May Contain Nuts

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…

I think I may end up with a whole ‘nother tag for my Uru Live post-mortem thoughts at this rate…

Before I get going, I want to stress that I’m not doing this to be critical of Cyan’s work just because it was ultimately unsuccessful. There are a myriad of ways to make fun of MOUL, and I hope to never fall victim to doing so. Rather, I want to learn from this failure. Rand said that the biggest regret he had about Live’s closure in 2004 was that they didn’t get the chance to learn from it. Six years of work went into something that ran for 3 months in a somewhat limited beta testing environment. The title never launched, and the content and story they were planning to roll out in the coming months never got released online. It just didn’t run long enough to learn anything terribly insightful beyond “lag is a serious problem” (and incidentally, they did make great strides in that regard during the past year). With over a year’s worth of updates, content, and story roll-out under its belt this time around, I feel that there are definitely some lessons that can be learned from Uru Live’s closure this time around that go beyond the technical limitations so often addressed by players. With what I hope is an emphasis on my respect for Cyan and a desire to learn from their mistakes firmly established, let’s press on.
One of the things that has always fascinated me about the concept behind Uru is the notion of an MMO driven by a compelling developer-run story on a daily basis. Sort of a perpetual D&D session, if you will. Emphasis on player actions is obviously still important, and makes up a fair amount of the content of any good role-playing session, but players are “living” in a story that is being told around them as well as through them. I think that Prologue did a much better job of this than MOUL in numerous respects, and I’d like to briefly go over a few of them.

1. In Prologue, events happened “on stage”. Sharper and a group of like-minded explorers tore down a barricade blocking off the entrance to the Kahlo Pub. He later broke into one of the neighborhoods’ Private Rooms, made that neighborhood private, and later had it deleted from the Nexus system by the DRC. Phil was kidnapped by the DRC on the rope bridge in Ae’Gura. Tink was later allowed to speak with him in Kirel (which at the time was just another private Bevin-style ‘hood, hooray for ret-conning ;)) when the protests from explorers started getting out of hand. Phil later “died” in the Guild Hall, and while that specific action wasn’t on-stage, everyone in the City was watching and heard the collpase, followed by the plume of smoke rising from the Guild Hall. In MOUL, virtually everything seemed to happen off-stage: Sharper’s trips to Negilahn and later to Noloben were completely inaccessible to players, and only existed through later re-tellings by Sharper, which were not done in any sort of continually-accessible way like journal writing, but rather through one-off live events. Sharper’s killing of a Bahro was perhaps one of the most “on stage” pieces of the entire story arc, when the Bahro linked into the Watcher’s Pub with their fallen comrade. Wheely’s death was also relatively on stage, but there were no outward signs of activity during the rescue; no sounds of drilling, no smoke rising from the Tokotah building from the DRC’s efforts… nothing to really make it that much more real. (I could also find fault with re-introducing Wheely to the Cavern just a day or two before she was killed off, but that may be going a little far.)
2. The DRC and other supporting cast members were in the Cavern more regularly, and for longer periods of time on average, than they were in MOUL. If news needed to be spread, it was usually done in multiple neighborhoods as well as in Ae’Gura, rather than through a single visit to a neighborhood before disappearing again. In Prologue, the DRC seemed like more realistic and believable characters; in MOUL, they seemed to be more like caricatures of themselves.
3. Prologue had the full contents of Ages Beyond Myst to provide depth and relevance to the ongoing live events in the Cavern. Yeesha’s single-player Journey gave players something to do and learn without having to attend live events on a regular basis. MOUL had plenty of additional Ages, but they did little to nothing to further deepen the relevance of the live story events going on in the Cavern. This turned the entire story into a collection of live events, rather than building the live events on top of a more stable, longer-lasting, at-your-own-pace single-player experience (incidentally, I think this is the only benefit that Uru Live got from the creation of ABM).
4. You can’t rely on players to fill in the game’s gaps, especially without tools capable of enabling them to do so. Players like J. D. Barnes, Echo McKenzie, the team at Subterranean Restorations, and others ran with this notion as far as they conceivably could, and groups like the Relayers stepped up admirably to fill a hole left by Cyan in the delivery of the story to the masses, but it seemed as though there was too much reliance on players to do it themselves, and not enough work done to make that truly possible. Further, entreating the players to make their own fun in a game they’re paying between $10 and $15 a month for (depending on your nationality) isn’t something that sits well with a lot of people, and I can’t really blame them for not wanting to invest more time into a game they’re already investing in financially just to enjoy the time they spend in it. Some players are more than willing to do so, and I say more power to ‘em, but not everyone should be expected (or required) to do that.

