I think the global stat ledgers and unified multiplier progression paths lend themselves to qualities normally associated with other "massive" games. True, the maps are limited in player size, but the feeling that there is a huge world of individual characters of varying class/strength/expertise that you may randomly encounter is pretty similar. It's like WoW battelegrounds/instanced dungeons minus the persistent world.
C'mon that's just silly. The "massive" part of an MMO is kind of an important attribute and ~20 players is about as non-massive as you can get. Quake in 1996 supported 16 players and there were leaderboards and ladders. It's not an MMO and neither is COD.
In practice you don't interact with more than a few dozen players when playing an MMO. Many of the most popular MMOs like WoW and Star Wars:TOR shove their best content into instanced zones styled in a format similar to many multiplayer FPS titles with similar player limits per instance. The core of MMO gameplay comes down to "RPG" style character progression that gives players a sense of complex and gradual character growth that is on display for other players in the community. The same is true of CoD and Battlefield, except there is only instanced content and no out-world. You might argue that games like EVE, where most of the content is non-instanced, are the only true MMOs, but the most popular "MMO" of all time has maximum player limit of 25 on 99% of the game's bosses, and similar limits in the PvP battlegrounds and arenas.
Quake in 1996 supported 16 players and there were leaderboards and ladders
If you're comparing the multiplayer experience of CoD and BF to Quake I have to wonder if you've ever played those titles. They aren't simply "leaderboards", they are detailed character RPGs that take a lot of grinding and deliberation over gear, just like an MMO, and that is what makes them stand out as blockbusters compared to other FPS games in the genre - your high level CoD character is on display to potentially any other player that participates in the CoD community, Quake leaderboards were just a list of kills, no persistent character growth.
Like it says in the name an MMO is a game with massive online play. CoD has no massive online play. CoD is not an MMO. PlanetSide2 is what an MMOFPS looks like.
Yes, I understand what the popular definition of MMO is.
Maybe a better example would be an IRC trivia bot in a channel with 1000 players, since that meets your rigid definition of massive. My entire point is that the genres aren't so rigid and that an uninformed reader could reasonably interpret any game where you can play with players all around world as "massively online multiplayer". In the annals of gaming history, MMOs are a very specific thing, but as far as the English language goes, massive doesn't necessary imply "X number of players on the server".
Personally, I think like anything over 64 players and up counts as pretty massive but that's my totally arbitrary opinion.
I have trouble following that thinking. If ledgers made something massively multiplayer, it seems like all those arcade games with miles-long high score lists in the '80s would have to be considered massively multiplayer. But a lot of them were actually single-player.
