Best MMO Company and/or Dev Team?

[Locker]

Ok I just got done reading the Worst MMO of all time thread and while it was depressing it has a lot of accurate information in there. That being said I would like to be a little more forward thinking and focus on the positive. Here is the question:

What company is "the best" at running an MMO? What Dev teams are best at creating and/or maintaining MMO type games? (i.e. who should we be watching and paying attention to?)

Thank you for any and all feedback.

Peace,

Locker

 

[ValenceTrident]

I think Raph Koster is still the best developer of all time. He was more of less responsible for shaping UO in to the "virtual world/sandbox format" -- that's something that literally no other MMOs have done since. UO was *entirely* about the end-game. Raph's reputation got severely marred by SWG... but he was only an SWG dev for the first few months of that game and it was a very good game during those months.

 

[Lairkingo]

That's silly... Raph was Chief Creative Officer at SOE when SWG started to collapse creatively and he should've stepped in and prevented them from ruining the game.

Personally I think Blizzard collectively is the best MMO company. WoW increased the size of the entire MMO industry 20x over in a year. That's quite the accomplishment.

 

[emist]

WoW, though somewhat boring to me, is undeniably one of thetop MMORPGs out there. I've only played a few several games in the past (kinda hard to play other games while being addicted to one) and I'd say it's between StudioBlueCat (devs of Project Powder published by Outspark) and the devs for Cabal Online.