There was an idea that I had for an MMO. The game has a basic backstory but players are encouraged to roleplay with other players and can get rewards for contributing to the overall story. Senior members in the game's comunity can be millitary generals and vote to plan what each faction chooses to do and every week or so a newsletter is sent to update the overarching storyline. Tell me what you think and if any game does something like this.

Roleplaying seems to be more common in MUD (multi-user dungeon) games than it is in modern graphical MMOGs. I might be wrong but, from what I've seen, the focus these days tends to be on leveling and quests. Actual role-playing would be a nice addition to the usual MMO scene, I think. In my research I came across a MUD called Aardwolf that encourages role-playing. I don't know if it's done to that extent, though.

There was an idea that I had for an MMO. The game has a basic backstory but players are encouraged to roleplay with other players and can get rewards for contributing to the overall story. Senior members in the game's comunity can be millitary generals and vote to plan what each faction chooses to do and every week or so a newsletter is sent to update the overarching storyline. Tell me what you think and if any game does something like this.

If you want to achieve that, take focus away from the usual RPG fare gameplay elements. I don't think rewarding roleplaying will be enough to make a huge amount of players engage in it, you will also need to make the usual leveling / looting / raiding grindfest less attractive.

Even then, prepare for your game to be quite niche. What I have seen on even "roleplay encouraged" MMO servers doesn't lead me to believe that most people care about roleplaying. So if your game FORCES people to roleplay, many will not play it. If your game merely encourages it, most players will just ignore the roleplaying aspects.

I don't know... I like the idea of having players influence the story in some way, but how to achieve that? How to make thousands of players have an influence on the story without ending up with little more than noise? How to prevent people abusing loopholes in the system to ruin the whole thing for everyone? What to do if players get upset about the direction the story takes because an organized minority might be able to steer it in some direction?

And how to somehow make this story influence gameplay so that more than just the few story-fans among the players are caring?

Sometimes a million monkeys at keyboards don't reproduce shakespeare... remember "Twitch plays pokemon"? That is the quality of output you can expect when you give thousands of random people control over something, without any constraint or strong incentive to achieve a desirable goal. Just as many people will use the system to PREVENT others from achieving a goal than the other way around.

Story Griefing... well, at least its a fresh way to get griefed in an MMO.