Players, players everywhere, and not much reason to group?

Ethec has some ideas on how to put the "MM" back in MMORPG! "Casual" was a stride forward for the genre, he contends (note the newstastic use of third-person for quasi-objectivity!) but does casual necessarily exclude much the old school fun we used to have with guilds, groups, raids... the game's player community?

I’d like to see a game offer a fixed development scheme; i.e. players would automatically advance, say, one level every week. Take the bulk of the achiever-impetus out of the game, and see if people will huddle together into groups and treat the game more like a social adventure. The technical demands would be huge, but how cool would it be to see hundreds of lowbies zerg a dragon as in some fantasy battle of yore.

Check out Massively Single Player, this week's editorial right here at TenTonHammer Main!