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Actually I was once thinking of doing something similar, just because it makes a nice (and simple) mud concept. The idea was that there would be a central "town" where players could meet up, buy equipment and form groups, before selecting a pre-generated "adventure module" to play together. As is usually the case, it never got beyond a basic design, but I always thought it would be interesting to see in action - the real problem being that you'd need a lot of adventure modules to keep people interested.
In fact I ended up copying some of the ideas across to the mud I'm currently developing, although it's not part of the main game. The idea is that there are a number of quests which can be accessed at certain points in the game, and each player (or group) gets their own version of the quest to complete - so they don't have to worry about other people wandering up and killing them (or otherwise ruining the quest) while they're trying to complete it.
Interestingly enough, I also recently read an interview with one of the World of Warcraft developers in which they described doing pretty much the same thing - they call it "instanced areas". The link I had to the interview no longer works, but here's the relevent portion:
RBridenbecker: How will you avoid player camping and kill stealing?
WoWDevTeam: This is one of the big problems of MMORPGs today. Here's our plan: Many of the areas of our world are instanced meaning that you and your friends can enter an instance that is essential a private copy of a section of the world. That being said, this is a social game, and too much instancing can be a bad thing. So large portions of the world are not instanced. Some player collision is good. It gives people an opportunity to make new friends. The key is that if you get to a location and find it 'camped' that you always have somewhere to go. Private instances guarantees there will always be somewhere for you to hunt in peace.
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