It's a good article and it would be great if people realised that this is all the case, but it falls down on two points:

First, while our characters are (usually) not the centres of the the universe on a world-wide scale, they can be the locally, and some people will strive very much to become that, often to the detriment of a lot of other people. Because the local plot is nothing to do with Blizzard, there's little reason to deny these folks the limelight, and they possibly generate a lot of roleplay doing it, but constantly hogging the limelight in their city doesn't usually make for great roleplay.

Second, MMO roleplay has little to do with PnP roleplay and a lot more to do with Live RP. For starters, instead of 4-8 friends gathered around a table, you have hundreds of people of very variable skill all wishing they could be centre of attention. In LRP, some people WILL get most of the power, be the ones everyone defers to, and often have the ego to go with it. Much the same kind of thing seems to happen when you have free-form roleplay in an MMO, the only difference being that it's far easier to just totally ignore the rules and lore in an MMO.

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