Perfect example of what Tyler was calling out on MOP this weekend - MMOs that mean well but just cannot resist turning the holiday fun into a grind or a gold sink. Really a missed op to shower fans with freebies and boost goodwill. I'm playing GW2 but not playing Wintersday.

@nbrianna.bsky.social got heavy back into GW 1 with this revival. It's so amazing to see the game brimming with people. Got me thinking. This time of year is really hard for a lot of us. Playing an old game allows me to feel nostalgia without pain. That's harder than it should be to find

Kotaku and IGN just awash in ad spam now. Good luck finding the gaming posts in that morass. PC Gamer, Eurogamer, RPS don't look like this fwiw. (And neither do we.)

Extremely cool, like playing Ultima Online in 1997 (earnest)! Also nice to see Blizzard catching up to pre-millennium MMORPG ideas (exhausted)!

If you don't step in to control it, the chaoslords will do it for you, and you will live to watch them burn it all down. Thirty years of online communities proves it over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Basically, what's been happening to MMORPGs over the last 10 years is happening to the rest of the industry now. massivelyop.com/2015/02/20/w... Some mainstreamers (not Tomas) are hoping it's just an MMORPG problem, but we were just the canary in the coal mine b/c of the timescales involved.

It's dawning on me that not only has my generation (1970-2000) been singularly lucky in terms of peace & prosperity before the Skynet age, we've also experienced a singular window of opportunity for MMORPGs. We were the perfect audience with a working attention span. It is basically over now. 😬

Preach it TAGN

"Let’s be honest: The real issue isn’t me—it’s you. You simply don’t read enough. If you did, you’d know I’ve been here for centuries." holy shit this but unironically

This is a straight truth bomb. Bartle's 'Designing Virtual Worlds' and 'Postmortems' by @raphkoster.bsky.social are the perfect place to start but there are heaps of great books out there. ... and there's one more set to be announced next month 🤫

I may have gone on a bit of an MMORPG history rant. You may put in the papers that I am mad.

*sigh* not even a week gone by this time. *taps sign* Just spit-ballin' but if every mass layoff required execs to take responsibility and lose their positions too (and lose their retention bonuses), I wonder if we would see less layoffs? I suspect other solutions would appear somehow

Microsoft claimed its defeating regulators is a "victory for players" EA said forcing devs in-office creates "incredible experiences for [its] players" How about you both fuck off. You don't speak for players or care about us. Don't you dare invoke us to justify your greed and labor abuse.

The frustrating thing here IMO is that I don't think we even need Sting. Pippin has enough room. But the situation is holding up the dark world access for unclear reasons (they have no escrow). We've already waited years for this, and now the hype moment has passed. My guildies are over it. :(

As Schlag put it, we had a bit of a celebrity sighting. :P

egg

the new LOTRO server is going GREAT

This is good and correct.

I am *fairly* sure people are just mass-trolling urban dictionary... but I also wouldn't bet my life on it, and also I Believe.

Dead game, clearly.

We had some dudes yell at us that we should know better, that layoffs after a launch are 'normal' - which even if true wouldn't make it acceptable so we'd still be mad - but in this GAAS case, it's extra suspect. I sure hope Once Human development isn't the template here. What a gift to Blizzard rn.

I'm convinced @sypster.bsky.social writes these to make me cry while editing them. I was holding it together until the last part, I really was.

Finally put out this excessively granular piece on SWG Legends' open-world apartment system, which is amazing and unique in MMOs but kinda underused, and I hope they can fix it. Thinking about doing GW2 next because it's such a great example of spectacular housing that is weirdly just not for me.

MOP's @sypster.bsky.social and I will be joining MJ's streamathon at 1p EST to record a live episode of the MOP Podcast! It's honestly surreal that we made it to 10 years as a fully indie outlet, far outliving the original. To think how close we came to giving up. But y'all said otherwise. :D

new City of Heroes time manip toon concept just dropped. Dark/time corruptor, maybe.

The best part of the Guild Wars 2 community will always be those folks who go out of their way to make sure everyone is resurrected after an event

This Warframe piece from Eliot is one of his best - it's a heavy topic, fair warning, but it also proves once again that there is serious storytelling going on in MMOs and MMO-adjacent games. We shouldn't discount that!

We called Josh Foreman a genius on this week's podcast. This is clearly proof we're right

This is so revelatory, so validating, yet so astonishingly simple of an idea: Sandboxes are best when they allow everyone, not when they try to shove archaic and bad memories down everyone's throat, and the path to MMORPGs should be a paved road and not a dirt path.

This is the piece about Stars Reach and MMORPG demographics I was talking about on the podcast. Y'all, the target demo here is 25-26. It's not us. And that's a seriously good thing.

This guy on Reddit speaks for the whole damn MMO genre tbh

Spoilers, I liked it. :D Just know it's not an MMO. It's like... an MO at best. I am hard to please with survival sandboxes as I tend to wash out after I have seen all the cool stuff, but if Astrolabe can sort that out, Aloft is one to watch through early access.

I spent a lot of extra time on this one this year to make the historical winners more readable and with updated links to the old stuff on frankengadget because I'm tired of MMO history being lost. Hope y'all enjoyed the season! I have already started prep for end-of-the-year 2025.

This stuff annoys me. Delve is a common word in MMOs. We have used it nearly a thousand times on MOP in the last 10 years, and I'd fire anyone for using genAI, so it's all organic. But now we have to stop using useful and common words because of the plagiarism robot. Bleh.

We made it to 500 episodes since MassivelyOP Independence Day 2015! :D I need a long nap!

This is the short version of those Tarisland lore recaps I did this year that made me wonder if I was having a stroke. The baby bump of vengeance isn't even the worst part.

I also feel as if I'm living in a different time and place from the people who do this - it's a luxury I'm so far away from I don't even miss it. I have never used a fast food delivery service, apart from getting a pizza sometimes (usually we just walk). Yes, time is valuable, but not THAT valuable.

heh heh... fethers

I will raise you by one of the first long-form pieces I did when MOP went indie in 2015: "Multiplex monotony and the death of the mid-budget MMORPG." It's wild how all these articles hold up, just as relevant as they ever were. If anything, the industry has only gotten worse in 10 years.

A Christmas Eve toast to that one MOP Podcast listener who suggested I simply hire a babysitter to take care of my kids so I could play more games to talk about on the podcast. I sincerely hope he's doing well and making as much money as he apparently thinks video game journalists do but don't. <3

Yeah MMO players skew another way entirely. For us, it's "were you a band kid or a theater person?" And for a lot of us, it's both lol.

There are even trolls shitposting on his *Linkedin* under his post. No good deed goes unpunished.

This is why we play video games. To fly around in shiny space yachts and soak in hot tubs in our minds.

This is is the kind of frivolous Star Citizen content I can get behind. :D (Irony: This is also the closest I can get to a hot tub now. Doc barred me from warm water, let alone hot hehe. Skin sucks.)

I microwave my water in a borosilicate glass teapot, then steep, then forget I had it steeping, then warm it up again, then pour :P

um

Correct! Being a good journalist covering games does not require you to have absurdly high skills at playing them! That's like saying people who report on football should themselves be professional-level football players, or that people covering classical music should have mastered the violin!

Man, my parents came up with a secret code for our family in the '80s. We weren't allowed to go anywhere with strangers who didn't know it. Now we're full circle with AI stranger danger lol.

CCP streisanding itself with this nonsense. "New World is now an online action RPG" levels of absurd.