Please Stop Calling Your Single-Player Games MMOs | MMORPG.com

System

Please Stop Calling Your Single-Player Games MMOs | MMORPG.com

This is a humble request for gamers to stop calling their single-player games MMOs, which seems to be a growing trend nowadays.

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ZenJelly

Psh, who cares. It's a meaningless tag anymore like most of the rest. If you want to play a game do the research yourself and decide. Stop getting hung up on labels.

Angrakhan

Sorry but every noun in the English language is a "label". If I point at a table that has an orange and an apple on it and say "Bring me the orange" and you bring me the apple we're going to have a problem. Labels do matter because words matter. If I call you an uneducated moron and you get offended and I tell you to "not get hung up on labels" something tells me you're still going to be offended.

Scot

This is important, genre names help us focus in on the games that we love. But no genre name is more misused than "adventure game". MMO is next on the list of most misused mind you.

This is all about fashion, when a genres hot everything has that label, I might also point out this happens to sub-genres too. Like "Cozy" and "survival". I can remember making a joke about 'it won't be long before we have a "cozy survival" MMO' and one of you pointed out that one was already out there!

It a darn nuisance and just leads to misinformation.

unfilteredJW

Literally doesn't fucking matter.

Champie

ZenJelly said:

Psh, who cares. It's a meaningless tag anymore like most of the rest. If you want to play a game do the research yourself and decide. Stop getting hung up on labels.

^An excellent example of the problem humanity faces - an obliterated mind.

unfilteredJW

Angrakhan said:

Sorry but every noun in the English language is a "label". If I point at a table that has an orange and an apple on it and say "Bring me the orange" and you bring me the apple we're going to have a problem. Labels do matter because words matter. If I call you an uneducated moron and you get offended and I tell you to "not get hung up on labels" something tells me you're still going to be offended.

The internet continues to be a graveyard of shit analogies.

mikeb0817

This place smells of hypocrisy 

Champie

mikeb0817 said:

This place smells of hypocrisy 

Indeed. It is a surprise that this is a SYSTEM post. MMORPGdotCOM is a CONTRADICTION wrapped in an abusive ad-revenue campaign

lotrlore

Champie said:

mikeb0817 said:

This place smells of hypocrisy 

Indeed. It is a surprise that this is a SYSTEM post. MMORPGdotCOM is a CONTRADICTION wrapped in an abusive ad-revenue campaign

Not going to address the hypocrisy angle - I mention it in the article itself if you read it - but the "System" post is just how the news post to the forums is made now. If you like...read the article...you'll notice it's definitely not a system post, but written by a real, actual person.

Nosferatupac

lotrlore said:

Champie said:

mikeb0817 said:

This place smells of hypocrisy 

Indeed. It is a surprise that this is a SYSTEM post. MMORPGdotCOM is a CONTRADICTION wrapped in an abusive ad-revenue campaign

Not going to address the hypocrisy angle - I mention it in the article itself if you read it - but the "System" post is just how the news post to the forums is made now. If you like...read the article...you'll notice it's definitely not a system post, but written by a real, actual person.

It does seem a bit odd that a site called MMORPG.com has several articles covering games that are not MMORPG's.

Isn't that kind of muddying the water since people would expect that any game covered on here fits into that genre?

lotrlore

Nosferatupac said:

lotrlore said:

Champie said:

mikeb0817 said:

This place smells of hypocrisy 

Indeed. It is a surprise that this is a SYSTEM post. MMORPGdotCOM is a CONTRADICTION wrapped in an abusive ad-revenue campaign

Not going to address the hypocrisy angle - I mention it in the article itself if you read it - but the "System" post is just how the news post to the forums is made now. If you like...read the article...you'll notice it's definitely not a system post, but written by a real, actual person.

It does seem a bit odd that a site called MMORPG.com has several articles covering games that are not MMORPG's.

Isn't that kind of muddying the water since people would expect that any game covered on here fits into that genre?

Welcome to another aspect of this I briefly covered in the article: the current hellscape that is Google SEO. The site covered single-player games and non-MMO multiplayer titles well before I took over in 2019, and without doing so, it likely wouldn't exist nowadays. 

We are not the first site to cover things outside the main focus (which still remains MMORPGs), and we won't be the last. But the two arguments here are mutually exclusive: whether a site called MMORPG should cover anything else and a request for people to stop calling another wholly separate genre MMOs are not the same thing. 

As an aside, Nosferatupac is an excellent forums name, lol.

 

Alverant

So what's the difference between a "live service" where you can play with other humans and an MMO?

lotrlore

Alverant said:

So what's the difference between a "live service" where you can play with other humans and an MMO?

All MMOs are live services, but not all live services are MMOs.

Overwatch is a live service. It's not an MMO. Same with Valorant, League of Legends, PUBG, etc.

Wargfoot

I feel like some people say they want 10,000 other players in the game, but then group with same 8 people and rerun the same instanced dungeons every day until they quit.

