MMO Week in Review: Spreadsheets in space in spreadsheets

EVE Fanfest announced one hell of a meme-made-real for fans this weekend with the revelation that it’s teaming up with Microsoft for Excel integrations specifically for EVE Online. We also learned that CCP’s latest EVE-flavored FPS is still in production.

Meanwhile, Activision-Blizzard got smacked with another lawsuit and announced Warcraft Arclight Rumble, Star Citizen is rumpling your bedsheets, Jack Emmert left Daybreak’s Marvel MMO to head up a new outfit for NetEase, and Path of Exile announced its Sentinel league.

THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES

EVE Fanfest 2022: The EVE Online universe FPS is still in development - EVE Online developer CCP Games has had its eye on the first-person-shooter genre for over a decade at this point, starting with its PS3-exclusive DUST 514 that was launched in…

LOTRO Legendarium: Remembering 15 amazing years of Lord of the Rings Online - Server performance issues aside, Lord of the Rings Online's 15th anniversary has been a smashing success. It's been far greater an event than I had anticipated, to be honest, especially…

WoW Factor: Is dragon riding in World of Warcraft Dragonflight borrowed power? - So there's a whole lot of stuff to talk about right now when it comes to World of Warcraft: Dragonflight; that's not under debate. Heck, I have about four or…

Jack Emmert is apparently leading a new NetEase studio – and not Daybreak’s Marvel MMO - So remember how Jack Emmert, the former Cryptic Studios boss, had moved over to Daybreak in 2016, where he was heading up Dimensional Ink, which was not only maintaining DC…

Wandering Wraeclast: Pets pounce into Path of Exile’s new Sentinel league - Two things I absolutely love in games are housing and pets. And having both just makes a game better! Path of Exile already has a form of the first (hideouts),…

Blizzard announces Warcraft Arclight Rumble, a new strategy game for mobile devices - Had you forgotten that today was the reveal of Blizzard's upcoming Warcraft mobile game? Well it's here now. Warcraft Arclight Rumble is its name, and strategic battles are its game... er, it's the…

Vague Patch Notes: The negatives of MMORPG rogue servers - Last week, we began a discussion about the ups and downs of rogue servers in the MMO space, by which I actually mean we talked exclusively about the positives because I…

CIG’s reports for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 recount work on AI, area design, and bedsheet deformation - The monthly development progress reports for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are in, and as the headline to this story suggests, updates from last month oscillate between the vital and…

Elite Dangerous lays out 2022 roadmap, new plan for console-to-PC migration - At this point, anything Frontier announces for Elite Dangerous makes players just as nervous about the game's future as bad news and no news, so the team may as well…

New York City just lodged a new lawsuit against Activision-Blizzard - A new lawsuit filed in Delaware by multiple New York City retirement and pension funds alleges in court something that's seemed like an open secret for months: that Activision-Blizzard CEO…

Perfect Ten: Why we need more post-apocalyptic MMOs - Ever since playing the original Wasteland back in the late '80, I've had a high fascination with post-apocalyptic settings. Yet it's not been the most fertile and frequent playgrounds for…

MMO Business Roundup: ArenaNet’s pro-choice stance, Blizzard’s new VP, and Nexon’s new CEO - Welcome back to another quick roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news. Human rights - ArenaNet and NCsoft have lent their voices - or at least their Twitter accounts -…

World of Warcraft ‘experiments’ with raid rewards in preparation for Dragonflight - It's always a super-comforting happenstance when a game studio decides that it wants to wildly monkey with the current MMO to prepare for an upcoming expansion. That's the situation that…

EVE Fanfest 2022: EVE Online puts spreadsheets in your spreadsheets - While EVE Online's nickname of "spreadsheets in space" was intended as a joke, the developers behind the game are really leaning into it. CEO Hilmar Petursson remarks at events that…

Albion Online’s next update overhauls magic staves, castles, Outlands travel, and dynamic events - It's time once more for Albion Online's director to seat himself in the Comfy Chair and regale players with the goodies that are on the horizon in the sandbox MMORPG's…

Lost Ark previews May’s upcoming new raids, quests, and Destroyer advanced class - We're just entering the month of May and that means that Lost Ark players are going to have some new content to face, most of which is aimed at the…

Menma’s TERA emulator awaits those who are looking for a new home before the MMO’s PC shutdown - With news that TERA is going to be sunsetting on PC in June, one of the common questions asked by soon-to-be refugees is if there's an emulator or rogue server…

Darkfall: Rise of Agon preps Steam closed beta, ‘retires’ official forums - Five years after Darkfall: Rise of Agon launched, the PvP MMORPG is getting ready to go into closed beta once more. This time, however, it's for the upcoming Steam version.…

