The new area protection is a bit clunky and requires an admin to establish new areas for multiplayer servers, which is quite cumbersome and not conducive to new players being able to join quickly.
Here's my idea: Craftable land claim papers
Maybe players start with a handful at the beginning, and it could be somewhat resource intensive to craft new ones. Maybe requiring gold ingots or some other things to be able to craft.
Land claim papers would allow players to claim a section of land and set their own permissions for it (i.e. Visitors, Building Permissions, etc.). Multiple land claim papers could be used together to claim a larger parcel of land.
Maybe even have it in such a way that players could rent out one or more sections of their land claims to other players for shops, apartments, etc.
Of course that would require some sort of currency system, which I would also like to see in Rising World so that there could be more of an economy to keep servers more active.
Along with that, some kind of shop/player-owned vendor system for a complete player-operated economy. I personally prefer this over NPC vendors that randomly spawn. One of the things that makes Rising World so unique is that the world is completely player built, and thus, the economy should be completely player dependent too.