I feel like you have WoW and FFXIV mixed up in terms of incorporating the player character into the story, though I'd be interested in further explanation of your reasoning.
WOW's story was a direct rip off of an older game, the environmental lore was purely based on Warhammer Fantasy with a tiny bit switched around to avoid litigation. The best ideas they had were gameplay and art direction, it was never the story. And starting with the end of Wrath they pushed all their story content into books written by terrible writers.
Want a great story in an MMO that told it through the environment, that was called The Secret World before they rebooted the game anyway. That's the problem, people think success means well crafted, WOW was never well crafted, it was just good enough at the right time and the right place. I paid for 15 years of it because it became a habit, not because it was good.
WoW simply benefits from jumping on the mmo train in 2004 vs FFXIV in 2013.They got way bigger fanbase and diehard fans that think Blizzard has Stephen King level writing skills.
hahahha, if only World of Warcraft had that kind of storytelling. This is like inferring a Big Mac as a well crafted Food Dish because it has Pickles. Sorry no, WOW has a ton of lore, and most of it is straight rip from Warhammer, what it doesn't rip from Warhammer is a reference to LoTR, D&D, Star Trek, and simple "lols" placed as easter eggs. The few epic moments of storytelling are 100% skippable or even removed from the game outright. Best moment of storytelling Wrathgate, it's gone, been gone for years. But don't worry, we now have a story told in books driving what is going on in-game with only the barest hint of what the book did. Oh but don't worry they will spend an expansion trying to bring the factions together to end the war, only to write a book add time travel and everyone forgets why the faction war was bad, but then next expansion they have a book telling a gritty plot of why the factions are at war, while at the same time bringing them together to face a space invasion by Warhammer 40k Demons in space ships, but then they end it with a book that explains badly why the Horde commits genocide.
Need I go on about the terrible storytelling, because I can list the books, the comic books, and the effect they have on the game, while the dev team fails to add in anything but the most minor references.
I played wow up until cata and have played FF14 for the last 5 years or so. I wont make a list as I have never really played any other mmo but from what I know of wow's story. I would not be putting it in the number 1 spot, I think FF14 tells a better story but I wont place even it at number one. I think its kind of amusing how the writer of the article underline that MILLIONS OF PLAYERS keep coming back. I smell some heavy bias coming from that writer :D Tons of lore also does not make a good story, you can still end writing completely garbage depending on how you approach it.
In FFXIV I am the "messenger boy of light", weapons and armor not required. Almost every single FFXIV msq quest step involves talking to someone and rarely you're given a task to actually do that consumes any significant amount of time. Comparing talk steps to task steps I would describe it as 90%+ talk steps and <10% task-driven steps. What's even worse is that even when given an action/task/mission it takes longer to get through the dialogue than to complete the mission. Ultimately, you are told what the story is. Its very non-interactive. Even when you're sent into a raid to complete a quest, ultimately its the cutscenes that do the story telling.
In Wow its more like 60% talk/40% task in terms of actual quest steps but time spent is more like 25% talk vs 75% action. Talk to someone and they give you a mission to kill people, spy on people, steal/find something, or do some other meaningful activity that's significant to the story. You better be wearing your armor and weapons because you're going to need it! Your actions show you the story and is done primarily in the open world instead of through an instance.
Wow is on the short end of most of my comparisons with FFXIV and I even think FFXIV has better story writing but damn the philosophy/approach taken by SE into translating it's stories into the game is awful whereas Blizzard is just on point.