World of Warcraft

It’s creator appreciation week, and I’m appreciating the creation myths of the most popular MMOs in the world!

Here we go again. The top 38 MMOs in the last 30 days in the USA, as reported by Google Trends.

With so many MMOs on the market, it can be hard to decide which one is right for you. Here are the 5 best MMOs to play in 2022 to help you make your decision!

New World has been released for just a week. It is way, way too early to start forecasting any sort of trends from this. Like, that’s ever stopped me before. I repeat this whenever I talk about Google Trends. Google Trends is based solely on what people are searching for, and does not correlate with the actual popularity of the game, the number of players, or anything. It’s just the number of searches on a specific topic in a certain amount of time. I would assume that search terms are connected to a specific topic by the searcher clicking on a relevant link in the search results, but that’s just a guess. That said… ...

I don’t play every MMO that comes out – not by a longshot. But, I follow a lot of gamers, streamers, and game developers, and between me and them, I see a lot of discussion about the new MMOs that come down the pike. Crowfall was released a couple of weeks ago. Suddenly, everyone was talking about it. And then, suddenly everyone was not. What did it all mean? I asked Google Trends to help me analyze searches for a dozen or so MMOs to help understand what all was going on with MMOs today. ...

Yesterday, “Kingdoms of Amalur: The Re-Reckoning”, an update of 2012’s “Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning” was released. It’s a refresh of a game that seemed groundbreaking at the time, being a single-player experience that would familiarize its players with the world of the MMO at that time known as Project Copernicus. The story of Project Copernicus and its developers, 38 Studios, would fill books. Its failure left Kingdoms of Amalur in a weird spot: An MMO-ish single player RPG set in an MMO world that would never exist. While playing KoA, it’s easy to imagine other people crafting at the quest hubs, teaming up for the dungeons, and bringing the world to life. As a single player game, it plays like an MMO just after the servers come up. ...

This is going to be a little Twitter-heavy, and I apologize for that. The @PantheonCrafter account, posted a survey today about crafting: Would you prefer the crafting mechanics for @PantheonMMO to be turn-based (like Vanguard or FFXIV), real-time (like EQ2), or Click-to-Craft (like WoW)? Feel free to reply and say more! #mmocrafting — Pantheon Crafters (@PantheonCrafter) August 18, 2020 I just had to question the whole idea of crafting. It’s become a checkbox item – does your MMO have… [x] crafting? [ ] fishing? [ ] dance emotes? ...

I’ve been running around in an EverQuest Time-Limited Progression (TLP) server the past couple of days. Is there even such a thing as a new EverQuest player anymore?

Boared Stiff. When I found out “Top (some number) (some thing)” articles were called “listicles” (for List Articles), my life was changed. I’d always had these feelings I couldn’t explain, where I’d think of some provocative list of things and then put any old things in as the list, because getting people to click on the link and come to the article – the LISTICLE – would be mission accomplished. Article could be blank. ...

The Scarlet Library? Each week, when Kasul and I meet for Neverwinter, we never know quite what we’re going to be doing. Grinding quests to max level? Not really our thing. We’ve got our whole crafting operation to worry about, the endless skirmishes, the occasional dungeon – our only problem, really, is having enough time to do it all. Our free companions had reached their max level – 15 – and were not up to their jobs any more. Which was really unfortunate, because my companion was a cleric, and healing is a nice thing to have. Kasul was rocking a control wizard companion. Both needed replacing. Kasul got Dogsupial, a skeletal dog dropped from the recent demonic invasion of the city of Neverwinter. I spent my astral diamonds on Flambert, an apprentice phoenix obtained from Nightmare/Nachtmahr lockbox. We spent an off-night last week leveling up the new companions so they’d be ready for our regular adventures. ...