Where's the community in MMOs?

This is going to be an extraordinarily broad-strokes statement, but it seems pretty accurate.

Every upcoming MMO - and most current ones - seems to be a single-player RPG that more than one person can play.

This is most obvious in terms of story, where the quest lines try to make it seem that the player is The Hero, capital letters intentional. That's the tried-and-true (and logical) architecture of a single-player RPG, but in an MMO each individual is just one of many. Some people may indeed be more important than others, but they become more important in terms of community rather than the scripted storyline (...with a few exceptions I'll touch on later). Groups and guilds are formed in order to take down bosses, but for the most part there seems to be relatively little support for these sorts of communities in the framework of the game. For the lack of a better word, the aspects of multiplayerness in MMOs are out of character attributes, completely ignored by the framework of the game universe.

There are exceptions to this. EVE, for example, uses the community to drive everything and in EVE, corps are a Big Deal. The biggest corps shape the way the game plays for everyone, arguably even more than CCP. And the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart is Asheron's Call. Yes, it's still around after...what, twelve years? It competed with Everquest back in the day, and I think that if the MMO industry had taken more cues from it rather than EQ we would have been much better off.

Ignoring a completely original setting (come on, how many games need to have elves and orcs and goblins?), AC is one of the few MMOs that actually, in-game, addresses the fact that players have infinite lives, that there are thousands of them, that they can /whisper each other. It had a unique guild system that encouraged more experienced players to mentor newer ones. It had an ongoing storyline that continues to this day. Monthly updates, people. But even though it isn't as community-driven as EVE, it did a few unusual things by including the actions of players in its storyline. It's very hard to top The Defense Of Thistledown in terms of MMO awesomeness.

Let's compare this to the MMO that I've played on and off for five plus years - WoW. In WoW, the player is no longer even in the storyline. Thrall and the Dragon Aspects do all the work. People blame dungeon finder and LFR for the dissolution of "community" but there never really was one. Part of that might be sheer numbers - 10 million people is a lot. But I was there from the beginning, from the closed beta for Vanilla, and the problem started then. Blizzard made no attempt to shape that small a community, and the nucleus of seething contentiousness that was the Closed Beta testers informed the wider community as WoW was released and grew. They've also maintained a distance between themselves and players that, while it might make sense for a single player game company, only frustrates people who continually consume content.

Let's compare this to The Old Republic. Marvelous single player storyline that drives you to a certain level and then...stops. What's the point? If you're going to script the story of an individual within the world, use a single player game.

You need a different kind of storytelling for an MMO, a sort of universe-building, group-oriented storytelling. You need to acknowledge the efforts of players themselves, whether it's a company going in and changing an asset in honor of someone, or an automated way of players making a mark on the world. You also need to give them communities, and not just a guild channel. We have many, many templates for social networking, so how hard would it be to build one into an MMO's interface? It's not like people don't like being in communities, it's just that if the cost is too high (they have to go somewhere outside the game) it's just not going to happen. I think WoW has lasted as long as it has because it's frankly the most polished and best-feeling MMO to play that's out there. But I don't think it's a good model for the future. For that, you should look to the past.