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So long, Massively, and thanks for all the fish
A little under five years ago, I answered the call for a wonderful opportunity to write at Massively. In many ways, it was an unbelievable dream come true. It married my passion for MMOs with my love of blogging while taking all of that to the next level. The first night after I got hired, I set my phone to deliver team emails ASAP so that I wouldn't miss out on a moment (I quickly turned that off so I could actually sleep). Since then, it's been a rollercoaster of wild news, personal projects, out-of-state conventions, long discussions, and general excitement over what the next day will bring. And now it's over. Oh, the MMOs are still going strong and 2015 is shaping up to be one mighty interesting year. Personally, I'll keep writing about these games on Bio Break and talking about them (we're taking the Massively Speaking podcast with us as a last-minute gesture of defiance against our former corporate overlords). Past that, I don't know what the future will hold. I guess I have to be content with not knowing. But before I bow out of the site completely, I have a few things to say to you all.
EVE Evolved: The end of EVE Evolved
By now, you will have heard that Massively is being shut down along with Joystiq and countless other blogs run by AOL. That unfortunately means this will be my final article for Massively and marks an end to the nearly seven-year run of the EVE Evolved column, which now holds over 350 articles on topics ranging from ship fittings and opinion pieces to guides and expansion breakdowns. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your readership and to express just how much playing EVE Online and writing for you really have impacted my life. I've been asked by so many people over the years for tips on breaking into the games industry as a journalist or MMO blogger, but the truth is that I lucked into this gig. When a post on the EVE Online news page said that some site called Massively was hiring an EVE Online columnist, I almost didn't bother applying. I was a prolific forumgoer back then and had written some guides for EON Magazine and my own blog, but I wanted to get into game development and had very little confidence in my writing ability. What I didn't know then was that writing for Massively would help improve my writing skills immeasurably and even help give me the confidence to launch my own game development studio. Massively gave me a platform on which to talk about EVE Online and an eager audience to share my game experiences with, but it turned into something much more profound. There have been low points dealing with trolls and organised harassment and tough times with budget cuts, but there have also some incredible experiences like attending the EVE Online Fanfest, investigating monoclegate, watching CCP redeem itself in the eyes of players, and collaborating with some of the best writers in the games industry. In this final edition of EVE Evolved, I look back at the start of the EVE Evolved column, break down my top ten column articles of all time, and try to put into words how much this column has meant to me over the years.
WRUP: Trolls and all
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you point out to me that it hasn't been six months yet. But what are you going to do about it -- fire me? Man, this kinda stuff still makes me grin, and I will miss you, my favorite trolls and all. Why are we still doing this? Because this is what we do.
Massively-that-was
I have sad news for the Massively staff and community today, news most of you already knew was coming. This week, we learned our AOL overlords have decided that they no longer wish to be in the enthusiast blog business and are shutting all of them down. This mass-sunset includes decade-old gaming journalism icon Joystiq, and therefore, it includes us. February 3rd, 2015, will be the final day of operation for Massively-that-was.
WRUP: Dropping all the subs
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you guess, to the day, when WildStar will join ESO in dropping its sub. Winner gets the admiration of his peers!
WRUP: MMO refunds
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you tell us whether you've ever managed to successfully get a refund for a video game.
Ask Massively: The most popular Massively posts of 2014
Like MMOs themselves, the MMO-related stories we like aren't always the most popular across the internet. And sometimes the articles that go viral are unassuming duds with our actual commenters, not the most controversial and heated. That's what we're going to look at today in this edition of Ask Massively: the 10 most popular posts of 2014, weighted by pageviews, though we'll talk a bit about comment count as well. Enjoy this trek into the year gone by.
WRUP: Playing house
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you tell Larry that his decorated Star Wars: The Old Republic stronghold/house is awesome. Because it is.
WRUP: MMO resolutions
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you tell us your MMO resolutions for the year and which ones you've already failed to keep three days in.
The Daily Grind: What would you like Massively to cover in 2015?
Ahh, did you get a whiff of that new year smell? Mmm. Wish I could bottle that up. There's so much to do, so many lands to visit, and so many virtual boars to kill for their valuable livers. Since it's still early in 2015, I'll toss out an interesting question for our readership: What do you want Massively to cover this year? Is there a game, a topic, or a focus that you'd love to see get some extra attention? Do you have the most awesome idea ever for an article? Hit us up in the comments below! As a post-script, don't forget that you can always contribute to the site by sending in news tips, podcast emails, or One Shots submissons! Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
WRUP: You'll shoot your eye out, kid
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you tell us how you got this awesome game under your holiday tree and you're playing that and we should be playing it too! Plus I'm totally going to use the ridable ferret pic again. Everybody wins.
Ask Massively: The one where we talk about our 2014 awards
Massively's 2014 awards series is over, but we like to go back and take a look at the reader polls and some of the big questions and neat comments that arose during the course of our rollout because many of our awards were contentious, as they are every year. It'd be no fun if they weren't, I suppose. Allow us to pontificate, and in the course of the review, we'll try to answer some frequently asked questions as well.
WRUP: Expanshapaign is too a word
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you tell us what Guild Wars 2's much-prophesied expanshapaign should look like.
WRUP: HDMI converter for GOTY
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you tell us why we should be playing HDMI converter.
Ask Massively: Scoring last year's MMO predictions
One of my favorite things to do every year is go back to the previous year's staff predictions. What did we think 2014 was going to look like in the MMO world back at the end of 2013? How wrong were we, and where did we hit eerily close to the mark? I won't include everything, just some of the more prophetic and ridiculous ideas our current staff offered a year ago. Feel free to share your own fulfilled prophecies down in the comments.
WRUP: Troll-free eggnog
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you pour everyone another round of that eggnog. The good stuff, if you would.
WRUP: The WRUP awakens
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you tell us which MMO studio is going to be the first to turn Episode VII into a F2P themepark WoW clone.
Ask Massively: Ridiculing e-sports is bad for MMOs
I don't love e-sports. I've never really been a fan. I used to enjoy spectating Guild Wars matches, but only in short bursts. Truth is, I prefer playing in PvP to watching it. I feel that way about real sports too; the ones I like, I'd rather play than watch. (Except tennis. I have no idea why, but I could watch that all day.) And if the MMORPG community's comments are any judge, I am not alone in my indifference to e-sports. Actually, "indifference" is probably too tame a word; some MMO gamers are outright hostile to e-sports, be those e-sports jammed into proper MMORPGs or waaaaay out on the fringes of the online gamosphere. That hostile ridicule of e-sports, however, degrades online gaming, our corner of it as much as anyone's.
WRUP: Lucky Korea
Welcome back to Massively's What Are You Playing, the game in which we tell you what we're playing this weekend and you remind us how sad we are that Korea is getting a crapton of MMOs we'll probably never see.
Perfect Ten: Lessons I've learned from working at Massively
In spring of 2010, I was asked to come on board Massively primarily as a feature writer who would also do a little news on the side. This opportunity was incredible since I was already blogging multiple times a day about online gaming, so why not be a part of the professional side of writing? Over four years and nearly two million words written since, I've witnessed a lot here at Massively. I've gotten to interview some big industry names, been allowed to take on fun pet projects, gone to conventions as a member of the press corps, and made a lot of good friends. I've also learned several lessons that have helped me to grow as a person and a writer, and I thought I'd jot a few of those down for one of these lists. Fun Perfect Ten factoid: When I proposed this column to the editors, I had done extensive research on lists that other sites had done (as to not cover similar territory) and drew up about 40 new topic ideas. In retrospect, it might have been overkill. I could have just written in an email, "People like lists."
