Sweet! An MMORPG element would be the bees knees here. Years ago there was a similar (though-MMORPG) game called Diaspora from a small studio[1]. I still remember waking up at all hours of the night to play inconspicuously (without tying up the phone line). It was freeware and featured in PC Gamer. Eventually cheaters/bots overtook the game, literally DDOSing the thing as each "node" could only support maybe 50 ships because of how they were displayed in game (~5x10 grid or so). Ultimately, the studio didn't have a solid monetization strategy and the project disappeared off the face of the earth when its users spiked. They would have made a killing with micro-transactions, but online payments weren't ubiquitous then. Instead these poor devs spent all this time/money developing the game, maintaining the servers and fighting cheaters for free before the whole thing crumbled under its own weight. It lived on in clones (Rillaspora, Xiaspora and The Reunion) but they all died within a year or two.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(video_game)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(video_game)</a>