes into it than I think you realize.
I also think grind will always be part of these games because players are always looking for ways to get ahead. They'll look for even small advantages until their bones bleed. This usually results in some kind of extreme grind or metagame. This doesn't mean there're no ways to reduce grind because there're. I just think it's impossible to completely prevent it.
A more reasonable answer to some of the problems I've encountered in sandbox MMO's, like Wurm Online, might be:
1) deeper skill system, involving more actions and assessment
.... this is about reducing repetition in skill use; so it's not mindless repeated clicking
.... lets also understand not everyone will enjoy certain things or skills--even with less repetition
2) more interlinked at lower and upper skill levels to facilitate an economy involving all the players
.... otherwise the lower skill levels are much more likely to grind--for value
.... the objective is to prevent a one-sided economy in which the higher skills always supercede the lowers
3) dynamic monster AI (war) zones
.... players don't have to live here, but if they do, the monsters will coordinate, form parties and raid the player settlements
.... this is to counter what I see in Wurm Online as a mid to late-game lacking survival elements
That's all for now.