Hello! I'm thepieddragon, and I'm just kind-of a humble newbie who stumbled onto this and have no idea what's going on.
Well, okay that's not really true. I've been a huge fan of the Myst series for a long time, and have played through Uru: Complete Chronicles a few times as well. What I'm unfamiliar with (mostly) is the online portion, which I wasn't aware existed until a couple weeks ago. You see, I had always thought Cyan pulled the plug on the online part ages (no pun intended) ago, before I actually got around to playing the series at an age where I could understand the puzzles, and had no idea that they not only rebooted the servers years later, but open-sourced the engine partially so others could make their own instances. So I'm almost all of MOUL's life behind and way out of the loop.
While I have some rudimentary knowledge from scavenging for info (I know the MOULa exclusive stuff, the changes to PoTS, a few pieces of history, some currently-running shards, etc), and I understand the basic differences between different shards, I really don't know what's going on in the grand scheme of things. Can anybody maybe fill me in on the current state of Uru and it's community as it stands? Perhaps what I should try out, or avoid (outside of the obvious 'don't be evil')? Honestly I just don't want to sound like an idiot.
Otherwise, I'm just a tech nerd and gamer who enjoys tinkering with PCs and the like, and I've been looking into maybe dabbling in age creation if I can work out the tools, so hopefully that can be a thing that happens.