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What I've seen in terms of "affect on the community" really has little to do with RMT or greed. When UO started, most gamers that moved to UO were involved in either one of two types of games (or both in many cases)... tabletop RPGs (DND and such) and MUDs. They brought those concepts into the early days of UO.
Granted during that same time there were just as many people who brought in the "rude, crude, and greedy" mindset (mainly from FPSs) as well, but people still played with a community aspect. The dungeons and stuff were all there, but the content in terms of "game-provided" wasn't as obvious.
Fast forward a bit to the Everquest model (and by extension WoW) and the genre moved away from the sandbox framework to the level-raid "themepark" clones. It was (obviously) successful in financial terms although it removed a LOT of what UO was in the early days.
Of course to adapt to this new reality, UO has tried to keep playing a "balance" game between sandbox and theme park.
The success of this of course is up for debate. Some people like one and not the other, others would like to see both. It's a sticky balance, especially while trying to retain the uniqueness (especially after a decade of level-based clones) of a non-zone skill-based game.
As for the economy side of it, the BIG killer of course is exploiting and the ONLY way you combat that is with an active GM/enforcement system... something which UO has not had in quite some time.
The balance you are talking about is, in my mind, really a temporary shift.
To understand this, let me make this statement:
Themepark games are for genre newbs.
Now I'll try to quantify that.
When new players come into this genre (MMORPGs), their experience is basically with Single Player games and an assortment of Multi-Player experiences. Mostly based on RPGs of some form or another.
So their expectations are "Massively Multiplayer" added to their previous experiences. That's what Themepark games gives to them.
But just as they get tired of replaying their Single Player games, they also get tired of these Themepark games. You can only play the same thing over and over again so many times. But these are Persistent Worlds. What happens then? They have persistent characters, in a persistent world, but the game has been played out to the end too many times.
This is where players start asking some questions, like "is there nothing more?" And they start thinking about what could be "more". And this is where "Worldly" comes in. The desire for the world to change, for things to happen through "story", for mystery, for greater depth.
EQ brought in larger numbers, and WoW brought in massive numbers that were all "newbies to the genre". And EQ did a fine job for what they were, but WoW fixed all the problems that EQ had. WoW fine tuned it to perhaps the best anyone could.
But all those millions of gamers were "genre newbs".
And WoW was great for them, and kept adding "content" and new ways to play the same thing, until the point that there just isn't anywhere else to go. How many new classes and races can a game add before it's just more copies?
But there's a cliff at the end of this road.
Worldly Sandbox games don't have this problem. Because the game is about the world and the story in that world. Both can be added to indefinitely. I'm not talking about land mass here in the case of "World", but all sorts of other things like new dungeons, new physics, new art, new player interaction capabilities. And "Story" is easy, if easier said than done.
My point is that Themepark games have a shelf life, and I think that it's "best used by" date has expired. Sandbox games need to be the move forwards now.
Themepark games still have a great potential in the Facebook crowd (newbs), but there's also a big gap for the experienced MMORPG gamers for Sandbox games taken to new levels.
(By the way, I have a feeling that some Chinese prison guards are going to be playing a lot of WoW soon themselves, once their superiors find out about them.)
Get the oldman on board first ... thilly!
