A week after PAX East’s close, we’ve completed our assignments and handed out our awards. Make sure you cast your vote in our reader poll for the best MMO of the show!
Meanwhile, EverQuest celebrates 18 years online, Revelation fielded pay-to-win complaints, we compared survival sandbox Rend to other MMOs, Star Citizen wowed onlookers with its level design, and our columnist took a hard look at The Elder Scrolls Online’s proposed Morrowind battleground system.
Read on for the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions.
THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
Massively OP’s PAX East 2017 awards and best-in-show reader vote - We've finished rolling out all of our PAX East content this year, and we've put our MMORPG-addled noggins together to try to choose our favorites out of what we got…
Remembering EverQuest Next - Is it too soon -- or perhaps too pointless -- to wool-gather about EverQuest Next? After all, that MMO project is deader than dead, so dead in fact that it…
Revelation Online players accuse the game of pay-to-win tactics - [AL:Rev]Don't look now, but the ugly form of pay-to-win might be slouching its way into Revelation Online. On the forums, players have accused My.com of incorporating P2W tactics into the…
LOTRO Legendarium: Heading into the Wastes as update 20 advances - [AL:LOTRO]If all goes well, within a few days the Lord of the Rings Online community will be getting its first glimpse of Mordor with the release of Update 20 (Standing…
WildStar’s Jen Ortiz leaves Carbine - WildStar is down another high-profile member of its development team this week with the loss of Carbine Senior Product Manager Jen Ortiz. On Twitter Friday, Ortiz said that she had…
You’ll need to put in about 20 hours in Albion Online to become competitive in PvP - As Albion Online barrels toward a summer release, the crew took to Reddit yesterday for a marathon AMA session to tackle any pressing community questions. Asked how much work an…
Star Citizen’s level design is coming along much faster than you probably thought - Following what turned out to be an intriguing Ten for the Chairman earlier this week, Cloud Imperium has released a Star Citizen Around the Verse episode that -- our tipster summed it…
League of Legends on LGBT representation and pro team mistreatment allegations - [AL:LOL]League of Legends will probably introduce non-straight characters eventually, a new interview on Polygon with Riot Games' Greg Street suggests. The publication asked Street questions about LGBT representation during GDC…
The U.S. Navy solicits players for ‘massively multiplayer online war game’ - Remember back in 2011, when the U.S. Navy rolled out the world's first MMOWGLI -- that is, massively multiplayer online wargame leveraging the internet? We do, since that piece was…
Conan Exiles contemplates official server wipes following massive duping exploit - Funcom says it's "weighing its options" following a series of rampant duping and apparent character hacking exploits in Conan Exiles. Players on Reddit have begun recording the exploits and demanding…
Dark and Light hit with another delay, this time to summer 2017 - Dark and Light has been delayed at least until summer -- so says the game's official Chinese website, anyway, which has a lengthy apology to players awaiting the game's release…
Massively Overthinking: When social play in MMOs is predatory by design - Blogger Tobold recently wrote a provocative piece on social play in MMOs, as pointed out to us by our dear tipster Sally. In a piece cheekily titled "Why I can…
EverQuest turns 18 years old, throws birthday bash with free heroic characters for everyone - One of the most famous and longest-lived MMORPGs is celebrating its 18th birthday today. Back on this date in 1999, EverQuest released to a much different gaming world than what…
EVE Online overhauls PLEX currency system, ending tales of PLEX-stuffed ship destruction - [AL:EVE]CCP announced this morning that it's overhauling PLEX in EVE Online. As the currency works now, players buy the 30-day sub token known as PLEX with cash and then either use…
Pantheon attempts to woo the Kickstarter community with its progress - It's no secret that Pantheon and Kickstarter haven't had the best of relationships, what with the game's crowdfunding campaign failing to fund back in the day. But Brad McQuaid is willing…
Blizzard seeks $8.5M from cheat software company Bossland - It's all fun and games... until you start selling software to help players cheat, then it's all lawsuits and court dates. Blizzard is asking the California district court to pronounce…
