Forget WoW, Eve Online is the Best!

A true connoisseur of music knows the most popular stuff is by no means the best. Class B tracks with catchy hooks see rotation a dozen times an hour while often times better music on the same album remains in obscurity. The best music in history, I bet, has never been broadcast on the airwaves.

For years we've seen the massively multiplayer online game (mmog) "World of Warcraft" (WoW) hyped everywhere. I'm sure everyone would remember the "Office Space" WoW campaign of Christmas '06 if they saw the commercial again. Measured by hype and number of subscribers, WoW is unarguably the leader of online virtual worlds, but in my opinion it is not the best.

The best massively multiplayer online game is Eve Online. I have been an Eve subscriber since December of '05 and likely I will be until the end of Eve or the end of me. As long as I've been playing, I am still learning new things all the time, and there is still a lot I haven't done yet.

There are a lot of things that make Eve superior to most of the others, only a couple of which I can outline here:

• No Tolkien-esque fantasy world full of cringe-worthy clichés here, Eve is original sci-fi
• All Eve players exist is a single world, no 'shards' like in Wow
• Expansions to Eve are free
• There will be no Eve II, the one and only Eve has been continually updated and expanded and will be for the forseeable future
• A robust economy and a tedium free, time-based skill system mean you're still playing even when you're not actually logged in
• Non-linearity and lack of a rigid, structured gameplay experience make for endless possibilities

A lot of people have a lot of valid criticisms of Eve and its proprietors, but that doesn't take away from the fact that Eve is the greatest.

MMOG Resources

• Broke Man's Money Portal/MMOGs
• mmorpg.com
• TenTonHammer