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Ultimately what you write sounds great the first time somebody does something, but in the age of the strategy guide and people sharing information, having to look for clues may fall to the wayside when people can just ask their bud "Hey, who's the killer?" in multiplayer games.

To craft something like that in EVERY quest sounds very tedious and not worth the return to the player, unless it was a single-player experience intending to immerse the player into the game world. I didn't see any multiplayer examples of immersive game worlds (I know they probably don't exist). At the end of the day, some games are more about technical development than story development. Tetris was about getting a high score, not some whack plot about rebuilding walls in Russia. People still played the hell out of it.

It also comes down to time: Some players just don't have the patience or time to immerse themselves enough to go through the necessary steps a virgin mind would need to solve a quest puzzle. In WoW, the objective text is there to simplify and direct the player to what they need to do to make the best use of their time. Unless you're dealing with an epic quest that is intended to be ambiguous, you always have an idea of what to do to get the job done. That way you can play in spurts, should your schedule demand it, whereas the type of gameplay you've described would require some serious immersion on the part of the player (and consume more time just getting into the mood).

Story also asks for change. In static universes that most MMOGs have, the actions of the player can't affect the game world, nor can it affect the content, else a player who has paid just as much money to play be unable to experience the content because someone got there first. You could have an awesome quest where people die and stuff gets blown up, but were the game dynamic, nobody else would be able to do it, so you've essentially got an event in a multiplayer game that only benefits one person or small group. That's why stories are usually confined and small in scope.

Anyway, that's my two cents.