Hello all!
Wow, I must've been in a time warp. I stopped by here last in June (or July?), apparently, but I didn't know GameTap discontinued MO:OL - I thought it was still going strong all this time!
I'm excited by what I see about user-created Ages - instead of talking on about how the Art or the Maker chooses an age, we can "make" the one we think the Maker would select for us (hopefully). It'll be refreshing to see some user-made maps that aren't killboxes or the latest version of de_dust.
I'm a bit surprised that GameTap discontinued MO:UL. That doesn't bode particularly well for MO:RE, but I don't know - it might just not have been the draw to new players that they wanted it to be, and I was less enthusiastic about paying for all the rest of GameTap (especially since I once thought it was $20 a year, and later that went to $60, or maybe I was mistaken). At this point I'm toughened up to the idea that MO might come and go in spurts, but I'm reasonably certain I'll hop on next time it comes around, and I feel more certain it can stay.
For a retrospective, consider how far things have come (in a way that helps MO:UL) since 2003, when Uru Online first appeared (late in the year):
- A gigabyte of bandwidth cost Microsoft about a dollar back in 2003. Today it's probably about twenty cents, or less.
- A hundred dollars buys you two gigs of consumer RAM today. For server RAM, $500 gets you 8 GB of DDR2, almost certainly more than up to spec for running the servers. Not bad!
I realize that Cyan might not be able to pass any of these apparent savings onto the player, but the community involvement (if it materializes) should guarantee that there'll be new stuff to see on a regular basis. It seems to me there's enough talent and dedication to the material that there would (will!) be some high-quality stuff that won't ruin the experience or the message.