evergreen
Perfect Ten: What your MMO quantity says about you
It occurs to me that it is very difficult to find MMOs that I have literally never played before in some capacity. There are...
Massively Overthinking: What we really mean when we talk about ‘difficulty’ in MMORPGs
Massively OP reader Steve wants us to revisit the Daily Grind on making death more meaningful without making it more annoying. His letter was long, so...
Perfect Ten: MMOs that claimed to be the first
We've all been there. We're playing our favorite MMORPG and then self-appointed professors of game history start arguing in world chat about firsts --...
The Soapbox: Three augmented reality game problems (most) MMOs don’t have – and one thing they do so much better
I'd like to think that I'm kind of a healthy gamer. While MMOs take a lot of time, the nice thing is that their...
Perfect Ten: Why trend-chasing doesn’t work at all for online games
Video games have always been a remarkably insular field; that's the nature of development. Someone produces Super Mario Bros, and a few years later...
Perfect Ten: More anthropomorphic MMO studio conversations
A while back, you may recall that I posted some of my conversations with anthropomorphized concepts of MMO studios. If you don't remember this,...
The Hunter’s Arsenal: Massively OP’s guide to the weapons of Monster Hunter World
Throughout their time in Monster Hunter World, players will have to make a lot of decisions, but none of them are as important -- or...
MMO Mechanics: The Fair Play Alliance and mechanising fairness
News of over 30 gaming companies taking a united stand against unfairness and toxicity in online game communities sprung out of GDC 2018 a...
Perfect Ten: Why MMO progression servers are a brilliant idea
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been enjoying the journey through RIFT Prime, the game's first progression server. Trion Worlds surprised and...
The Game Archaeologist: World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood pandemic
It began with an exploitable glitch. It exploded into an uncontained nightmare of death. It established a meme as strong as Leeroy Jenkins. It...
Perfect Ten: MMO missteps that didn’t have to happen
Around the time I started working at Massively-that-was, there was an article that I quite liked talking about how four high-profile MMO failures were...
Perfect Ten: A dozen MOBAs that didn’t make it
With the insane success -- both in terms of popularity and finances -- that Dota and League of Legends spawned, you can easily understand...
The Soapbox: Six responses to the ‘gaming is wrong/evil/an addiction’ argument
I recently went on a rant about gaming, but it wasn't directed at gaming. It was in defense of gaming. I am so weary...
Perfect Ten: The tabletop GMs behind MMOs
One of the advantages to computer RPGs, I've always thought, is that you don't need a friend who you can alternately sucker or bribe...
Perfect Ten: Ten more World of Warcraft races fans would like to play
Sometimes, you write a column more or less as a mental exercise, and then World of Warcraft drops an expansion pre-purchase that makes it...
Re-examining Asheron’s Call’s Shard of the Herald event on its first deathiversary
Although the Asheron's Call series has now been dead for exactly one year today, it's far from forgotten by fans. It was admittedly a cult classic, and...
The Soapbox: Confessions of a serial hoarder (in MMORPGs)
How much is too much?
To some, that might seem like a reasonable question. But I knew. I knew. There is no such thing as...
Trademarks, copyrights, and patents: What they mean for you and for video games
Has the pace of news moved so quickly that we've already forgotten about Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene's statement that video games lack any IP copyright...
Perfect Ten: The MMOs with the most uncertain futures in 2018
This is, bar none, the column I hate doing most on a regular basis. None of the games I highlight in here is something...
Massively Overthinking: What’s the smallest MMO you’re willing to play?
A comment on Reddit about the current size and viability of Kritika Online got me thinking about MMO playerbases in general lately. We all...
