As a gaming parent of gaming kids, I really appreciated this article.

The "safety issue" is paramount with me. One of my biggest concerns as a parent of kids playing MMOs (WoW, mainly, but also CoX and LotRO) is that, while 99% of other MMO players are just fine, one does encounter the occasional obnoxious creep or jerk.

So, our standing rule is that general and/or OOC chat gets turned off, and I don't allow my younger kids to group up with other players.

One workaround for this issue is to find MMOs in which 1 to 3 players can accomplish all or most of the content so that we can, as it were, keep the group content "in the family." Guild Wars was absolutely perfect for this.

I have often wished that games such as LotRO and WoW would offer smaller-group (or even solo) alternatives to some of their instanced content -- say, dungeons scaled to party size. Unfortunately, there seems to be some unwritten rule in MMO-dom that "group" content MUST have parties of at least 5 (WoW) or 6 (LotRO) players.

That said, most MMOs still offer a ton of solo and small-group content (other than the instances, of course). My hope is that GW2, STO, and SWTOR will be more "solo, duo, and trio friendly" than the current crop of MMOs.