Is it possible to have paid staff to play NPC's in Mmorpgs?

After reviewing how many player subscriptions are secured in Wow, 5 MILL+. I was thinking how much money that generates for the company in a subscription basis and not even thinking about the original game purchace... it is mega money.
 
I recently played Star trek online, I have to say I was severely dissapointed. One of the first things I did in game after playing the tutorial was travel to Deep Space 9.. I wanted to check out Quarks Bar, as I thought that would probibly be one of the places to hang out in the Star trek Universe. I saw that alot of people in game were thinking the same as me and were doing the same... I was very dissapointed, the bar was a shambles of static NPC with nothing to say.. there was no atmosphere, nothing to do. Infact all of deep space 9 was an empty shell.
 
I started thinking to myself... if companies that generate much lower profits can use operatives on call centres to phone up and represent the company call after call.. why couldn't an mmporg pay a member of staff a wage to play as an NPC and interact using chat?
 
If say in STO Quark was played by a person or people with good startrek knowledge that the Bar would be an entirely different place with a decent atmosphere. The member(s) of staff could even be responsible for making Quarks bar interesting by using the ingame engine to create/request dynamic content/ minigames.. to make real focal points in MMORPG's... Ok in a heavily instanced environment this would be highly improbable.. but say if deep space 9 was reduced to 1 instance.. it could of been a very exciting game.
 
With the budgets that these companies have... and subscription that they recieve monthly, I think it's about time that we had real role played NPC that operate as a bar manager should by shaping the engine to accomodate dynamic changes to focal points ingame. in some of these online games, instead of a single line of text when you communicate with important characters.. this would be awesome!

This is basically what The Matrix Online did on an almost nightly basis for the first 3-4 months of its launch. Live actors playing the roles of the main characters of the series to interact with the best factions (not even the highest ranking or most powerful factions on the servers) in order to create live events and quests. 
 
And yes, it was awesome.

How Matrix Online did it makes sense, but if an NPC was needed to complete something I wouldn't want to have to wait for that guy to pay attention to me. If STO had Enterprise flying around and helping out randomly, that would be pretty neat. I want Patrick Stewart to be the guy playing that ship though.

that would be pretty cool to have people doing that. a person would have to wait if the NPC was doing something. it would take a while to get use to that. the company would have to pay a person to do that all night and day.

That's actually not a bad idea.  I think they'd need to make sure their financial model could sustain that, but I don't see why they couldn't have a few, at least.  I know promotional reality games will sometimes hire people who interact with people on a more personal level than a computer would, and it really makes those games engaging.  I can think of some social issues that might crop up, but it might make things more interesting.
 
But if it's not on a role-playing server, though, I wonder if they'd more often than not be targets for harassment.  Imagine a virtual Disneyland where the consequences for pushing Donald Duck down the stairs were basically nil...

MxO did it great, RIP

For things like quest goals and recieving rewards, etc, you'd obviously still need to have computer controlled NPC's.  But I do like the idea of having human ones that could perhaps add a human touch and a bit of atmosphere to some areas..  The Deep Space Nine example was perfect, in the game it does feel like an utterly lifeless shell.  Add a few employee's that do nothing but go around here to liven things up a little and it could really turn the place around.
 
Gaile Gray, the old community manager for Guild Wars would occasionally log on and arrange little parties in the towns while she was there, and everyone seemed to react really well to her.  The difference she made by being there was pretty amazing, especially for something like GW where the towns tend to feel pretty isolated and lonely a lot of the time. 

" ultima online had people who played as the NPCs. such as Lord British. they used to lead hundreds of us to do crazy quests. "

I think they'd seem more like another player than a real character.  A lot of people in MMOs already do that role playing thing like a full time job.  I'd prefer to just read some text, with "Kill 10 pigs" in bold at the bottom.

maybe profit margins and making shareholders happy is more important, perhaps a monetary system does not allow for great products with characters or anyother ingame employed roles.
 
Even if once a week I saw Thrall walking around orgrimmer and commenting on peoples achievements gear.. that would be great :P

I think Everquest you had GM's that would take control of world bosses and fight against players.   But they stopped doing it because costs are pretty high to pay someone to control an NPC across all the servers they had.

" This is basically what The Matrix Online did on an almost nightly basis for the first 3-4 months of its launch. Live actors playing the roles of the main characters of the series to interact with the best factions (not even the highest ranking or most powerful factions on the servers) in order to create live events and quests.   And yes, it was awesome. "

if they can they aren't Non Player Characters now are they?