I've often thought it would be interesting if you made an online game where everything was available all the time. If crystal kelp really did appear along the coast and Murlocs really did drop it, whether you needed it or not. It would be interesting to see how many players would naturally revert to adventure game behavior, scarfing up everything needlessly and hauling around armloads of random crap.
Everquest, especially the older areas, works like that too. As you get higher level, and the content gets more modern, tradable quest items become rarer (so you have to actually loot the corpse yourself) and eventually they added a real Quest Log system, but for years and years there was virtually no quest state saved anywhere outside the inventory.
Monsters dropped what they dropped regardless of who killed them, any NPC (even other monsters) could be handed any item, and that was it. If you'd read a spoiler you never had to encounter any quest text at all. I learned about a ton of quests just by finding an item I didn't recognize, and yes, I ended up with a bank full of quest junk that I never got around to finishing.
All sorts of rumors and theories swirled around any item with no known use. Many were just outright useless, and many quests were broken and uncompletable, but every once in a while someone would work something out and a years-old mystery would be solved.
I really loved Everquest questing, it was such a community exercise. It's a shame no modern MMO could ever get away with anything similar.
