This week in MMOs, Guild Wars 2 botched rewards for its EU rollback, we mused over the quarterly financials for Pearl Abyss and NCsoft, Lord of the Rings Online teased new content, we counted up all the City of Heroes private rogue servers we could find, Bethsoft sketched out the future of Fallout 76, and we grumped about cash shop shenanigans.
Read on to catch up with the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions today as every Sunday in Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review!THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
LOTRO Legendarium: What I want from Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO - While my primary interest and focus in this column continues to be Lord of the Rings Online, I'm not so stubborn as to refuse to make room for Amazon's upcoming…
BioWare Austin’s studio director confirms Anthem reboot will be more transparent and ‘a longer process’ - It's been some time since we heard about the rumored and then confirmed reboot to Anthem -- since February, to be precise. As of this past Friday, BioWare Austin studio…
LOTRO community unravels mysterious cipher to reveal a new dungeon - For the past week, the Lord of the Rings Online community has been hard at work trying to decipher a secret code that the developers activated on May 13th. It…
Chinese World of Warcraft players beg NetEase to rescue them from RMT bot infestation - How is World of Warcraft doing in China? If one player's collected account is anything to go by, not well at all. A Chinese player posted a plea for help…
Working as Intended: The big list of City of Heroes rogue servers, 2020 edition - It's been a weird and wonderful year for City of Heroes fans. In April of 2019, the expose of a secret City of Heroes private server blew up, prompting the…
Massively Overthinking: Do MMOs need ‘adult’ character customization? - A Random MMO Fan recently wrote to us with a fun topic, linking to an article about Cyberpunk 2077's ESRB rating, which is apparently based in part on the fact…
WoW Factor: Why I genuinely miss World of Warcraft’s old janky Retribution Paladin - So now we've gone through all of the ability unpruning and changing coming with World of Warcraft's next expansion. We know what it's going to look like, and... gosh, it's…
Twitch forms a ‘safety council’ to promote healthy streaming habits and protect marginalized groups - Twitch wants you to know it cares. No, really, it does. Why else would it announce a Safety Advisory Council whose sole purpose is to make the streaming platform a…
The Darwin Project battle royale ends development, servers stay up for now - So who remembers Darwin Project? It was kind of a battle royale title, popping up in 2018 with a weird Running Man gameshow template whereby one player was the show…
EverQuesting: EverQuest II’s Blood of Luclin offers an aggravating lesson on gated MMO content - To the moon, Alice! Well, I may not be Alice, but I did go straight to the moon. EverQuest II's Blood of Luclin expansion launched last December, allowing Norrathians to…
NCsoft Q1 2020: Double YoY revenue thanks to Lineage 2M, Tencent to pub Guild Wars 2 in China - Business is booming over in NCsoft's world, though it's not because of its western holdings. In this first quarter of 2020, the South Korean gaming giant doubled its revenue year-over-year…
Valorant has so far found and banned over 8,000 cheaters, causing sweet cheater tears to flow - As contentious as Valorant's Vanguard anti-cheat process has been, it appears to be yielding some results. According to a tweet from anti-cheat pipeline designer Phillip Koskinas, 8,873 cheaters have been…
New World deep-dives spriggan boss encounters and design in new dev blog - Here's the thing about spriggans: They're scary as hell and you should stay away from them. That's the only logical takeaway from New World's latest dev blog, which focuses entirely…
Desert Oasis: Exploring Black Desert’s guild system, from contracts to drama - Guilds: one of the quintessential social features of an MMO. Along with grinding, crafting, and partying up, guilds are just one of those things that are permanent features in the…
PSA: But seriously, don’t buy vampirism cures in the Elder Scrolls Online cash shop - The Elder Scrolls Online Reddit community has been ablaze this week over a recent in-game promotion in the cash shop that appeared to encourage players to buy the Vampire and…
Fallout 76’s 2020 roadmap includes seasons, scaling rewards, and the Brotherhood of Steel - Now that Wastelanders has reshaped the face of Fallout 76, it's important for Bethesda to keep this rare positive momentum going. So what about a 2020 roadmap? Yeah, that might…
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has many new race customizations and is considering endless Torghast runs - A new alpha build for World of Warcraft: Shadowlands means new character customization options being added, because that is the most important thing in this expansion. That's not a joke,…
