Well, I think the problem that you (the article writer) are missing is that online gaming has yet to move much past it's infancy in any absolute sense. Right now game developers want a game that they can just leave to run on it's own and make money for it's publishers with little in the way of direct control on the part of the administrators.
The problem with games like early UO is that you were dealing with what many would consider "griefing", which is people setting out for little purpose other than to exploit the system to make other players miserable. Realistically there was no lasting repercussions as evil death was just an inconveinence and a skill point dock, and no viable motivation "in character" to the world for a lot of what was done other than the knowlege that some player on the other side of a character was going to become irritated by what you did.
Add to this the issue of balancing good vs. evil. See in an MMO enviroment that is just left to run itself, evil is very easy to reward... you wind up with more stuff, the satisfaction of killing people and the furstration of players. Good on the other hand winds up presenting very little in the way of tangible rewards, in a game enviroment largely governed by loot, stats, and other things it's not like most other players care much because they are more concerned about whether you can afford the stuff they are selling, or their own self sufficiecy than what kind of play enviroment you might be fostering. What's more when the bad guys wind up with more and better stuff, and thus higher stats, the only way to really keep up to even conceive of stopping them is to become a huge bastard yourself... and then usually you wind up just becoming another rat yourself, irregardless of whatever your intentions might have been to begin with. Useless NPCs telling you what a great guy you are don't really provide much in the way of a reward.
What's more when your dealing with heroic fantasy, as opposed to something trying to be dark and realistic, that's a paticular issue. One of the things that slotted players of Ultima off is that the game series has always been about morality and the triumph of good over evil and the benefits of following the virtues even if only one very specific person became the incarnation of them all. In that world a guy dedicated to virtues like Compassion, Sacrifice, Honor, or others should wind up trumping someone who sets out to be a complete bastard in the long term... especially in THAT world. The guys complaining were not just victims but fans of the Ultima games (play them sometime, especially starting with IV, GoG has them, they were more recent at the time this game came out).
This all brings me to the initial point, to REALLY advance MMOs as a genere you don't just need players acting freely to advance the RPG and free form aspects, but you need an administration that constanly interacts directly with the player base, and is capable of subjectively interpeting what people are doing. GMs who are capable of looking at people being bastards and taking reasonable action on part of the world, or rewarding righteous
play for those being good guys.
The big problem with this of course is that most companies running MMOS don't want to actually pay a staff to run the game. What's more the people they hire are more akin to coders or customer service reps than actual Gamemasters (which is what we need), guys who both hold a certain degree of detachment from the players, as well as being trained to think dealing with them in any meaningful fashion isn't part of their job. If your lucky some GM might drop a few extra monsters on a town and call it event in most MMOs, and really that isn't what building a real world like this takes.
I believe it was Larry Niven's "Dreampark" novels that chronicled the evolution of games of this sort (ending up with VR, as they existed in the actual story) and has so far come pretty close, though we have sort of stagnated. Those stories outside of the central mysteries driving them kind of explained what you need to make a virtual enviroment work, and that involves an active administration running the game itself, as well as "Loremasters" who are players with similar authority (either known or covert) acting to cultivate the game enviroment. Many players of course fear the idea of other humans having direct control over thegame this way, but at the same time no code, no matter how advanced, is going to be able to maintain a proper fantasy play enviroment.
To be honest I kind of suggested something similar between actual GMS and the Loremasters of Dreampark early on in UO, based on what some MUDs wound up doing by empowering players, of course the idea was never really embraced, and we see what they chose to do instead... for good or ill.
