May Contain Nuts

I’ve been mulling this over for more than a month now, since I brought it up to Blade as part of our conversations about the GoA after attending the GoMe meeting in August, and have finally reached a conclusion: I can no longer be the sole point of development and administration for DPWR.  The site has gotten large enough, and I’ve gotten busy enough, that I simply can’t handle the work load anymore.  Unfortunately, because of DPWR’s history, transitioning to shared ownership will not be an easy thing.  The code has never been under source control, and development hasn’t exactly been what one might call “professional” at any point in time.  DPWR is how (and why) I learned PHP, and a lot of what I do with the site generally consists of hacking and modifying existing files in Invision Power Board, with poorly-documented and poorly-commented results.

What I want to do is essentially start from scratch in some ways.  I want to start with a virgin installation of IPB and the various components that I use for DPWR (Links, Gallery, and Wiki), and then build the current feature set back into the site.  It’s a fair amount of replicated effort, I know, but I think it’s the only way to start off on the right foot.  To make things potentially easier, I’ve already subversioned the current files so that there’s a base point of comparison that can be built from and re-implemented whole-cloth where appropriate (and possible).  In addition to re-programming the PHP, I would also like to tackle modifying the site’s skin as well, since it’s got some rather obvious legibility issues and needs some love to pull it more in-line with the Guild of Archivists concept (Tweek being the awesome person that he is has provided me with his “Guild Pub” emblem for the GoA, which I’d like to run with).

Ultimately, my goal is to get everything updated and moved to the live site by the end of the year (just in time for IPB 3 to come out and start the process all over again :P).  Since most of the stuff on the site doesn’t need much (if any) modification to work, and all of the really hard work of getting the Archive to support tags has already been done (it just needs to be re-implemented into the vanilla install), I think the thing that would take the longest would be the skin.

I’ve decided to do this now (rather than wait for IPB 3 to come out) for several reasons: 1) I want to make sure that the site is actually maintainable by a small group before IPB 3 comes out and the really hard work of porting the Archive component to the new version begins, 2) I want the site to be able to support all of the requirements that being the host for the GoA puts on it ASAP, and 3) I don’t have the time to do any of this by myself anymore.  I’ve got one pro bono web design project I’m working on right now, and will hopefully have a contract for another site by next month.  Coupled with the 3 months worth of other small-to-massive-sized projects I’ve accumulated over the summer without a Mac to call my own and the fact that I’m at work 9 hours a day, I just don’t have the ability to throw myself at DPWR the way I did when I was 15 without a care in the world ;).  (On a side note, it’s actually kind of scary that I’ve been managing this site since I was 15… it originally launched on Homestead on June 30, 2000)

So, if you’re a PHP developer interested in helping to get DPWR on its feet, please leave a comment with some way of getting in touch with you, or email me and let me know you’re interested.  I realize I’m asking a great deal with no real compensation (all I’ve got are my gratitude and appreciation [as well as my most profound apologies for the current sorry state of the code base]), so I don’t exactly expect a stampede of volunteers, but anyone willing to lend a hand would be very, very greatly appreciated.  I’ll discuss the details of how to get to the SVN source, as well as some other guidelines and requirements, privately with anyone who volunteers.  It’s not nasty, mean, paranoia-inducing “OMG SEEKRETS!” stuff, just stuff that I would rather discuss in confidence because it has to do with a non-open-source project ;).

To whom it may concern,

Clearly you feel that there is something seriously wrong with the way the MOUL forum is being run, otherwise you would not persist in your sarcasm-laden, poorly-veiled commentary on the moderators who run it and the posters who frequent it.  I could swear I remember stating as a matter of public record some time ago that I would be willing to discuss perceived mistreatment of members and mismanagement of the forum by the MOUL moderators privately.  Unfortunately, nobody involved in the explosion that triggered that statement has since taken me up on the offer, nor has anyone involved in the forum thread I linked to above.  Is this simply poor memory on your part, or do you feel that it is better to try and publicly stir up bad vibes and goad people into taking actions you can later use as justification for your divissive behavior?

I have been entirely honest in my offer to extend a hand in honest, open communication regarding perceived mishandling of situations on the forums by the moderators, and my offer still stands.  Vacant, public accusations of wrongdoing will get you no farther in resolving anything; I’ve learned that lesson myself.  If you have a problem with the way the forum is being run by the moderators, take it up with me directly - that’s why I made the offer I did.  If you have a problem with the behavior of a forum poster, take it up with them directly; don’t over-generalize and accuse the entire forum population of being Cyan yes-men when it’s plainly clear that that is not the case.