Consider real life where we live in a game with 7 billion people but probably are doing well to fill a short bus with the ones we actually care about.   

From a dictionary definition perspective, the definition matters - but when it comes to playing I bet it counts less than most guess.

Cogohi

Wargfoot said:

I feel like some people say they want 10,000 other players in the game, but then group with same 8 people and rerun the same instanced dungeons every day until they quit.

Of course they do.  If Fred had to work late on raid night they need a backfill.  If somebody forgot to put in their order for heal pots the requisite 24 hours in advance or the friend group crafter is just that prickly an auction house is a wonderful thing.

If your game has larger format content than your merry band of regulars a large player population is a useful thing to have access to.

Phoenix_Hawk

Holy crap, I felt like you yoinked at least most of that from my own writings.

People keep trying to call anything online, with any measure of multiplayer a MMO. Like take all the people that still try to call Genshin Impact a MMO, or every town hub instanced action RPG, like C9, Dungeon Fighter Online, Vindictus, and others.

MMO just means that a large number of people can actively play together in said online service based game. The actively playing together part is important, as if it is taken to refer to how many are on the server, or logged into the service, then you open it up to single player games, and games where you can only play with at most three other people to being a MMO.

Another similar annoyance of mine is how many keep trying to call just about everything a genre. This includes MMO, when it's just a descriptive, in the same way single player, and multiplayer are descriptive terms, and in some cases, free to play (F2P), when it's just a profit model.

When people just make up their own words, and meanings for words, it makes it rather difficult to have a discussion with people about things.

Tiller

When I tell people I play MMORPGs these days, many ask wtf that even is lol. If I say MMO, they are all "oh like CoD?"

ShankTheTank

Let’s not get bogged down with who defined a single player game as an MMO to whom

Grymmoire

ShankTheTank said:

Let’s not get bogged down with who defined a single player game as an MMO to whom

Looks to be too late; i see the quicksand sucking many into it.

ShankTheTank

Grymmoire said:

ShankTheTank said:

Let’s not get bogged down with who defined a single player game as an MMO to whom

Looks to be too late; i see the quicksand sucking many into it.

……no James

mklinic

ShankTheTank said:

Let’s not get bogged down with who defined a single player game as an MMO to whom

ValdemarJ

Oh dear, here we are in the page rank addiction zone. In an SEO nightmare of desperation. We've come not full circle, but deep spiral. We've tapped the well and found it dry.

Dammit Jim, I'm forum troll, not a quicksand proctologist. There's only so much I can do in a single reply. Let's just hope that some brave hero will find our Hugh Jackman Wolverine anchor hero and restore him before it's too late.

Because that, people, that is what an MMO is, and is all about, and why we must continue to misapply it, most severely, at every opportunity.

ZenJelly

Angrakhan said:

Sorry but every noun in the English language is a "label". If I point at a table that has an orange and an apple on it and say "Bring me the orange" and you bring me the apple we're going to have a problem. Labels do matter because words matter. If I call you an uneducated moron and you get offended and I tell you to "not get hung up on labels" something tells me you're still going to be offended.

I see, well I guess then your label would be incorrect idiot. Because if you're choosing your game based on how it's labeled, then you're exactly that.

Hengist

lotrlore said:

Nosferatupac said:

lotrlore said:

Champie said:

mikeb0817 said:

This place smells of hypocrisy 

Indeed. It is a surprise that this is a SYSTEM post. MMORPGdotCOM is a CONTRADICTION wrapped in an abusive ad-revenue campaign

Not going to address the hypocrisy angle - I mention it in the article itself if you read it - but the "System" post is just how the news post to the forums is made now. If you like...read the article...you'll notice it's definitely not a system post, but written by a real, actual person.

It does seem a bit odd that a site called MMORPG.com has several articles covering games that are not MMORPG's.

Isn't that kind of muddying the water since people would expect that any game covered on here fits into that genre?

Welcome to another aspect of this I briefly covered in the article: the current hellscape that is Google SEO. The site covered single-player games and non-MMO multiplayer titles well before I took over in 2019, and without doing so, it likely wouldn't exist nowadays. 

We are not the first site to cover things outside the main focus (which still remains MMORPGs), and we won't be the last. But the two arguments here are mutually exclusive: whether a site called MMORPG should cover anything else and a request for people to stop calling another wholly separate genre MMOs are not the same thing;

Welcome to discussions that went on 2016-2020. It's odd to think that someone who runs a site that talks about MMORPG's would have missed the past 8 years. I had to do a double take to see when it was posted, seems like it's about 8 years late


It's like if I, for amusement, opened the newspaper today, and read about JFK being killed, and thought it just happened, and wasn't something 60 years in the past. Would have been a solid article when it was a current and relevant topic, but from the discussion here, you can see, it's past. Most people realize it, and don't care, the battle has been fought and lost for a long time.

Sovrath

While I'm happy to have some leeway with the mmorpg initialism all that embedded video made me want to do was drop everything and play those games!