game design
EVE Evolved: Building your own empire
When CCP announced its far-reaching plans to overhaul EVE Online's territorial warfare gameplay, players were cautiously optimistic but understandably guarded. EVE's old sovereignty system...
WoW Factor: A three million loss lesson
It's been a little while, hasn't it, friends? In the time since I last penned WoW Factor (which missed an installment purely due to...
‘No more grind’: PvP sandbox Das Tal launches its Kickstarter
As promised, buy-to-play indie PvP sandbox Das Tal has begun a Kickstarter campaign today to coincide with the launch of the German wing of...
MMO Mechanics: Three favourite action combat systems
Virtually every MMO contains dangerous places that are filled with other players or NPCs that will attack characters on site, and many also feature...
EVE Evolved: Seven years of EVE Evolved
When I started writing about EVE Online for Massively back in 2008, the MMO genre was really hitting its stride, and emerging sites like...
The Daily Grind: When should MMO devs just stop tweaking?
Yesterday's reveal of Lord of the Rings Online's legendary item imbuing system struck me as a promising show of faith from the devs but nevertheless a...
Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns interview unwraps specializations and traits
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, readers of all races, professions, and levels: I finally have the news we've all been waiting for! Today...
EVE Evolved: How many subscriptions does EVE have?
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...
The Daily Grind: What old MMO feature deserves to make a comeback?
Today's Daily Grind comes to us from Kickstarter donor Diskonekted, who asks one of the genre's million-dollar questions:
What features or technology from older MMOs are...
MMO Mechanics: How strong communities are barriers-to-exit
MMOs occupy a unique position in our game libraries because they include a wide range of clever mechanics that keep us logging in day...
RIFT chronicles the remaking of the Hammerknell raid
If you came into RIFT late in its life cycle, you missed Hammerknell. If you weren't raiding when Hammerknell was super relevant to the...
EVE Evolved: Four lessons sandbox MMOs can learn from EVE
The past few years have seen a resurgence of support for sandbox MMOs, both of the trying-to-be-minecraft creative kind and the hardcore nuke-it-from orbit...
The Soapbox: The misguided quest for MMO stickiness
This guest Soapbox was originally commissioned in 2015 through Massively Overpowered's Kickstarter campaign and is authored by Tyler F.M. Edwards, who blogs at www.superior-realities.com....
Massively Overthinking: The true value of free-to-play players
Today's Massively Overthinking question comes to us from Kickstarter backer and prolific commenter Omedon, who wrote us a really long question. It's long. But it's a...
Guild Wars 2 removes bleeding caps in Heart of Thorns
One of the routinely stated design goals about Guild Wars 2 is that you should be able to wander out in the world and...
EVE Evolved: CCP’s Andie Nordgren on new structures and sovereignty
I've been pretty critical of EVE Online's upcoming sovereignty and nullsec revamp, calling the constellation-wide battle fake and its use of reinforcement timers unnecessary....
EVE Evolved: Sovereignty 2.0 Needs Some Work
When CCP Games announced last year that a complete nullsec revamp was coming to EVE Online, the playerbase breathed a collective sigh of relief...
Daybreak now has two G.I.R.L. scholarships for 2015
After this week's Storybricks drama and today's brutal cutbacks of customer service and forum support, the company formerly known as SOE could really use some good...
Working As Intended: ‘Multiplex monotony’ and the death of the mid-budget MMORPG
Back in December, film editor and author Jason Bailey wrote a piece on Flavorwire called How the Death of Mid-Budget Cinema Left a Generation...
Star Citizen developers respond to feedback on Rental Equipment Credits
When Star Citizen recently announced its plans to sell temporary rental equipment this week, the online response was pretty mixed. While most backers seemed...