I look forward to working with you to resolve whatever problems you see as existing on the MOUL forums in a direct, professional, and speedy manner.

- Alahmnat
MOUL Forum Moderator

I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning…

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother trying to stick around anymore when all anyone ever seems to do is argue.

As I mentioned in my last Uru-related entry, I wanted to save the user-created content commentary for a separate post because this is going to be a thorny subject and I suspect I’m going to be on the wrong side of the debate here.  I’ve thus far been expressly avoiding major additions of user-created content like Ages and such because I honestly don’t think that they’re essential to the long-term survival of Uru.  Please to be not pummeling me until I have a chance to explain myself!

I am absolutely not saying that I think fan-created content is bad, nor am I saying that Cyan is wrong for wanting to give players the means to create their own stuff to share with others.  What I am saying is that I don’t think Uru is the right vehicle for that content.  Uru is (or at least was, I’m not entirely sure anymore) a Cyan project that builds on and continues the extension of official Myst canon.  As much as I like the guys at GoW, integrating fan Ages directly into official canon is a hazy proposition to me.  It just feels… off.  Of course, one could always just turn Uru into this content platform, and leave Cyan with the option of creating a Myst MMO with a brand new title ;).  I just get kinda squirmy when it comes to the “you got peanut butter in my chocolate!”-style scenario that could arise from putting fan content directly into a game built on canon (I’m a purist, you may now commence pummeling).

Where I think fan-created Ages (and indeed, whole fan-created games) would be better suited is a spin-off service that still runs on Plasma, has an officially released toolkit for developers to build their stuff with, and enables users to embrace or ignore as much or as little of the available material as they like, without it getting in the way of Uru’s story or content.  Like Steam, but just for Myst stuff.  With such a service available, content wouldn’t just be limited to what could be produced within the confines of Uru.  In effect, it becomes an official, kosher distribution point for virtual fan fiction, with the obvious disclaimer attached that none of what you’re seeing should be considered canon unless it’s officially adopted by Cyan.  You also get the added benefit of not getting freaked out about someone’s new Age mucking up the Uru Live Vault, and not having to figure out the managerial headache of how people would download and access player content without just piling it all into the initial download (which would be messy and ginormous).  Ultimately, I think trying to cram user-created content into a game that was never designed to support it would cause more problems than it would solve, and that the better way to do it would be to keep the two separate.  This way, Cyan doesn’t have to potentially re-architecture portions of Uru’s download manager, fans can still build and release content that runs on the same engine on whatever schedule they like, and players can access and enjoy both.

I think that such a service would blow the doors off of a potentially massive Myst extended universe, much the same way that Star Wars has grown exponentially beyond the confines of the original films through licensed books and software.  The Myst universe has the potential to be incredibly huge and rich, and I think a lot of people in this community recognize that fact, otherwise there likely wouldn’t be such a huge push for player-created Ages in Uru.  And while I have to give props to the work the people at Alcugs have done to get their stuff into the offline version of Uru, having a sanctioned release channel that doesn’t skirt legalities, and doesn’t have vague questions about what you can and can’t put in your Ages like the current Uru:CC distribution system does, is going to get a whole lot more people on board.

On a larger scope, I’d love to see more commercially available Myst universe material.  I mean seriously, the Myst universe is simply too large and varied to not be expanded upon by fans and, in my opinion, other creative professionals.  There’s 10,000 years of Atrus-free history to work with here; don’t tell me that not one interesting thing happened in that time that wouldn’t be worthy of a book, movie, TV show, video game, etc.  Think of it: CSI: J’Taeri!  The Mahnxooreeahn Candidate!  Call of Duty 5: The Pento Wars!  Burnout: Ae’Gura!  Sim City: D’ni! (two great tastes that taste great together!)

