Massively OP’s 2020 Awards: Best MMO Event of 2020

December 12, 2020 12:00 PM

MassivelyOP’s end-of-the-year awards for 2020 continue today with our award for Best MMO Event of 2020, which was awarded last year to AdventureQuest 3D for its KORN and Alice in Chains concerts. In previous years, we’ve expanded this award beyond holidays to include studio-led and player-led events across the whole spectrum of the genre. After all, MMOs aren’t just about mega-updates; plenty of online games revolve around dynamic events, competitive tournaments, and social celebrations! Don’t forget to cast your own vote in the just-for-fun reader poll at the very end!

And the MassivelyOP staff pick for the Best MMO Event of 2020 is…

EVE ONLINE’S WORLD WAR BEE 2

Andy McAdams: I’ll be biased here – I really loved one of the microholidays in WoW: the Kirin Tor Bar Tour.

Brianna Royce: I thought EVE Online’s ongoing world war deserved the nod this year, largely because this is an entirely player-directed event, it’s massive, it involves almost everyone in the whole game, it’s dramatic, it actually has an impact on the political dynamics of the server, and CCP has properly capitalized on promoting it for its own benefit. That’s way better than anything a developer could manage top-down by itself. Power to the players.

Chris Neal: Guild Wars 2’s April Fools cats. Gigantic cats. I’m not sure I need to say more. Runner-Up: Fortnite concerts.

Eliot Lefebvre: It’s pretty crazy how EVE has another huge war against The Jerks.

Justin Olivetti: EVE’s WWB2. There are always plenty of carefully crafted developer events, but player events that really take off always are more special. The multi-month World War Bee 2 was an event for the history books and indicative of what virtual worlds are capable of doing if given enough freedom and tools.

MJ Guthrie: AQ3D Battle Concerts and the Dual Universe puzzle event. Although the Battle Concerts began with the inaugural Korn event last year, (and even won the MOP’s best event in 2019), this year’s was even bigger and better, including introducing a really great feature called a trove. With this, as players collect the event cosmetics they added via quest to the trove — a place that acts as a wardrobe allowing players to access each piece without having to take up precious inventory slots. For Dual Universe, the massive system-wide puzzle event was very impressive and intriguing. I really love events that are outside the box and test limits. I’d love to see more creativity and ways to bring people together in events. While not an MMO (and not quite an event like a holiday would be), I’d like to mention Warframe’s Nightwave series The Glassmaker; it, too, broke out of the mold by having us investigate crime scenes and decipher the clues to solve the mystery.

Sam Kash: AQ3D concerts. It’s just too random and amazing.

Tyler Edwards: LOTRO’s Bilbo memorial.

EVE Online’s World War Bee 2 took our award for Best MMO Event of 2020. What’s your pick?

Reader poll: What was the best MMO event of 2020?

EVE's World War Bee 2 (47%, 247 Votes)
Dual Universe's puzzle event (1%, 3 Votes)
Fortnite's We the People panel (0%, 0 Votes)
LOTRO's Bilbo event for Ian Holm (10%, 52 Votes)
ROBLOX's Lil Nas X concert (1%, 5 Votes)
EVE's COVID research citizen science effort (10%, 55 Votes)
AQ3D Battle Concerts (3%, 15 Votes)
Warframe's Nightwave series The Glassmaker (2%, 8 Votes)
Fortnite's Tenet trailer event (1%, 3 Votes)
Any of WoW's micro events (3%, 17 Votes)
LOTRO's Weatherstock (3%, 18 Votes)
Guild Wars 2's April Fools cats prank (6%, 34 Votes)
Fortnite's Travis Scott concert (3%, 17 Votes)
Guild Wars 2's suicide prevention events (6%, 32 Votes)
Something else (please do tell us in the comments!) (3%, 18 Votes)

Total Voters: 457

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How does MassivelyOP choose the winner?

Our team gathers together to nominate and discuss candidates and hopefully settle on a consensus winner. We don’t have a hard vote, but we do include written commentary from every writer who submitted it on time so that you can see where some of us differed, what our secondary picks were, and why we personally nominated what we did (or didn’t). The site’s award goes to the staff selection, but we’ll include both it and the community’s top nomination in our debrief in January.

How does MassivelyOP populate this poll?

Poll options include all events nominated plus a few others we thought should be included.