Guild Wars 2 hands out free mount skins to players who lost playtime in the EU rollbacks - Earlier this week, Guild Wars 2 players in the EU were dismayed to realized that an unintentional rollback of their server cluster had cost them days of playtime and character…
Pearl Abyss Q1 2020 financials: Black Desert, EVE Online revenues hold steady - We've got Pearl Abyss' financial report for the first quarter of 2020, and in common with so many gaming companies right now it was a solid quarter indeed. The South…
Perfect Ten: Actually useful World of Warcraft toys - Pretty much since its inception, World of Warcraft has made a point to include just-for-fun items that were more about personal expression and enjoyment. Later called "toys," these objects helped…
The Culling returns, again, with an eyebrow-raising new business model - You all remember The Culling and The Culling 2, right? Xaviant Games tried to launch game-show-themed battle royale The Culling 2 back in 2018, but it didn't go over at…
ArcheAge’s Garden of the Gods expansion launches June 11 – here’s the trailer - [AL:Arche]With Gamigo clearly culling its herd of MMOs, you might be wondering who's next. Good news: It's not ArcheAge. In fact, ArcheAge is due for a rather large expansion next…
Lord of the Rings Online is finally buffing Hunters in a big way - Remember that "something secret" that Lord of the Rings Online promised would arrive today? Part of it may be a surprise for one of the game's underperforming classes: Hunters are…
Gamigo is sunsetting more MMOs, this time Dragon’s Prophet EU and its sequel, Savage Hunt - Dragon's Prophet has not had the best run the last few years. In 2015, Daybreak sunsetted the US version of the game, though the Runewaker MMO survived under Gamigo's banners…
Final Fantasy XIV’s Ayumi Namae explains why newer glamour outfits look more modern - As time has moved forward, Final Fantasy XIV has produced a lot of new cosmetic outfits for players to dress up in... and they've gotten a lot more modern along the…
WoW Factor: World of Warcraft’s class and race restrictions have never made any sense - There are some things that exist in games because they make sense in-universe, and there are some things that exist solely as a game balance mechanism. We all know that…
World of Warcraft’s infamous Leeroy Jenkins raid gaffe is 15 years old - The date was May 11th, 2005. The guild was known as Pals for Life. The location was the Rookery. And the plan was meticulous, with a 32.33, repeating of course,…
Guild Wars 2 has restored the EU servers to Monday morning after multiday rollback - Yesterday, we covered the Guild Wars 2 community's many reports across Reddit and the official forums that the game had suffered a major rollback to Saturday. EU players found on…
CIG’s Articles of Association reveal a partnership that might mean VR for Star Citizen or console launch for Squadron 42 - A poster on the Star Citizen subreddit has played an intriguing game of connect the dots that might mean some interesting things for the game's future, assuming suppositions are correct.…
Wisdom of Nym: What awaits in Final Fantasy XIV’s relic battleground? - We don't know just how long it's going to be before we're all chilling out in the battlefield for Final Fantasy XIV's next relic weapon stage. It'll be some amount of time,…
Not So Massively: Kind Words is one of the most intense games I’ve ever played - In these trying times, I think we're all dealing with a certain degree of anxiety and loneliness. For some of us, feeling worried and alone was part of normal life…
Guild Wars 2’s EU server cluster suffered a multiday rollback this weekend - Back when I first started in MMOs, rollbacks were a daily occurrence, quite literally. Not only was the server likely to crash at least once a day and wipe an…
Rumor: Diablo II is getting a remaster at the end of the year - While many fans are perhaps looking to Diablo IV to save the franchise (aka rehash Diablo II), there are some rumors stirring that Blizzard will... well... straight-up remake Diablo II,…
Vague Patch Notes: Player vs. class in Final Fantasy XI - I had finally hit level 41 on Red Mage in Final Fantasy XI. That was when the world changed, and if you played the game, you know why. It was Refresh…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 271: Population Zero plus three
The Stream Team: Saving the Skald-King in Elder Scrolls Online
The Stream Team: A look at Conan Exiles’ Architect of Argos DLC
The Stream Team: Going after the The Glassmaker in Warframe
The Stream Team: Star Trek Online’s Defense of Pahvo event
The Stream Team: Finding The Lost Gatekeepers in Dungeons and Dragons Online
The Stream Team: Being a Berserker in AdventureQuest 3D
The Stream Team: Defrosting a droid in SWTOR
The Stream Team: More crypt crawling in Neverwinter
The Stream Team: Getting through Elder Scrolls Online’s Greymoor prologue
Warframe talks digital TennoCon, Nightwave Series 3, and more in latest stream
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 bits of news we didn’t cover anywhere else.
