Asymmetric Multiplayer

I remember playing Tie Fighter back in the day.  A neighbor would come over and we would spawn all four difficulties of all four types of rebel fighters (A, B, Y, and X wings) and take them on all at once.  In a Tie Advanced, we could take them all on for hours at a time.  The reason we could do this was that one of us was only on the stick, maneuvering and finding targets, while the other was only on the keyboard, re-distributing energy to different systems as needed.
This is asymmetric multiplayer.  Two (or more) people cooperating in the same game, but playing in fundamentally different ways with different interfaces.  And this is the basic idea of player leadership of political units.  The leadership UI is a fundamentally different experience from the standard MMO, and could be criticized in Orison on the basis that only few people ever get to experience that UI. Why waste the resources putting it in the game?  Because the actions of those few players have large effects on the world that all the players inhabit.  This is player generated content, and is simply more fun than procedurally generated content.
The ideal is procedurally generated content that, while happening at random times, is fairly predictable once it happens, but nevertheless demands a response from nearby political unit leaders.  The humanly unpredictable responses of the player leaders could make the world seen much more alive.

Crowfall: An Exciting Upcoming MMO

  Crowfall is an MMO in development here in Austin TX by the good people at Art Craft Entertainment.  The core of the design philosophy is 'eternal champions, dying worlds'.
  Consider a persistent, competitive, unending game: this well describes the meta PvP in games like Eve Online.  The danger with this is that one group of players will gain an early edge over other players.  In doing so, they now have access to more resources than the other groups.  This is a 'winner take all' situation.
  The way Crowfall is attempting to avoid this scenario is to have multiple, short-lived, proceduraly generated game worlds operating simultaneously.  Player characters persist across multiple 'campaigns' and take spoils back with them to their 'Eternal Kingdoms.'  Different campaign rule sets vary the amount of loot you can take back into another campaign with you. Newbies may want to jump into a 'Terminator' rule set campaign where nobody imports anything except the clothes on their backs.