The Think Tank

Can you remember your first MMO buying experience? What series of events led to your interest in massively multiplayer gaming? What made you finally accept that paying monthly for a game is a thing that's OK? Or did you wade through countless free-to-play games before finding one that suited you?

As the guys and gals you turn to each day for your MMOs news, the team at Massively has a solid history with this genre. So I dug a bit deeper to get those stories from a few members of the team. Feel free to leave your own MMO origins story in the comments below as you enjoy our own after the jump.

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Last month, Justin asked you in a Daily Grind article whether you'd play a chat-less MMO. His examples included The Endless Forest, where communication is done through emotes and symbols, and Journey, where players use visual cues to signal intent.

As MMO players, we feel that massive communication is a must-have feature and socializing is just part of the game. So I was curious about the opinions of the massively staff members on this topic. Would they play a chat-less MMO?

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One of the beauties of the MMO is that it's ever-changing. This means that the world expands, the community grows, and skills are always being re-balanced. Sometimes this comes in the form of a patch or update, and sometimes it comes in the form of a full-fledged expansion.

But when these changes affect the original game too much, it's inevitable that some players will not like what the devs see as improvements. In the case of the infamous Star Wars Galaxies NGE, players left in droves.

So I threw the question out to the Massively staff to see if anyone had been so turned off by a game update that he or she left for good. Read on to find out who left what and why Patrick might need to leave the country for a bit.

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Drama is a human condition that plagues some more than others, but it's generally unavoidable. When drama comes from a game developer, we, as players, usually respond with our own drama in the form of forum posts containing lots of all-caps.

Whether it's an out-of-context interview faux pas or whatever the War Z devs are up to this week, studio drama makes the news. Some of us love it; some of us hate it. But our reaction to developers behaving badly is what we're most interested in exploring today.

I asked the Massively crewmembers how they react to drama from their favorite developers. Does it affect their purchase of the game? How far is too far? Or do we need to keep studio views and the game itself separate?

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Whenever a new MMO with a popular IP is announced, there's a palpable sense of dread in the Massively virtual offices. Multiply that dread by a thousand if the IP is being overused in other media or the game is being produced by a studio with a reputation for churning out junk. Whether we're talking Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Game of Thrones, or even gaming-centric IPs like The Elder Scrolls or Final Fantasy, that wariness is understandable. We've all been burned before.

But even still, not all of the members of the Massively staff allow an IP to unduly influence their opinions about the MMOs themselves. In today's Think Tank, let's discuss just how cautious we are about MMOs saddled or boosted by popular IP-driven settings. Are they a boon or a curse?

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Your most popular MMOs usually share some type of common denominator. Whether that's a familiar UI, a skill tree that makes sense, or a cast of classes involving the holy trinity, it's safe to say that many MMOs are very similar.

But in recent years, developers have been stretching their creativity bones to invent new ways to play a roleplaying game online with lots and lots of people. Some of these innovations have worked; some have not. This often leads us to yearn for the old familiar features and mechanics we fall back on as a security blanket of sorts.

What does the Massively staff see as the most important MMO feature or mechanic? Read along after the cut to find out, and be sure to let us know your own opinion in the comments below.

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While government regulation is welcomed in some corners of our lives, it's not always welcomed everywhere. After recent gun violence has been making headlines more than ever, U.S. President Barack Obama set out to "find the cause" through new funding for 23 executive orders that pertain to the origins of gun violence. Vice President Joe Biden then met with experts in the video game industry to discuss the possibility that video games themselves are the cause. And probably that rock 'n' roll music, too. Darn kids!

Certainly we here at Massively have our own opinion on this matter, as video game violence legislation would affect us all. Read on past the cut to see what we have to say about government regulation for our favorite hobby.

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The topic of the MMO business model is a hot one lately as studios are in the Wild West of experimentation, discovery, and limit-testing. New games are going free-to-play every week it seems, and we, as consumers, are accepting more and more as these business models become standard.

But that's certainly not always the case. Among the Massively staff, pricing opinions run the gamut, and we're not afraid to tell you what we think. That's why this week's Think Tank column is all about how we would assemble our own perfect business models from the pieces of others. Who does it right? Who does it wrong? Read along for more on our thoughts for the perfect business model.

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We're spending this edition of The Think Tank to explore our predictions for next year's MMO-scape. Which games will launch? Which games will be postponed or cancelled? Will we see any innovations in the MMO space?

Remember, these are our own individual opinions and may not align with yours, so be ready for that. Also be sure to take a look back at the previous year's predictions and see how close or far from reality we were!

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In the spectrum of entertainment, MMOs are still relatively young. When the original MMOs were created in the late '90s, I don't imagine the innovators thought much about what would happen if millions of people got hooked on these games, built solid relationships, put thousands of hours into their characters... and then it all went away. The consequence of that unique situation is a lot more painful than most early developers could have imagined, yet it's happening more frequently.

With the closure of popular MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes and more, some players are a bit irritated at the genre as a whole. Not too many other time-investment hobbies can completely go away as quickly as an MMO.

So what does the Massively staff think is the solution? Do we turn to F2P publishers to throw some cash shop Band-Aids on the game and nudge it back into the wild? Do we bypass legal avenues and look at emulators? Is there even such thing as a solution?

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The funny thing about opinions is that everyone has one. While we celebrate that fact on an individual basis with our wildly popular column The Soapbox, often times the rest of the Massively team wants to weigh in on a particularly hot topic as well.

Think Tank is a new column that will act as a roundtable of opinions from the Massively staff on today's hottest MMO topics. We're all MMO gamers, and we all love to talk about the genre, so this is our place to do it. And as always, you're welcome to share your own opinion and let us know what you think about the topic each week in the comments.

For this inaugural installment, we're going to tackle the question of crowdfunding. Is Kickstarter just a fad, or will it redefine game publishing as we've known it?

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