My best idea so far for addressing this is to give all players exactly three characters, which they can switch between at any point. The goal would be for most of your "boring" productive output to be determined more by (character) resource allocation rather than participating in the grind yourself all the time.
For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.
You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.
It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)
I've whiteboarded some very similar ideas to this! If multiple people are coming to similar conclusions, there might be something here.
In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.
So I wasnt convinced it would stick.
I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed
I'd like to pretend the cost of a license would mitigate this, but yes, it would probably be disastrous in practice.
The capitalist in me says "oh goodie, people will give me more money to get more power in the game", but the part of me that cares about making a game that's actually good thinks that outcome would be pretty gross.
I wonder if there are some other things you could do to mitigate it, like only allowing characters to operate autonomously for a time that is proportional to how long they are controlled for. It's a half-baked idea, but my hope would be that it prevents the "pay-to-win" model from scaling.
For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.
You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.
It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)