Not for any planned game as of yet, but I've been hitting up a few MMORPG's recently including my first, Everquest as well as reading various posts here on MMO design.

One of the main draws of an RPG I believe is a sense of reward and progress ... doing what the game wants you to do rewards you with some form of 'experience points' which make your character stronger, tougher. As well as earning money to buy new and better equipment (or being rewarded with equipment itself). Part of this reward is being able to venture further afield and fight deadly monsters.

Personally I feel this falls down when you bring the 'MMO' part to the party. Friends can out level you and you wont be able to play with them in the newest dungeon because your to weak ... or on the flipside your waiting for your friends to progress to join you. Than there is the idea of PVP, the more powerful player can run around ganking weaker ones with little threat from them.

So I suppose what I'm looking for is a 'Have your cake and eat it to' solution. Is there a form of progression that keeps players at least on an even footing while stilling letting them feel like they are progressing? So at level 5 you can play with your level 15 buddy and both have a fun and exciting time without certain threat of death due to being low level. Or that ten or so level 1's CAN fight off a level 30 player.

The other topic that comes to mind that can dampen fun is PVP ... either you have it and a few ruin it for everyone because all they do is gank the helpless singing trololololo all the way or PVP is removed because of this leaving those who legitimately want to have proper battles with other players out to dry. So wondered if there was a middle ground, fighting territorial battles for power and glory is promoted while "pwning n00b3" who are happily making elf cookies is punished?

I guess this is a very old horse of a topic, but I wanted to see what people thought these days on it? Can you have open world game, PVP, mechanically rewarding RPG gameplay and level player footing? Or is this the unreachable dream?

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So I suppose what I'm looking for is a 'Have your cake and eat it to' solution. Is there a form of progression that keeps players at least on an even footing while stilling letting them feel like they are progressing? So at level 5 you can play with your level 15 buddy and both have a fun and exciting time without certain threat of death due to being low level.
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I've never played a solution that scales players up (out in the world; in specifically set pvp areas (battlegrounds), that approach arguably works), but there have been some that would scale a player down (scale a lvl 10 down to a lvl 5 when he's in a lvl 5 zone) so you would be able to play with your lower level friend.

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Or that ten or so level 1's CAN fight off a level 30 player.
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This is all just a matter of how you scale players as they level up. I recall a friend telling a WoW story of he and about 20 other people around level 40 going up against a level 60 paladin. He said the paladin won, but the paladin was easily the most survivable class in the game at that time. It seemed like no other class would have been able to survive that fight. I think if you're wanting this kind of thing to be viable in a game, you have to find a balance of making the player feel their power grows a respectable amount by leveling up but making it so that the numbers don't inflate so quickly that somebody being 2 or 3 levels above somebody else is an automatic win.

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The other topic that comes to mind that can dampen fun is PVP
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For that statement, I feel you should be reminded that for some people it can dampen the fun; for others, it is literally the only reason the buy/install the game.

For the larger question of can this be done at all... I think it can but that is a very tough balancing act and is something that will take lots of staying on top of what your user base is saying about different features and you educating them (so that hopefully they accept your reasoning) or making changes that alleviate their concerns. If it were easy, I suspect lots of companies with very clever and experienced designers and developers would have put it together and copied the formula over and over. But as it stands, there seems to be a pretty significant challenge to putting together a collection of experiences in one world that keep pve players, pvp players, explorers, crafters, social/guild-type players, etc all satisfied.

So at level 5 you can play with your level 15 buddy and both have a fun and exciting time without certain threat of death due to being low level. Or that ten or so level 1's CAN fight off a level 30 player.

If you're looking for an example, Eve online does a good job of this:

- you can always bring a "lower level" (smaller ship, less skilled) buddy along in your harder missions (to shoot smaller ships/get combat experience) as long as the higher level player is tanking, and the lower level player knows how to get out when they take aggro. As well as this, high and low "levels" can go PVP together just fine. Smart players will always take out the low levels first, but the low levels can still provide a valuable roll by holding down the enemy while the bigger ships get into range.

- in addition, in PVP, sheer numbers can always trap and bring down even the largest ship, although tons of the smaller ships will die in the process, and the bigger ships' tank usually gets stronger as the fight goes on, or allies get called in, etc.

You could make it so that instead of getting numeric advantages, you gain more skills and are able to do more things. If you want to improve, then you could add equipment-based improvement so that you could make yourself stronger, but not extremely stronger (i.e. a tier 12 armor set would only give twice or three times as much health as a tier 1 set), and so that your friends could try to help you catch up. This way, your character can get stronger without depowering new players or relying on unreliable twitch-bsed combat.

The problem with RPGs is when you set them in super competitive battlegrounds with a cap on the number of people per side. Of course no one wants to have more lower levels in a game with a maximum number of players allowed.

Its the player's fault for wanting to play MMOs as if they were fighting games or MOBAs.

Imagine an MMO battleground with a level cap and not a player cap. You can have 400 levels and not 10 level 40 players. 40 level 10s, 10 level 40s, 20 level 20s. Assuming of course the game was balanced to be that way. And the matchups might be random so you never know what you will get.

Of course everything is easier in non player vs player situations. Single player coop, large size coop, the computer side will never complain that its unfair or spew forth endless excuses about how the player side had 3 mezzers and they only had one and such.

Designing games to be serious competition always cripples fun and creativity.

The other topic that comes to mind that can dampen fun is PVP

For that statement, I feel you should be reminded that for some people it can dampen the fun; for others, it is literally the only reason the buy/install the game.

Well as I mentioned it can be a dampening also if it is omitted due to its weaknesses ... unless your saying for some the draw is to grief, in which case I personally would have say they aren't the ones I want in my playerbase anyway. I was more thinking of how to have a system of PVP that rewards fun challenging combat between players and punishing abusive behavior.

AltarofScience: As far as competition I see your point, I've never really liked the idea of fanatical hardcore competition and rather versus situations between players is aimed more towards fun, although I know by its very nature some competition is always going to arise.

I just really dislike that hardcore competition bleeds into other genres when it should stay in e-sports and MOBAs.