[quote=@PPQ Purple]MMOs exist as a venue for socialization. That is their literal selling point. Like taverns and conventions they exist to create a fandom and than maintain it for the members to facilitate socialization. In fact I would go so far as to say with some confidence that the vast majority of the hundreds of people I hung out with during that period of my life realistically couldn't have actually cared less about the game as such other than the fact that it was the thing we all used to hang out in and do stuff together. 
[/quote]

Sure.

But saying

[quote=@PPQ Purple]
Basically a good MMO is fundamentally not a game you are supposed to have fun with but something that's meant to facilitate social interaction. 
[/quote]
 
is asinine.

The best MMO's are both something you fundamentally have fun with and facilitate social interaction. They're not mutually exclusive concepts. Upping one doesn't reduce the other.

I would even argue that the more fun an MMO is on a fundamental level, the more people will be drawn to interact socially on it. Why? Because that MMO will be recommended to friends, who will in turn naturally fall into socializing, so having even more people actively running around and engaging with the game's content.

Fun, inherently, incentivizes social interaction, because if you're passionate about something, you're going to want to talk about it.

If I play an obscure videogame for its own merits, I don't need to talk to anyone about it. That doesn't make me any less happy when I find someone who also has played it, but the fact of the matter is I didn't need to have met them in order to have had fun. In the same way, if you fundamentally have fun in an MMO, then meet someone by chance who hits you up for a conversation and you become friends, the MMO has done its job.

Friends got me into XIV, friends that are far more social than I, but if XIV wasn't a good videogame then they couldn't have gotten me into it. Now I'm an active part of the Free Company they're in, and while I'm still easily the most distant person there, the mere fact of the matter is that if the game hadn't kept me playing on its own merits, I wouldn't be there [i]at all[/i].

If you want a chatroom, go to a forum. Like where we are now. MMO's are still videogames and need to use every trick in that book in order to be competent ones.