I think it’s important that an MMOS effort be able to effectively combine live events (like Wheely’s death) and fixed-in-time storytelling segments (like Yeesha’s Journey). The live events should be used primarily for providing day-to-day activity within the game on a small scale - stuff to keep players interested and generate “flavor” in the story; nothing directly related to advancing the plot - and for major, it-can-only-happen-once sort of events, like Phil’s kidnapping, his “death” in the Guild Hall, the rescue efforts to save Wheely and her subsequent death, etc. Fixed-in-time stories should be things that players can continue to complete at their own pace even after the plot events leading to the unveiling of that story have advanced beyond it (case in point: you can still release a Bahro into the Cavern by completing Yeesha’s Journey four years later in MOUL, even after the Bahro were freed from their enslavement to the Tablet).

It’s equally important, though, that these two practices not get switched around if you want to create a world with a truly impactful, cohesive story and a way to keep players interested between major in-game live events. For instance, requiring players to complete a time-sensitive challenge within a certain date range to be able to participate in the releasing of a Bahro (essentially replacing Yeesha’s when-you-have-time Journey with a sequence of live events) is a bad way of doing things, as would be enabling everyone to witness Wheely’s death first-hand regardless of when they happened to get around to completing that leg of the story (essentially tacking her death onto the end of a Journey-like series of player-triggered events as a climax). The first example distances players from the story by ensuring that only a small handful of players are actually able to complete a task that should be open for everyone to participate in, while the second example lessens the power of a watershed moment in the Cavern, solidifying the fact that the Bahro weren’t all sunshine, unicorns and lollipops into the collective consciousness of the Cavern. You just can’t kill Wheely every day of the week from now until the story ends and expect it to have any meaning. Were it an event in a single-player game, that would be an obviously acceptable action to take, but in a shared universe like Uru, once a character is dead, they can only die once, or it undermines the suspension of disbelief required by the game to make it appear to be a real place.

Interestingly, I think this means that an episodic content release schedule for online games like Uru could be a viable means of releasing material, but not by following the model used for MOUL. Episodic releases that cram considerable amounts of activity into a small span of time are fine for bringing in players and even driving up interest and participation in what are likely to be major plot points. However, outside of those periods, the game can’t simply stop, which is what Uru did. There can be a flurry of activity in those week-long episodes, but outside of them, the characters still need to make appearances, and small things still need to happen often enough to keep players there for the entire time. Further, by moving some of the story into play-at-your-own-pace arcs of single-player or small-group content, you deemphasize the need to be present at every live event during the episodes to know what the heck is going on in the game. Combining these two factors, the crush to see a character during an appearance should be lessened, resulting in better game performance, better interaction between players and characters, and create better interactive characters since they don’t just turn into walking scripts who say their piece and then leave before the crowd gets too unmanageable.
Finally, I don’t really have any specific answers or suggestions for how the events of MOUL could have been played out differently that haven’t already been mentioned by dozens of other people, so I will avoid doing so in the interests of not being repetitive (and because I don’t like back-seat game-developing… learning lessons is one thing, saying “you should have done X instead of Y here” is entirely another). However, I think that any future efforts to make a story-driven MMO need to learn from the pitfalls and promises of Uru’s development and execution, because I feel that there are real lessons there to learn from that can make future products better, more engaging, and ideally more likely to be profitable.

This may be the wrong thing to be saying right now, and I’m betting at least a couple of lynch mobs are forming even as I write this, but here’s what I think should be done about Uru Live’s cancellation:

Let it go.

This is a game that has struggled to manifest itself since day 1, and has been in development for almost 10 years now. It’s been beset by setback after setback, and has now been canceled twice. Whether it was given a fair shake or not is irrelevant; the horse has long since ceased breathing under its own power, and it’s time to stop hitting it with that aluminum bat.

That is not to say, however, that we should give up on the idea of Uru. Uru’s premise and promise are filled with potential untapped by Cyan throughout their numerous efforts to bring Uru to the masses. I believe in the concept of Uru – even if its execution thus far has been flawed to varying degrees – and I believe that it can succeed. Yet in order for it to do that, it must rise from the ashes of its failures as a phoenix, not a zombie.

