A few years ago the editorial team at Ten Ton Hammer were in the midst of one of our semi-annual “blue sky” brainstorming sessions, when the idea of creating a social network for MMO gamers entered the discussion. The concept was pretty simple: allow users to create profiles that would facilitate being able to meet other MMO gamers with similar interests. Think less dating site, and more along the lines of an external tool that would facilitate finding guilds, or even players to group up with if you’re not the type who enjoys PUGs.

Let’s face it – social systems within MMOs are not as robust as they could or should be in most titles, so there is plenty of room for this type of third party system to flourish, while also providing a worthwhile service to the millions of MMO gamers out there.

Our take on the concept never did go much further than a very rough outline of what such a project might entail, but apparently we weren’t alone in thinking it was a good idea.

ZergID has been in public beta for close to a year, and has already reached the half million users milestone, and continues to build up a sizable audience of MMO gamers. If you’re not familiar with ZergID, the official description goes something like this:

“ZergID is a social network for MMO gamers. Setup a ZergID and stay connected with your gamer friends. Use the free Guild Management system to schedule Guild events and keep up to date with Guilds across multiple games. Connect and share with other MMO players via our Zerg Feeds. Reach out into the real world with push notifications using our iOS and Android messaging app while keeping your personal info private.”

Above: an example of the ZergID Character Creation screen

Along with the announcement of reaching the half million user milestone, the folks at ZergID also helped shed some light on what the future holds.

“New features are on the horizon for ZergID users. Coming later this year, users will be able to employ a matchmaking feature to discover people at similar ranks and levels in the same games they play, enabling users to easily form parties or teams and schedule events.

Through its recent acquisition of OpenRaid, ZergID will gain tools that provide ZergID users much more detailed information regarding who will be attending events in World of Warcraft. This feature will expand in 2016 to cover other popular games including League of Legends, Guild Wars 2 and Heroes of the Storm.

Also coming to ZergID is a streamlined process for adding characters to users' accounts. ZergID will utilize log in with Battle.net so all World of Warcraft characters associated with a specific account can be imported automatically to their ZergID profiles. ZergID plans to work on expanding this streamlined process to other popular MMOs.”

For more info on ZergID be sure to visit the official website!