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In all roleplaying games everywhere, one of the biggest questions the staffer need to keep asking themselves is how to craft plots that capture not only the players' interest, but the players themselves, so that they can immerse themselves in the game world and the plot, heightening the experience for all parties involved.
The common conception of plots that is followed in this matter is the one inspired by the books and movies that we love, summarized in the words of the simple phrase "The bigger the better." Without discrediting either, the approach they take simply can't be ported over to MU*s, as both are deviced by a single entity, who has absolute control over the characters in their world. The delusion that one has any control of similar level over the PCs of any given MU* is quickly shattered as soon as one tries to take one's plot ideas from theory to practice.
However, the inherit flaw in this approach -- the one that it simply doesn't work as well as in any book or movie -- becomes obvious only after a certain amount of time, when a certain number of plots of the "Bigger & Better" kind have been run -- whether these were successful or not doesn't affect this long-time effect. At one point, players will inevitably get bored -- not all, but those that have been through similar plots before.
The result is what could be called the Hero Syndrome: it almost looks like day in, day out, they're doing nothing but saving their homeworld / the worlds of their allies / the galaxy as a whole -- been there, down that, overcame the odds. There's not much fascination here any more, little enthusiams to spur, few to no new roleplaying experience. The players develop a dislike of plots, and stay away from them in favour of their "homecrafted" RP -- a dislike that I, as I have to admit, would call healthy.
What this trend yields are two major things:
1.) Unhappy staffers: people will still participate in their plots, but they will be less, and often their hearts won't be in it. In turn, they will either begin to put less effort into their plots, or try to top the last attempt with an event of even bigger scale -- and obviously, they will run into problems down the road.
2.) Disgruntled players: they will begin to see plots as something mandatory and trite, not as something that they can or would enjoy. Thus they will participate in as few plots as they can manage, try to get over with those that they can't avoid as fast as possible, and there goes our vicious circle.
I'll be the first not to credit me with the ability to run the perfect plot; in fact, I don't trust my ability to run plots at all to be beyond a mediocre level -- it would be hubris to claim that I, of all people, have the panacea for this problem. What I have, though, are observations that I've made; mostly from the player side of things, but also from the position of the uninvolved staffer, and I'd like to share those in the hope that it'll help.
The major thing that my experience tells me is that the fewer people the plot plans to involve, the smoother it will go -- and it's rarely a problem to work additional people into your frame if they should get involved. (Impromptu changes to one's initial plans are the plot-running staffer's best friend, after all.) The less players you have to take care of, the closer you can get to them and the more personal the roleplay becomes.
If you plan for "close-encounter" roleplay from the beginning, the scenes you get will be of greater intensity than usual, though they need not necessarily be full of suspense in the classic "action movie" definition.
This kind of plot also has a lot of positive things in stock for the players -- for one thing, they have something to tell other people about ICly, without the others going "Oh yeah, I was there too." It gives them more uniqueness of character, more ground for their character development, more depth and more history than a string of save-the-world plots, no matter how well these might be run.
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