101760-why-do-mmo-designers-write-their-stories-like-this

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It may not bug you, but it drives me nuts when mmo stories are written like single player games. 
 
Take, for example, the "Background" story for your typical Exile toon. You are just another cryo-pod that was woken up accidentally; that's great, a perfect blank canvas to write a story on. But, wait, there is more: The dude, Deadeye is looking for his wife Sadie, you help him find her and then save her life and then he goes to the planet. But if I make a new character, there he is again, looking for his wife once more. This is a great and compelling story for a single player game, but this bugs the living daylights out of me for an MMO. Every exile toon has saved Deadeye's wife like some sort of sinister con-artist play that the Brightland family has been pulling off for years in order to wake-up more and more exiles from cryo too soon.
 
I can handle and ignore this. I have to. I know that a lot of quests in MMOs don't make a lot of sense that a bunch of people are doing them over and over but sometimes the writers seem like they are trying to make it make sense. 
 
Not so much with Wildstar: Some of the quests you do are actually SOLVING issues in a zone, completely... and then you move on, but nothing in that zone changes actually. Even though according to the story, they do. I'm just wondering why the writing tends to be focused on a single player. Like you're a super hero that diffused the bomb, that will still be here for the next 100 toons to defuse. 
 
I can ignore all this when RPing, but I like to connect my characters to the world they are in and it seems hard to do this with the quests I've done. Does this bug anyone else? Do MMO writers even consider this sort of thing?	
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			So what you are saying is that every character should have different quests to make their experience unique to the world?	
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This has nothing to do with writing or the story in my opinion it is simple the basic core mechanics of the game.
 
You either have a world with quests, like we have here, and do some occasional phasing. Or you go a dramatically different approach which has not been done yet, though it sounds like EQN are going to try, where everything is a one off event and intelligent AI move around the world based on player action. Or of course you try and go somewhere in between like Guild Wars 2 with events that not one off but do add variety. None of those options have mentioned writing yet!
 
You could of course do the option of quests with a different story each time but well that just is not going to be financially viable. No. Quests x No. of Players = A lot of time and effort for very little return on your investment.	
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			I'm definitely not saying that I want unique quests for everyone. I simply want quests in an MMO to make me feel like I'm apart of something bigger than me, instead of making me feel like I'm the only one in the world. That's really it. 	
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I'm definitely not saying that I want unique quests for everyone. I simply want quests in an MMO to make me feel like I'm apart of something bigger than me, instead of making me feel like I'm the only one in the world. That's really it. 
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Even the group content is fundamentally repetitive. Individual content repeats across characters, group content repeats in time.
 
The core problem is that it's a theme park. In the original days, you would have had a person, a game master, deciding how the world reacted around your individual or group actions; but that's not feasible in a massively multiplayer world. Imagine the cost to hire and coordinate a small army of game masters so that every individual or small group playing in the world had one watching over them, making NPCs react and forming a story.
 
In a few worlds, the intro story and even other solo and group content has a few variants and branches, and this helps, but it doesn't go very far. It's hard to write; it's hard to debug, and players burn through it and then complain they're out of story anyhow.
 
The alternative would be to have the game world automatically be fully dynamic; with some sort of advanced procedural story generation. But that's simply beyond the state of the art for now. Although, there's been some advances that are promising, I'm not expecting anything industry-changing soon.	
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			It's done to make it more engaging, in practice. It's much more difficult to make an engaging storyline when you play a wall flower, even if it'd be much more appropriate in an mmo environment.	
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During the time I leveled on the Dominion side, there was a feeling similar to what you'd describe. Although the player seems to be nearly as important as on the Exile side, alot of Chua quest givers don't give a damn about who you are and once the quests are done they'll leave you with a "GOODBYE! Good luck. Good riddance...", and you'll be like "Yeah, yeah... jerk." And it makes you feel that you're one amongst ALOT who may have been hired by this one Chua quest giver.
 
Agent Lex has a nearly similar behavior, even despite being a great help for him, you tend to feel that if you didn't stand up for the task he'd have easily found someone else for it. It actually derivated from the usual "You sir are our best asset".	
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Personally I have been waiting for an MMO besides Eve that doesn't make the you ZOMG SAVIOR OFTHE UNIVERSE, or Companion of the Savior of the universe.
 
Why can I be the local drunk, or theif, bandit, Blacksmith, town Guard, bob dole, Harlot, Stripper, Political activist, miner, bald guy, Perfect Hair Forever guy, or something along those lines.	
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and then you move on, but nothing in that zone changes actually.
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