Last December I posted an article about the top 5 most memorable events in MMORPG history which received a huge response from the MMO community.  Today I decided it revisit this post and list a few more of the top events in MMORPG history.  These are in no particular order:

Serenity Now Bombs a Funeral – World of Warcraft – March 2006

While not the first funeral massacre, it is the most famous that I know of.  An in-game funeral was being held for a girl guildmate that died in real life when it was attacked by a rival guild Serenity Now.  The guild posted on message boards about the funeral and asked players not to break it up as it was in a PvP zone.  Obviously one guild had other plans.  Click the link above to see the video.

Lord Kazzak Terrorizes Stormwind – World of Warcraft – 2006

Before the release of The Burning Crusade, it was possible to lure Lord Kazzak, an outdoor raid boss to Stormwind.  Once there he basically became invincible since he gains massive health every time he kills someone.  With the release of TBC, Lord Kazzak has since been chained to the Blasted Lands.

Shard of the Herald – Asheron’s Call – Nov 2000

The Shard of the Herald was the final shard in Asheron’s Call which was hidden until the first 6 shards had been destroyed.  With the destruction of the final shard, the legendary demon Bael’Zharon would be released as well as new more powerful weapons and items for player .  However players were given a choice to either attack or protect the final shard.  The playerbase on all the servers became divided into those wanting to destroy the shard and those who swore to protect it.  As the battle raged across AC’s servers, the defenders held their ground and were able to protect the shard, this was until the developers stepped in to help the attackers.  NPC controlled by developers contacted the most powerful players and those that passed the test were given  powerful items for their service and dubbed Bael’Zharon’s “Dark Masters”.  Shortly after the Shard of the Herald was destroyed on all servers except for one, Thistledown.  Defenders on Thistledown got organized and started to monitor the status of the shard and setup shifts where players would come to protect it.  The defenders were able to successfully defend the shard until once again the developers step in and stacked the side of the attackers by adding several mythological followers of Bael’Zharon to aid in the attack.  The Shard of Herald was thus destroyed, but the defenders of the shard on the Thristledown server were rewarded with a statue bearing the names of the leaders to commemorate those who stood against Bael’Zharon’s dark followers.

Fansy The Famous Bard – Everquest – July 2001

When Everquest created the no rules server Sullon Zek , they didn’t anticipate a Bard by the name of Fansy.  The no rules server was just that with one exception, players below lev 6 could not be player killed.  The new server was split into good and evil with most players choosing to become evil.  Eventually Fansy decided to join the server on the side that no one wanted to play on and became a bard.  Fansy leveled to level 5 when he realized he could train a sand giant, a high level monster that normally a bard couldn’t train until a much high level.  But this was a no-rule server so Fansy proceeded to create an small army of sand giants.  Still being level 5, Fansy then traveled through out the realm slaying anyone in his path.   Eventually the highest level player on the server came up against Fansy, but being invulnerable stood no chance.  Eventually GMs were notified of this loophole, but for 3 days Fansy was allowed to wreak havoc on the Sullon Zek server until finally the no-rule server got some rules.

Shadowbane Server Hacked – Shadowbane – May 2003

What started out as items and money disappearing from players characters, soon turned into the most chaotic event in MMORPG history.  Hackers were able to take control of one of Shadowbanes servers for a few hours and basically do whatever they wanted.  It seemed like the hackers has a sweet tooth for newbie blood as noobs were the main targets of the attacks.

“The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.”

One safe zone in particular, “Newbie Island” became one of the main targets.

“Experienced players looked on in horror as new players were slowly and gleefully dismembered by ax-wielding ogres.  Others just laughed and looted the characters’ bodies after the ogres were done.”

Eventually this hacked server was rolled back and all players were able to regain their items.

Massive Protests – Starwars Galaxies – 2005

When Starwars Galaxies did the “Combat Upgrade” players of the community rose up in protest stating that the new combat system was too simple and was dumbed down. Cancellation rose, but eventually leveled off and SWG started to grow back until the release of the “New Game Enhancements” update.  This was the last straw for players as the new upgrade further dumbed the game down.  Protest erupted on the SOE message boards asking for an explanation.  SOE decided to delete any negative posts and then started to mass ban users, which eventually lead to the forums being closed down.  However players were not done yet and decided to take their protest in-game.  Meeting up in star ports players cranked up their graphics settings and started to open multiple windows using their data pads, coupled with channel spam and the fact everyone was in the same location caused server loads to sky rocket.  Players were being threatened with account suspension and bannings, but the players got their point across, although it was too late to save SWG.

