What makes a MMO an MMO and how does SW:TOR stack up in this regard?

I can tell why SWTOR is not an MMO. First, do you play on one of the handful of full servers? If so, then it generally is an MMO. There is no OWPVP, but that is a different issue. The problem is that the terrible server management and the game engine itself do not allow any substantial number of players to interact at the same time. I played a lot of LOTRO. It never, never, was as dead as the typical SWTOR plant. I dont think I ever was in a region in LOTRO where I was the only person. Typically there would be a half dozen people within viewing range. In LOTRO you could get twenty people in the screen and not have freezes. Then at each major destination point you nearly always had five or more people within a few seconds of movement space. This was after a year of play. And it was the same the entire year since I started playing it in closed beta. Now, having been on Tera since beta, we still have many people playing in almost every area. You NEVER, in either LOTRO or Tera, can move at full speed for twenty minutes and not see a single other player. That is common in SWTOR. Understand now?

SWTOR is an MMO by definition - the things that people argue are created by the population not the design of the game (like the afore mentioned community or world PVP - those are based on how people play the game not the game itself. The game can move them one way or the other but it is not the deciding factor).

Other people say that it's a single player game b/c it has a story in which that is centered on the player. Again, by definition, that doesn't matter. MMO means Massively Multiplayer Online - the only part that is open of interpretation is "massively" which essentially means that it is capable of supporting hundreds/thousands which SWTOR does.

Again, the issue is not whether it is "capable" of supporting hundreds of people, it is whether it actually does. And the game engine, btw, is probably the worst I have seen at supporting many people in the same area at the same time.

I've read many people say that SW:TOR is not an MMO but an online single player game or a co-op game but I don't really see any reasons as to why it isn't an MMO so I'd like to find out what makes an MMO an MMO for you guys and why SW:TOR is lacking these areas.

I personally don't really see much difference between TOR and say LotRO, EQ2 and WoW especially as its in its infancy and those games have had time to add lots of features that we take granted these days. Now I accept the arguement that even those games I've mentioned don't really stack up compared to older MMO's like Asherons Call, DAOC and EQ but they also were not perfect and really just put players in a world and had them grind their tails off, so I'm a little perplexed by this SW:TOR is not an MMO but I'm always willing to be proved wrong and re-educated.

There is also no doubt that on the majority of SWTOR servers today, it is not, in fact, an MMO, because it fails at delivering that first "M".

One of the things that I do believe makes an MMO is community, something TOR is terribly lacking and the other newer MMOs such as WoW, EQ2, and the like also seem to have done away with.

Community isn't just a mob of disorganized individuals worrying about themselves and no one else, with the occasional raid. Community is a collective of many people with a clear focus. In the original EQ, this was simply for the sake of leveling as you couldn't even get anywhere unless you grouped. In the olden days of WoW, this was heavily emphasized with PVP matches (Remember Alterac Valley matches that lasted 2 days and were made up of only people on a single server).

In SWG, it was a community with the entire socio-economic structure of the game. Cantinas were places to go for socializing after running spin groups. In that game you could not go anywhere, touch any item, or perform any activity without another player being involved in it somewhere.

Over time, though, the community emphasis has shifted to that of the singular individual, with games like WoW altering their entire structure over time to accommodate it. Instant gratification has become the norm, and TOR holds to that ideal even more so with a very solo-centric storyline that further separates people from each other.

The problem is that it isn't easily fixed. This is the new reality of online gaming.