That sounds interesting!
Are you a designer or developer? In what phase is the project? What are the most important lessons we should learn?
I used to do a lot of developing, but I have over time moved more and more toward using existing free open source code as much as possible instead of writing new code from scratch.
The problem was that technology moves too fast, by the time I had a universe running nicely for a single-line BBS (Bulletin Board System) on dialup, TCP/IP was coming along and everything would need to be re-written to handle multiple simultantously-online players, stuff like that.
So what I try to do nowadays is find any and all multi-user online free open source games and, if they actually work, which many do not, try to find ways to fit them into a larger schema, a metagame so to speak. So that ultimately they all become different views and interfaces into a common multiverse.
It looks like you are already addressing one of the biggest problems, which is that games tend to become holes into which you throw endless money until you run out and cannot keep the game online because there is no money to pay for bandwidth and such.
The top page of documentation of what I have been working on for many years now is at
http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieuAs you can see from that page, part of how I discovered cryptocurrencies in the first place was as part of my search for solutions to the place where the rubber hits the road, the point at which to have a game, with accompanying in-game economy, at all you have to have some way of paying the bandwidth bills on
the planet known as Earth.
If you do manage to do that, then probably you also run into the problem that even in galaxies far far away, to which Earth is considered a myth if it is known of at all, currencies in use on Earth acquire crazy proportionate value due to the "possession" of inhabitants by the minds/spirits of people (aka the players of the game) who actually live on Earth...
One way I have tried to approach addressing this problem is to try to include individual character scale play inside the same universe(s) used for much larger scale play. The idea in this is that if, say, players living on Earth are willing to pay, say, $0.01 for a magic sword this is, say, 3 pounds of metal, ought they not consider it reasonable to pay much, much more for a Deathstar that is many millions of pounds of metal?
That is, we tend to see in games that players will pay some dollars for something of a certain amount of power in the game, regardless of the actual purported scale of the game; a player willing to blow $10 on something of use in a game might equally pay that $10 for one sword in an individual-character game or for an entire spaceship in a spaceship-oriented game. Those games being entirely separate obscures the weirdness of three pounds of metal worked into the form of a sword being apparently worth just as much as many thousands of pounds of metal worked into a spaceship.
By trying to have all that exist within one over-arching metagame it is hoped that maybe some better sense of scale could result, whereby a Deathstar you need to melt down a billion swords to build might actually end up fetching a lot higher price than any one, or even several thousand, such swords...
-MarkM-