There were way too many acronyms in that post to make sense out of easily. And I also noticed a distinct lack of punctuation and proper capitalization. Far be it from me to wear the badge of the grammar police, but that post was extremely hard to wade through, Wtcq. Now, to bring this topic back to where I assume it was meant to be leading, the MMO (Or Massive Multiplayer Online) genre has taken a pretty strong foothold in peoples' daily gaming, because it offers an aspect that other genres don't - the ability to play in a world populated not by computer-generated NPCs, but by other people.
Now, this can lead to problems as well. I've always found that the MMO experience is usually very 'sullied', you might say, due to the fact that I'm surrounded by other people. If I want to play a 'role playing game', I assume that I'm going to be assuming some sort of 'role' beyond that of 'the guy who plays the night elf rogue'. Unfortunately, interaction with other people tends to be that of an 'out of character' nature. RP-based games, and even "RP only" servers on MMOs usually even only manage to keep up the facade to a certain extent.
I personally don't like to play MMOs because I never can get immersed enough in the plot to enjoy them. I hear a lot of people trying to convince me that you can take an 'active role' and 'follow the storyline', but when all is said and done, the game only moves forward when the programmers move it forward - until then, the entire point of the game is to advance your character to the maximum possible level the game allows, then group with other maxed-out characters in order to fight against extremely difficult enemies, ad nauseum. It's become much more streamlined, and I applaud the effort put into these quests by the games' developers (I did spend a good bit of time playing World of Warcraft a year ago), but ultimately the problem with them is that they lack an ultimate goal.
My biggest complaint with MMO games is the very thing that they'll never be able to overcome - the fact that there's no way to win the game. If you become the highest level, explore every inch of the map and defeat every enemy there is to defeat, the game just continues to go on, because it is necessary for the game to accomodate all players. There's really no way to finish the game, and hell - if you could actually finish in a MMO, you'd probably stop playing, and the developers would slowly lose revenue. Hence, the biggest gripe I have about them is their very raison d'etre.
Now, I beg to differ about the thought that MMOs don't contain adventure elements. As I'd said before, they do have a fair attempt, depending on the game, at a cohesive plot, and there're no small number of puzzles you have to work out. It's granted that the puzzles themselves are much easier to work out than, say, a puzzle in The Dig, or even The Longest Journey for that matter, but aside from the fact that the way they are forced to deliver a good number of puzzles is limited, they still have just as many 'adventure' elements as they generally do 'real time strategy' or 'role playing' (a misnomer in and of itself).
I don't honestly think that the game world is leading to exclusively console and MMO games - it's very likely that the largest portion of gaming is going to be leaning in those directions, but there'll always be a market for single-player games on the PC, I think. At some point, people are bound to want the simplicity of an adventure game or platformer, which doesn't involve spawn points or 'mobs'.
And on the topic of cost - if you don't want to pay money for an MMO, play one that doesn't have a monthly fee, like Guild Wars.
