The Josh Strife Hayes Ultimate MMO Tier List

Another entry in the JSH video series. This time around he went out and scoured YouTube and the web to tabulate all the rankings of MMOs he could find in order to bring them together in the ultimate data driven compilation of online opinions… and, as they say, “garbage in, garbage out.”

But I am not being fair with that.  It is not entirely garbage, or even mostly garbage.  In fact, most of the top 25 are pretty spot on.  But when you stretch things out to 250 entries… there are things you perhaps ought to discard.  Also, something something 90% of everything is shit gets proven again.

But JSH persisted, and even printed out his chart, a Google sheet too expansive to be viewed on a single monitor, to give a sense of how much data went into this.

My own experience with this video started when it was mentioned on Liore’s Cats Discord server where it was discussed, the top ten were revealed, and then Corr went through and made a Google sheet with all 250 entries listed out, with the status and space for us to check a box to indicated if we had played, or tried, titles on the list.  So I knew before I had watched about how many titles I might be familiar with.  (My count was Played: 26, Tried: 36, with the line being a vague notion of how much time I spent playing.  I have only tried Vanguard or Anarchy Online, but I have played Guild Wars 2 and Toontown Online.)

I was also a bit frowny about some of the items that made the list.  There is stuff on there that never shipped like EverQuest Next, stuff that is slated for the future like EverQuest 3, and stuff that just didn’t belong like Overwatch.

However, I wasn’t too worked up about the list because JSH had billed it as ranking of MMOs and, in my world I have long since given up trying to police the term, which gets used for any title where three people can play online together.  So with that point of view, V Rising, Team Fortress 2, World of Tanks, and League of Legends all fit to the extent that anything fits I suppose.

When I want to indicate a shared persistent world online experience with thousands of simultaneous players, I fall back on MMORPG… often clarifying exactly what I mean by the term.  That is where I draw the line.

JSH, despite his experience, is still holding out that MMO means what it did back in 2004 and, while I salute his dedication to holding the line on that, most people who know better have simply given up the fight on that. (Also, he did a video about this which I linked in a post where I had asked AIs to define the two terms for me.)

Anyway, I had the list… or bits of it… in my head before starting to watch this nearly two hour long journey through 250 titles and was somewhat refreshed by the fact that JSH was holding things to a higher bar than I might have.

I enjoyed the “proof of work” where when some title that was clearly not on within his definition of MMOs would pop up and he would go to the data to discover who ranked that particular title as an MMO.  And given the repetition of a couple of sites doing that, there is an argument to be made that maybe they should have been omitted from the data set.  But I can also see that picking and choosing only the input that meets your own specific criteria might bias the results as well.  Also, this was a silly and unfulfilled quest, so let the man do his thing.

I also noted a few missing items, like Need for Speed World, though that did get at least a passing mention when Motor City Online came up on the list.   Also, the list is not just a breadth of sources, but a lot of sources over many years.  He went and found a lot of stuff.  [Note to self: Do some top MMO list posts so I can influence this sort of thing should it ever be attempted again.]

That said, despite going back in time to older reviews and rankings, the end list does feel a little biased towards more recent titles.  Link rot and the impermanence of the internet no doubt contributed to that.  You work with the data set you have.

JSH did spend at least a bit of time with each title to set its story and the arc of its life, including whether or not it actually shipped.  While he had done videos on many of them, this still amounted to a load of work in and of itself, especially when tracking the design and name changes that happened over the course of time.

The only irksome bit for me, besides a couple omissions, was JSH hitting Tarisland and feeding us the whole “It was a WoW clone built to fill in for WoW being unavailable in China” thing.  It is a WoW clone in that any fantasy MMORPG does a lot of the same things that WoW does, tropes and all.  But I recall how mad some people got when Richard Bartle said pretty much the same thing about Warhammer Online being just WoW.  And, of course, you can’t just magic an MMORPG into being that fast.

The most likely reality is that it was in production already… they actually make a lot of MMOs in China and launch them all the time… and just happened to fall into that time frame… and it didn’t even do that very well.  WoW was already on its way back to China before Tarisland even launched.  Plus, have you even tried to understand the Tarisland lore?  The game was a lot of things, but it wasn’t a WoW replacement any more than any other MMORPG competitor has been.

But that is my hobby horse and I expect to make no headway with anybody on that front.  The narrative landed and stuck and at some point 20 years from now somebody will write about this era of the genre and either cement the idea for all time or call us all hysterical boobs for believing such a thing.

All said, it is worth a watch, or at least a listen while you do something else (tabbing back when “jiggle physics” gets mentioned) if you are a fan of the genre and/or harbor as many opinions as I do.