evergreen
LOTRO Legendarium: Coping with Lord of the Rings Online’s Mount Everest of content
I vividly remember back when Lord of the Rings Online launched its first legendary server, Anor, in 2018. Like many of you, I got...
Vague Patch Notes: The specter of racially locked classes in MMOs and before
One of the things I've taken on multiple times in this column is the concept of gender-locked classes, which are bad, and if you...
Perfect Ten: 10 of the worst launches in MMO history
Launch time is a difficult time for every MMO, and honestly, I have nothing but sympathy for the teams launching a new game at...
WoW Factor: What would World of Warcraft ‘Classic Plus’ even look like?
So before I start this column, I want to make something very clear: I do not for one moment, in my heart of hearts,...
Vague Patch Notes: What you leave behind in MMOs
You meant a lot to me when we knew one another. I wonder if you ever really understood that, or if I even communicated...
Perfect Ten: Times when MMOs brought about world-shattering cataclysms
The notion of an in-game cataclysm is hardly the sole domain of Activision-Blizzard; on the contrary, large-scale apocalypses pop up all the time in...
Vague Patch Notes: Internet killed the MMORPG star
If you ever need to understand why MMORPGs today look so different from how they looked back in 1997, there are a lot of...
The Soapbox: How Vanguard’s diplomacy system could be revived and improved
Once upon a time there was an MMORPG called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. It wasn't the most popular MMO, but it did cultivate a...
Vague Patch Notes: The shell game of MMO subscriber numbers and player counts
Here is a very reasonable question: How many subscribers does Star Wars: The Old Republic have? Not how many players, but how many subscribers....
Perfect Ten: 10 MMORPGs whose worlds were built from scratch
Maybe I'm the only one to have stopped to think about it, but a great deal of the MMOs that we enjoy are based...
Vague Patch Notes: Almost nobody can save struggling mid-to-small MMOs
A week ago, we all sounded off on the best way to save a small-to-mid-size MMO that was struggling, as prompted by a discussion...
Perfect Ten: Every expansion era of World of Warcraft ranked
For a long time, I have been considering this particular column just because, well, it's an obvious one. If you have a column whose...
LOTRO Legendarium: Ranking LOTRO’s forests from maddening to awesome
J.R.R. Tolkien famously loved nature, and that passion seeps into his creation of Middle-earth. To him, the great outdoors was not something to be...
Design Mockument: What would a Transformers MMORPG even look like?
Everyone who has read my work here for a while knows that a Transformers MMORPG is a longstanding element of my pie-in-the-sky wishlist. This...
Perfect Ten: 10 memorable MMO marketing campaigns from the genre’s past
Believe it or not, MMOs get off easy when it comes to notorious marketing campaigns. Anything on the following list, good or bad, is...
Vague Patch Notes: Culture doesn’t excuse poor design choices in MMOs
So Tarisland has heard that people don't like gender-locked classes. This is the correct feedback because gender-locked classes blow, and every game that has...
Perfect Ten: We’ll always have Glorbo
Yes, folks, you've all heard the news by now about how Glorbo is finally being added into World of Warcraft. You may, of course,...
The Soapbox: Why Cryptic’s MMOs are the epitome of comfort gaming
They say you never forget your first kiss. I honestly can't recall much about mine, but I do vividly remember the day that I...
The Soapbox: The day my son lost his first online video game to a sunset
It was a few weeks back that I walked into our family room and saw my 14-year-old son crouched over the iPad with a...
The Soapbox: Why The Secret World really failed
We're back with part two of my long-overdue post-mortem of The Secret World, my favourite MMORPG of all time. In the first part I...