On a more serious note, I really hope that projects like the Myst Movie thing actually get off the ground and make a dent in the public consciousness.  The Star Wars expanded universe has scads and scads of books, comics, action figures, and reference materials, not all of which are anywhere close to being canonical anymore, and the scope of a potential Myst expanded universe could easily rival such a construct.  I know Cyan’s had some bad dealings with shady, less than agreeable types in the past (*cough*SciFi*cough*DarkHorse Comics*cough*), but I think that with the right people on board to start an extended universe, it could really take off.  And while I imagine that Cyan could probably come up with a lisencing arangement that would prevent the creation of … uncomfortable products (”Section V, article 25: no ‘Atrus and Catherine consumate their relationship’ scenes”?) in order to maintain the franchise’s reputation, as long as there was an understanding that what you were reading or watching was part of that extended universe and not Cyan-sanctioned canon, I don’t have a problem with getting more stories about D’ni out of this franchise.

This is probably the eighth time I’ve re-written this entry, so hopefully it hasn’t gotten too long in the tooth through the numerous re-writes. I’ve been trying to work out an effective format for addressing the three remaining lessons I’ve learned from MOUL’s year-long run, and doing so without turning out a novel-length post is a considerable challenge. These three lessons all center around involving players in the game without forcing them to become addicted to it, and cover story, repeatable content, and content formatting. So let’s dive in (again, and for the first time).

As I mentioned in a recent post on the MOUL forums, Cyan has faced an uphill battle against time, money, and manpower constraints when developing Uru since UbiSoft decided to muck up the game’s formula 8 months before release, and these battles were only further exacerbated by the brief timeframe that GameTap gave a somewhat understaffed Cyan for re-launching the title into public beta at the end of 2006. These constraints have resulted in additional changes to Uru’s original game plan (episodes, live-only story) which, while more subtle than UbiSoft’s single-player campaign mandate, had a similar impact on Uru’s ability to succeed at its own game. I firmly believe that Uru is a concept that can succeed, both artistically and commercially, but all of the pieces to Uru’s development puzzle have to be in place for it to work well at all. You can call me a blind optimist if you like, but I still don’t think Uru as it should be has been given a chance to work… so far we’ve only managed to prove that “Uru Live Lite” isn’t a good business proposal. Twice.

That said, Cyan’s more limited resources require some smart game design decisions that would probably take the game to places other than it was originally intended to go. Still, when given the option of an under-executed original vision and a well-executed alternative, I’d have to go with the alternative option. Here are a few ways that I think Cyan could create a successful “alternative” Uru; one that has all of the pieces in place, but executes them smartly on a tiny budget.

Content is obviously a huge issue for Uru. It is, after all, a content-driven MMO rather than a grind-driven or competition-driven MMO. However, Cyan simply cannot provide Uru with enough content to keep the rabid puzzle-solvers sated, especially with their limited staff. As a result, focusing on single-use Ages with solve-once puzzles is not the most optimal use of resources, because for most players, once they’re done solving those puzzles, there’s little motivation to return to those Ages again, and then they quickly get bored and leave. An alternative Uru needs to focus more on repeatable gameplay and smart re-use of existing content to keep players interested and keep production costs at a minimum.

Repeatable gameplay would most easily come in the form of in-game mini-games. There are already several examples of this sort of content in both Prologue and MOUL, but they seem more like ways to test the water than really well-developed concepts for getting players to kill time in-game.

Small table-top games like Ahyoheek are nice distractions, and with functional leader boards could even fuel more regular play (especially with a game-wide board for players to vie for spots on), but it’s not something that will hold attention for hours on end, and most players will get tired of the D’ni version of Rock, Paper, Scissors before too long anyway. Still, it’s a nice start, and something to fall back on when you’re out of other things to do.

More exploration-based games like the user-created Marker Missions fill another niche, but can only be played solo (which is good for the loner types but not as useful for making actual games). The original Ubi beta for Uru in 2003 had 2 additional game types: Capture and Hold, which were played with teams in a single Age, and had a set time limit. In Capture, you ran around collecting markers for your team, and everybody playing could see all of the game’s uncollected markers. In Hold, the markers you collected didn’t disappear, meaning the other team could steal markers away from you. In both games, whichever team had the most markers at the end of the timer was the winner. They were fun and fast-paced games, and I still don’t quite understand why the time wasn’t devoted to making them work in the final release; they disappeared shortly after Ages Beyond Myst’s announcement at E3 2003, never to be seen again.

