I hate to burst some people's bubbles here, but if it's going to be a sandbox-style MMORPG, it's almost got to be full-scale person-versus-person combat, and this is coming from someone who totally adores the original EverQuest model, so it's not a case of what I'm wishing for, just simply a case of content design. That's not to say there are going to be griefs-without-consequences (we can go in the way-back machine to UO's blue/grey/red system to find a simple, effective way of handling player-killers and other deviants), but it'll almost assuredly involve some PvP combat. And, in turn, the likely pay-off for swallowing such a system is player-driven bounty systems, player-driven economy, player-driven housing, player-driven content - well worth the trade-off, in my opinion. Nothing is cooler than hunting down some dickwad griefing motherfucker who killed a bunch of lemmings, only to melt his face off, drag his lifeless corpse back to whoever bountied his ass, and collect your well-deserved reward. That's the kind of social interaction a sandbox-style game promises - nay, necessitates - and it's awesome because it requires actual social acumen, much like imperative socially-oriented aspects that the original EverQuest was based upon.
Classes will also probably still exist, although I imagine they'll be much broader, and will involve a hybrid of the EQ/UO model where you choose a class at the start and work within very loose parameters of that class, allowing you to level up chosen skills within said class to a hard-cap point - the catch is that you only have a certain number of skill points to allocate, so you'll have definite strengths and weaknesses relative to others playing your class. Like, say, you choose a rogue-style; some rogues choose to specialize in stealth and traps, while going light on the armor, while other rogues wear heavier armor and dish out more hand-to-hand damage. You could also have one that's a puller that goes heavy on the armor and stealth but has weak damage output, and so on. And I imagine, keeping in line with sandbox ideals, that all of these specialized traits can be changed whenever the player desires, but it'll take time to level them back up. Like, say, you're tired of pulling and want to be a sneaky bastard that deals a ton of backstab damage; that's cool, but there's no secondary switch-off you can do immediately - you've got to level the skill back up from wherever you let it drop to (only, perhaps it's faster to level the second time around since you've already learned it).
