MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Biggest MMO Blunder

December 16, 2024 11:00 AM

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

Today’s award is for the Biggest MMO Blunder, which was awarded to Overwatch’s MMO-esque-PvE bungle. (Yes, we do sometimes extend this award to multiplayer titles and studios, not just core MMORPGs.) This award isn’t exactly fun, but it’s important accountability and a complement to the praise in our other awards. We believe identifying where the industry went wrong this year is crucial to both avoiding these genre trainwrecks and preparing for them in the future. 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 Blunder of 2024 is…

NEW WORLD’S MESSY AETERNUM MARKETING

Andrew Ross: The SGF announcement of New World Aeternum, woof.

Brianna Royce: New World Aeternum’s bizarre volte-face on the MMO genre. I want to be clear here that the existence of New World Aeternum is not the blunder. Aeternum is fine. Good, even. I liked my time in it. I am also happy it’s finally on console. More big MMORPGs should be on console. But what Amazon did to the MMORPG community this past June was basically like using a loyal old friend to get into a party and then pretending you don’t know him as soon as you meet some cool people at the bar. The company mistreated the very MMORPG players who bought into the MMORPG and kept it going for the last three years, first in dropping the content cadence to basically nothing and second in pretending the game was no longer an MMORPG as if we’re drooling idiots. I still have my disappointed mom face on about this. MMO players won’t forget.

Carlo Lacsina: Biggest blunder for me is New World suddenly not being an MMORPG but still being one.

Chris Neal: New World Aeternum. This was so absolutely needless on so many levels, but it seems pretty clear to me now that the devs of New World were told to deflect and divert all mention of the MMORPG being an MMORPG from some higher-up that saw the term as fiscal poison. A whole bunch of PC player goodwill and dissolution of the genre for… what? Adding more players to an MMORPG is what makes these things awesome! What are you scared of??

Eliot Lefebvre: Amazon completely faceplanting on New World with months of silence before the console launch. Like, I have been continually baffled by the fact that so many people are willing to go to bat for this game in the first place, but the way it handled its console announcement as if it was anything the actual players wanted? Cringe. There’s no other word for it. This makes me cringe. Honorable mention to World of Warcraft’s paid headstart for its expansion, which has still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Justin Olivetti: Elder Scrolls Online’s rollbacks, WoW’s paid headstart. We don’t often see massive rollbacks anymore, thank goodness, but ESO reminded us why they can be traumatic when it botched some file sharing and then spent a week rolling back accounts and getting the game straightened out. And The War Within may be a fine expansion, but it had a terrible start as Blizzard split the community between those who paid extra to get in a few days early. If you didn’t, you were subject to both a wait and a nerf to leveling when you arrived.

Tyler Edwards: The content drought and poor messaging that preceded New World’s relaunch as Aeternum. Not necessarily the relaunch itself, just everything around it.

New World’s problematic Aeternum launch took our award for Biggest MMO Blunder. What’s your pick?

Reader poll: What was the biggest MMO-related blunder in 2024?

New World trying to pretend it's not an MMORPG and mistreating MMORPG players (28%, 139 Votes)
WoW abused headstart FOMO with War Within's preorders (10%, 50 Votes)
Elder Scrolls Online's week-long rollback fiasco (3%, 14 Votes)
WoW tried to sell a pay-to-win dino mount for 90 bucks (10%, 49 Votes)
Cryptic is basically hollowed out as everyone is laid off (5%, 24 Votes)
CCP Games tried to convince everyone its blockchain game EVE Frontier isn't a blockchain game (9%, 43 Votes)
Zenith and Temtem hit maintenance mode as devs launched side games (1%, 3 Votes)
Blizzard canceled BlizzCon in WoW's 20th anniversary year (4%, 19 Votes)
Elder Scrolls Online canceled NA 2025 anniversary meetup (2%, 10 Votes)
XLGAMES downgraded ArcheAge Chronicles while killing ArcheAge (1%, 6 Votes)
Sony completely botched Concord (9%, 43 Votes)
Dauntless' relaunch post buyout by a blockchain company is a mess (2%, 12 Votes)
Palia was super dodgy for no good reason about its beta status (2%, 10 Votes)
Blizzard trotted out the mystery line graph to spin WoW's subs (1%, 5 Votes)
RuneScape jacked up its prices again (0%, 1 Votes)
Daybreak charged $1500 for in-person Fippyfest tickets (1%, 6 Votes)
Mass layoffs at Activision-Blizzard and ZeniMax under Microsoft (5%, 25 Votes)
The Day Before devs resurfaced with a Kickstarter for a new game lol (2%, 9 Votes)
Blizzard canceled Odyssey and started hiring for a different new game (0%, 2 Votes)
NetEase's corruption scandal saw multiple Chinese execs arrested (1%, 3 Votes)
EG7 and Daybreak sold PlanetSide and moved PS2 to a subsidiary (0%, 2 Votes)
Ubisoft killed The Crew 1 and provoked a class-action lawsuit (2%, 8 Votes)
Something else - tell us in the comments! (1%, 5 Votes)

Total Voters: 318

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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. Reader poll options include all blunders nominated plus a few others we thought should be included.