Shattered Kingdoms

While I'm sure that reiatsu mentioned earlier would be great (not,) I like Trag's one character per player idea best of everything listed so far. Here's a few ideas that I think don't fly in the face of the status quo too much:

Login with a mobile phone number, get texted a password, put it in, play your character.

Hold a vote every six months for everyone to vote on who to siteban for six months. Ancient greek ostracism style.

Fewer levels. Like, 25, tops. Do we really need 50 levels? All it does is create an unfortunate divide between casuals and veterans that doesn't motivate the modern casual player to keep playing. In most games leveling up is supposed to feel like a reward for your time spent grinding. We only get that every five levels, and then we have to grind more to actually get that reward in the first place through training's XP costs. The additional spells added to the really awful post-journeyman levels on some caster classes don't feel like they help.

Add a grand equipment level cap to the thief check: carrying over so much in power level puts you at risk of dehoarding. Infinite ceilings take the entire concept of building and choice away from strategy.

Some kind of ability to set your "Gamer Archetype" to let online angels and immortals know what kind of spontaneous GRP you would find fun.

Make walking around cost less for pre-journeyman characters. Sleeping in the city gates is boring and makes people want to log off.

And, my personal favorite:

If you're keeping alignment to what it has been reduced to, create an opt-in aura-based global chat channel. The world is way too big for any real sense of unity. This would sidestep many of the challenges of playing in a rather empty game world without having to resort to OOC tools.

I'd like to just take a moment to point out that my multiclassing idea solves a lot of class imbalance problems. Mr. Mercsorc from the example could take his merc status to get bash, and a sorc status to get ethereal, then Mr. MRGriefSorc is screwed hard.

Oh, and another idea:

Altitude factoring. "Flying higher above the ground" and "Flying lower toward the ground" should have an impact on combat and movement in some way. I know, D, you said that it was a feature you meant to implement way back when but it got back burnered indefinitely, but now might be a good time to add that altitude tactic into the game.

Abilities to forge your own weapons, shields and armor with the help of blacksmiths and the right type of ore. Or give it to a few classes as a skill. Make it so you can make your own desc for those items using dyes. Also using dyes to change the color scheme for armor made from skins. This would mean a change to the current midnight cabal's skill, giving them a new ability. Which is possibly the worst skill of all cabals currently.

Was it NXS or chemhound who was all about tradeskills?

I think it would be a very neat concept if it was done well, but that would run afoul of a lot of surrender of control issues. And balance issues. The player-made items are already out of hand (vials, for instance.) You would want to limit how much someone could make, but you'd have to be able to identify someone to really do that well, and we don't really have the means without an "account" approach.

Remove the decrease of stats with age, and keep the positive stat increases. Give attribute points for major age milestones and the ability to change adjectives per major age marks.

So many of these mechanical changes would be invisible to a newbie, you know.

Or are we talking about this idea as bringing back people who have stopped playing more than people who have not yet played?

Both.

Both at least according to the question posed by D.

I know that the ability to redesc equipment would make a lot of dress-up people happy, but I also know that such an idea has been shot down in the past.

I guess I'll still go with aura-based global party lines. You'd be able to turn seeing it on or off, but you could never see who was inside other than talking to people. It would provide an LFG system, RP platform, and conveniences for communication that would promote the RP and, maybe, the PVP advocated by things lately. I know that I and a couple other people only join cabals for the cb.

It'd certainly be the "big change" that OP was asking for in terms of visibility.