The modern MMO's biggest enemy is difficulty, because pleasing everyone is basically impossible—and yet, they must

Calyx, a villain in FF14, holds a stylus pen beneath a graphic for Terminally Online, PC Gamer's own MMO column.

Terminally Online

(Image credit: Future)

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.

MMORPGs are monstrously complicated things—they run on huge, easily DDOSable servers, they have economies that can easily get knocked off the rails, are designed to run for decades, and require constant balancing and fine-tuning. If you work on an MMO, you are Sisyphus trying to get a boulder up a hill, except you also have a bunch of angry forum users calling you an idiot the whole way up.