Quote Originally Posted by shadowfox View Post
An MMO essentially requires two major things to be considered an MMO:

1. It should support a large number of players simultaneously within a single world and
2. It should feature a story-driven persistent world ie - the state of the game still keeps changing regardless of whether you are online or not.

In the case of Dota (and many other multi-player games), people connect to a server for the purposes of matchmaking - they do not all play on the same server. What's the max per map - 10 or 12? Not really massive. If you use that definition, any game with a couple of people on the same map would qualify.

And what happens when the game is closed? Does the world continue moving forward? No - the map/instance is essentially destroyed when the game ends, and refreshed when a new game starts. There is essentially no passage of time.

Bodhi was basically correct - the title of that report (I'm not singling out MyG here - but the authors of the original report rather) should have been top online games of whatever year.
I just happen to disagree. I think the fact that everyone logs into a single server and can chat with one another before a match in Dota COULD be why its being considered. I personally don't think the persistent world has anything to do with if its an MMO or not. Just many happen to have a persistent world.

From wiki "A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO and MMOG) is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting large numbers of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet.[1] MMOs usually have at least one persistent world, however some games differ."
For me Dota technically covers that. for you, I guess not. But I honestly think this is a dumb debate, since I don't think anyone really cares. It's just a label, it's not the reason someone is going to like or not like a game.