Finally, we segue cleanly into strictly competitive mini-games. Typically quick and constrained to a game surface like a wall, a life-sized game board, or a track, these games wouldn’t appeal to everyone in Uru’s crowd, but would hopefully provide something to entice new players into the fold, as well as give those interested something more exciting to do with their time in-game when not out puzzle solving. These games are also typically great for spectating, but Uru has traditionally made getting to these games tedious at the best of times, and downright frustrating at worst, which I think has soured their appeal for most people. Beyond making them easier to get players and observers into, areas like Jalak and Gahreesen’s Wall need to provide places for spectators to gather, a solid way to determine scoring and victory, and ideally a set of leader boards in a public place to showcase your accomplishments and give you something to work toward, if you enjoy that sort of thing. The Wall has more of these requirements than Jalak, but I think that if both were tweaked to include this complete feature set, they would both be fairly popular hang-outs for the more energetic segments of the Uru community. Releasing planned content like the Kahlo creature races would only add to the number of possible things to do in the game during story down-time.

Beyond mini-games, though, content has to be recyclable for story and general gameplay purposes too. For instance, consider Er’cana - quite possibly the only real forray into repeatable gameplay that Cyan has made. Er’cana’s puzzles are almost all complete throw-aways that have nothing to do with actually operating the machinery in the Age. It’s a big set of “get around this broken pathway” puzzles with power switches at convenient intervals. The only really sustainable puzzle is figuring out a good pellet recipe, and that was generally short-cutted around through the communal efforts in the forums. After that, the Age became largely useless, and the machinery didn’t seem to have anything to do with the actual pellet-making process, which was a curious shift from Cyan’s typical attention to such details. I think that the concept of Er’cana can be seriously expounded upon by at the very least factoring in machine operation and supply management in basic forms. My ideal super-complicated implementation would call for a ‘hood-instanced mega-Age with weather patterns to learn and track over months or even years, and dynamic vegetation growth and harvesting that responded to changes in the weather (i.e. a long drought would cause plants to wither and the ground to become cracked mud). Creating and testing such a system would obviously require considerably more resources up-front than the far simpler infinite supply system and basic puzzle mechanics of Er’cana, but I think the Age would last a LOT longer as a result, and complex puzzles like tracking weather patterns seems like something right up the alley of some of the more obsessive Uru fans. As a launch Age, it would give players something to spend at least a few months pouring over obsessively, without putting a multi-month delay on other content drops while the beast went through development and testing.

As a final point on content, adding new material to existing Ages was another promise of the original Uru which never came to pass in MOUL, a fact I find most unfortunate. I think that part of this was related to the 4-year-old setpieces that Cyan had built versus the new direction in which they were moving the story. To that end, I think there is a need for a set of content that can be repurposed for pretty much anything, and I think that the Path to the surface could provide the perfect opportunity for such a set piece. It’s largely modular, and could be broken into discreet sections by strategic cave-ins; it runs through any conceivable section of the D’ni Empire you need it to; when tied into the GZ coordinate system, you can drop all kinds of subtle clues to players leading them to new content in already-explored areas; KI access restrictions could be integrated into the doors to keep players out until they’d completed any pre-requisite story arcs… the list of potential uses goes on and on. Especially for smaller story-related material, these sorts of simple expansions to existing areas could have a huge impact on the depth of the game world and provide a cheaper alternative to building new Ages from scratch every time you needed a new story element unveiled.

This leads us inevitably to the story. I think Uru suffered from the same fate that befell the new Star Wars trilogy: a good story poorly executed. However, while we only have Lucas’s inability to write his way out of a paper bag to blame for Episodes 1-3, Uru’s story failings have a myriad of causes that stem from a lack of time, money, and manpower.

Since I’m already adopting the viewpoint that a new Uru needs to be a complete reboot in terms of development anyway, with a lot of time being devoted to building large sustainable content chunks before release, I figure I might as well go whole-hog here. Uru’s storytelling technique is unique in the MMO genre because it abandons the notion of player-controlled, player-instanced story for that of a global tale being told in real time, concurrent with the progression of time outside the game. In Prologue, this was handled through regular, live, in-game events that moved the DRC plot along, with a parallel solo story arc involving Yeesha and the Bahro that could be explored at your leisure. MOUL abandoned this solo story arc concept for new development, focusing instead on the much cheaper-to-produce live events as the exclusive manner in which story was unveiled in the game. Unfortunately, this method didn’t work very well, and players more often than not became frustrated with their inability to watch the game’s story unfold first-hand, and instead resigned themselves to learning about the story through out-of-game means like the forums.