Fallador Massacre (666 Massacre) – Runescape – June 6, 2006

On this day 6/6/06 a player by the name of Cursed_you was about to reach lev 99 in construction, the highest level ever reached for that skill and decided to celebrate by having a house party.  As players showed up, many went into the dungeon where they could participate in PvP.  After some time Cursed_you had enough and decided to expel everyone out of his house.  What happened next no one could have predicted.   With so many players being expelled at once, the game just couldn’t handle it.  So when players were out of Cursed_you’s house they realized they retained the ability to PvP, anywhere!  Many quickly saw the benefit and started killing anyone they could, taking their gold and looting their corpses.  GMs quickly became aware of the situation and tried to warn other players to log off or bank their items, but it was already too late.

We’re raising the bar around here. We’ve noticed that a lot of alleged MMO news sources and Warhammer info sites have been spawning lots of generic, non-informative and highly “graphical” previews and sneak peaks at some of the features of Warhammer Online. That’s all good for some, but what about our readers, many who are still using AOL or Compuserve dial-up on a 56k line? Trust me, they are out there. Hell, I even got an email from a reader who still uses Prodigy.

We’ve had enough of these flashy “Character Generation Previews” – yeah, thanks for the 10 minute video watching you stumble around trying to make your Dark Elf’s tits look bigger. Also, quite frankly, all of these videos of PVE battles are pretty damn boring. Rather than add to this problem, we’ve decided to bring you a real, original and informative look at RVR in Warhammer Online.

So, I logged on my Bright Wizard last night and headed for the frontiers for some good ol’ PVP action. I missed an important piece of information as I logged in; either due to consumption of alcohol or my one handed navigation thanks to my new duel monitor setup.

The piece of information I missed was this:

Order population: 372  Destruction population: 561

Knowledge of this might have made me enter the RvR lands a bit more carefully. I entered the frontier land, past the “small group” of Order I saw (why are they standing near our RvR entrance, I thought to myself) and then promptly got knocked 30 feet the wrong way by some level 40 guy and then chewed in half by 7 Squigs.

Using the Warhammer in game editor, lovingly called “WARPaint”, I drew this up as a summary of my night of RvR:

All kidding aside, I think that Warhammer Online does have a bit of a population balance problem. I’ve done a strict scientific analysis on this, involving me logging into each EU server at least once, and I’ve decided that Destruction has roughly 20-30% more players at any given time. Keep in mind that this strict scientific study was, in fact, done in one night. Word from the US has roughly the same estimate.

So, what’s the reason behind this? Are Destruction classes just more interesting? Do the girls look better? Is there free beer? Is the inner emo of many players finally being reached, and you find that playing a Destruction character is a way to tell the world you are a beautiful and unique snowflake in a tasty goth flavor?

What do I think? I think that it’s a combination of a couple things: Destruction classes are more interesting, Orcs and Goblins are cool, and the chicks definately do look better on the evvvulll side. Truth is, they’re just showing more skin. Order Elves, in my opinion, are pretty “meh” in regards to aesthetics and class fun factor. Dwarves and Humans have the most interesting class choices of Order, yet both only have 3 to choose from, sadly.

So, how will Mythic handle this? Will Destruction be the new Albion/Alliance zergfest of Warhammer Online? Lastly, how will this effect your decision on what faction to play? I know after a couple nights on both sides of the fence, there is no way in hell I’m going to play Destruction on release.

Hi, I’m Daniel. You might remember me from such other MMO articles like “It was great except for the Elves with 5 o’clock shadows” and “Tits and Fatalities aside, Age of Conan sucks flaccid donkey genitals”. I’m new here; and bringing you a highly opinionated, wordy rant on the latest of MMO trends: the term “WoW Killer”.

The meme itself isn’t new: the first earliest recorded instance of this meme was by the scribe Pontus Sextus Alphonsus in 300 A.D, writing about the threat of an invasion from far eastern Empires into the vulnerable Roman empire. He referred to these savages as possibly the first “Rome-killer” -  yeah, ok, I just made all of that up. The term “WoW Killer” has been kicking it around since WoW first became a success back in 2004. Any major MMO release since then has been plagued with this term: “Will this game be the WoW Killer? Will this game gain self-awareness, attack the Blizzard server farm with a targetted nuclear strike, then start searching for Sarah Connor? Does this game have the potential to learn kung-fu?”

