I think the people who've left permanently to pursue fan ages are proverbially small potatoes, and unimportant in the long term. I'm pretty confident that the majority of people who've left or idled have gone on from Uru altogether, to other games and worlds and communities. Sometimes, they check back in to see if things have changed. And eventually, due to the chronic slowness with which the MORE plan has progressed, many just give up.
That upsets me a lot more than a few people who've left because their impatience leads them to try to take matters into their own hands.

Who are we to say one group of people are more important than others? As one of these people who has left to pursue fan Ages, I'd like to think my view on uru is still as important as the next guy.

It is not difficult to see that a generative principal at the root of this statement has been the catalyst for everything that has led to this moment in time. The responsibility for it goes directly to the top decision maker(s) at Cyan, and It is important to note it.

The emergence of Myst was an event that was the metaphorical equivalent of catching lightning in a bottle. It was unique. It had enough energy to birth a number of subsequent, yet increasingly less creative offspring beginning with Riven.

Unfortunately, it appears that for whatever reason(s) the leadership within Cyan has developed an attachment to "The Idea of Myst", and this attachment has allowed the company to become the gaming world equivalent of the "one hit wonder" repeatedly recycling old ideas and old games for new technology. Some of this is no doubt reinforced by listening to a small, but vocal fan base that is just as blindly stuck in a similar feedback loop. This group wants to see each emergence as something new, yet refuses to perceive the reality that very little that is significantly creative has emerged from Cyan in over a decade.

When one couples that influence with the grand mistake of attempting to recycle the same foundations that propelled the single-player offspring of Myst to modest successes, and apply them to an environment that allows players to co-mingle, one sets the stage for exactly what we are seeing now.

It seems obvious to this observer that to some extent, listening to this small but vocal population has helped reinforce an inability at the very top levels of Cyan to say "NO" to their attachment to "The Idea of Myst".


You can't have your cake and eat it too.

"What doesn't want or refuses to change is doomed to die"... :P

Oh, and..."principle," I think.

Er, no. One word is the right one, and the other one isn't. Unless you mean that some American headmaster is involved in all this....

Everything is doomed to die. Whether it changes or not. (EDIT: though, thinking about it, the music of Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikowsky has not changed for over a hundred years, and it still seems to be doing rather well. Maybe only living things die.)