Gravity is apparently cracking down on Ragnarok’s rogue server community - The Ragnarok Online rogue server community is in uproar this week as Ragnarok's Korean developer and publisher, Gravity Co., has filed at least one lawsuit and appears to be cracking…

Massively Overthinking: The minimum requirements for MMO player housing - We've got housing on the brain lately, thanks to Ship of Heroes' housing beta, Final Fantasy XIV's botched housing lottos, Warframe's new housing, and World of Warcraft doing... whatever the…

Wandering Wraeclast: Path of Exile’s Sentinel update enhances endgame with new passives and mob modifiers - Earlier this afternoon, Grinding Gear Games announced Path of Exile's foray into in-game "pets" (with a twist!) coming with the new Sentinel league that will launch on May 13th and…

Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore heads to Kickstarter with an ask just above $63,000 and an open test running concurrently - We've been keeping our eyes on Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore for a while now, as it's the latest in a long line of games advertising itself as a throwback indie sandbox…

Ship of Heroes’ player housing beta begins today - As promised, City of Heroes-inspired indie MMORPG Ship of Heroes is throwing open its superhero doors for a fresh round of open beta beginning today. This eighth leg of testing…

LOTRO promises a ‘significant portion of engineering’ to address server performance - One of the unfortunate side effects of Lord of the Rings Online's population boom amid its 15th anniversary celebrations is that all of the players have put increased strain on…

Black Desert’s new silver and extraction rebalance raises fresh whaling complaints - We've got a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for you from Black Desert this morning: Pearl Abyss is making a precision strike on the economy in the form of a silver…

RIFT brings back its first battle pass and packs the rest of the year with events - While RIFT's "great update" of 2022 ended up being somewhat of a disappointment -- although not a surprising one, considering Gamigo's layoffs in the months previous -- the fantasy MMO…

AQ3D community manager quits after lodging sexual harassment allegations against Artix Entertainment dev - (We've updated this end of this article with the latest developments, which include the CM retracting her claim of workplace sexual harassment.) Another potential sexual harassment scandal has erupted in…

Legends of Aria talks up its next testing phases and attempts to rationalize why it ‘needs’ the blockchain - Legends of Aria is continuing to beat the drum of its revamp and restructuring into a blockchain and NFT-filled MMORPG. A new dev blog from the game's new owners talks…

Fight or Kite: CRSED FOAD aka Cuisine Royale is a mouthful of an ‘MMO’ - In my ever-widening search for a game that sticks with me for longer than a few weeks I have stumbled across a battle royale I hadn’t played before: I found…

Riot doesn’t want the Runeterra MMO to ‘be the only game you will ever play’ - Riot Games' Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has been dropping more words on Twitter to tease and hype the MMORPG he's spearheading for the company. The latest round is all about time…

Lost Ark begins blocking VPNs to help servers struggling with bot-laden queues - If you're on certain Lost Ark servers, you might have noticed that the queues aren't really going away, even in the middle of the night, and if you believe the…

Activision-Blizzard wants shareholders to vote against making the company release public abuse reports - The Activision-Blizzard annual shareholders meeting is coming soon, and several proposals are up for voting. Among those proposals is a required report that outlines the company's attempts to prevent harassment…

PAX East 2022’s COVID outbreak has already resulted in one death - Last week, we covered the story about an apparent COVID outbreak at PAX East, which followed an outbreak at GDC; no less than the Boston Globe called the virus, which…

SWG Legends’ new ranching, farming, taming, spicing, and smuggling patch is now live - When Star Wars Galaxies rogue server SWG Legends announced a major patch to add farming, ranching, and spicing into the game two weeks ago, I didn't imagine it was close,…

Wisdom of Nym: Examining Final Fantasy XIV’s refreshed PvP system - It has to be frustrating to be one of the PvP designers working on Final Fantasy XIV. Not because the overall team doesn't support you (I doubt that's the case), not…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

The Stream Team: Getting a quick romp in the open alpha of Ethyrial Echoes of Yore

The Stream Team: Checking out the Ship of Heroes housing beta

The Stream Team: The start of a new AQ3D Dragonslayer

The Stream Team: Doing tasks for a Neverwinter dragon

The Stream Team: Backseat Streaming some superpowered shooting in CRSED FOAD aka Cuisine Royale

The Stream Team: Visiting the critter-filled world of Temtem

The Stream Team: Nature calls in Guild Wars 2’s Echovald Wilds

The Stream Team: Annihilating the Archons in Warframe’s The New War

The Stream Team: The final TERA anniversary

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.