I went from feeling not-so-good last Wednesday to full-on plague over the weekend. I won’t say that the only thing that kept me alive was the stack of magazines I had waiting for me when I got home from GDC, but they definitely helped. One of those was entitled “MMO Games Magazines #3″, which was the final and saddening shell of the now-defunct Massive Magazine.

As Simon covers on GSW, Computer Games Magazine and Massive are now both dead. I find it incredibly unfulfilling that the last issue of Massive was stuck with the awful ‘MMO Games’ name (some sort of legal thing sparked the name change). The ‘MMO’ appellation is quickly asserting itself again, after I’d begun to see MMOG finally hitting some strides. I guess ‘M-M-O’ is faster to say than ‘mog’? Either way, it’s a kind of embarrasing end to what was finally starting to turn into a halfway decent rag.

Even if it wasn’t hard-hitting journalism for the Massive scene, it did offer a common touchstone for fans of the genre that was light-years better than the alternative. Here then, are some sad highlights from the last issue ever of a mag I was hoping to write for sometime:

• Page 6 editor’s letter: weird dodge of the name-change and a call for submissions to the magazine on every Massive game under the sun. Laudable, but should have started with a frank discussion of why they had to lose the really excellent name. Maybe the court decision tied their hands?
• Short discussion of in-game ads on page 13; reminded me of a similar talk covered in Virgin Worlds broadcast number 60.
• Uru and the WoW social network Rapture get a brief mention before coming to a piece on page 20 about the ‘Lords of the Dead’ cross-game guild. Looking down their history across a number of different worlds (extant since before Ultima Online, they claim), I really want to write a book telling the history of Massive games via the guilds that have played them.
• Forgettable interview with Cryptic’s Emmert (sorry Jack) leads to the WoWTubing feature, now a regular thing on page 24. I normally hate putting URLs in paper media, but this is a great idea. A great YouTube video will stick around for quite a while, and there’s so much WoW-related stuff on the service it’s worth pointing the good ones out. My favorites from their picks have to be Big Blue Dress (which gets stuck in my head, dangit), Ballad of the Noob, and Battlestar WoW-Style.
• Getting into the Beta section of the mag, they cover Hellgate London (really? in Massive? hmm.), WAR, Huxley, and Conan. Unfortunately, absolutely nothing new if you’ve seen any of the GDC coverage. Damned print-mag lag time.
• The big feature for the month is a 28-page spread on making money in-game. There are several pages on WoW, FFXI, EQ, EQ2, and EVE. There’s also a page for Kingdom of Loathing, which scared me. Overall, the section is a pretty solid feature … excepting the WoW stuff. None of their details touch BC content (which makes sense, again, given magazine lead times). You can make more money farming vultures in Hellfire in 30 minutes than you could farming Un’Goro for a whole day. I guess if you’re only old-world, it’s great info? Certainly, you won’t have much competition for Un’Goro apes anymore.
• Loot distribution systems get a quick going over, in an actually kind of interesting article. A sidebar covers a Ladder/Reel Point Bid system as submitted by a Guild Leader. This is where I think the magazine’s strength could have been: real gamers talking about what works for them in a first-person perspective. Wish we’d seen more of it.
• A short piece on the insanity of players whining about quitting, and sticking around anyway. Kind of a ‘whatever’ topic, but it’s written (very well indeed) by Julian Murdoch of GamersWithJobs.
• The last three pieces in succession are another strength of the magazine: columns by Castronova, Mark Jacobs, and Raph. HAH! Beat that, M-O-G. Jacobs’ piece is especially interesting, as he rails (again) against gold-selling in that cogent way of his. Now that I’m not dying, you’ll hear similar things from him here on the site today or tomorrow.

And, far too quickly, it’s over. Oh Massive, what you could have been. In three short issues, you gave me ideas for columns and books, and made me dream of what might have been. You will be missed, even if only by one person.

Sniffle.