Constantly escalating stakes

anemo

So what do you all think about the current story pattern that MMO devs have fallen into with constantly escalating stakes?

Essentially taking something like FFXIV:  You start as a homeless vagrant, deal with some tribal issues (in a group that's made to monitor the tribes), followed by ending up an empire's most wanted, to being one of the lead figures of the resistance, to successfully freeing a country, and similar.   With a side/weaving plots of "a country is at risk" by primals, followed by "world ending" by older primals, and leading up to "multiversal ending" by the two oldest primals. 

WoW also has lots of escalation as well from the cut scenes I've seen.  

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Personally I've noticed in the CC thread that it's probably one of the major reason why Enchanter/Mesmer style classes were taken away.   Since you can't have a class that weakens that escalated boss even a little bit, because if one person could weaken that world ending escalated threat it's obviously not as big as the story declares.    It's a little sad to see an entire playstyle eliminated, at least in my opinion.

Likewise it takes a lot of effort to make "something big" actually feel big, along with needing a lot of  lead up to emphasize the threat and give players a logical reason why they have a chance.    Which means developers are forced to only work on/explore that one story each expansion     I'm rather fond of Runescape's quest system where you have many loosely connected quests, and personally think it's one of the better games for quests for that reason (even if I wouldn't even bother to load the game up now days).   Or EVE's style where "there are things happening", and you're important enough to know things are along with having the ability to figure it out before the news (even if EVE has been squandered by the developer).   Basically both EVE's and Runescape's method of having a changing world/narrative feels so much more natural in an MMORPG, especially for the RPG part where there will be somethings you just won't care about.   While those linear escalated quests eventually lead to silliness like this

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DzUK3q2yAM  which is very unRPG like.