Hi-Rez puts SMITE Rivals development ‘on hold’ - Bad news for those who were looking forward to another SMITE spinoff game; it appears that the digital card game version of the game, SMITE Rivals, is taking a vacation from…
How Frostkeep’s Rend compares to other MMOs and survival sandboxes - I was pretty well taken by multiplayer survival sandbox Rend as soon as I saw it at this year's PAX East 2017, as I wrote yesterday. The concept immediately spoke to…
Sony is going to let you access PlayStation 4 games through your PC - Don't let the lack of a PlayStation 4 in your house stop you from, y'know, playing the console's games. On Monday, Sony announced that it will be paving a path for…
Tamriel Infinium: Battlegrounds will change Elder Scrolls Online PvP forever - [AL:ESO]I've read all the impressions from the PAX East show that I could find, and they were all overwhelmingly mild -- including ours. As you hopefully know by now, Elder Scrolls…
Final Fantasy XIV discontinues 90-day subscription option for PS3 players on March 18 - [AL:FFXIV]If you're playing Final Fantasy XIV on a PlayStation 3, your days are numbered. Support for the platform is being discontinued with the launch of Stormblood, something that the official…
Trove officially launches for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 - [AL:Trove]Voxel sandbox Trove has formally launched on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One today, having been in open beta on both consoles since December. Trion says it's now "captivated nearly five million" players across…
Raph Koster explains why griefing in virtual reality isn’t going away - Even if you can overlook the expense, the current lack of games, the potential for nausea, and the annoyance of wearing a clamshell on your sweaty face, virtual reality has…
Ship of Heroes salutes City of Heroes in its network demo video - Ship of Heroes has a new video out today that is ostensibly a network demo showing off half a dozen remote developers spread across the country testing out 16 characters…
The Repopulation is back up and running - It might not have been everyone's ideal scenario, but the fact is that The Repopulation has come back under new management -- and you can access the game once more.…
Researchers study ArcheAge’s beta wipe for real-world apocalypse behavior - [AL:Arche]If the world was to end this week, how would people react? That's an interesting question to ponder in the abstract, but researchers took this hypothetical one step further by…
PAX East 2017: Introducing Rend, a three-way survival sandbox from Frostkeep Studios - I don't really like survival games, typically -- I understand why a lot of people do like them, don't get me wrong, but I don't care for them myself, for a…
Why gacha is the ‘gotcha’ tactic of MMO sales - Making money in free-to-play games isn't as simple as pursuing a single revenue stream. Often studios are looking at multiple approaches to coax players to part with their money in…
What ever happened to Darkfall, Fallen Earth, and Runes of Magic? - It bears repeating that here on Massively OP, we cover an immensely wide field of live games -- so many that it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of…
PAX East 2017: Hands-on with the surprisingly fun Kritika Online - [AL:Krit]It's pretty much a rule of nature that at least one game is going to be far better and more fun to play than I expected on the PAX East…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 108: PAX East power-up
Battle Bards Episode 94: Drakensang Online
The Stream Team: The joys of ARK jousting
The Stream Team: EverQuest celebrates 18 years!
The Stream Team: The Repopulation has resurfaced
The Stream Team: Scorching enemies with Revelation Online’s Swordmage
The Stream Team: Xsyon survives six years
The Stream Team: Celebrating Paladins’ console closed beta with Inara
The Stream Team: An AQ3D afternoon with Artix in Ashfall
The Stream Team: A look at Logan in Marvel Heroes
AND FROM OUR FRIENDS AT BLIZZARD WATCH
Should there be more transmog items for sale in WoW?
World of Warcraft: Chronicle Vol. 2 is another must-read
Blizzard previews patch 7.2’s Broken Shore
Every week, get caught up on the MMO genre’s latest news and Massively OP’s best content in our MMO Week in Review! Want more roundups of content? Try Friday’s Betawatch for MMO testing highlights, Saturday’s Make My MMO for MMO crowdfunding updates, and Sunday’s The MOP Up, which mops up all the little bits of news we didn’t cover anywhere else.
