ddb174 wrote:There isn't much interest in Uru in general anymore. Sometimes a number of people talk with their friends and all come on at the same time. The Uam shard isn't meant to be a busy place by any means. That will never be sustained in Uru, as Uru does not hold much interest for people. (UU was usually empty too, once the initial interest wore off.) It is a place where you can come see all the fan Ages and come with friends if you like. It's a very different place than DI, with a very different purpose.
See, I tend to disagree with the idea that Uru cannot sustain many people. I think, and as was evident during the episodic periods of GameTap. That if you have regular stories/events happening, along with a steady flow of new content every month, you can have a shard that will get the numbers needed to sustain a "busy" and happening place. You just need two things. 1. A story and events. and 2. Content to go with that story. IE Ages, areas, collectibles. The problem with Cyan's and GameTap's running of MOUL wasn't that it didn't have large groups of people. It's that it only had them during the peak times when things were being released. Once people knew when to show up, it was hard to get in. One week a month it was busy, the rest of the time it was not. So, the answer then is fairly simple, and falls back to what Cyan tried to do in those early days of Ubisoft. Build a pipeline, a years worth of content, to sustain Uru for a year, while releasing it slowly over the course of that year as they built more and more content for the next year. IF Ubisoft had not cancelled Uru, I'm fairly certain that it would have run pretty smoothly during that first year (aside from the bugs, some of which are fixed others...not so much) with enough content to keep it fairly busy. However it was cancelled, and the majority of the content was released in expansion packs, with other stuff being repurposed into Myst V and the rest sitting in the vault over at Cyan.
Gametap's era however had limited funding and a much smaller staff, and the result was less content was created during Gametap's year run of things then Ubisoft's. More content was produced but not nearly to the depth that content under Ubisoft's reign had. And the stuff that was just the expansion packs repurposed yet again.
So where does this history lesson bring us: To the future. In order to attain a high number of players on a shard you need to give people a reason to sign onto that shard on a daily/weekly basis. The difference between Uru of the past and the Uru of the future is that we have, at our disposal right now, a collective of individuals in our Guilds, with enough talent, and the proper tools at their disposal, to generate that much content on a continued basis but only IF they wanted to. We have within this community a crap load of coders who have the ability to work on the tools and the client and python for the puzzles. Some VERY good Cyan quality age builders who can make ages, and some very talented texture artists and musicians who can make ages come alive. The only thing these people lack is motivation. But it can be done, the resources are there. The talent is there, and the tools are there. This community, if it truly wanted to keep Uru alive and sustained and growing, and most importantly FULL, then it could do it.
Posted: Sat Sep 04, 2010 10:36 am
and, in fact, that's exactly how I've been treating and *using* DI. 
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