Our homes our lives in game were changed forever. Six years of waiting it all out to hopefully see changes all lost.. People were heart broken alot come back just to see the new changes there was alot of hope in alot of people.. we used their atms it was to better the game when they made the price of living in there so bad that we could not live any more. We supported them through bad bugs horrible game play lag.. to be told screw you were closing with out any warning at all.. some sims used atms and put as much as 200 plus dollars in at one time…

We are heart broken ea has never done us right their advertizing for our game has been almost nill.. their customer support is what killed the game to begin with… errors would happen people would loose their things to get the run around when reported to ea nothin has ever been givin back to the players that they worked so hard for.

They took all our devs away bam no warning.. 3 weeks before with no word all the updates stopped.. (and there were plenty scheduled they kept us advised of what they were working on and when it possibly be implimented)
Closed us down the day before we were to get all our gifts back with amnesty. Told us we would no longer be charged after that date.. that we would all have free play till aug 1, 2008.. and free club pogo subscriptions.

We were outraged to say the least.. our hard earned real money waisted in atms. Promises not kept.. Months of next to no game play because of updates bugs and mishaps and us still stickin in was all for nothin. They said that our game play would continue as always… well it hasnt.. they have decided to do refunds on all the atm charges and our subscription fees for a month… which the atm charges no one has seen yet to my knowlege and that was posted I’d say at least a week ago. Players are still being billed by ea even after they said they no longer would. They promised us stable game play till the end and most of our custom content has dissapeared. You cant get on a lot because the game locks you up. The lag that was fixed is back in droves. When they reimbersed us our game play (we had to call to get it) they changed our accounts to free play in which you cant hardly do anything in the game not like a premium player. Yet another call to get that fixed… none of us have been treated right or fairly for along time its not just since the new dev team come in to update the game.. people need to understand just how long ea has owned the sims online.. and the horrible customer support we got. To understand just how much we have been through, you had to have been there. And all for the love of the game we staid we enoured and in the end we have lost… There is a rally to save our game even after all we have been through… Why you say after all this??? Plain and simple we love our game… how many games do u know would their players go through all of this and still want their game???? We want our game to be sold to a company that cares about their player and will manage the game right.. Things could have been done and should have been done to make the game successful and plain and simple they just werent and we the players are the one that paid the ultimate price for it with our hearts.

(I still need to contact the Guiness World Record Book people – they apparently have Ultima Online listed as the longest continuously running MMORPG. No disrespect intended, Raph, but I want to get credit for that!)

My son actually brought that book home last week. It is riddled with errors! It also claims that UO is largest in terms of shards or something, which is plain wrong on the face of it.

The company that made the virtual world will have to eventually make the hard, but financially sound, decision to pull the plug on the world

I just want to say that ‘Manda and I decided when we made Furcadia in 1996, that we would keep it running as long as we live, and hopefully it would keep going after that too. This was never discussed nor even mentioned out loud, we both just knew that we felt that way without having to bother saying it to each other. From a business standpoint, I’ve always kept the operating costs ridiculously low, and I’ve watched the costs of adequate server power and bandwidth to run this type of a game plummet over the 11 years we’ve been running. As perhaps the most cost-efficient MMORPG in the industry, it’s hard to imagine a time when it couldn’t bring in the minimal amount of revenue needed to pay for just server leasing and bandwidth. Someone making a little too much money for their own good could run a comparable server as an expensive hobby, and in not too many years, I imagine someone with a more modest income could do the same. Just wanted to say that the idea that “they all must shut down eventually” isn’t the case for all types of online games – just the ones with high operating costs. (I still need to contact the Guiness World Record Book people – they apparently have Ultima Online listed as the longest continuously running MMORPG. No disrespect intended, Raph, but I want to get credit for that!)

Just to make sure, when I read your comment, I went and looked up Gemstone to make sure they’re still running, before posting here that they are. Yup, they are. If you count Gemstone II, they date back to the 1980s, though they’re currently up to Gemstone IV. Last I heard, the latest incarnation of Habitat was still around, too. Though now going by VZones/Dreamscape/newHorizone. Legends of Kesmai, the graphic remake of Island of Kesmai, was apparently shut down after being purchased by Electronic Arts (hmmm, a pattern emerges?). Apparently there’s some fan-run server emulators around for those that miss it. And I know that when Castle Infinity shut down (still to my mind one of the most visionary, ahead of its time online game designs), one of the players quite literally rescued the server machine from a dumpster behind Starwave, and got permission to put it online and figure out how to get it running again. They’ve since worked out how to add new levels and content, and the Castle is still running to this day! I need to get back on there sometime for nostalgia purposes.

