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Heres the problem with the "real world like" sandbox. The Real World fucking blows. I hate driving to work. I hate getting groceries. I hate taking my cat to the vet. These however are all things that are required to live.

You talk about letting NPCs do the boring stuff. I say remove the cause of the boring stuff. Why create boring resource based management systems where players or NPCs have to go harvest? There is no point!

You are trying to create competition between players. How about you fight over mines, fields, forests, etc. Controling these areas rewards your zone with resources automatically without the duldrum of actually harvesting.

This achieves competition and allows for the enemy to put a "hurt" on your city. What you want seems like anti-PvP. Forcing players to camp NPC miners and lumberjacks? WTF!? Fighting NPC guards? Fighting NPC caravans?

Keep it simple. Fix the causes. Players can't defend their cities because they are not online 24/7? Well great! How about scheduled times to attack the city determined by the two warring parties.

It seems you talk about how boring sand box games and then fall right into what makes them so boring. I see no reason why fun gameplay can't be implemented into a sandbox game. We just haven't seen it yet because the developers fall right into the "make it like real life" trap. Not to mention the #1 killer of sandbox games is the fact that content is never there and its left up to the players to make up most of the content via PvP or whatever players do.

I understand your wanting of a free for all world, but without boundaries you don't have a very good game. Players need to have a sense of guidance that drives their purpose. Its like when your in school and get 12 straws and a foot of tape to build a capsule to protect an egg from a 10 foot drop. Think of all the possiblities that people come up with. How can that be translated to a game? Simple give the players the tools within a limit (boundry) and let them go. You give the class however many straws they want and you remove the fun.

The reason things in EVE are so time intesive is two fold. 1) One world = one server. You can't just shove everyone right on top of each other. Therefore things like travel have to be drawn out to give scale to the world. 2) Factional territory control requires that players have some means of control over their area.

The other boring aspects like mining and so forth aren't even required. They are just in game to give players something to do. There is people that love mining and traing their skills just to mine. There is people that love to trade and do nothing but train skills to haul items back and forth. There is people that love to "rat" (aka fight NPCs) and train skills to do so. Then you mix all these play types together into a corporation and you have exactly what makes EVE so great. Then time comes when the corporation needs miners to do this or ratters to do this... so people have to adjust for the team.

The reason it remains a niche game is because of 1) the learning curve is insane and is something CCP is still trying to address and 2) the world is harsh with gankers, corporation wars, and so forth being the majority of the good gameplay. If you just want to solo then EVE becomes a very small world really fast that has nothing really to offer you. 3) Also the end game is just hard to get into if PvP is not your thing. We're not talking killing other people... we're talking an entire end game that revolves around competing with real players instead of NPCs for everything. 4) Finally EVE takes skill and patience to learn. No leveling and time based skill gain turns people off. Veterans are way ahead and you won't be catching up... ever. Flying ships effectively takes a lot of skill. Good players are known in EVE because they own your ass before you can blink.