To a certain degree, MMOs have always existed in a state of infamy. People assume that the game requires hours of sitting and scowling at the screen, watching every element that makes you a human being burn away beneath the light of the monitor as you farm a raid for hours in the hopes of one drop and exchanging awful slur-filled insults with your supposed friends. But the reality is that’s just EverQuest! It’s never been a genre-wide thing. (That was a joke, EverQuest fans.)
That does not mean that there are not titles that live in infamy, of course. Some games exist in a permanent state of infamy because of various conditions, names that are recognized even outside of our normal corner. And there are moments that people know about, incidents that have become dark legends across the internet, moments that make people shudder in fear when whispers surface. So yes, today we are looking at some MMOs and MMO moments that live forever in a dark, unpleasant spot and will likely remain there forever.
Yes, of course there are more than 10. These are just 10 of them!
1. Camelot Unchained
I am not exactly thrilled to be putting this on here. I am not exactly thrilled to look back more than a decade to when Camelot Unchained was first getting crowdfunded when I was thinking that this didn’t sound like a good idea and that the people who were clamoring for these throwback revival projects were going to watch their ideas crash against the rocks of reality, but here we are a decade later and my hit rate is hovering at around 100% for all of this. And so it goes with this long-delayed title, too.
You may wonder why this one lives in infamy when things like Shroud of the Avatar don’t rate, but the main difference in that case in my experience is that you have a lot of people who are willing to excuse Richard Garriott because he made the Ultima games and/or people forgot or didn’t hear about that NFT abomination he was associated with for a hot minute or don’t remember how he ejected from the SOTA situation and leaving his player investors dangling. CU does not enjoy that degree of mitigating circumstance. I’m sorry.
2. Diablo Immortal
“Do you guys not have phones?” was a serious moment of oof. As someone who does not and has never cared about this franchise, I remember that hearing it felt like a gut punch of secondhand embarrassment. Just a moment of “no, honey, please don’t say that, oh please don’t say that, oh dear.” The game’s reputation has never changed substantially, and its intensely predatory monetization just cemented it. At this point you could discover that playing it reverses aging and many people would still debate if it was worth it.
3. Final Fantasy XI’s hours-long boss fight
There are people who know nothing substantial about Final Fantasy XI beyond remembering that there was some boss fight which lasted for hours on end, and they are thinking of Pandemonium Warden. What sadly tends to get overlooked or forgotten is that this was not, in fact, a designed state of affairs; the players were in a place where they could keep going but they weren’t making significant progress. This was not how the boss was supposed to go. So it was not just the designers being sadistic monsters.
Mind you, Hiromichi Tanaka was in charge at the time, and he was absolutely on board with that; he just wasn’t trying to make people fight a boss for 18 hours at a stretch.
4. World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood ‘pandemic’
There’s not much I can say about this one in no small part because Justin has an excellent article about the whole incident, so you should just go read that. Saves me some time writing!
5. Star Citizen
Hey, did you know that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are starring in Waiting for Godot? That is genuinely really cool, and it’s nice to see the two of them working together even more (you laugh, but their chemistry is very real and present), and I wish I had the spare money to go watch them put on the play. And the play itself is a classic, a meditation on futility and waiting for something that’s going to make everything all right that just never, ever arrives.
Why am I talking about Waiting for Godot in an entry for Star Citizen? Who knows. I’m a wacky kinda guy.
6. Roblox
You do not want to know the nicknames we have for this game in work chat. They are not flattering. But then, a lot of the stories about this game are not flattering. I mean, earlier this year, we had to divide our list of stories about “bad things happening in Roblox” into two lists because one was getting too long! Oof indeed, my friends. Oof indeed.
7. RuneScape’s Party Hats
The important thing to know about RuneScape’s kinda ugly party hats is – and I think this is vital – that none of the designers really intended to make something that would become a huge flashpoint of controversy and RMT and prices that feel like you should be purchasing an acceptable used car. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of it was supposed to be like this. But it was like this, and veterans of the game will get an eye twitch if you so much as mention party hats. What a time to be alive.
8. Anarchy Online’s launch
Funcom has never had a game’s launch go well. That’s not a statement on the quality of the company’s games themselves, which could be a different column in and of itself, but it’s a statement of fact; Funcom has always gotten the launch wrong. Every single time. But Anarchy Online was perhaps the worst case of all, and thus its launch has gone down in history as something wherein almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It’s a bit of a shame that a lot of people kind of lost track of the game after that, I suppose, although I suppose when your launch was as bad as this was a lot of people might have just assumed that was the end of the story.
9. EVE Online
It would be incorrect to say that everyone who plays EVE Online greatly enjoys being a jerk to other people. However, it’s very clear that this is the median demographic for the game, and it seems almost indisputable that the game’s marketing over the years has leaned hard on the idea of the client being a login to the Jerk Dimension. Just Google “HTFU.” Long-time internet users have had a lot of practice with the idea that if you don’t select against the jerks, jerks quickly dominate your publicity and userbase no matter how hard the decent players work to combat them, and here we see what happens when that is treated less as a cautionary tale and more as a challenge.
10. War Thunder’s classified documents
The weirdest thing about someone posting classified military documents to win an argument about War Thunder is not just that it happened. Like, it is weird that it happened, but as I think we can all attest a lot of weird things can happen. What makes this even weirder is that this particular weird thing has happened multiple times. We have now gotten numerous scandals wherein someone has leaked classified documents online in order to win an argument about the game, and the fact that each one becomes news makes the fact that it keeps happening even more insane, especially when the developers are begging people to stop and in at least once case there were serious legal repercussions for the people involved.
“Ah, yes, the last few times were a disaster. But this time, leaking these classified documents is a very good idea.”
Everyone likes a good list, and we are no different! Perfect Ten takes an MMO topic and divvies it up into 10 delicious, entertaining, and often informative segments for your snacking pleasure. Got a good idea for a list? Email us at justin@massivelyop.com or eliot@massivelyop.com with the subject line “Perfect Ten.”
