Personally, I enjoy your site immensely, but my response here may seem a bit critical. Its meant constructively of course. Just a caveat before reading....
I find your definition of MMO a little constricting. In reality, looking at the acronym, nothing can be inferred about the qualities or features of an "MMO" other than it has a large scale of players and is online. It speaks to nothing about how your game play experience is presented. Character progression (see Borderlands section) and persistence are non-factors. I think the media definition for these games is often wrong. For instance trying to relabel RPG character progression as MMO character progression is a fallacy. Perhaps the only reason for this oft made mistake is the fact that the earliest of these MMOs were RPGs. Having been around this genre since its earlier days (1997 with UO), you never saw anyone doing anything but RPGs. I do not think that is good reason to start constricting the definition of what an MMO is. RPGs were just a very easy integration into this type of game. Now I'm not trying to convince anyone here that halo or any old game with a matchmaking service is an MMO, but I can't fault anyone for thinking in as broad a terms as those.
To me, MMO is perhaps the wrong marketing term to describe these kinds of games, at least from the perspective of persistence. Back in the day, another term we used to describe these games was PSW or persistent state world. Now that term obviously talks to persistence. To me it is a more apt term that you can more legitimately infer things about. I.E. its a persistent state WORLD, and a world has lots of people, so right there you can infer it is something having alot of people on it. Overall I think its just hard to label things and I just want you all to think a little more carefully when trying to pin down exactly what an MMO is. Personally, I think the term MMO now is being used to describe any game or service that enables you to connect to a large and diverse set of gamers to play a particular game, and honestly I am ok with that definition. It is a different approach than the old stick 1k people on a server and let them figure everything out on their. Not saying that that model is outdated either, because that kind of sandbox game is one of my personal preferences....
At the end of the day though, why is this even important? Even in a "true" MMO (in the traditional sense) like WOW, yes you have a "persistent" world with "massive" amounts of players. But the majority of that world is barely used or seen due to the ease of travel (teleports, portals etc), and common points of focus (Ironforge or whatever the popular new gathering place city with Lichking was). There is alot of hardware out there supporting a world where the only thing enjoying it is the AI of the monsters running around out there. Not to mention the fact that in reality the world is self is very static and unchanging. Not to mention the fact that you don't do anything with anymore than 5, 10 or 25 people anyways.... so really, the fact that i can run around in this huge, unused world with a thousand people that I cant truly interact with to do anything worthwhile... well it just makes me think that the definition of what an MMO is unimportant. Having fun in whatever the game creators offer you is what is important =)
Is it Getting Harder to Define What Makes an MMO?
Today's market is bursting at the seams with games riding the coattails of the MMO craze. As the success of games like World of Warcraft rose, publishers ran wild with the "MMO" tag, persistent world or not.
When we reported EA's unveiling of its Need For Speed World racing-sim MMO in London earlier this week, the news received little fanfare from our readers, and they weren't alone. Most MMO fans weren't exactly frothing at the mouth in anticipation of a new "massively-multiplayer online racing game," with the exception of Need For Speed's established community and the usual racing-sim fans. We're not specifically picking on Need For Speed World here; it's just another sign of the times. The unrelenting emergence of online multiplayer games branded as MMOs has watered-down the market. Today's new MMO announcements (which surface weekly) just don't carry the weight they once did, even those with relatively-unique gameplay based outside the usual RPG fantasy and sci-fi genres.
One problem is that today's market is bursting at the seams with games that tried to ride the coattails of the MMO craze. As the success of games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft rose, video game publishers ran wild with the "MMO" tag, often branding it on multiplayer games that don't even feature a persistent world. Today, the line that actually defines an MMO has become blurrier than ever. However, a lot of video games that teeter on that line have benefited from the influence of "traditional" MMOs. The first-person shooter and real-time strategy genres, for example, are taking cues from the progression-based gameplay and social/co-op aspects of MMOs that made them famous.
A few years ago, defining the elements that constitute an MMO was an easier task. The answer was in the acronym, after all…a "massively-multiplayer online" game. Back in the Ultima Online and EverQuest era of PC gaming, there was an obvious distinction between several hundred players gathering online in a "virtual world" and a handful of friends connecting to a private server to play a FPS or RTS game.
Things started to change when consoles like the Xbox and Playstation2 plugged into the Internet; by definition alone, shouldn't something like Halo 2 be considered a "massively-multiplayer online" game? That's why the "persistent world" factor became particularly important to distinguish MMOs. The term was coined in the early days to describe the ever-present "virtual world" of MMOs that persists despite the relativity of a single player, or a small group of players—unlike the transient environments and "worlds" created in most online multiplayer games.
Eventually, this would be the "litmus test" that most media and fan communities would use to determine if a game could be called an MMO. The genre certainly wasn't limited to MMORPGs; plenty of old sci-fi and shooter games like PlanetSide and Jumpgate were considered true MMOs, which gave rise to all the suffix acronyms we use today, like "MMOFPS" and "MMORTS." But unless the game featured a persistent world, the task of labeling it as an MMO was fairly black-and-white.
Recently though, the stark boundaries that separated MMOs from the rest have become a little fuzzy. Games like EA's Battlefield Heroes or Riot Games' League of Legends forced the mainstream gaming media to reevaluate its definition of MMOs, at least in terms of news coverage. When considering whether to devote coverage to a particular game, we at ZAM have entertained more debates about these issues throughout the past year than ever before (and we're confident in guessing that most other MMO media outlets have as well).
In the case of Battlefield Heroes, for example, we decided to run a beta-preview of the game even though it isn't technically an MMO. It was hyped as an online shooter with "MMO influences" because of its character progression and gear itemization mechanics. It's also a free-to-play and highly-accessible Web-based game (via a browser plug-in, à la Free Realms), but there's no actual "persistent world" to speak of.
Much of the same is true for DotA-style games like League of Legends and our recently-previewed Heroes of Newerth; gameplay is "match-based" but includes what many gamers would consider "MMO-esque" elements like leveling and character progression, persistent gear or item rewards and more. They don't technically qualify as "true" MMOs, but games like these lift some of the most-appealing aspects of the gameplay that MMO fans enjoy.
The result is a middle-ground genre that, in many ways, parallels the success of the burgeoning "social gaming" medium. In fact, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the growing similarities between online social gaming and MMOs, which we detailed in an earlier editorial. The distinction between MMOs and social games like Farmville is still an "easy call" for most gamers, and aside from the occasional spoof, we don't cover this genre…but we're still keeping a close eye on the impact that social networking is having on MMOs, which is proving to be substantial.