As we did in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, today we’re going to recap our annual awards and other articles from the end of 2024.
We gave out 23 formal awards over the span of December 2024 and early January 2025, in addition to our annual recaps, roundups, listicles, predictions, golden yachties, oddities, community discussions, and retrospectives running into the start of 2025. Per tradition, we delivered over 100 special articles, each capped off by a newly commissioned piece of Mo art from Larry. Yes, the dragon has a name.
Following our deep-dive into our awards, we’ll be collecting all of the end-year articles too so you can poke through anything you missed over the holidays. Enjoy!
All of our 2024 winners!
Let’s break it down by award, with past winners and reader polling too. This round, we’ve reformatted our historical breakdown of winners to make it more readable; you’ll see the year, the award with a link to the original post, and then the community’s vote if there was a community vote that year and it differed from the site’s pick. Generally, awards post 2015 had community votes, but most before that didn’t, with the exception of 2009 and 2010, which were weird and often had community votes but not staff votes.
Years ago, we decided to include both new and old MMOs in our GOTY award so as not to discount existing live-service MMOs, and indeed, a year ago, we gave the award to a game that traditionally wins Best Classic MMO. But this year, we found a worthy contender in a new MMO: Throne and Liberty. As MOP’s Justin put it, at the top of 2024, nobody really expected T&L to amount to much, given its weak reception in South Korea, but by the end of 2024 (and a long effort by western publisher Amazon), its global launch actually impressed a broad chunk of the MMO base – to the point that it apparently did better than even NCsoft expected.
Our readers chose Guild Wars 2, and we’re not sad about it; GW2 won three other awards from us this year. Another worthy choice.
Fun fact: Guild Wars 2 has never put out an expansion and failed to win best expansion, ever. I thought this might be the year, but Janthir Wilds’ housing edged it out over World of Warcraft’s War Within, both for our staff and our readers. And this was a very tight year for expansions, as most every serious mid-tier-and-up MMO delivered one!
Stars Reach ran away with the nominations during our staff discussion, owing to how much we’re looking forward to a modern take on Star Wars Galaxies by the developer who made the big classic MMO sandboxes so great in their day. But the fanbase of Monsters and Memories – also nominated by our staff! – returned to run up the polls. Well, we want that game too!
I thought this would be a controversial pick, but nope. I have long joked that the year NCsoft officially licensed players to openly run City of Heroes servers would be the year that it won best studio. But it’s not joke: That year was 2024, thanks to the crowning of Homecoming, and even our readers agreed with the sentiment, though ArenaNet was close on its heels in the polls.
“For the company to finally grant an official license in 2024 isn’t just great for City of Heroes fans; it’s good for the whole genre, and it’s the highest-profile example we now have of a legal and legitimate way to keep MMORPGs online after a sunset,” we opined. “It can be done, clearly – and now MMORPG players can keep demanding it from other corners.”
As we’ve joked before, the Most Improved award can feel like a backhanded compliment, but it’s not really meant that way. This is the second year in a row that WoW has taken the award, and it’s for similar reasons: WoW was not in a great place in the late teens and early ’20s, but Blizzard has really turned the game around in the last couple of years, both in terms of Retail’s accessibility and Classic’s flexibility. Moreover, the team has finally put in the hard work to deliver communication and roadmaps that modern MMORPG players expect. Perhaps it’s Microsoft forcing hands over there, but whoever is doing it, it’s working. We’re expecting an even bigger 2025. And our readers agreed – overwhelmingly.
Some years, it seems as if this award is Guild Wars 2’s to lose, as it was last year, when grumbling over Secrets of the Obscure’s price-to-content-value cost it the crown in favor of a safe subscription game. But this year, the popularity of Janthir Wilds, combined with its overall low fees and minimal P2W, secured its win, with our writers and our readers.
“Underrated” is actually one of my favorite awards to give out because it’s usually a complete mess! Nobody agrees on what’s underrated! It’s pure chaos energy! Sometimes people pick the biggest MMOs in the genre for this award, and I’m like, what?! And sometimes, we have an opportunity to aim a big spotlight on a game that’s flying under the radar. DDO was an easy pick for us (and our readers, apparently) this year, as the small Daybreak/SSG game actually pumped out a solid expansion.
