hi
ive thought of the same thing, here are the facts
the best way to pull it off would be to eliminate realtime battle effects
the game would be totaly changed, more like an RPG without action
random battles.... .............................yes
magic (ice, fire, wind, earth, water).... yes
stats.................................................yes
And for the 'ever changing world' aspect of it, we would need more dissasemblers and hackers to make better editors (map, model, image, and especially mission editors). With the current tools, development will be mighty slow and this 'crime online' thing will shoot right past us
transferring map data...................yes
saving and loading in game data... not sure (ironicaly, that would be the most important thing)
dedicated server.......................... who's dedicated without pay