I decided to take a break from listing MMORPGs' flaws to instead talk about some of the things they've gotten right.

Player Cities in Star Wars Galaxies - What better way to avoid the stale feeling of an NPC city, than allowing players to create their own?

On to flaw #2

Lifeless NPCs - Most NPCs in MMORPGs can be accurately described as "sign posts".  They are stationary, dispense the same information to anyone, and pretty much only serve to point you where to go next.

• Catering to thousands of players - an MMO has to consider every player, and how each of those players experience the content of the game.  Players can log on at any hour, during any day, and could be anywhere from level 1 to max level.  So how can our NPC "Joe Questgiver" do anything but stand still for all eternity?  If he ever goes to work or sleep, someone may not be able to find him when they need him.  This would lead to frustration on the part of the player, which is not something you want to happen to someone you're asking for $15 every month.
• Resource and programming limitations - The fact that MMORPGs are such large worlds means there is also a large number of NPCs to populate that world.  Programming different scripted actions or AI for hundreds or thousands of NPCs would be a huge task.  So would giving each NPC unique dialogue based on the interacting player's race, faction, or accomplishments.  It would just be incredibly complicated.  Age of Conan did a respectable job of giving every NPC a unique voice (at least everyone I talked to).  It made you actually want to listen to what they say, as opposed to an NPC in WoW, where you skip over everything he says just to read what the quest objective is and get going.  However, AoC also requires about 25 GB of storage, which I'm sure consists largely of audio files.

Note to reader:  This post is really my opinion, but is intended to open up discussion, so please share your thoughts in comments.

Love 'em or hate 'em, MMORPGs are here to stay.  With the carrot-on-a-stick that is Activision Blizzard's monthly income from World of Warcraft subscribers, there will always be some developer/publisher out there looking to get a slice of the pie.  Personally, I'm a sucker for MMORPGs.  But even those who drop $15 a month for these games can agree that there are plenty of flaws.  But are they inherent to the genre, or has the development community just not figured out how to fix them yet?  Before we dive into that, let me first list some games that I've played for some street cred.

• City of Heroes (played a character into the 20's)
• Lineage II (played a character into the teens)
• Star Wars Galaxies (mastered many professions on a few characters, reached Jedi on one)
• World of Warcraft (played from beta to now with a short break before Burning Crusade, have one level 70 doing raid progression)
• Age of Conan (played to about level 11, cancelled account because I enjoyed WoW more)
• Tried a few more briefly, but not really worth mentioning.

• Instant teleportation - This is by far the fastest and easiest form of travel, whether it's clicking where you want to go on the map in Guild Wars, or using your hearthstone in WoW.  However, the instant teleport is also accused of taking away that sense of a huge epic world (just listen to Yahtzee (NSFW)).  If you can instantly switch to any area at any time, the game world is really more like a series of levels than a big connected world.  WoW tries to balance this by allowing instant travel only occasionally (though some classes can do so more than others).  But if you've ever played WoW, you know that much of your time is still spent on a gryphon, hippogryph, or bat.  Which brings us to public transportation.
• Public transportation - Many games employ a mode of public transportation; a type of fast-travel accessible by anyone in the game.  Some examples are WoW's flight paths and boats, SWG's shuttles, or CoH's monorail type train.  The pros of this type of travel is that it fits nicely with the game's "reality".  For example, in Star Wars you never see someone instantly transport, so do to so in the game would break that game universe's "reality".  It also serves to quicken your travel without losing that huge epic world feeling.  In fact, it may enhance that feeling.  While riding a gryphon cross country in WoW, you can look out into the distance and take in the view.  You may even notice things you hadn't before, like some ruins or the skeleton of a long-dead giant.  The con of this type of travel is that it still requires waiting, whether you're waiting for the shuttle to come in SWG (I think they reduced the wait time since I last played), or you're riding a gryphon for the thousandth time, and you could care less about the scenery.
• Mounts and other speed buffs - The last form of speedy travel (that comes to mind, anyway) is the mount or other speed buffs.  These types of travel keep the sense of a huge world, and they also keep the player in control of their character, so they're not quite as boring as an automated public transport.  The downside is that they are usually the slowest form of "fast travel", and you often still have to worry about being attacked by mobs or other players that can end your travel plans quickly.  The ability to mount, though, is usually restricted to higher level characters and/or people with enough money to buy them.  This means you're new character is still going to be hoofin it for foreseable future.  The best form of this travel that I've seen has to be the travel powers in City of Heroes.  Flying just felt cool.