The game I'm wishing for

Massively asks what next-gen MMO people are wishing for from Blizzard. Someone asked Tigole whether that game would be sci-fi, fantasy, or historical, and he answered "all of the above". So based on this little information, what game am I wishing for.

I'm thinking of a Victorian steampunk game, where steam-powered ships fly through space and visit fantastic worlds to trade with them. I really, really want a space game next, because that is apparently the only way to get something like a trade economy into a MMO. With trade I don't mean what is already happening on auction houses, but the idea that some goods are more abundant and cheap in some part of the world, and can be transported and sold at a profit somewhere else, where these goods are rare. That concept fails on fantasy worlds with their teleports, but works well with space games.

I want that game to somewhat resemble a cross between WoW and carebear EVE. No PvP, but a huge single-server galaxy to travel through. Mining asteroids, but with some amusing puzzle mini-game, not the boring EVE way, provides the basic resources for building various parts to upgrade your spaceship with. Various regions of the galaxy have different minerals on the asteroids, which is where the trade would come in. Another thing copied from EVE would be buy orders on auction houses. Where WoW comes in is in my dream game having tons of PvE content, like quests, or borrowed from WAR even public quests, like a fleet of space pirates attacking a planet. There would also be group PvE content, where players would need to form fleets to tackle some NPC threat.

Combat would be ship vs. ship combat, and I'd borrow a lot of good ideas there from Pirates of the Burning Sea. As the ships are Victorian, broadsides in space would be very cool, and give combat a tactical maneuvering component. There could also be planetside avatar combat on the fantastic worlds, and player avatars could explore planets, and even build player and guild housing there.

There would be no character levels, but a skill system. We could take offline skill learning from EVE, plus give out skill points for various activities, but unlike EVE I would introduce some sort of skill cap, like in Ultima Online, where you have to unlearn old skills to learn new ones. The advantage of that would be that new players could catch up to veterans. And instead of learning everything with time, players would be forced to specialize into careers that only consist of skill templates.

I don't really believe that Blizzard's next-gen MMO will look anything like this, but a man can dream, can't he?