Massively Overpowered

Were you too busy gaming this week to pay attention to MMO news? Get caught up every Sunday evening with Massively Overpowered's Week in Review! Raph Koster changed the direction of Star Wars Galaxies historiography forever this week by blogging about the travails of the sunsetted MMO's PvP system and laying most of the blame for SWG's struggles at the feet of the...

Two weeks ago, a mathemagician over at The Nosy Gamer published some interesting calculations showing that EVE Online's subscriptions may have dropped by around 18% in the past two years. CCP has always prided itself on the fact that EVE has grown year-on-year since release, but the last official number we heard was when it reached 500,000 subscriptions back...

We introduced El Somni Quas to you last week -- it's an old school sandbox created by an indie team in the Czech Republic. But that team is keenly aware of some of the genre's stereotypes and assumptions about indie projects and Ultima Online-inspired sandboxes in particular. Jiří Wallenfels, producer of the ESQ project, sent Massively Overpowered a copy of its planned...

Here is some good news for you Camelot Unchained fans who also like pet classes. CityState has found a way to work around the various technical issues that were preventing a proper pet handler from filling out the RvR title's roster. Spirit pets are better than their fleshy counterparts because they can float above the ground, move through objects, and otherwise...

Need for Speed World has entered its final lap. After five years of operation, the game is shutting down on July 14th, with purchases of speed boosts already disabled for current players. New accounts cannot be registered, but existing players will be able to still log in and play until the shutdown date; no reimbursements for cash shop currency...

We don't see a lot of Champions Online pics come through here, probably because of the game's small population. That's a shame because if nothing else, Champions has a vibrant art style and is almost never lacking in interesting sights. One such sight is the image of a teddy whaling on bad guys. We have reader Michelle to thank for this...

I won't pretend that I'm one of the biggest fans of the game, but I'm really glad that Triple Triad is a thing in Final Fantasy XIV. I'm also super psyched that World of Warcraft has its various Darkmoon Faire diversions (though they should really be around more) and I'm even keen on the absurd little pattern-matching Dilithium mining...

This week in MMO crowdfunding news, we learned about the new Powerplay update coming to Elite: Dangerous that promises to revamp the space sim's mining profession into something approaching lucrative. We also heard from Crowfall's devs, and more specifically, how they plan to make their ambitious realm war title for a paltry $6 million. Finally, Shroud of the Avatar...

You can get Shroud of the Avatar on Steam for a 25 percent discount this week, according to Update of the Avatar #121. The lengthy post features a bunch of other tidbits as well, including a look at before-and-after screenshots of Vertas Pass with new Unity 5 lighting and high fidelity art assets. We also get to see some of...

At some point this year -- Turbine isn't saying when, yet -- Lord of the Rings Online will be making an effort to consolidate server populations. It's a good move, considering that this MMO has quite a few servers and the players are too spread out. I'm hoping that transferring players from low-pop servers will grow the community and...