Yes, Until Uru servers are potentially a drawback and potentially a benefit to Uru Live.

I don't think the private shards are going anywhere soon. Everyone would raise a lot of uproar, and Cyan knows it.

I also don't think many new people are going to get into UU except through D'mala. There are just too few Kagi Keys floating around, and it looks like Cyan isn't interested in distributing more.

Jahuti wrote:

Should we be closing down the forums because people are gathering there to discuss things, rather than going into Live for such discussions? I think not...

Well, that's not the same, and you know that. A forum is not a fully 3D rendered cavern with linking books included.
I understand how much love and work has been poured into UU by the shard admins and others, and you can access it when Uru is not at your disposal (like at work, as I am doing now ). I'm just trying to make you think about the drawbacks, which seem to be overlooked most of the time.

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Morningstar - KI#1053460
Please avoid drinking the lake water.

I think the player run shards are great, and taking them down would be a major loss. I only breifly played on a couple shards during the beginning of UU, but that doesn't mean I didn't like them. I just felt that I ran out of things to do. Now that the community has better tools for creating ages (check out COBBS) and getting better every day. I think we will eventually start to see player created ages. And who knows, if some of those ages are good enough, we may see them in live. (Assuming the developer is willing to share them with Cyan)

Many games, especially online games, like to control the game completely. However some of the best games in the past have been games that 'support' modding. Halflife, Unreal, etc. I believe this is because by allowing the community to contribute to the game, they feel closer to the game than they would ever have felt if they just played it.

I've been in and out of UU since its inception, I have always considered it as Until Uru, to be honest they can't get rid of UU, not that people created their own authorization server. But when UruLive returns UU should go.

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Beneath - Journey of an explorer in D'ni
UruBlogs - Blogs from Uru Explorers
Tweek@Guild of Writers - Age development Blog.

I believe a lot of time and effort was put into the private shards, and that is where I got my feet wet, and made a lot of friends. We have all gone to D'mala as requested but after a period of time that has become a bore. Things could be done on the private shards which can't be done on D'mala and it would be nice to be able to show new comers what can be done, and the fun we had waiting for live to show up again. This is the opinion of the management

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John 14:6 KJV

I say that the private shards, as nice as they are, are meant only to be temporary. I say get rid of them once Live starts up again; not meaning any disrespect to those who love their private shards, but that's not what Live was ever meant to be, and nostalgia alone isn't a good reason (otherwise, we'd have the old Choru and Ubiru servers to play around in, which we don't).

Private shards are not being forgotten by those in Until Uru, though some may be forgotten by their admins.

I'm still tweaking and enhancing my shard. Granted, UU may be a temporary thing, but it doesn't mean its dead. Does UU mean more than Live? No. Live was far better back in the day and I hope to see Live return to what I once knew it to be. Lord knows this community could certainly use that.

There was a certain harmony and discord. The discord though was only based on our being anxious for the next thing to show up, for something new to emerge and to explore. We were often granted new content and the Live community thrived, even flourished then. We were all very much united and rarely was a bad thing ever said to another. Worst thing to us were the AFK'ers in Ae'gura.

I do miss the days of Live and how things were then. Maybe one of these days people will be able to see what I saw then, back when it was truly a community. I feel sorry for those who have only seen what's happened in the meantime.

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The intention of Until Uru was for it to be something for the fans UNTIL Uru returned. I would support Cyan completely removing access to D'mala and the private shards once Uru Live returned.

However, I can understand the desire for private shard owners to continue to run their own shards. My concern (and I believe this would apply to Cyan also) would be that there would be some people in the position that they might not join Uru Live as long as UU still existed (others might not join regardless). This group might not be large, but it still would be depriving Cyan of income, which would be ironic since UU is a gift to the fans from Cyan.

