I haven’t taken any German since college, but I did recently learn a new word: verschlimmbesserung, which essentially translates to “disimprovement” – specifically, an attempted improvement of something that actually makes it worse. We’re gonna do as we do here in The Daily Grind and apply this concept to MMOs.
I’ll pick the obvious example here: Star Wars Galaxies’ NGE. Oh, I’m not saying everything after the NGE was terrible; I think the game that sunsetted in 2011 was superior to the game that launched in 2003, frankly. But the NGE as it launched was supposed to be an improvement and was a colossal fail, both because it was messy and incomplete and because it was a total undermining of the core game the playerbase had enjoyed for years. After the NGE, the game got a whole lot worse before it got any better.
Tell me about the verschlimmbesserung in your MMOs. When has an “improvement” in an MMO made it much worse?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
