We need an MMO-Off to declare a winner once and for all!

Pepeq · February 2015

We need an MMO-Off to declare a winner once and for all! That's right, a no-holds barred head to head down and dirty street fight. Each contender will compete using a single server running the original release of their MMO. In that I mean, contenders can only submit the original release of their game as it was when it originally hit the store shelves. No expansions. No patches, bug fixes or content that did not release during the original 3 month timeframe. That's right, a single server per contender. This means there could potentially be login queues for the duration of the MMO-Off. If the title is indeed worthy of winning, it should be plagued by login queues.

The roundup of contenders should ideally include all those titles everyone keeps asking for a return to. Server activity will be recorded for a period on 3 months. Activity monitored based on total concurrent logins, not total number of accounts created. A metric will provide us with the overall population activity during those 3 months. At the end of 3 months a winner will be announced. The contender with the most concurrent logins wins, hands down.

All servers will be F2P, meaning any and all are welcome to root for their favorite game by replaying it once again as it was. Since most titles are likely to have been released about 10 years ago, everyone's hardware should be easily up to the task of running them.

Of course this will never happen, but it would be a unique experiment to see... would we all actually return to our old game for 3 months straight or would we hop from one to another like we do today? Would we forgo playing our favorite title just to see what all the hubbub was about with the competitors of the time? Maybe had we played game X instead of game Y we would have realized we liked X game better... or conversely proved to ourselves that game Y was indeed much better?

Perhaps the developers of said titles don't want us to revisit the past, only their vision of what that past was?

sumdumguy1 · February 2015

Why? So we can experience the same fiascos all over again. Ultimately we can get a good feel about a game by the population and those who leave and come back. Financial information can be misrepresented or worded favorably as anything else can but most people have no real way to verify it. I look at WOW, GW2 and others like that which stand the test of time and continue to thrive. Does it really matter which game is the most popular? Find a game you play and enjoy it.

Akulas · February 2015

Bobs $10 MMORPG aka some indie game no one ever heard of. Playerbase: 25 Best game ever.

Stone_Fountain · February 2015

There is timing in when it was released to take into consideration and existing pay types. Some games when released did not have alot of competition. Because if that is no consideration EQ1 would win hands down and I don't know why this would then even be a discussion. It had no competition in its first days even though it was buggy as hell and it was sub only and playable on a 56k modem and low budget machine.