I got to about page 8 of this thread and realized I was reading the same thing over and over again, so I just skimmed through a lot of it after that. Forgive me if I missed something that was actually important to this discussion.
At the risk of sparking more hostility (although I think that risk is low considering how wiped out everyone is with this mess), I'd like to input my thoughts. Not because they're going to change anything, but because this is the internet, and if I can't make my thoughts feel important by posting them on the internet, then dammit, why do we have it?
As someone who really doesn't know entirely what's going on at the MO:UL forum because I've not visited it in months and months, I can base my opinion really only on what's been said here. Even still, I've been there long enough that I know everyone is probably still slipping around in the same bile that they were slipping in when I left.
I think the general accusations of hostility in this thread were more reactive than based in anything that was said. There's a lot of sarcasm here, but everyone reacts stronger when their emotions are up and their last post in only 3 hours old. This wasn't a bitter discussion to read. It wasn't happy, but I don't see the insanity here that I've seen on the MO:UL board. When people are done with a discussion here, they leave. They don't regurgitate their feelings over and over (or at least, only 2-3 times). So I think that alone counts in your favor.
Second, it's obvious everyone is disgruntled with the present situation, and a lot of that falls on Cyan. I could go on to repeat and reinforce a lot of what was said here, but then I'm falling back into the same trap. Let me offer a slightly different angle.
Cyan, based on their track record, has come to a point of setting expectations that cannot be met by them or anyone else. And this creates a profound sense of disappointment in the community. Over a period of time, these disappointments add up, people grow discouraged, communication breaks down, and people leave.
Lame Expectation Number One: Cyan's goal with Uru Live was always to have a dynamic place where the entertainment was in the new content. They wanted to compete with television. I believe it was the Uru Retrospective video in which Rand said that instead "what do we want to watch tonight?" it was to be "where do we want to go tonight?" This was done in poor foresight to say the least. They were riding high off of the success of Riven, and during the production of Uru, Myst III. Their idea was never possible and they should have spotted that early on.
In order to compete with television, you have to match the level of content that television provides, which is considerably enormous. Even massively popular games like WoW don't make their bucks off new content every day-- they make it by keeping players logging in through grinding for a rewards system. Cyan's model was never realistic, even when they had a larger team. Instead, the environment became static, cyclical, and confusingly non-linear from the start. If your entertainment is based on new environments, you better have a lot of them and have them frequently. From the get-go, there was no way they could have matched supply with the demand of a ravenous puzzle-solving community, and it took them 12 years to figure out. Ubi was smart to pull the plug the first time.
Lame Expectation Number Two: In their attempt to leave expandability options with a rich backstory, they created lots of 'locked doors' within the content. Places that suggest a larger environment but in actuality lead nowhere. I mean more than just the hundreds of physical locked doors. I mean things like maps that hint at more explorable areas; vistas to places that are implied to be reachable but actually aren't; non-functioning animal interactions like in the Pod Ages; the broken path at the Kadish Vista; and on and on it goes. While all of this is great if they ever actually could have realistically gone back and added to it, there was simply too much. The Pod Ages were really a great representation of the entire game's philosophy-- provide glimpses of a larger outside world, but leave you trapped in a little bubble.
Of course this was due more to resources than any intention to leave players feeling trapped, but that's the point. They couldn't have kept up all that content and still created new environments with more back doors to hidden places. Eventually there are only so many rabbit-trails you can follow until you run out of people to finish them. And each time the player comes to another "locked door" in the content (so to speak), and as the subtle expectation is created that the door will eventually be opened, the letdown gets bigger each time it remains locked.
Lame Expectation Number Three: mis-management of fan resources. This grew to be a bigger issue in MO:UL, and it was a problem long before it was canceled. The storyline of Uru has always been to create division in the fan-base, from Prologue on. This was intentional on Cyan's part, but it was insanely stupid. As seriously as this community takes this game, and as long as they've been waiting for it (some of us for twelve years), you never want to create artificial division. It's not entertaining. It never has been. It's only ever led to problems.
Mishandling the Liaison situation, creating characters like Sharper vs. the DRC, Cyan's attempt to spawn two 'sides' opposing or supporting the DRC then dragging passionate players into it... this isn't fun and it isn't content. Frankly it was stupid, and it picked a scab that was covering a much bigger problem in the community; argumentativeness. There are too many people on too many forums who are too willing to engage in 16-page debates about virtually anything; be it who gets to do what with Cyan's content, or IC roleplay fights over rocks falling off the Cavern ceiling. Cyan drove a wedge into a small crack that has blossomed into a chasm.
Poor Communication Skills: Let's face it, the majority of people still here have been here a long time. Cyan would have done well to have a little more respect for that. But periods of prolonged silence did no good. Even if there was nothing specific to say, simply making a stronger presence in the community would have gone a long way. They've done this over and over. There were so many valid suggestions that went unanswered. There were so many attempts to communicate that were ignored. Of course they didn't owe us anything, but it was a poor decision. In many ways, Cyan still exists because we've supported them and their games, even when things were grim. If that time comes again, support will be much weaker than his has been in the past, only because they drove so many people away.
So those are some of my thoughts on the present situation. I think the problems we're seeing are a symptom of greater and more numerous diseases, the above four among them. Arguments like these are signs of company loyalty in its death-throes.
[/month-old thread revival]