Hopefully, I don’t have to tell you that having players leave the game to learn about the story because it’s easier than trying to wring it out of the game itself is a bad thingâ„¢. Eventually, even the simpler methods of maintaining a permanent storytelling record in MOUL, like Sharper’s journal, stopped being updated entirely. Regardless of the fact that Sharper, as a fellow denizen of the Uru universe, probably stopped updating his journal once he found out it wasn’t exactly private anymore, some way to keep that information flowing was necessary, and it wasn’t maintained. Removing it cut off the only remaining source for catching up on events in-game without trying to find someone else who knew what was going on, and that was bad for the story’s delivery.

Beyond that, realtime events ended up cheapening some of the story, in my opinion, by turning them into second-hand recountings of really exciting stuff which, like vacation photos, are really only cool to the people who went with you. Story arc points like the unveiling of the Bahro civil war could have been handled much better, I think, through a player-controlled reveal much like the original Yeesha journey’s reveal of the Bahro’s very existence, rather than Sharper recounting That Time He Almost Died in Negilahn and That Time He Shot a Bahro in Noloben.

Not everything is suited to a real-time event in Uru, but not everything can be placed in the hands of player progress either. Wheely’s death and Watson’s return, for example, had to happen once and only once, as there was only one Wheely and only one Watson for these things to happen to. If someone joined in November and was able to witness Wheely’s death first-hand as if it was happening for the first time, it would certainly be more informative for that player, but it would also violate Uru’s premise that all of this is actually happening in the real world. Some things can even be a combination of real-time and player-time events (I like that term, I think I’ll keep it). For example, many many players were angry that they didn’t get to see Yeesha’s speech in the season finale, and so missed their only opportunity to see her again in person. As an alternative, let me propose the following: upon completing the Path of the Shell Ages, you arrive in a private instance of K’veer so as not to be disturbed. Yeesha appears before you in a triggered sequence that plays once for all players upon reaching this point. Yeesha reveals the salient points of her speech, but leaves out the “kthxbye” part. This gets used in her real-time appearance and speech in Exodus, which obviously only happens once. After her departure, the Yeesha in K’veer becomes a hologram for anyone else completing the Path of the Shell Ages, and an additional line or two detailing her departure could even be added for consistency and explanation. This way, everybody gets to see Yeesha regardless of when they complete PotS, and the real-time event where she departs to draw the Bahro away is preserved as an event for the history books. Provided MOUL’s sole animator hadn’t spent the entire development period animating all of those Bahro around Kerath’s Arch, Yeesha’s 2-minute speech could probably have been cranked out in a couple of days, plus maybe a little overtime (or minus a couple of dogfighting Bahro).

On one final note, I have thus far been very intentionally not mentioning user-created content beyond Marker and Jalak games because that’s a whole ‘nother bail of barbed wire that I’d rather be saving for another post that isn’t already several pages long :P.

I have another Backseat Developer post to make that’s been sitting in my draft bin for a couple of weeks now, but I wanted to get some thoughts down about Uru’s second closure now that I’ve had some time to reflect and cogitate.

Surprisingly, I don’t find myself nearly as upset about it as I was last time.  Of course, last time it was basically sprung on us at the last minute without warning, and we only had a week to pack up and head home, so the circumstances were obviously different, and there was more time to get through the rough patch without also having to say goodbye to the game itself.  The entire tone of the situation - from the time they announced the theretofore nonexistent season finale back in September, through the announcement on February 4th - wasn’t exactly promising, and after the announcement, we were given 60 days to clean out our lockers rather than the 5 days that Ubi gave us.  It just gave me a lot longer to really come to terms with it this time.  That’s certainly not to say that I’m not upset at all, and that I don’t feel bad for not being able to devote more time to enjoying the game while it lasted.  I’m guilty on both counts, and I do wish that things had gone differently to make Uru more of a success than it was.