No, it doesn’t. The term itself implies that WoW in fact can be killed, which it can’t. Sure, it can lose some subscribers: even for arguments purpose, it’s possible (though not likely) that games like Warhammer Online have more total active subscribers than WoW. Does that mean WoW has, in fact, been killed? No. It would still be the 2nd largest MMO subscriber game, and it would still be the all time biggest MMO in terms of subscribers. Even in this best case scenario, WoW would still have a piss-ton of subscribers by industry standards.

Many people say that the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself. I liken this to people watching too many Terminator movies as kids or possible temporal lobe damage from hearing the pre-pubescent screams of Eddie Furlong too many times. WoW can’t kill itself, but it’s supporting staff of humans can perhaps muck things up a bit. A lot of WoW subscribers were alienated or quit after the Burning Crusade expansion: WoW subscriptions were down to around 2 or 3 million actual subscribers and about 17 million chinese gold-farmer accounts. Wrath of the Lich King might do the same thing; and it’s good to theorize that if Warhammer Online provides as good of a PVP experience as everyone hopes it does, it will take a good deal of the “real PVPers” away from WoW (if any still play) – and WoW can be happy in deluding people that the little e-sport Arena games are “real PVP”. At the end of the day, though, there is still a core group of people that love WoW for what it is: whether it’s because it was their first MMO, the majority of their friends play, or even it’s cozy familiarity: people will always stay and play World of Warcraft, and in great numbers.

TL;DR version: WoW has too many loyal fans and addicts to ever be “killed” as a MMO. End of story.

Now that we’ve determined that WoW can’t be killed, it’s time to move on. Even though it can’t be terminated, it can still lose a lot of customers, or better yet, it *is* possible that another MMO has just as big of a following and playerbase as WoW does without stealing their customers. In fact, this latter scenario is the best scenario because it means that players have been gained from outside the genre and the industry has indeed grown. This can’t really happen with titles like Warhammer Online or Age of Conan because it’s still stuck in the same genre (Fantasy) and is really just a rehash of the same thing – and maybe niched to a certain demographic, like PVP/RVR with WAR or Nudity and … well, whatever for AoC.

So what can rival WoW in fanbase and subscribers? A non-fantasy, perhaps “non RPG” based MMO that is rock solid, using a known IP. Whether this is a MMOFPS or MMORTS (or even both) – this is really the only chance that the MMO industry has at ever producing something that rivals the beast of WoW in revenue and following. Using this logic, companies like Mythic, Funcom and 38 Studios actually hurt the MMO industry because they won’t be generating many new players (from outside the genre) and have instead been focusing on stealing other players away from other similar games. Meanwhile, hordes of fantatical FPS and RTS players are uncatered for in our over-saturated Fantasy MMORPG market.

I digress; in conclusion, let’s stop using this tired term “WoW Killer”. The term is just plain inaccurate; we need to be more creative and constructive in representing the MMO industry. So, let’s focus on objective reviews and previews of upcoming releases and advancing and expanding the industry, rather than throwing this lame meme into the mix with every new title that’s about to be released.

It seems that the walls of World of Warcraft are impenetrable as yet another hyped MMO is broken against them, I’m of course speaking of Age of Conan.  Age of Conan was probably the most hyped MMO in the last few years and while the hype helped AoC to break sales records, it didn’t last long.  Age of Conan became the fasted selling MMO of all time,  shipping 1 million units by June and Funcom stated it had 700,000 accounts by June 30th.

While off to a good start in terms of sales, the game itself did not start off so well.  Across any MMO gaming site you’ll read about player complaints and gamers leaving AoC due to the many issues.  While Funcom has not released any figures since June 30th, it is rumored that about 1/2 of the player base has left the game.  Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime also recently mentioned that “40% of the World of Warcraft subscribers that left for Age of Conan have since returned“.

Although the walls of WOW still stand strong, like all great world powers they must eventually fall.  In an article at GamePlayer.com.au, they write about the recent “Recruit-a-Friend” campaign as a sign that subscription numbers are falling and Blizzard is looking for ways to bolster them until the release of Wrath of the Lich King.  I myself made a prediction back in May stating that WoW would reach its peak this summer and then start to decline.

It seems that with every new big MMO, WoW is slowly starting to feel the pinch.  With Warhammer Online on the horizon and a few other MMOs (Huxley, The Chronicles of Spellborn) before the years end, can WoW continue it’s growth?  I’m sticking with my earlier statment and say no, it can’t.

Also, this article is not to say that AoC is a failure, I’m merely stating that AoC did not live up to the hype and is little to no threat to the WoW empire.