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To be honest, for a minute I was in favor of EA acquiring and killing lots of MMOs, simply because I can't stand the current paradigms that most of the MMORPG genre are based on, like level treadmills and timesinks.

Then I remembered that just five short years ago, EA killed my MMO dreams when they shut down Multiplayer Battletech: 3025. I place much of the blame for the tepid and weak pool of current MMO offerings on the axing of MPBT:3025, which was bar none the finest multiplayer 'mech experience I've seen.

Damn you, EA. Damn you to hell for continually working to make MMO games suck forever.

Check out Parsec, today!

You can find it on MPOGD.com here.

The game has a great modding community and all we need are more players and developers. Join us today!

Then I countered with:

"Mr. Gambardello, and Ms. Yant Kinney:

First off, Ms. Kinney, if you're letting Mr. Gambardello do all your research, I highly suggest that you both find different lines of work.

Second, your information about Warriors of Freedom, is almost, but not entirely, the opposite of the truth. The first link in Google when you enter in "Warriors of Freedom" takes you here:

http://www.elisacarbone.com/index.2ts?page=study

A page for teachers resources on the Civil War. The fact that this pops up first, a non-exact match, is proof that "Warriors of Freedom"
is almost entirely unknown.

Gamerankings.com turns up no matches in its database. Mobygames.com turns up no matches in its database. Gamespot.com turns up no matches
in its database. IGN.com no matches. Gamespy.com no matches. Gamers.com, no matches.

Do you see a common theme here?

If none of the major gaming sites, and none of the mid-major gaming sites have ANY information about this game at all, and bear in mind,
these sites cover games overseas, games that are released for free, and everything, this game is popular in no way, shape, or form.

The actual site is too small to have even been indexed by Google. I find a page that refers to the offical page, but not the official page
itself, and the one page I do find is not even the top link in Google! How much fact checking did you do after you punched "Warriors of
Freedom" into Google?

What you think are matches for the actual PC game, are not sites for the game at all. When I did find the official site that you refer to
in your article, which IS up and has been for all of today since your article was posted, by the way, I find a meager page for someone's
piddling little online project.

Registration appears to work just fine, but that's all moot since once you actually bother to move to the next page you notice that in red
text it tells you that there is a 1000 player cap on the game. That is the smallest Multiplayer Online Game I have ever heard of. By the way,
did you try figuring out when the game went down? Any chance that maybe, just maybe it's been down for quite a while now, especially
since nobody knows anything about it? Coincidence? No, it's common sense.

In fact, as far as I can tell, there are fewer than 10 sites that actually refer to any game, much less a PC Game.

The only information I can find on the game is here:

http://www.mpogd.com/games/game.asp?ID=1754

Which lists the game's interface as "text based", meaning that the anime figures you mention are undoubtedly from that pen and paper RPG,
formerly of the same name. Especially since it lists the game being of type, "Empire Manangement" and doesn't sound one bit like the "Warriors of Freedom" pen and paper RPG, which has since changed its name
to "Guardians of Har".

Since that Guardians of Har only claims copyrights from 2000-2002, one is left to assume that this name change took place sometime around last year (at the latest.) and that this game, and the PC "Game" that you and Jack Thompson are reporting is the basis for the kids' group name
have nothing in common. If the anime characters from Warriors of Freedom DO exist, they're from the pen and paper RPG and have NOTHING
to do with a text based PC 1,000 player maximum limit empire building game of the same name.

I can't find anything anywhere about screenshots from the game, which may since it's text-only. I'd really like to see the figures you're
talking about, because I'm 99.9% positive that they bear no relationship whatsoever to the PC Game you're talking about. Connection
between an anime related PC game and a kid who drew anime? Coincidence? No, merely conjured up conjecture, because there's no anime in the "Warriors of Freedom" PC game.

It's not even an RPG. According to MPOGD.com's short writeup of it, it's a fantasy empire-management game. Poor-man's Warcraft.

Um... Wouldn't this kind of game really inspire a kid not to go out and kill, but to go out and finance a mine, farms, barracks... conscript a bunch of young men into service and send THEM out to do the killing?

I'm not sure if MUDs are actually diminishing all that much. If you look at sites like mudconnector there are quite a few MUDs listed. The same goes with MPOGD. I, myself, am an active participant in a MUD that has been running over thirteen(13) years now. The player base has only increased, as has the complexity of the MUD itself. I know others that have followed somewhat of the same path as well. The only reason MUDs may be diminishing, is that the maintainers lose interest, or go on to do something else. However, it seems that if the MUD is programmed well, and has a strong playerbase, it isn't going anywhere. I know for a fact, that if the MUD I play opens donations, almost every player will donate at least $100 US Dollars without flinching.That clearly shows some dedication. (Note that one doesn't ever HAVE to donate money.)

If anyone is curious, or wants to play, the MUD I'm on is Bat. www.bat.org/

I run a site that focuses on it at www.mpogd.com, where you can find nearly a thousand games made by small companies, or just basement programmers. Take for example a free multiplayer game I worked on from 95-96 ARC, the people from that game have been playing it now for 5 years straight, and most of us know each other by name. We consider ourselves part of a private community that participated in a great game that the media completely ignored. If you want to see the last stand of games made by gamers, check out the independent sites and games. They are founded upon the same "true gaming" beliefs that came from the 80's, and not the "lets make a FMV game that'll sell a few million copies" you see today.

Didn't you all see our industry going to pop-culture hell when Dragon's Lair came out?

You guys are forgetting about the great selection of multiplayer browser-based games that are growing in popularity more then any other branch of games. These can easily be played by any linux computer with a net connection. Games like Planetarion, Archmage, Dominion, Ominix, Utopia are all browser based and each have 10s to 100s of thousands of users. Massively Multiplayer Turn Based Strategy Games will bring linux into the marketplace by telling us game developers that if you want to get more of the pie, you got to developer for linux. I have a list of these games at my website www.mpogd.com which is a directory of 500 or so online multiplayer games, about 1/2 of them are able to run on a linux machine.

English: Fry's 30 day money back guarentee

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