MMOs and Heroes

[This is a modified comment I made on Tobolds blog]

We all agree that heroes are limited in number by definition.

This applies to everything humans do. If every guy jumped into a burning house to safe the children, the one who got the water to safe the houses in the neighborhood were the hero.

Humans value almost everything that is rare. (If it doesn't harm them). Even if it is something utterly useless, like gold in nowadays real life.

MMOs and all social activities allow you to gain respect from other people within a limited group.
Single shard games, like EVE, can also add a sense of a large community. That is not unsimilar to one-shard battlegrounds in WoW a long time ago, just more massive and thus potentially more meaningful.

One difference between EVE and other MMOs is that in EVE the stories that are told are smart and credible. While the stories that other MMOs tell are catered to 8-year olds.

Why did we build a colloseum in Northrend?? Why did NPCs capture terribly powerful 'boss mobs' in Northend, brought them to the colloseum to have us test ourselves? Isn't that a little bit inappropiate allocation of rescouces? Weren't we there for the Lich King? Didn't we have a limited amount of time? If they really, really thought they'd need this colloseum, why didn't they build it in the old world? Probably a lot easier in the absence of the Lich King and his minions...

Why does the LK teleport to the Colloseum right into the center of all his joined enemies? Why doesn't anybody try to kill him the second he is there? How credible is it that this colloseum is built on top of Anub'araks cave? Didn't we kill Anub'arak before in some heroic? Why doesn't the Lich King do something about this flying city right next to his citadell for months ? What did he actually do at all exept for waiting for us to kill him? .... And then Blizzard actually stopped caring about story altogether: Onyxia.

On the other hand, there are stories in WoW that I write myself: My guild, my raids, my BGs, my arena team: These stories are credible, they are meaningful, powerful. They are what we actually enjoy in MMOs.

In EVE the 'official' story is consistent with these stories, in WoW it is not.