I suppose its my own personal issues with the game.
I used to feel like this particular MMO was something very special and represented sometimes a very interesting sort of 'interactive fiction' where things that we did with other players and the NPCs affected the world of the game and the 'story,' and the people who made the game, who wrote the PF stories, were really interested in the lore and there was sort of a respect and back-and-forth with us the subscribers. The 'story' seemed very important to the overall game, and was given focus and time and attention by the powers-that-be behind the curtain. Each expansion was a lore event, things happened, the plot moved, it was one of the more public and visible parts of the game. The lore sort of oozed out of every pore of the game, it was rich and it's probably what sucked in most of us here on this forum.
While it was never this thing where the players drove the story on their own all the time, we were given a PF bone pretty often and allowed to interact with the fiction. Things happened often in the PF, and it was all most of us needed to have something 'concrete' to bounce our own stories off of. "x faction did this and said this and this thing happened" and then us nerds would go off and fight about it or debate about it, or sometimes effect it.
For a variety of reasons those days are over, and I'm having to do a lot of reflection lately on continuing to pour my time into a game where the people making the game don't seem to have any of the same interests in my area of interest any more. It's not that what they are doing is bad (although some expansions are hard to defend), they can take their IP and move it anywhere they like. It's weather it is a time investment that's worth it for me moving forward.
I'm failing at not trying to sound butthurt (heh), but my point is I used to feel like the game I was paying for, a lot of the people making the game had a lot of the same interests as me the player. Lately I don't feel the same way, do any of you feel similar?