Uru is too entangled in its own problems, I think, to successfully engage a sufficient number of players and provide a dynamic world capable of satisfying the demands of modern gamers. Its cancelations and single-player releases have been re-incorporated into the game as story elements. The story arc revealing the Bahro for what they were was crammed into a separate game and then further grafted back into Uru as history that most players knew nothing about. Its story and its mechanics have become convoluted over the years, beaten down by the demands placed upon it to keep it alive at all. Worlds have sat unmodified for years now: doors still locked; machines still broken; homes still empty. Systems like the Great Zero calibration project and the lake lighting effort have been hampered by a lack of sufficient automation and feedback from the game. Uru cannot continue like this. It needs to stop.

In its place, new worlds can appear, with new stories, new histories, and new players to experience them. Whatever Uru becomes, it must be more accessible to people who have never picked up a Myst game in their lives, while drinking deep from the reservoirs or material that long-time fans will rightly expect from a game set in the Cavern. It needs to break free of the restrictions placed upon it by the content it is currently saddled with. Take us to the City Proper; let us explore the Lake; give us new, expansive worlds with reactive and dynamic environments. Make D’ni a home, not a place.

All of this can happen, but only if we let Uru as we know it go in peace. If we continue to beat on our horse with an aluminum bat, we will only get more of the same, and while that may be good enough for some folks, its not what Uru is to me. It’s much more than that. Before Uru was Uru, it was MUDPIE, and DIRT before that. I saw it as a way to explore all of those places that I had been to before in the Myst novels; a chance to “live” in the fictional worlds in which I had grown up. And not just explore them by myself, but with the friends I had made in the community; all the while being entertained by Cyan and their masterful storytelling. While in some ways it has outgrown those early expectations in ways I can’t even begin to comprehend thanks to the dedicated community of explorers, it still falls far short on the most important counts for me: exploration and storytelling. Without these things, I don’t think that Uru can ever be successful enough to support itself.

I am deeply sad to see Uru Live shut down for a second time, and I truly hope that the talented folks at Cyan can come up with another project to keep them going, but I think it’s necessary that we let Uru go, so that something even better can take its place. Call me crazy, call me an optimist, call me a traitor to the cause, I really don’t care… I’ve been through this enough times already, and I’m ready for something new.

It occurs to me that I’ve been rather a bit more talkative than usual of late.

Anyway, an update, a personal bit, and some rumination to follow.

Firstly, on the promised subject of DPWR, I’m hard at work getting the upgraded version of the site hammered out, finalized, skinned, and integrated into IPB 2.3. The forums are complete, as are the Gallery and the Archive. The links system has been totally overhauled, and will need to have all of its information re-entered from scratch, but there’s a lot of cruft in there that doesn’t work anymore anyway, and a lot of new stuff to add, so I look at it as a way to make the whole thing better overall. The Community page just needs a couple of tweaks, and will ultimately prove to be FAR more useful than the current landing pad with two links on it that I’ve been using for the past 3 years. I’ve taken to syndicating a few of the community’s RSS feeds, such as the feeds for Explorer Exchange and the Jalak Registry, as well as MystBlogs, UruBlogs, and the CCQDB. Community-related news items from the main page are also re-printed here, along with a calendar, an online list, and access to the Member List.

Slightly less far along is the actual home page, but that’s mainly because it’s still missing some minor News integration and the whole gamut of Library integration. Once the Library is wrapped up, I’ll be tying that in, and everything will be complete. There’s already some better integration than there used to be, with better Archive integration befitting of the new Archive component, separate news feeds for Community/Cavern news and general game-, GameTap-, and Cyan-related news, and a new listing of the last 4 images to be posted in the Gallery.

The Golden KI, the Library, and the News segments are the only things that still require considerable amounts of effort. The Golden KI is largely complete, but it’s my intention to overhaul the rather arcane voting system and manual contest switch-overs that are currently in place, and replace them with poll-based voting in the forum itself, as well as an automated task to switch the contest over, handle topic/poll creation for each round, and announce a winner after each round is over.

The Library will be largely unchanged, because it doesn’t seem to be lacking much beyond a search feature, and I’m still looking into how difficult that would be to actually implement. The layout will be updated to reflect the new site design (don’t worry, it’s nothing drastic like previous revisions… this is more of a refinement). It’s still in the early-ish stages of development, but it should move fairly quickly once I dig in. My goal is to have the Library complete by Wednesday night.

