I've played numerous MMO's over the years, and for the most part never really thought much about ideas for stories from them. However, at one point or another, I did try to develop some "storylines" within them to make the game more interesting either for myself, or other people. Some hit and miss with that though.
Kind of a long post, so bear with me please
In UO (Ultima Online), they had some world events where monsters would spawn in the town (and prevented guards from spawning so they wouldn't auto-kill the monsters). I would lead guild members into the towns in an attempt to "liberate" it from the monsters. While we never could successfully do that (the monsters would respawn shortly after we killed them), many people found it kind of fun, and added some fun to the event in what otherwise would've been seen as an annoyance.
In another guild-related event (which I talked over and got approval by the guild master), I had him dress up as a monster, in which I'd kill him then run off into a dungeon. The idea was to have the guild come and try to defeat the people in the dungeon, with me as the "boss" (my "minions", aka guildies who decided to play the "bad guy" part were quickly overwhelmed). Boy were some guild members mad at me for "killing" our leader, at least until the end when the guild master fessed up and told them that we had in fact planned this event, at which time they thought it was kind of fun.
In DAOC (Dark Age of Camelot), there was less room to make up events like that, but it was still fun taking part in defending your lands with other people from your realm. Before it became really bad (the "turning point" being the TOA, or Trials of Atlantis, expansion pack), it used to be very fun defending your land's keeps from enemy players, where battles of 100 vs. 100 people weren't uncommon. Since there were 3 sides in this game, sometimes the third realm would come either to interfere, or perhaps assist, in taking keeps. I never got to develop any good "storyline" for this game though, because of the limited game mechanics, although at times it was fun fighting against other players (when you weren't ridiculously outnumbered anyway).
In WOW (World of Warcraft), it has some interesting backstory, but ultimately like DAOC, the gameplay mechanics don't let you do too much. While it is pretty fun leveling, once you reach the max level (70 as of this post), it largely boils down to players just grinding (running through) the same dungeons over and over to get gear, and although some areas have interesting storylines, you never really get to appreciate it, either because it's so hard to reach, or you just don't have the time to absorb the story.
For example, there is a dungeon known as "The Battle for Mount Hyjal". If you've played Warcraft 3 to the end, you'll recognize this, because it's the very last stage in the game, in which 3 races ally in an attempt to stop the bad guys, known as the Burning Legion, from destroying their planet and taking over and enslaving everyone there.
In this dungeon, you get to take part in this battle, because the storyline is that there's this radical group that's attempting to alter the past (in this case, the outcome of that battle), and it's up to you and your allies to stop them and ensure the outcome still makes the Burning Legion lose.
While the background story sounds really good, and probably makes you want to get to that dungeon so you can take part in it, the requirements (called "attunement") in order to get there are very steep, so much so that only the most hardcore of gamers would be able to reach that dungeon (seriously, you have to do about 20 other things, all of which take a lot of time and patience, and then you'll need 25 other people who are also "attuned" in order to participate in that).
As a result, it turns out to be something that many players will never get to see. And it's such a shame really, because a lot of their other content is really good, and even the storyline makes this dungeon interesting, if one ever manages to reach that stage.
I'm not bashing these games so much as pointing out that they sometimes have a lot of potential, but then because of various other factors, end up falling short of what the developers envisioned.
And what this means for me is that I start to focus less on the stories and ideas that the designers no doubt worked hard on. Ultimately, instead of seeing a really cool dungeon or quest where I have to stop the bad guys or else they'll cause some really bad things to occur, it turns into a "grind-fest" where I don't care about the story, I just want "phat-loot". And this in turn limits the "creativity" I'd otherwise try to develop.
I do sometimes get inspired by some of the storylines in the games, but again, a lot of it falls flat after seeing that getting there will take a lot of time (I don't mind working for my rewards, but a lot of the steps needed require you to almost play the game as if it were a 2nd job, requiring you to spend like 3-6 hours a night on the game, which is hard if you have a life or family). And no matter what I do, I can't save the world or anything. Well, I sorta do, but then so does the next person who rescues that prisoner, or stops the evil bad guy from achieving his plans lol. Unfortunately that's the nature of MMO's though, so I can live with it, but sometimes they do have interesting stuff.
That's not to say that there hasn't been stuff that inspired me however. There was an event that took place where every player was encouraged to take part. I forget what it was called exactly, but it involved gathering supplies for the NPC's (non-player characters), so that they could have materials they'd need to stop an invasion of powerful creatures from a place known as AQ, or Ahn'Quiraj. The event took place for several weeks while players gathered the materials needed, and once that happened, then powerful monsters did indeed emerge, and players did what they could to fight off the monsters (as well as the armies of NPC soldiers).
What this "story" boiled down to was a new dungeon opening up, but the storyline behind it, and the amount of player participation it required, rivaled what I've seen in some books and movies, except I got to take part in it. And because the materials were readily available for me to gather, I felt like I was "doing my part" in helping out.
It's just a shame that the dungeon itself was quite hard for people who didn't have the appropiate gear (from running other dungeons), and the items from the new lands in the Burning Crusade expansion pack made all the old world items obsolete (and therefore, pointless to acquire for most people), but again, that's the nature of MMO's.
So I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes you can get some interesting ideas from an MMO, and you can also attempt to create your own ideas in the game as well to add some fun, but ultimately it's hard to create ideas from them because they change all the time, or because you can't really do much because of the limitations of the system.
