iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

I too am a ton of fun and totally inessential

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

2020's "our mentors are leaving in droves" but they never stopped leaving

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Arbys managing to troll us from the grocery store now too ... but legitimately my husband had a stash of those packets, so accurate

photo of a bottle of store-bought Arby's horseradish sauce that says on the label 'no more hoarding sauce packets'

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Best games pr email I got all year. Honestly I just appreciate the brevity and candor. Apparently the game is good too.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Extremely cool, like playing Ultima Online in 1997 (earnest)! Also nice to see Blizzard catching up to pre-millennium MMORPG ideas (exhausted)!

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Basically, what's been happening to MMORPGs over the last 10 years is happening to the rest of the industry now. massivelyop.com/2015/02/20/w... Some mainstreamers (not Tomas) are hoping it's just an MMORPG problem, but we were just the canary in the coal mine b/c of the timescales involved.

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~Syl @mmosyl.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

It's dawning on me that not only has my generation (1970-2000) been singularly lucky in terms of peace & prosperity before the Skynet age, we've also experienced a singular window of opportunity for MMORPGs. We were the perfect audience with a working attention span. It is basically over now. 😬

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James Crosby @mmofolklorist.com · 09/07/2025

This is a straight truth bomb. Bartle's 'Designing Virtual Worlds' and 'Postmortems' by @raphkoster.bsky.social are the perfect place to start but there are heaps of great books out there. ... and there's one more set to be announced next month 🤫

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

I may have gone on a bit of an MMORPG history rant. You may put in the papers that I am mad.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

As Schlag put it, we had a bit of a celebrity sighting. :P

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

I am *fairly* sure people are just mass-trolling urban dictionary... but I also wouldn't bet my life on it, and also I Believe.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

I'm convinced @sypster.bsky.social writes these to make me cry while editing them. I was holding it together until the last part, I really was.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

Finally put out this excessively granular piece on SWG Legends' open-world apartment system, which is amazing and unique in MMOs but kinda underused, and I hope they can fix it. Thinking about doing GW2 next because it's such a great example of spectacular housing that is weirdly just not for me.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

MOP's @sypster.bsky.social and I will be joining MJ's streamathon at 1p EST to record a live episode of the MOP Podcast! It's honestly surreal that we made it to 10 years as a fully indie outlet, far outliving the original. To think how close we came to giving up. But y'all said otherwise. :D

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Belghast @belghast.com · 24/01/2025

The best part of the Guild Wars 2 community will always be those folks who go out of their way to make sure everyone is resurrected after an event

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

This Warframe piece from Eliot is one of his best - it's a heavy topic, fair warning, but it also proves once again that there is serious storytelling going on in MMOs and MMO-adjacent games. We shouldn't discount that!

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Chris "Wolfy" Neal @wolfyseyes.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

This is so revelatory, so validating, yet so astonishingly simple of an idea: Sandboxes are best when they allow everyone, not when they try to shove archaic and bad memories down everyone's throat, and the path to MMORPGs should be a paved road and not a dirt path.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

This is the piece about Stars Reach and MMORPG demographics I was talking about on the podcast. Y'all, the target demo here is 25-26. It's not us. And that's a seriously good thing.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Spoilers, I liked it. :D Just know it's not an MMO. It's like... an MO at best. I am hard to please with survival sandboxes as I tend to wash out after I have seen all the cool stuff, but if Astrolabe can sort that out, Aloft is one to watch through early access.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

I spent a lot of extra time on this one this year to make the historical winners more readable and with updated links to the old stuff on frankengadget because I'm tired of MMO history being lost. Hope y'all enjoyed the season! I have already started prep for end-of-the-year 2025.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

We made it to 500 episodes since MassivelyOP Independence Day 2015! :D I need a long nap!