The News bit is going to require a little bit more work, because I want to democratize it a bit more than it currently is. The new version of the News section will allow anyone with an account to post a news article or event announcement. Regular member accounts will require staff approval of their entries to prevent spam, while certain groups, like TCT, who have a history of posting solid material, will be able to post without the approval restriction. As with the Library, I’d love to have a search feature for this section of the site, but it depends on how feasible it ends up being; both the News and the Library both draw their data from Invision Power Board’s forum database, so the permissions restrictions and such that go along with that need to be worked around in order to get search working outside of the forum itself. Development of News should be completed by Thursday or Friday at the latest. Ideally, this will all be wrapped up before my new computer gets here, so I can give it my undivided attention when it does. I fully expect to have the new DPWR online before October 1st (of this year, just to be overly-specific).

Moving on to a completely different topic, today I started “Phase 1″ of my eventual data storage and backup solution. My current solution is pretty much “hope the drive doesn’t crash before late October”, though I’m hoping to move well beyond that soon. I was doing some browsing earlier today and noticed that Best Buy was selling the new revisions of Western Digital’s MyBook line at $50 off, so I went ahead and sprung for a 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for all of $140 after tax. This will eventually become my Time Machine back-up drive, but for now it’s serving as an extended storage drive for my Mac, because I’ve been running desperately low on storage space for the past while now. I’ve already moved my iPhoto library over, and am in the process of moving my iTunes library over as well, for a combined storage savings of about 80 gigs.

When Leopard comes out, I will be getting a copy along with an additional internal hard drive (probably also 500 GB), which will become the new extended storage drive. I’ll be backing up all of my data to this drive, and then doing a fresh installation of OS X on my primary disk, just to make sure all of the cruft and haxies and random crap I’ve installed but no longer use is cleaned up for before I start using the new OS. Once I have Leopard installed, I’ll copy what needs copying back over to the primary drive, and then set up the MyBook drive as the Time Machine backup target. So, I’ll have 820 gigs of storage backed up on a 500 gig drive. Perhaps not an optimal solution, but one which can be extended as time goes on as need be.

So… Cyan dropped a big-honking amount of Guild-related material this week. The Archivist in me is going “squee!” over the new Guild color information (and the designer in me is going “*vomit*” over some of the color choices ;)) posted on the DRC’s website Wednesday. The Archivist in me is also more than a little disappointed that there isn’t room in Kirel for a Guild of Historians or anything remotely close to it for those of us into D’ni linguistics or history. Maybe we should start our own “unofficial” Guilds instead, and see if Cyan/The DRC deign it worth their time to tweak out a new t-shirt color or two. (On a side note, the Linguists lucked out on color… if you order a D’ni Guilds shirt from MystWear, I sure hope you enjoy supporting the Linguists ;))

But slight bitterness over historians and linguists being snubbed aside, there’s a lot of positive energy on the forums right now regarding Guilds, and from what little I’ve been able to get into the Cavern to see, the sentiment seems to be largely echoed there as well. I’m a little apprehensive about the stuff going on because I tend to worry over-much, and I’ve had some rather ugly experiences with organizations and the community’s reactions to them in the past, warranted or not. However, I am overwhelmingly excited about the potential for what the Guilds could bring to Uru, and I think a lot of people are interested in making this a positive experience, rather than a power struggle for control of some elite status.

The “first five” Guilds that the DRC is angling to establish are the Cartographers (map-makers rejoice), the Greeters (a given), the Messengers (again, something of a given, but perhaps the most complex to organize), the Maintainers (perhaps the most potentially volatile group, responsible for investigating Ages for safety/security [aka bugs]), and the Writers (Age-makers rejoice). Presumably more Guilds can and will be added in the future, but for now, we’re sticking with the popular “powers of five” notion.

What interests me the most is how these Guilds will integrate themselves into the game itself, rather than just peripherally through websites and forums. Obviously, this integration will at some point require some amount of effort on Cyan’s part, but even the basics are exciting. For instance, imagine the Guild of Maintainers making use of Gahreesen as a base of operations and information, or the Messengers being able to broadcast audio news through the neighborhood auditoriums, or text updates through some new imager placed in the City (perhaps even fix the broken imagers in the Kalho and Watcher’s Pubs). Or the Cartographers being able to add maps to a device in the Library, which players could download to their KI for reference. Maybe in the future, give a Guild of Archivists the ability to write histories of the Ages and story of Uru to be placed in an as-yet-unopened section of the Museum. I very much look forward to the day that Guilds are better-supported by in-game mechanics, rather than just through forums and websites, with no real rules or obvious indications of actual membership (rather than support, which is what the t-shirts are for). It excites me to imagine explorers gathering around the booths in Kirel, learning about the Guilds during Q&A sessions with their leaders or members, having the D’ni Guilds t-shirts “passed out” to those interested in participating.

