To justify being an mmo and not a single player game though doesn't the story an mmo have to tell arise because of the players?

The stories that arise in mmo's now actual kind of reveal the true focus of the game: loot drama, guilds breaking up, ninja looters, etc...

I think if the games focused more on the world, and had a mutable world that players could really feel apart of that the dynamic of the game could shift. Playing a single player game that has a great story, just on a server with other people can be fun but at what point does it make more sense for it to just be a single player game?

"...but at what point does it make more sense for it to just be a single player game?"

I couldn't agree more with you, one of my biggest arguments and complaints about the design choices of a game like Star Trek Online as an example, is that the game they are creating would have made for a far better singleplayer game. They've already made all the fun choices for you: you're forced to be the Captain, you have to play with NPC pets, you only get xp from missions and not from kills. If that's the game they want to create then why didn't they just make it a singleplayer RPG with a deeper story and character interaction like a Mass Effect/KotOR?

Most true MMO players are going to expect the opposite from a Star Trek MMO. They'll want to choose the profession they have, they'll want to group with friends over NPC's, they'll want to explore giant worlds instead of the same small boxed sized instance zones with different skies and ground texture. It's a shame because I remember playing UO and EQ over 10 years ago and thinking how awesome MMO's were going to become in 10 years time, now here we are and the current designs are taking us backwards.

The design ramifications of choosing to make a game massively multiplayer are clearly not understood by designers. It's primarily a problem with the game industry as an institution. This problem becomes endemic because the only people with enough money to make a serious MMO are institutions within the game industry. Sure, there are rare exceptions, but big games need big money and big money can only be found in people who are too conservative to allow MMOs to depart far from the established conventions and norms. Too much money is at risk for innovation to take root.

I think that smaller-scale MMOs that have more rapid (and significantly less ungainly) development cycles and more realistic implementation goals can achieve a measure of success the stagnating MMO industry. If you can make a small game that does a few things very well, player will take notice. I know that if someone approaches me with a young, small, innovative game, I certainly lean towards publicizing their work and endorsing it instead of sticking with talking about the same tired stable of big business MMOs.

I wrote a longer article similar to this comment here:
http://www.thatsaterribleidea.com/2009/10/path-to-mmo-revolution.html

Procedural generation is the next step in the evolution of games. It may serve as another plateau on which developers will sit a while, but it's not the solution.

Evizaer, you write very well. I agree wholeheartedly with what what I've seen of your perspective on MMOs so far.

I wonder if procedural generation is really the next step. We've seen this in the dungeon crawler genre and it worked well. However, I don't want MMOs to be procedurally generated dungeon crawler. I'm already tired of the grind.

Personally, I enjoyed CoH and WoW, but I'm not sure there is a fix for the current state of MMOs. Once you've lived in and been burnt out by an MMO, it's very hard to go back. The genre would have to change dramatically for me to consider investing another 4 years in a new MMO.