About 0hp

0hp is an independent MMO magazine with a record-keeper's spine. Three pages carry the whole idea: what is coming, what is closing, and what is happening this month, across every MMO worth tracking, each entry carrying the publisher's own link and the date we last checked it. Around them we write about what changed, and we say what we think of it.

The name is zero hit points. The moment the fight is over and the numbers are in.

The three trackers

These are the product. Every one of them is generated from a maintained data file, never typed into a page by hand, and each says on its face when it last changed and when it was last checked.

• The calendar puts every dated MMO event on one page: patches, seasonal events, betas, launches and anniversaries, plus daily and weekly reset times for the games people actually log into. Nobody else maintains this across games.
• The sunset tracker records every announced shutdown, publisher handover, delisting and end of support, with the date and the notice. The incumbents publish a retrospective once a year; this is the live version.
• The release tracker lists every announced or credibly rumoured MMO with its current date, its status, and the day that date last moved.

How a fact gets on a page

Every date is announced or estimated, and the page says which. An estimate is labelled as one wherever it appears, and it is never dressed up as a confirmed date, in the words on the page or in the structured data underneath it.

The only things read while writing are the publisher's own: patch notes, developer blogs, press releases, their own forums and their own Steam news posts. Other outlets are read for leads and are never a source.

Credit is not optional here. Where a creator, a guild, a wiki, a dataminer or a rival outlet found or explained something first, they are named and linked in the body of the piece where a reader will actually see it, not tucked into a footnote. Crediting somebody is not reading from them: we state the fact in our own words, point at the people who did the work, and send you to them. A site with no backlinks grows because the people it was generous to pass it on, so this is self-interest as well as fairness, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

Every article is pegged to a publisher announcement, links it in the first hundred words, and carries at least one section the announcement does not have: a table, a timeline, a before and after, or the part they left out.

Where we stand

We have a point of view and we would rather tell you what it is than pretend to have none.

We are old school at heart. We like worlds over lobbies, power that was earned over power that was bought, servers with names and reputations, and games that respect the fact that you have a life. That is a preference, not a rule, and we cover every game fairly whether or not it shares it.

We are against pay-to-win. Cash shops that sell power, paid progression, loot-box odds and "convenience" that turns out to be a paywall get called what they are, with the specifics, every time a source touches one. When a publisher ships something generous we say that just as plainly, and we do.

Our criticism aims at publishers and systems, never at players. The audience for a piece about a game is the people who play it. We will be sharp about a decision, and sometimes funny about it, and we will not make a joke that needs one of you as the punchline. A game can have died three times under three publishers without a word against the people who loved it.

Opinion always sits on top of a sourced fact, never instead of one, and the section carrying it is headed Our take so you can see where the reporting stops and we start.

The art

Every article leads on an original painted scene made for it: the landscapes, weather and mood of a game's world, never its characters, its logos or its interface. We do not use publisher screenshots, because almost every publisher we cover forbids it for a site like this one, and we would rather make something of our own than borrow badly.

Who writes it

0hp publishes under the brand, with no personal bylines. How the writing is actually done is set out in full on the AI disclosure page, which is deliberately blunt about it.

0hp is independent. It is not affiliated with any game publisher and does not speak for one. Every trademark named here belongs to its owner, and the notices those owners ask for are reproduced on the legal page.

Corrections

Write to admin@0hp.com. A wrong date is the worst thing that can happen to a page like this, so corrections go to the front of the queue and are fixed the same day they can be confirmed. Say which page and what changed. The contact page has the rest.