While we like to think of MMORPGs as being in a special genre bubble, the truth is that the mass layoffs across the industry this year affect us too, as developer security is trashed, studios shutter, and yes, even major MMO companies like Blizzard and ZeniMax shed the workers building our games. It’s been devastating and will take years to recover from, which hits the notoriously long-development MMO sector particularly hard.
Just as Best Business Model is practically Guild Wars 2’s to lose, Worst Business Model has effectively become Star Citizen’s to lose… and this year, it did indeed lose to something worse. See, the only thing our writers (and readers) hate more than boondoggle crowdfunding is crypto MMOs, and CCP Games pulled up in a slimy crypto car to market EVE Frontier and insist that it’s a blockchain game but nobody should call it a blockchain game. In fact, not only did EVE Frontier beat Star Citizen with our readers, but so did crypto/blockchain games in general. Nobody wants this!
As we’ve noted before, nothing would make CIG (and its stans who harass us) happier than disqualifying the game from winning this award when it deserves it, so jokes aside, we’re not doing that.
It was MOP’s Justin and his list of expansions that launched in 2024 that convinced our team that the rush of expansions from all the big MMOs and many of the medium MMOs was the key trend of the year – and a welcome one at that. Our readers were more divided, supporting the continuing unionization across the industry and the normalization of solo-friendly endgames.
I have to say, I was shocked that V Rising won in 2024 in this brutal field for not-quite-MMO-but-still-multiplayer games. We clearly have a ton of people on staff who love it, perhaps because it’s got such great crossover appeal for MMO fans specifically. Path of Exile 2, while still extremely new in its early access, took the community’s poll.
The tiny indie MMORPG Project Gorgon has been a favorite around MOP’s community for years now, but it definitely returned to prominence in 2023 and again in 2024, owing specifically to its wild content updates over the past year, heavily funded by player donations. Harder hardcore living! Horse breeding! Guildhalls! It’s pretty nuts what this little game has on offer.
The Monsters and Memories fanbase clearly came out to run up the community vote again! You rapscallions!
Obligatory note: We’re not hoping for a stormy future but merely predicting one along the current trajectory, and this year, both readers and writers are panicky about the future of the Cryptic MMOs – Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, and Champions Online – now that Embracer has all but turned off the lights at Cryptic and shunted the games overseas to a subsidiary.
This award comes with a caveat: It’s not meant to mark the best MMO housing of all time but rather to recognize something specific done for housing in an MMO this year. Consequently, our staff handed this one to Guild Wars 2 in 2024, as its Janthir Wilds expansion literally introduced proper housing to the game for the first time. Our readers traditionally ignore the goal here and just vote for a big game with housing that they like – but not this year! This year, they agreed!
Biggest Disappointment is one of our oldest awards because let’s be real: MMO players always have something to be disappointed about. This year, we were most bummed by the cancelation of Blue Protocol before it ever finished its port westward. Our readers picked the mass layoffs across the industry, which is legit too – so legit we already gave it a nod for Biggest Story.
Isn’t it nice that Blizzard’s blunders this year were so (relatively) mundane that it’s not at the top of the list for the first time in ages? But it’d be even nicer if Amazon hadn’t scored a truly astonishing own-goal with the New World Aeternum situation, however. And as we explained, the problem wasn’t New World or the console port or even Aeternum itself. That’s all good. Most of us thought it needed to be on console! But Amazon basically gaslighting everyone by claiming the MMORPG was no longer an MMORPG even though it had all the same content as it did before, just to try to dazzle a new console crowd, was grotesquely dumb – definitely a blunder. It pissed off the very PC MMORPG fans who’ve been driving the game’s base for years, all in exchange for some temporary console bux. So disappointing.
“What Amazon did to the MMORPG community this past June was basically like using a loyal old friend to get into a party and then pretending you don’t know him as soon as you meet some cool people at the bar. The company mistreated the very MMORPG players who bought into the MMORPG and kept it going for the last three years, first in dropping the content cadence to basically nothing and second in pretending the game was no longer an MMORPG as if we’re drooling idiots. I still have my disappointed mom face on about this. MMO players won’t forget.”
The writers and readers show I’m not alone in being genuinely surprised that Blizzard is finally giving in and adding housing to World of Warcraft after years of dragging its feet and saying it’s just too hard when what it meant was it didn’t want to. Whether it’ll be a success with the type of playerbase WoW has carved out for itself in recent years is another story! Worth noting is that NCsoft’s City of Heroes Homecoming license was a close second in the reader poll, and the only reason it wasn’t closer for us was that the HC team had been talking about it for years. It was only a matter of time!