Oscy and I met up with a few of the ResEngs (and Calliope) at the Service Station in Spokane after MOUL shut down, and there was some good catharsis over the game shutting down.  It was really good to see everyone again, and it made me wish I could have been there through the end.  Working at a different job now, I didn’t get the opportunity to be in the ResEng video that GD posted (everyone else still works at Cyan in other capacities, so tracking them down to be on camera was just a matter of heading over to the South Building), so I’ll have to make do with saying here what I would have said in the video:

Thank you to everyone who hung out with us goofballs in Beginner’s Bevin.  Thank you to everyone who was on-hand for my first day on the job… that 10:00 orientation was unforgettable.  Thank you to vid for inviting Dogherra and I to your New Year’s Pod Party.  Thank you to everyone who came to my last orientation, featuring Dreschel, Keeley, and Mr. Cone.  Special thanks to Resolute Guardian and Calliope for all of the fun we had together, whether it was un-sticking you guys from walls and railings or dragging you into verifying bug reports before they got filed, you two made the days that much more entertaining.  I really enjoyed the time I got to spend as a ResEng… there was never dull moment, and between the community and my co-workers, there was enough insanity and dedication in Uru to keep me amused for days.  Thank you all for the laughs, the questions, the attendance at orientations, the getting into situations that made me and the other ResEngs go “WTF?!” on an alarmingly regular basis, the humorous support tickets (both intentional and unintentional)… thank you for everything.  It was totally worth it.  And thank you for letting me don my pseudo-hat on the last night.  The reunion was great.

I hope that this is good night, and not goodbye.

I posted here that I was stepping down as a moderator on MOUL.  I did so out of a sense of professionalism, since I felt that it was inappropriate to complain about people I was in charge of fairly moderating on the forum, and wanted to avoid any perception of bias or retribution going forward.  However, given that everyone seems to think I’m still a nice guy, and that I’ve been asked not to step down by the other mods, I’ve decided to come at this from a different direction instead: I will be staying on at MOUL as a mod, in the interests of better communication and cooperation.  If anyone, slacker or otherwise, wants to discuss something that is related to moderation, you can contact me privately and we will discuss it.  I may have burned a few bridges here with my comments about people’s behavior, but I am not above building new ones.  I meant what I said when I talked about this community needing more cooperation, trust, and understanding.  To that end, I am willing to work with people.  Shocking, I know, but I mean it.  Being one of the “oldbies” around here (if not by age then almost certainly by seniority ;)), I should probably be leading by example, and so if I’m up on my soapbox advocating cooperation, common decency, direct resolution of personal problems, and all that, then I’d better be willing to walk the walk.  I’m willing to let bygones be bygones; holding grudges is for people with stronger stomachs than mine.

The original UU is well behind us, for good or ill, and MOUL is shutting down in a month and a half.  What this community does to survive after that is up to all of us, and as I’ve said before, I’m in this for the long haul.  I’m also willing to accept that people have different opinions on a vast number of things and still be able to sit next to each other at a table without punching each other.  But there has to be cooperation from both sides for that to happen.  I’m willing to take that first step; offering my hand in mutual not-hating-each-other, if not friendship (I guess we’ll see how it goes) in the interests of building a better community.  Are you?

Since I’m betting that MystBlogs is about to puck up my previous post on its RSS feed, I’ll put this in a new entry to be sure it doesn’t get lost.

Given the tone and position of my last entry, I feel it’s only appropriate that I step down as a moderator on the MOUL forums, effective immediately. I have sent GD a message asking to be removed from the mod list as soon as he gets the opportunity. I don’t want to bring the rest of the mods there any further trouble; they’re just making the best they can of the bad situation they’ve been put in by the very people who will bring the hammer down once they read my last blog post. And to those people I say: this is not a victory that you can claim and pat yourselves on the back for. This is me making sure that any bile you want to throw gets thrown at me for what I said, not at the other mods on MOUL just doing their jobs.

All this infighting and he-said-she-said and bitterness and anger and talking about other people behind their backs and grudges and intentional “innocent” rule-bending etc etc etc etc is really starting to piss me off. It may not be tearing the community apart, but it sure as fuck is starting to fray it around the edges. This shit has got to stop. Why do people think that this is an appropriate way to behave? Why do we let them get away with it?

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been around for so god-damned long that I just don’t care if I’m ostracized or made fun of or put on any particular group’s blacklist, but I am sick and fucking tired of dancing around issues and grudges and problems and arguments just so that nobody gets upset and leaves. It’s stupid. We keep talking about how Uru (and Myst) is something that can be this huge commercial success that appeals to a zillion different people, but at the same time, we get so paranoid over making someone mad and having them leave because it’s one more person gone from this tiny little community we have here. We can’t have it both ways. Personally, I think that while this community may not be huge enough not to miss the contributions of any one individual, it’s big enough to get over it, and small enough that keeping problem-causing people around is eventually going to make it fall apart. It’s not worth it.

