This is actually not as much of a rant as it might initially seem. Also i'm not trying to convince anybody that singleplayer is superior or anything, because it's just a matter of preference, but i've always found multiplayer (especially online) to be less to my tates.
Alot of games these days seem to have online multiplayer as a large portion of the game (alot of the time more than half), which is cool, but sometimes the singleplayer get's neglected. I guess one of the things i've always thought about a game are the story, the characters and the immersion. Though in most MP there's no real use/need for a story or in depth characters. Also i've always found just personally that MP also lacks immersion because it becomes much more of a competition to try and pwn other players, but SP is just about your experience which you can (most of the time) do at your own pace.
The other thing i've realised i don't enjoy as much about MP, which i've realised mostly after playing L4D, is that it realies alot on playing with people who are; not pricks, about your experience level and if it's team based, then good team players (which is very much the case in L4D as you probably already know). And online play often means i end up relying on the good will and decent personality of the wonderful online gaming community, which usually turns sour.
It can just be a bit dissapointing when games like L4D or Halo 3 (no i'm not trying to turn this into a Halo bashing session) are 90%/95% about multiplayer, when really i want to focus on SP. Okay, sure you can play the campaign in Halo 3 but it's pretty short, and you can play with bots in L4d but they just plain suck.
But anyway, as i said, this is just based on my preferences, i'm not putting down MP or anything.
cheers, i agree 100% with what you say also. Playing repeated sessions of 'shoot the other online player' get's really bland. It just seems that so many games these days seem to place alot more focus on MP than SP, which is a real shame 