Almost exactly a year ago I put down some predictions for the year in Massive games. It’d be cheating if I didn’t grade myself, so that’s what I’m going to do here, looking back at my 2006 MMOGnostications. This will be a pass/fail test, class … pens at the ready!

Burning Problems – The launch of the expansion to World of Warcraft is going to cause Blizzard bigtime headaches.

Buzz! Bigtime wrong. The launch went almost flawlessly, and despite the huge impact it has had on the life of raiders WoW rolls along unbowed and unbroken. I always thought the expansion was going to be good, but I expected Blizzard to have problems similar to the game’s initial launch. Instead, big blue learned its lessons and scored a customer relations coup.

That Not So Fresh Feeling – At least one of the MMOGs slated to launch this year is going to end up being kind of a stinker.

Ding! This was kind of one of my ’safety’ options, but it came very much true nonetheless. Vanguard was a huge letdown for expectant fans, and the SOE team is still doing overtime work to make the ship sail in a straight line.

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Over at Gamasutra you may have seen the rest of the interview I did with John Smedley back at SOE’s Gamers Day. People seemed to enjoy the first one, and I’ve seen this one mentioned all over as well.

Probably because of stuff like this:

“Those games don’t have that kind of mass level of accessibility, I think, even World of Warcraft notwithstanding. We’re not aiming for those kinds of numbers with FreeRealms, we’re aiming for a lot bigger. I think that bringing something that I can play with my kids to the market is a big deal.”

I don’t think FreeRealms is going to be my thing; indeed, it’s not “for” me. Just the same, it’s crazy interesting to see the company hanging its hat on something so completely different. Add The Agency into the mix, and you’ve got a lot of newness.

In celebration of the Agency’s coming out party, I’ve changed my banner. Something about that piece of concept art really gets to me. The seekrit reason? The Agency is the closest thing to a Shadowrun MMOG I’m going to get for a very, very long time. I’ll tell you right now: assuming I can get some friends to pony up with me, I am going to play the crap out of that game. Both UNITE and PARAGON sound like a kick in the pants, though I’m probably more of a tux-and-silencer type.