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

I also feel as if I'm living in a different time and place from the people who do this - it's a luxury I'm so far away from I don't even miss it. I have never used a fast food delivery service, apart from getting a pizza sometimes (usually we just walk). Yes, time is valuable, but not THAT valuable.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

I will raise you by one of the first long-form pieces I did when MOP went indie in 2015: "Multiplex monotony and the death of the mid-budget MMORPG." It's wild how all these articles hold up, just as relevant as they ever were. If anything, the industry has only gotten worse in 10 years.

massivelyop.com

Working As Intended: ‘Multiplex monotony’ and the death of the mid-budget MMORPG | Massively Overpowered

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

A Christmas Eve toast to that one MOP Podcast listener who suggested I simply hire a babysitter to take care of my kids so I could play more games to talk about on the podcast. I sincerely hope he's doing well and making as much money as he apparently thinks video game journalists do but don't. <3

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Yeah MMO players skew another way entirely. For us, it's "were you a band kid or a theater person?" And for a lot of us, it's both lol.

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Hikari Kenzaki @hikarikenzaki.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

This is why we play video games. To fly around in shiny space yachts and soak in hot tubs in our minds.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

I microwave my water in a borosilicate glass teapot, then steep, then forget I had it steeping, then warm it up again, then pour :P

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Rebekah Valentine @duckvalentine.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Correct! Being a good journalist covering games does not require you to have absurdly high skills at playing them! That's like saying people who report on football should themselves be professional-level football players, or that people covering classical music should have mastered the violin!

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

CCP streisanding itself with this nonsense. "New World is now an online action RPG" levels of absurd.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

This is the main problem with Guild Wars 2's housing as it stands, apart from the barriers-to-entry (cost/access/isolation): With just one lot per account, the best builders have to tear the old ones down to build anything new. (It's still really cool, though. And this particular build was amazing.)

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Marnick @protobear.dev · 01/12/2024

I'm not really beating my self up over it, maybe a bit on the having wasted time but I'm also exaggerating to be funny. But it's weird that it feels so intuitively easy to define and then I attempt it and all I walk away with is "I know it when i see it". And that it needs fishing. Sorry EVE. (/s)

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Also the obvious rebuttal to anyone insisting "real ID" schemes will improve MMORPG communities. Offenders lack shame or fear, but their targets are always driven underground, which makes the games poorer. Even Blizzard figured that out.

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Marnick @protobear.dev · 01/12/2024

Spent an entire weekend trying to define what an MMORPG is, only to end up with 11 failed definitions, flawed math, and the realization that @nbrianna.bsky.social was right all along. So to save my ego I'm making the case that it doesn't matter what an MMORPG is. blog.protobear.dev/it-doesnt-ma...

blog.protobear.dev

It doesn't matter what an MMORPG is.

This week I tried to write an article attempting to define what an MMORPG is after reading "What it means to be an MMORPG" by Bree Royce, who argues that the definition of an MMORPG is fluid and ever-...

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

nobody is having more fun than this guy dancing in mistlock

a Guild Wars 2 video game character wearing a hot pink and teal barbarian skirt, wraps, and sandals and a smiling paper bag hat, dancing in a space-esque zone while brandishing two sparkling axes

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Courtesy of my 10yo daughter... The guy from Cake starting a food fight: He's throwing the biscuits

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Ocho @ocho.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

🎶 It's the moooost wonderful time of the year 🎶

A large, 3 level, wide grocery store display filled to the brim with plastic jugs of Egg Nog from different brands. A truly massive amount of nog, easily like 200 jugs.

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

There is an infamous online troll/grifter whose bsky handle is really irritatingly close to mine, but I've been using "nbrianna" for five thousand years, and I'm not changing it. I'm not her. Don't block me lol.

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that_shaman @thatshaman.com · 14/11/2024

I'm no longer the #GuildWars2 commander, outlander or wayfinder. I'm Shaman from accounting.

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Belghast @belghast.com · 13/11/2024

Okay an attempt was made... I know for certain I missed some folks and potentially also flagged some folks on the list incorrectly. At some point I need to combine a decade worth of yearly spreadsheets into an inclusive Blaugust list but... hopefully is useful to someone. go.bsky.app/5qucHfZ

go.bsky.app

Blaugust Folks

Join the conversation

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

I feel like this site's demographics can be described as "still mad about the loss of Google Reader"

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breetoplay @nbrianna.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

MMO Studio starter pack. A handful of devs; not journos or blogs. bsky.app/starter-pack...

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