For many years, from the era of the big three MMORPGs (Ultima Online, Everquest, and Asheron’s Call), until shortly after the release of World of Warcraft, I was a literary content creator on a website called the Vault Network. The content was mainly critical commentary about the direction the genre heading, specifically in regards to the expansions that were being released for “1st gen” MMORPGs, their “2nd gen” sequels, and all the so-called “next gen” titles that were in development.
My concerns were generally that the trend of “theme park” style MMORPG were slowly beginning to replace the “sandbox” style. With that, the genre would generally become online single player role playing games, with the option to play with other people at the so called “end game”. This game design would force players to run a content “treadmill”, or pay more money, to get to the fun part of the game. I was very vocal about this trend.
In the meantime, the Vault Network, then owned by internet gaming site IGN, was purchased by News Corp in late 2005. Their long term goal was to depreciate the VN, moving away from community gaming commentary, and be more of a broad spectrum entertainment portal.
Over the course of the next few years I slowly migrated my old posts to a new site, Blogger. Any now posts that I made were cross posted between there and the VN. By the close of the decade, the old VN had been consolidated and contributors no longer had an audience.
I continued using Blogger as a way to reach my followers. By 2015 my content and traffic needs had outgrown a free blog service, so I registered FantasyNext. As of 2020, I have turned my focus to how to develop a MMORPG on mobile devices that retain the spirit of PC versions of old.