The king is dead; long live the king! I actually did a double-take when I realized Throne & Liberty was dethroning Albion Online for best PvP, an award it had won all three years since we revived it in 2021. I still think folks are sleeping on Albion Online, but T&L is a brand-new MMO and a solid pick that takes endgame PvP seriously. I’m just happy we have more to choose from! Our readers nommed the Warhammer Online rogue server, which is honestly another great choice.
Giving an award to the top classic MMO in our genre is still a pretty new thing for us, but I’m so happy to be giving it to City of Heroes Homecoming this year, as this is the first year it’s eligible for it as a fully licensed version of one of the best MMOs from the golden age of the genre. Lord of the Rings Online edged it out in our reader poll, however.
I was so sure that one of the City of Heroes servers was going to win again that I almost didn’t nominate Star Wars Galaxies Legends this year, but so many people on our staff did that it seemed like a no-brainer. And it wasn’t for nothing: This year, the player dev team not only heavily updated space but overhauled player cities with roads and new structures that totally reshaped the face of the game. Plus it set a new concurrency record as it celebrated outliving the original MMO’s age! The EverQuest Online Adventures Sandstorm community, however, showed up to flood the community poll. You guysssss.
We do always have to point out that generally we don’t cover or include rogue servers for live games, which means that rogue servers for games like UO and WoW aren’t included.
It was a bit sad to see Final Fantasy XIV overlooked in many of the awards this year, but it did pick up Best New MMO Class for Dawntrail’s Viper. The community also apparently wanted to reward FFXIV, but it went with the Pictomancer. The takeaway here is that FFXIV has good jobs/classes – it’s really hard to go wrong there.
We have let this award come and go over the years as – like the award for best housing – it often prompts some weird voting for the same couple of mainstream themeparks over and over instead of, you know, games that tried to revolutionize or center crafting in that specific year. But we brought the award back this year as I knew we had several good options again. I thought Pax Dei might take the crown this year, but a large chunk of our writers were swayed to Lord of the Rings Online specifically because of SSG’s efforts toward revitalizing crafting and adding crafting-specific events throughout 2024. The community polling just… went right back to picking Final Fantasy XIV as always.
Back in 2021, we started granting a lifetime achievement award to an MMO that’s made great contributions to the genre but hasn’t necessarily been recognized for a specific award (and in some cases, is unlikely to ever get one because of its age). And what other MMORPG deserved a lifetime award more than EverQuest in 2024, the year it turned 25 years old and Daybreak brought back a live event aka Fippyfest? And it’s still alive, playable, and getting new expansions to boot! Happy Year of Darkpaw, EverQuest.
We do have a few awards we’ve given out in the past but didn’t this year; we might bring them back in the future, as we did with Best Crafting this year, so here they are for posterity:
And here are all of Larry’s graphics for posterity too! You might notice there are 10. As in, we’re approaching our 10th birthday next month…
That’s a wrap on our awards for 2024; for those of you who missed other special content over the holidays, we’ve rounded up all our Golden Yachtie awards, our weirdest story series, our end-year feature columns, our monthly news recaps, our staff roundtables, and our favorite top tens and streams and screenshots right down below. Make sure you check out at least the biggest stories list, biggest surprises list, healthiest MMO list, best updates list, the uncertain futures list (coming next week), our predictions for next year, the big crowdfunding news, all the MMOs we’re watching in 2024, and the best-value MMOs!
2024 GOLDEN YACHTIE AWARDS
2024 WEIRDEST STORIES SERIES
2024 RECAP LISTICLES & ROUNDUPS
END-OF-2024 READER OPINIONS
END-OF-2024 STAFF ROUNDTABLES
END-OF-2024 COLUMN EDITORIALS
COMPLETE 2024 MONTH-IN-REVIEW SERIES
COMPLETE 2024 AWARDS SERIES
That’s it! We’re done! We’re signing off now! Love you all!
The MMORPG genre might be “working as intended,” but it can be so much more. Join Massively Overpowered Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce in her Working As Intended column for editorials about and meanderings through MMO design, ancient history, and wishful thinking. Armchair not included.