I like the Myst games, and I like this community… but sometimes the people in it make me wonder if I’ll even make it to my 10-year anniversary. But if I give in and leave, who else would be willing to put up with it? How many good people are these two-faced back-stabbers going to drive out before there’s nobody left but them and the people who don’t know any better?

And just to be perfectly crystal-clear on this, I’m talking primarily about the Slackers and their self-righteous ivory tower we-know-best attitude. They show up in droves when the situation suits their purposes, and they utterly destroy those who stand against them, argue with them, moderate them, or even just cough while they’re talking. Of course, they don’t do it in public, they do it privately, plotting in their little forum about who’s going to take the brunt of their next round of ass-hattery, and playing all innocent whenever someone calls them on their bullshit. I’m sick of playing in the undercurrent of implication and vague suggestion. Flame on. But know that I’m not leaving, no matter what gets said about or against me. I spoke earlier about all of the ills that came out of UU, well, this is the worst of it. And it needs to stop.

Belford has written a long but very-much-worth-reading essay on the future of Uru.  I have very, very mixed feelings on this whole thing, so I feel I need to speak my peace and lay everything out in the open.  A lot of this is going to re-tread history that has already been covered and re-tread in many places, and I’m almost certainly going to say things that offend some people, but I need to say this, and I’m tired of holding it in.  At this point, I really don’t care if I end up pissing off some of the people in this community, or becoming unpopular because of something I’ve said.  And really, some people deserve to be offended :P.
Back when Uru was MUDPIE, and we got our first tiny glimpses of it through Spyder, Cyan’s open house at Mysterium 2000, and realMYST’s easter eggs, it was the culmination of a dream for me and, I imagine, many other people who had not only spent time in this universe, but grown up in it.  If you think I’m joking about this at all, you are sorely mistaken.  I first played Myst at the age of 11, and I’ve been a member of the Myst community since September of 1998.  I may not have literally grown up in D’ni (wishing to avoid improper use of that word), but I did effectively or perhaps figuratively grow up there, spending copious amounts of time better applied in school learning about the D’ni and linking theory, endlessly debating Rivenese water, reading and re-reading the Myst novels, cementing images of these magnificent places in my mind’s eye.  To me, at least, MUDPIE was a way to finally be able to see those places “for real” and share them with others.  Story, at that time, was unknown and unimportant.  My desire for what would eventually become Uru Live was driven by 10-year-old fantasies of seeing the place where it all began.  And throughout my time in the private beta for Uru that was run by UbiSoft, I saw things, went places, and performed feats I never thought I would be able to do.

To be certain, there were issues with the game itself on a technical level, and I reported those issues as I was expected to, but the game’s world is something that has and will always be a special place to me, because all the while, I was living a dream.  I was exploring D’ni.  And despite the hobbling of the online release by UbiSoft at the final hour, Cyan’s plan seemed to be working… the Cavern evolved on an almost daily basis, and real characters with real depth set the stage for an adventure that would sadly never come.

Until Uru was released shortly after the final expansion of Uru’s offline content, and was hailed by the community as a glorious resource and a way to keep the dream of Uru alive, and continue to share the Cavern with our friends.  At the time, I was overjoyed to be able to keep exploring with others; I had actually been surprisingly overwhelmed by the emptiness of the Cavern in To D’ni, and to this day have very rarely had occasion to venture into Ae’Gura via Complete Chronicles, because it’s simply depressing knowing that I will never see another person there.

For a while, Until Uru provided the respite and safe harbor that I had been wanting since Live’s closure; a place to explore and laugh and be with friends, even if that was all there would ever be to the journey.  But over time, something changed.  UU became something other than what it was supposed to be: a way to keep the idea of Uru alive.  It evolved, and not, I think, in a way that has been entirely healthy for either the community or the game itself.  To this day, certain people still will not speak with each other, and whole groups hold absurd grudges against other individuals, groups, or the community as a whole for things that happened in UU.  I can’t even begin to summarize what went on, because by that time, I had lost interest in going there due to the bickering, the in-fighting, and the general nastiness that existed on most of the shards.  There were plenty of good people in UU, and many valuable projects were started there that have lived on to this day, but unfortunately (and I’m not sure for whom), I let those motivated by anger, frustration, and bitterness drive me away from my second home in the Cavern.

