@Cara when i MMO'd still i wanted the world to feel less dead.

one of those experiments was using the neural network thing from the Democracy series. but feeding player events in to it. so people grinding bandits in some area would cause the bandit node to disable, which could in turn change other levers.

Democracy fakes complexity that way. you have stuff like a "crime" node which has +/- connections to other nodes, and the "laws" are the same thing. they +/- other nodes. so it runs turn by turn with these influences to create the "country."

moonring does a thing where merchants are sent on a route and if they are killed before they make it to their target town, that down gets a depression debuff.

star citizen's "quanta" bullshit is supposed to do something like these. you have a small set of NPCs that run AI scripts on a tiny version of the universe, and are supposed to sample from that when players actually go somewhere. so it only runs ex. 300 NPCs for the galaxy, and watches their traces to determine which systems are well stocked etc