Ultimately, I think in the long run the only obstacle to any online community running forever will be that some of them don’t achieve “critical mass” of number of people and/or level of interestingness, and eventually fade on their own. But for those that get there… I suspect some of the Usenet newsgroups I participated in back in 1980 are still thriving, though with much turnover of people in the intervening years. Ventures like Areae will hopefully allow a lot of people to start up communities/games/etc. with confidence that the infrastructure can be counted on to stay along as long as the community has some life to it, and if it’s lucky enough to become one of the few “eternal” communities, so be it. Or to “only” last 50 years or something, which isn’t bad either. Of course we have seen a lot of communities migrate to “the next, bigger, better, flashier, cooler thing”. This will continue to happen as long as technology is advancing so rapidly, and will still happen somewhat when/if the pace of technological advancement slows down. Even without new technology, we see in other media, old works can always be outdone by advances in writing, in style, and the invention of new genres. In our medium, advances in game design, form of interaction, and user interface can be significant even without any change in CPU or graphics rendering or bandwidth. When someone invents a better mousetrap, older communities may start to slowly shrink, even if they might not ever totally dissappear. I don’t think this is a bad thing, the alternative is stagnation. Personally, I want a steady stream of new movies trying to outdo all the past ones (though not always succeeding) or at least offer something new. Games had certainly better be doing that too! Doesn’t stop me from occasionally going back to a few time-worn old favorites, which I imagine I always will do as well. (Someday I still need an Asteroids arcade cabinet!)

So when entities increasingly get this much space and power and control over huge swathes of the public and their time, hey, law is going to change

Since the law HASN’T changed yet, you admit, at least for now, that you’re wrong and he\she’s right in the current context.

You didn’t need two posts worth of text to state that.

Try brevity sometime.

Shrugs. EULAs and TOSs are unconscionable, oppressive, and take away people’s rights. Eventually, they will be changed to accommodate more respect for users because they won’t be viewing games as merely a tea-cup ride you go on once a year, they will understand that the daily usage of a space with long hours and commitment represents something far more.

The idea that this “private property” depending on billions of hours and dollars invested in it by the public can go on being as abusive and confiscatory as it has been is one of those ideas that you will watch crumble with increasing acceleration as the years go by. So it’s better to move to thinking how on earth you can defend something that is abusive to the public and confiscates user-generated wealth and property on such a large scale, and work at thinking how to create the balanced systems that will respect both game publishers’ rights and users’ rights.

Everyone knows that computer game companies are “private clubs” and fit under the law as “private club”. Except…they aren’t. They increasingly fit more under the rubric of “Internet Service Provider” and “common carrier,” and increasingly become a giant public space that everybody is in before, during, and after work and private life, increasingly taking as much more time as work or private life or even intersecting with first lives.

So when entities increasingly get this much space and power and control over huge swathes of the public and their time, hey, law is going to change *even if your mind doesn’t*. Aren’t you tekkies always telling us to adapt, change, evolve, embrace the inevitable? Did you think those principles only apply to us, and not you?!

Increasingly, influential public figures, politicians, media, government, regulators are going to say, hey, this isn’t like the private club law that applied to the Boy Scouts to enable them to keep out gays (and many will say *that* should change); this is more like the private mall law where a mall can’t crack down on a political t-shirt wearer because it’s a public commons. And so on. Try to realize that you can’t just issue a diktat on this anymore.

When the public has THIS much time, treasure, and talent locked up into a giant public space like this, then government/regulators/media/schools, etc. begin to cry foul when they behave in beastly, unjust matters and steal or confiscate or callously lose or destroy what people have come to regard as their property, and which in some cases, will already increasingly be viewed *as* their property, created by them, re-created or aggregated or stored by them in permissions transfers in these systems.

I’m sure someone who is a professional historian can think about persons though history who were once considered someone’s property (nobles, landowners, women, children, slaves) but then became propertied, emancipated, made equal. Why not the avatar?

You can cry and whine and howl and scream all you want about how unfair this sounds, how unscientific, how impossible, how ridiculous, but more and more it will be taken seriously, and you’ll have to adjust. It’s not going to be the calamity for game-god state capitalism you imagine, either.

And yes, a game or VW company emulating a government function, in a capacity where more and more, it will have powers and money and people under its sway larger than many small countries, will in fact face demands to behave under the rule of law like a government, too, just as trans-national corporations increasingly came under this pressure as least to put in some policies to behave like good corporate citizens.

I find that the game and VW companies themselves are evolving faster along these lines that the geek coders in and around them are evolving on this issue.

I hope not, but I do wonder.