Cyan has often stated that the story of Uru is not just what they do, but what the explorers do as well. I think the Guild system is the biggest – though likely not the only – way that this statement will gain greater significance. User-created content – whether it’s maps, stories, or whole Ages – is ultimately what I think will drive players to participate, above and beyond the years-long story arc that Cyan is building on a monthly basis. When explorer contributions to the game and the story are no longer constrained by interaction with a handful of characters played once a week by a handful of overworked staff members at Cyan; when players can do more than stand around and chat or kick cones at each other, I think things will really start happening.

Even outside of the Guilds, Cyan is obviously trying to involve players more frequently than just once a month, but providing them with things to do in the meantime. Some, like the Marker Missions and pellet baking are story-related, and rather dull / repetitive, but others are more play-oriented, like Ahyoheek, and now Jalak and hopefully the Wall in Gahreesen sometime soon. These things do little if anything to further the story being told, but they make D’ni a more realistic and well-rounded place. Not everything needs to be (or even should be) a puzzle – in disguise or in the open. The D’ni lived in this place, so the story goes, and as such I think it’s entirely relevant to open up some of their sources of entertainment as just that: sources of entertainment.

Obviously, each Age will not appeal to everyone. Some people can’t stand Minkata; others despise Kadish; as expected, there’s a number of people expressing disappointment and boredom with Jalak; for a number of reasons the jumping puzzles in Gahreesen annoy a fair number of people; and as has been the case since 2003, pretty much everyone hates Kemo and Gira ;). But no matter what kind of Age gets released, there will always be a group that dislikes it, and I think it’s rather daring of Cyan to build an Age with no purpose other than to be a game within the game. The most vocal complaints have come from players who have regularly stated that they dislike the multiplayer aspects of Uru and want to be alone as often as possible. Clearly, there’s not much value in Jalak for those folks, but others have taken to creating games and shape sculptures with a suddenness and a skill that really rather astonishes me. It’s obvious from the response to Jalak that this sort of thing has been sorely needed in Uru: something to do that isn’t a one-time puzzle or once-a-month push to get a word in edgewise with Cate, Kodama, Sharper, or Laxman.

I wonder what Uru will have by December that will provide for an even more well-rounded play experience. And I’m rather excited to find out.

Am I the only one who finds the behavior of people in Live this release a bit weird?

People have been clamoring for more story and fill-in for Age releases and events for the past couple of months. So Cyan kicks off Scars with a boat-load of appearances and dialog, with an announcement that Minkata will be coming out Thursday, and apparently some story lead-ins from Nick and Laxman.

And now people are complaining that the new Age isn’t being released on day 1, which would almost certainly require the same sort of “oh, by the way, here ya go” release that Delin, Tsogahl, Negilahn, Dereno, Payiferen and Tetsonot got, which people seem to be pretty not-okay with (no build-up, little to no announcement before-hand, no history provided… the list goes on).

I get the feeling that over the past week and a half, “new content week” somehow got re-interpreted to mean “we’re going to turn everything on within 5 minutes, and then you’ll have a week’s worth of content to play with before you’re bored again.” I’m not sure how that happened, but I can – given the history of this community to over-analyze RAWA’s used tissues (let alone major press releases) – say that I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that it did.

Some people are just never going to be happy, I guess.

I would like to say that I’m honestly glad I haven’t been nominated this time around for a Liaison position… I don’t have the time for it at all, and considering how little I’ve been in UU of late, I can’t say as I’d make a terribly good candidate besides being the one everybody seems to know (it’s inexplicable… everyone seems to know who I am…).

Though, given my lack of presence, I’m hardly surprised I’m not on the list of nominees… I’m actually more than a little surprised I was nominated last time.

My stance on Uru, honestly, is that I just want to be another player this time around. At least, until I get a job working on it, anyway ;).

*hopes*

…

*and plots…*

I just need to go through our 1,000+ photos (you think I’m kidding…) first. That’s on my list of things to do today.

Holy Friggin’ Crap

*begins obsessively checking Cyan’s jobs page*