MassivelyOP’s 2022 Awards: Biggest MMO Disappointment

December 15, 2022 11:00 AM

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

Today’s award is for the Biggest MMO Disappointment, which was awarded jointly to multiple underperforming new MMOs last year. Disappointments can be games, launches, patches, trends, stories, sunsets, all manner of topics in the MMORPG genre and orbiting sub-genres. 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 Biggest MMO Disappointment of 2022 is…

SWTOR’S LEGACY OF THE SITH

Andrew Ross: Niantic’s POGO bungling, Richard Garriott’s new blockchain MMO. Niantic in general has been ruining Pokemon GO by rolling back COVID changes that were largely much needed quality-of-life improvements, canceling games, being super-secretive about Pikmin Bloom’s privacy mode when honesty could have helped fix the game’s image, missing much-needed and promised communication, and delivering endless bugs. There’s been a lot of clowning this year, but Niantic stands out primarily because its mistakes affect people in meatspace, not just in terms of safety, but also unnecessary COVID exposure and wasting gas/money to attend events that were broken or very poorly planned.

Andy McAdams: Lost Ark’s toxic hellscape.

Brianna Royce: Legacy of the Sith, Garriott’s blockchain MMO, the cancelation of the Marvel MMO. I can go for the consensus on this one because I most definitely expected much more out of SWTOR this year, and Legacy of the Sith was basically a fizzle. It is absolutely astonishing to me that a Star Wars MMO that was once one of the biggest MMOs in the west is delivering such piddly expansions in 2022, the height of Star Wars’ potency on TV. And then losing Charles Boyd? My god.

Carlo Lacsina: Elyon’s sunset.

Chris Neal: Legacy of the Sith, Blizzard’s clownshow. SWTOR could have used a homerun – hell, even a base hit – but instead it fouled all over the place and kicked over the sand castle of trust it seemed like it was starting to slowly build back up. Which sucks.

Colin Henry: Legacy of the Sith, Crowfall’s demise. This should have been a great year for SWTOR. There was an expansion, for one, and with it came a lot of quality-of-life improvements, like a new UI, class and combat changes, and updates to the wardrobe system including cosmetic weapons (finally). It sounds great on paper, but what we got was really lackluster, and the expansion content was extremely thin, with only a few hours worth of story. I really want to root for this game, given that Star Wars has been bigger than ever the past few years, but this just wasn’t a great year for the MMO.

Eliot Lefebvre: My reasoning for voting for Star Wars: The Old Republic: Legacy of the Sith is chiefly down to [BLURB LENGTH EXCEEDED, WE HOPE YOU HAVE ENJOYED LEGACY OF THE SITH VOTE]

Justin Olivetti: Diablo Immortal. Diablo Immortal should’ve been a surefire hit as a mobile spin-off of the ultra-popular franchise. But absolutely horrid monetization plagued the entire game’s design, making it a subject for derision and mockery. Yeah, it still pulled in numbers and revenue — but at the cost of tainting an entire franchise. What a waste.

MJ Guthrie: Legacy of the Sith. I’d have to say SWTOR’s Legacy of the Sith was so non-existent it couldn’t be anything but disappointing. But I also want to nominate LOTRO. This one is very personal for me. You know those emails you get when someone tries to access your account or tries to change the password? The ones that say please contact immediately if that wasn’t you? Well, apparently with Daybreak/SSG, they are worthless. I had a close friend get that exact email for his LOTRO account and contacted immediately — I’m talking within one minute — as well as contacted customer service and submitted a ticket. He also tried to immediately log into his lifetime Grandmaster account to check it (he was actually sitting down to play and couldn’t log in!). And you know what happened? Nothing. Nada. Nichevo. As in, CS completely and 100% ignored him. He even had to put in additional tickets. Still, complete silence. Not only was a hacker able to change the password without there being confirmation from the account holder, but the studio refused to acknowledge his tickets let alone help. I had to sit and watch over the next week as someone was logging into each of his characters, ripping them out of the kinship, blocking me from houses I had access to, and most certainly stripping each character, as his account had quite a large amount of money spent on it over all the years. It has been two months and Daybreak/SSG still has not responded. This is totally and completely unacceptable to me. I am thoroughly disgusted with LOTRO now.

Sam Kash: Crowfall’s demise.

Tyler Edwards: Dragonflight, Legacy of the Sith. Legacy of the Sith failed to deliver when it comes to both quantity and quality of content, and Dragonflight, like Battle for Azeroth, feels like the flailing of a company that only knows that its game was popular in the past, but not why. Blizzard just keeps resurrecting old ideas in the hopes of capturing the old magic. “You guys liked the faction war, right? No? What about dragons? Talent trees? Please just take me back, baby, I’ll do anything!”

SWTOR’s Legacy of the Sith took our award for Biggest MMO Disappointment. What’s your pick?

Reader poll: What was the biggest disappointment in the MMO world in 2022?

SWTOR's Legacy of the Sith (14%, 129 Votes)
Richard Garriott goes in on blockchain MMOs (7%, 64 Votes)
Elyon's sunset (1%, 12 Votes)
Crowfall's demise (6%, 54 Votes)
Diablo Immortal's monetization (16%, 147 Votes)
Lost Ark is a toxic hellscape filled with bots (8%, 68 Votes)
Dragonflight's humdrum content (4%, 37 Votes)
Niantic's bungling of Pokemon Go (2%, 14 Votes)
The crypto clownshow invading MMOs (13%, 115 Votes)
Daybreak canceling the Marvel MMO, again (3%, 24 Votes)
Blizzard pulling out of China (0%, 3 Votes)
EVE Online's fiasco-ridden 2022 (2%, 15 Votes)
Maintenance moding of Red Dead Online (2%, 14 Votes)
Roblox's shameless monetization (2%, 14 Votes)
The sunset of TERA (4%, 32 Votes)
Legends of Aria's blockchain trashfire and rebrand (1%, 8 Votes)
Babylon’s Fall flopping (0%, 4 Votes)
Nightingale isn't an MMO (2%, 15 Votes)
Elyria backers lost their lawsuit (2%, 14 Votes)
Funcom abandoning Conan Chop Chop (1%, 8 Votes)
NCsoft slowing down Blade and Soul's cadence (0%, 2 Votes)
Blizzard abandoning Heroes of the Storm (4%, 32 Votes)
Rogue servers being suppressed by big corps (2%, 16 Votes)
SOLO went free-to-play (0%, 0 Votes)
Sub prices going up across the genre (1%, 10 Votes)
State of Decay studio exposed as toxic (0%, 4 Votes)
Gazillion boss waited five years to apologize for Marvel Heroes (1%, 12 Votes)
Little Orbit going from hero to zero (1%, 8 Votes)
Something else (tell us in the comments) (2%, 18 Votes)

Total Voters: 607

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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.