Inspired, perhaps, by Blizzard's "classic" version of World of Warcraft, allowing players to experience the game as it was circa-2006, another long-running MMO, Lord of the Rings Online, has announced a similar idea, called the "Legendary Server".

When it comes to long-running, massively-multiplayer games, the conversation usually starts and stops with World of Warcraft. Which is fair enough, given its sustained success over 14 years. But there's another, older game that's been forgotten in recent times: EverQuest. Almost two decades on, the game is getting its 25th expansion, called The Burning Lands.

If your player base is tanking and you've tried everything else under the sun to boost numbers, what do you do? Go free-to-play, of course. This is the route Daybreak has taken with its title H1Z1, dropping the price from $US19.99 (~$26) to zilch.

Online-only games introduced players to an unfamiliar concept -- that your favourite title could essentially "die" at the whim of its creators. Save for reverse-engineering or a gracious code donation from the developers, once the server lights go out, that game can never be played again. Daybreak's MMO FPS PlanetSide met this fate mere hours ago.

From the outside, it appeared an odd decision that development on Landmark -- the interactive creation tool for EverQuest Next -- would continue once the game it was built for was cancelled. Whether this was a good decision wasn't immediately clear, but with Landmark's official release on Steam, we now have a better picture. And it's not good.

How precisely do you deal with people in MMOs that are found guilty of botting, cheating, griefing and generally being a negative influence? One MMO is trialling an interesting answer.