This may be a weird response coming from me ... but maybe what you need is more ARRPEE. I mean, yeah it's a MUD and whatnot, but I've seen countless logs where people just encounter and start fighting each other. If you were playing a tabletop game, this would never happen. (Generally wouldn't happen in real life either.) People would talk trash to each other first, or demand stuff, negotiate, etc. That generally doesn't happen on Arctic; it used to sort of happen back in the day on the board, but I'm sure that's long gone now.
One of the other things that a MUD kinda loses out on is controllable territory. If a clan could, say, take over a town, and make it off limits to other clan(s), then there'd be some reasons to fight. Chokepoints, strategy. That sort of thing.