Here's an idea that I think would be the best compromise. The Uru Live client is likely to use modified protocols for both the game and authentication, and surely it will use a different authentication server. What if Cyan also released a new Until Uru client that was still compatible with the UU shard servers, but was able to authenticate with the Uru Live authentication servers. This would mean that if you wanted to continue to play UU you would still need to sign up and pay the monthly fee for Uru Live. Cyan would then stop the operation of the D'mala and Kagi Key authentication servers (whether or not they continued to run the D'mala shard would be independent of this).

Would that work for most of you who want UU to live on beyond the opening of Uru Live?

J'on

Quote:

Q: When will Until URU close?
Moke: Until Uru is still serving its purpose. But when Uru Live is back, I'm not sure that will exist anymore. One of the big problems is that the code will not be the same. We're making improvements to the engine that will make Until Uru incompatible with Uru Live.

the future is being writen.

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semplers' shards

I personaly have no problem with Cyan making monthly membership on UruLive a pre-requirement of access to the private shards.

It is their code.

They have however made it clear that they wish to try and use fan ceated ages. That brings with it a requirement for some secure location to develop these ages if only to make the supprise of release aof real value.

At the moment the logical space for that development is the private shards. My concern at the moment lies in the potential creative tallent currently twiddling its thumbs waiting for Live to go to beta test.

I conceede that in the future the Uru game engine will change, but the 2D, 3D models and all that goes with that side of development will not suffer becuse a designer learned his skills working with an older engine.

The core programing skills currently Python would still be based in a learnable language.

If Cyan want fan based content no matter where Uru Live leads there will allways be people trying to do their own little tweeks and mods. I can only see it being better for Cyan if this is happening in an open and controlled way.

Back to my first point surely linkng access to a current live membership would aleviate the worry that the private shards would be removing income from the core live game. This would also provide a platform for those still on dialup.

If anyone wishes to repeat that old chestnut that old stuff is past and should die just look at the list of programs available on game tap.

I believe one of them Asteroids was the worlds first video (computer) game so they should stick that in the archive for future reference.

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When Uru Live II is up and running it will be truly sad to see UU go. But go it should, IMO. Issues of engine compatibility aside, UU as a story concept is incompatible with Uru Live. Both cannot exist simultaneously: storywise UU would be the ultimate OOC statement in the IC world of Uru Live; in a marketing sense, UU would contradict, confuse and de-focus the main product.

I feel that the UU shards should be left alone. It would remain a great place to decompress from the new Uru Live adventures and allow the shard hosts to continue experimenting with new KI adaptations, etc.
Naturally, the UU shards would become incompatible with ongoing Uru Live upgrades and remaining two separate entities would not decrease the importance of either. Ultimately this is Cyan's decision to make and we will abide by their decision, grateful for the great, happy times we have had on the UU shards. For the returning folks who never bothered with UU, you missed a lot of fun.

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MOULa KI 211837

Personally I think UU should stay. Why well cause of the fact that new content means broadband requirement just like it did in Live. That means dialup users would be left in the cold yet again. With UU they can get their Uru fix. And if fan created ages are allowed in UU then there would be minimal content, doubtful but possible.

According to Moke, dial up is not reccomended "but there's nothing to stop that from working if you have superhuman patience."

That sounds an awful lot like what UU is now, so I don't see any changes there. Just like many other graphics-intensive, bandwidth using MMOs, its just aren't designed for dialup, but dialup users are not barred, just technically limited.

I quite frankly like the idea of the UU shards being a testbed for fan-written Ages. We can work out all the bugs in them, and Cyan can do market research in the process in an effort to determine whether or not they'd fly in Live. It would be a simple matter of volume over time. For example, if there's an initial burst of interest followed by a marked fall-off in activity where there's only ever one or two people in a given age, or empty most of the time, then we might be able to conclude that such an Age wouldn't generate much interest in Live.

That would then bring up the question of what would happen to D'mala, since we're talking mainly about the fan shards. Would Cyan see fit to keep D'mala up for purposes mentioined above, or would they view it, as some have said here, as a distraction from the real product, which would be Live? That will be an interesting question to see answered.

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The ending, indeed, has not yet been written.....or has it?

KI #00063063