Well, I decided to visit again so I guess I might as well give a bit of an update on this since I've been playing Love for over a year now. Actually a lot of the stuff from my original post is very outdated and quite a bit of it turned out to be wrong from the start.
First of all, Love isn't really an MMO. It isn't "massive" in the sense that a regular MMO is and was never designed to be, it focuses on much smaller groups of players.
It wasn't designed to handle "massive" numbers of players. Currently it can only support up to a few hundred at most.
Looking at this now, it reminds me of an up-rezzed Minecraft. I guess it wasn't as interactive, though.
Not quite.
Having played both, Love doesn't share much in common with Minecraft beyond the way in which players can build things. Of course, in both games that's just a means to an end, end the end are very different.
Building is not the main point of Love, it's just one way in which players interact with the world. I would even go so far to say that I feel the emphasis on building things in Love seems to have decreased somewhat as other gameplay mechanics and systems have been added.
Love is not a sandbox game, it's is about players interacting with the world and the AI. The world and the AI have to be able to affect the players just as much as if not more than the players can affect them. This by itself means a lot less sandbox-like freedom. Love has goals and objectives like a more directed game, but they're more fluid and emergent.
On an interesting side note, Eskil Steenberg and Markus Persson do know each other in real life.
As mentioned earlier big part of what Love is about is players interacting with the world and the AI and those interactions being as emergent and dynamic as possible. Very little is pre-scripted in Love and nearly all goals and tasks in Love are either emergent and/or procedurally generated.
For example, one time our settlements forcefield got destroyed and needed to be replaced as a result of an attack by the AI tribe known as the Omprelly Enclave (players usually call them the blue people). The blue people attacked us because we fought with them previously and made them hostile towards us. We did this because the Glindra Traders (a.k.a. the yellow people) requested our help in fighting them, and we chose to do so. The yellow people probably got angry towards the blue people because the blue people stole their tokens earlier. The blue people probably stole tokens from the yellow people because they happened to settle down in close proximity to them and the world builder made the area without any major obstacles between them, and so on and so forth.
Most games that try to generate things randomly seem monotonous because they are random, you have things happening without much of a cause.
In Love there are also elements of randomness, but because there are many systems affecting with each other by the time the effect of the randomness reaches the players, it often has a chain of cause and effect behind it that the players can understand like the one described above. When you have cause and effect, not only does it seem less meaningless, but it opens up further ways for players to interact with it because they can affect how things turn out just as the random numbers and the AI can.
The other big part of Love is cooperation between players. There are almost no purely self-serving goals in Love, the game is designed so that everything you do is for the good of the settlement as a whole. Unlike other online games where the goal is to make yourself more powerful, in Love the goal is to make you and everyone else in the settlement more powerful. When you find a device, tool, or resource, everyone in the settlement benefits directly or indirectly and your capabilities as an individual are tied to the capabilities of the settlement in various ways.
For example, if I bring back a token that provides a tool to the settlement such as radio or dive gear, then that tool becomes available for use to everyone in the settlement. If that token is destroyed somehow as a result of an attack, accident, or whatever, then everyone loses that tool immediately regardless of where they are (tools disappearing from your toolbelt is usually a sign something has gone wrong back home). If I find a power well and direct its energy back to the settlement, the device it powers will benefit everyone in the settlement. Likewise, resources collected from the world and brought back to the settlement can be used by anyone in the settlement.
Most games try to prevent players from affecting each other to such a degree because of griefers. Griefers were somewhat of a worry early on, but so far there haven't been any major problems. This could be due to the fact that players are motivated to help new players because doing so benefits them in return (many "griefers" in other games are confused new players). It can also be because Love's community is small, very close, and strongly prefers more direct text and voice chat over forums (the sense of anonymity goes away as you inevitably get to know everyone else). There is also Love's rather high learning curve, which makes it extremely difficult to learn the game without help from an existing player.
Even though Love is currently one of my favorite online games, there are a plenty of reasons why some people will not like it.
The biggest thing that was brought up in the past few months seems to be the game's learning curve. I mentioned earlier that Love has many systems that affect each other to make the gameplay. A consequence of this is that there are a lot of systems that players have to learn to deal with, especially regarding infrastructure and interactions with the AI. New features have been added to Love very frequently since launch so tutorials and guides made by the developer and the community become obsolete very quickly. Admittedly, because Love's community is small and close to the developer (many regulars chat with Eskil almost daily), changes to the game have tended to more about making the game more enjoyable to existing players. From what we've seen, having someone else to teach you how to play is the most reliable way to learn the game and joining the Teamspeak server is highly recommended. Players who try to learn the game on their own generally do very poorly. However, there has been discussion among the community and Eskil about features to help ease new players into the game so hopefully this will be improved in the near future.
Another thing to turns people away is the fact that there is no character progression, grind, achievements, or any other such intentionally "addicting" elements in Love. It has more or less been decided that Love should focus on gameplay, not on making its players addicts through other means. There was at one point a "progress" system put in Love that allowed you to gain "xp" to use certain devices. However, both Eskil and the community (myself included) really hated the effect it had on the game so Eskil quickly removed it from the game. (Without getting too specific, it seemed that the average gamer's tendency to "grind" themselves bored was much stronger than anticipated.)
Something that has been brought up by new players as something that they disliked was that they could not start their own settlement with just them and their friends. Most of the time when you log into the game you are automatically put into the existing player settlement with everyone else. It seems that some new players coming into the game are uncomfortable with the idea that their actions, or more specifically their potential mistakes, can affect other players to such a degree. More than a couple new players have stated that they were afraid to do anything because they were afraid of messing things up for the existing players and angering them. This is very unlikely to happen, we've never rejected a new player for making a mistake and we're nice enough that I don't think any of us would hold it against them personally. Nevertheless, it seems that the anxiety is there.