Beyond the ugliness that grew out of UU, there also came a certain sense of ownership and entitlement, which I think more than anything else has seriously altered the way that some segments of the community see Uru.  The shards were ours, after all, and there was no authority standing between us and the game’s content.  And so, UU once again changed, and certainly not for the better, in my opinion.  The UserKI and AdminKI, as well as the myriad other ways in which the game was modified, are some of the worst things to have happened to D’ni that I can possibly fathom.  In 2003, there was a realism to the world of Uru, a sense that this was a real place, with rules, structure, and a certain adherence to the laws of nature.  What it became was Myst: Second Life, with people leaping hundreds of feet in the air and walking around with neon blue skin, the lake tinted to whatever color struck the fancy of the shard administrator(s), etc.  Whatever realism was in Uru was destroyed for me by what was done to it in UU.  I know a lot of people in the community adored the UserKI, the skydiving “feature”, the ability to literally be a little green man, the fact that the shard admins could upturn Kerath’s Arch and turn the sky in the Cavern pink, and spawn a massive copy of the DRC’s laptop in Tokotah Courtyard for everyone to play on, and so I’m sure, moreso than I was when I suspected (incorrectly) the last time I said it, that I will be lynched for uttering these words, but I hate what UU did to Uru (or, to be even more direct, I hate what this community did to Uru in the name of making their own fun).  More than that, though, I hate that UU’s atmosphere of happy-go-lucky do-as-you-please-ness has become so accepted and ingrained in the minds of some people that they outright protested Cyan’s efforts to do the very thing that UU was intended to facilitate: re-launch Uru Live, citing that over-developed sense of entitlement as the sole reason why UU should be left running (oddly, pretty much everyone I saw protesting UU’s closure on the grounds of MOUL’s limited international availability were people who lived in supported countries).
I could go on at length about the ways in which either Cyan or GameTap screwed the pooch this time around, but I’m not going to.  I’m pretty sure that Cyan knows what went wrong, I’m pretty sure that GameTap doesn’t read my blog, and I know for a fact that the community has been all over this facet of Live’s second closure, and so I see little point in continuing the exercise.  Suffice it to say that mistakes were made which probably contributed far more to Uru’s second death than any failure of imagination or effort on the part of the community.  And now that Uru is gone again, everyone wants desperately to have something else to hold on to, and the only thing that comes to anyone’s mind is another UU.

While I can’t blame people for wanting to return to the only known way of keeping this game alive on an unofficial basis, to put it bluntly, this notion scares the living shit out of me.  I’ve seen this community turn D’ni into an amusement part for its own entertainment, when years ago, the very notion of such a thing would have turned the stomachs of everyone I knew.  I don’t want to take over D’ni, and turn it into the community’s plaything.  I don’t want to usurp Cyan as the arbiter of D’ni canon.  I don’t even want to usurp the notion of there being an arbiter of D’ni canon.  At the same time, I have no qualms with people who build Ages, or tell stories, or create artwork that increases the depth and breadth of the D’ni universe; people who - like those of us who signed on to this game eight years ago - see D’ni as a real place and want to share their interest and enthusiasm for it; people who genuinely want to give something back to the community.  If left in the hands of people like that, I wouldn’t be concerned at all, because I would know that D’ni was in good hands, and I would work with them as long as I could to make sure that the Cavern was never silent again.  Even before Uru, there were attempts at something similar through the Writers of D’ni MOO, and though I sadly have never participated in it, I know some of the most creative members of the community in ages past did so, and created a place second only to Uru in its representation of D’ni.  More than anything, though, I fear turning D’ni over to people who would once again turn it into an amusement park to make it more “interesting” or “fun”, not seeing or even understanding that D’ni is interesting and fun enough for a great many people on its own merits.  Based on the dedication I have seen from the Guilds in their present form, I don’t think Guild-managed new content with ultimate approval from Cyan would be a bad idea.  But anything that removes Cyan from the equation entirely for a second time is begging for a repeat of the bickering, anarchy, and entitlement that ultimately stemmed from Until Uru, and I don’t think I can stand to see my childhood desecrated like that again (yeah, I’m one of those people; the kind who finds stuff like Pyst to be beyond simple poor taste).  Sadly, I don’t think there are many people left in this community who share my experiences of D’ni, and I weep for what may be done to it again in the name of “entertainment”.  Perhaps it would have been better never to have dreamed at all…