MassivelyOP’s 2022 Awards: Best MMO Rogue Server

December 10, 2022 11:00 AM

Welcome back to Massively Overpowered’s formal end-of-the-year awards!

Today’s award is for the Best MMO Rogue Server, which was awarded to City of Heroes’ Homecoming servers last year. Readers will recall that after a few years of testing, we elevating this topic to the status of a formal award for the first time in 2021. We use the term “rogue server” to describe private servers that aren’t necessarily approved by the original company that ran the game and aren’t necessarily emulators. As a rule, MOP does not cover rogue servers or private servers for MMOs that still exist and are still being developed by their parent companies, so this award, like our coverage, will be limited to player-run servers for dead MMOs and studio-approved player-run servers. (For example, we do not include pservers for World of Warcraft or Ultima Online.) 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 Rogue Server of 2022 is…

CITY OF HEROES: HOMECOMING

Andrew Ross: SWG Legends. I’d personally choose SWG for this, namely because it still feels like it’s what a lot of us old timers bring up to compare new stuff to (good and bad), there’s no fuzziness about how much/little it’s an MMO, and rogue servers have not only kept it alive but added new content to it.

Andy McAdams: City of Heroes Homecoming.

Brianna Royce: SWG Legends. SWGL and CoH Homecoming are both rogue servers that I personally play actively as two of my four primary MMOs, and frankly I can say SWG Legends had a much bigger year with brand-new systems like farming and ranching added seamlessly into an incredibly dense and complicated economy. I understand the urge to grant it to Homecoming again, however, because City of Heroes is fun, and I logged some time on several of the new powersets this year (Symphonic Control!), but updates slowed noticeably in 2022, and the direction of the game has been extremely endgame-centric this year on the whole to the point that I’m mildly concerned.

Chris Neal: City of Heroes Homecoming. This boils down to personal preference more than anything else, but I also have to call attention to the fact that this rogue server gets some beefy, interesting, and awesome updates. Even as I admit to personal bias and experience, it’s hard to argue that anything else out there comes close.

Eliot Lefebvre: City of Heroes Homecoming is the rogue server that matters to me, and thus it’s an easy nod for me until basically the end of time. It helps that the people developing stuff here keep developing stuff I actually like, to boot.

Justin Olivetti: Warhammer Return of Reckoning. Hey, how about that Return of Reckoning team? With all of its hard work, it’s almost like Warhammer Online never left but has been growing over the years. Reading about the Land of the Dead and the new capital city coming to the game gave me warm cockles in my heart.

MJ Guthrie: City of Heroes Homecoming. I’ll honestly say that my vote was initially putting SWGL above City of Heroes Homecoming, but since SWGL is just the hands-down winner for another award for me, I wanted to share the love. After all, Homecoming is a great thing and deserves a spotlight!

City of Heroes’ Homecoming servers took our award for Best MMO Rogue Server. What’s your pick?

Reader poll: What was the best MMO rogue server in 2022?

City of Heroes Homecoming (49%, 780 Votes)
SWG Legends (4%, 69 Votes)
Warhammer Return of Reckoning (7%, 111 Votes)
WildStar Nexus Forever (2%, 28 Votes)
Asheron's Call's emus (1%, 12 Votes)
City of Heroes Rebirth (28%, 444 Votes)
Vanguard Emu (1%, 20 Votes)
PlanetSide 1 PSForever (0%, 5 Votes)
EQOA Return Home (0%, 5 Votes)
Menma's TERA emu (2%, 33 Votes)
Earth and Beyond emu (0%, 5 Votes)
Sims Online FreeSO (0%, 3 Votes)
SWGemu (1%, 13 Votes)
Neocron (0%, 1 Votes)
Free Realms Sunrise (0%, 3 Votes)
Spellborn Reborn (0%, 5 Votes)
Infantry Online Free Infantry (0%, 1 Votes)
Earth Eternal Anubian War (0%, 0 Votes)
SWG Restoration III (1%, 9 Votes)
AOEO Project Celeste (0%, 2 Votes)
SWG Empire in Flames (0%, 3 Votes)
CoH SEGs (0%, 4 Votes)
Something else (tell us in the comments!) (1%, 22 Votes)

Total Voters: 1,484

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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 commentary from writers so that you can see our thought process. 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 MMOs nominated plus a few others we thought should be included.