The Great Tree

[Durin Mephit]

Everyone,

This is the promised open letter that I am writing. I call this the first draft. I have perused the Ubi forums for ideas and picked the minds of others for the concepts in this letter, so while the writing is mine, the contents are not just of my own head but are meant to represent a cross-section of Uru players and the thoughts we share.

I am posting it here first in hopes that your feedback may make this a better document. My intent is to move quickly on this letter and incorporate suggestions from this board tomorrow morning for a final draft, then if all looks good, begin spreading it to the other Uru forums as well as other gaming discussion forums where it would be appropriate.

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS - DO NOT COPY OR REPOST WITHOUT PERMISSION

An open letter to Cyan and Rand Miller:

Uru Live was a fascinating and wonderful attempt at an online game. In just two months, thousands of avid MYST fans came together online and discovered not only each other, but the opportunity for roleplaying in a universe with loftier goals than the hack, slash, and take-take-take that predominates the MMORPG genre. Large communities sprang up to embrace different ideals, developing political intrigue from the ground up like no other online game we've seen before.

This letter is divided into two portions; the first speculates on the causes of Uru Live's failure, and the second addresses our recommendations for Uru's future.

Why did Uru Live fail, and how could these mistakes be avoided?

The first point we'd like to make involves the length of time used to determine Uru's success as a subscription-based game. In your letter, you refer to Cyan's efforts to repackage planned Uru Live content into an expansion pack format and state that this effort has been ongoing "in the past weeks." That statement implies that your decision to drop Uru Live was made (at least in part) shortly after the Christmas holiday. While we are sure that the official announcement was held until you were more certain that subscription numbers would not increase, we believe that various factors that you may not have considered could have contributed to the low subscription numbers. These factors include:

* Some individuals may have not desired to play the online component of Uru because they had read about the problems in the Prologue and were waiting for the problems to be corrected. In this age of internet connectivity, word-of-mouth can travel as fast as the speed of light. As an example, consider how the Motion Picture Association of America recently bemoaned the internet - not because of the sharing of movies, but because of the sharing of opinions about movies. The difference between blockbuster and bomb sales in the film industry has become marketedly pronounced because the internet allows people to rapidly disseminiate their approval or disapproval of any product or service. The game industry is quickly discovering that while the internet allows products to ship unfinished with the promise of "we'll patch it later", doing so can be a Public Relations disaster that short-changes initial product sales. Solution: Don't ship too early. Leave a good first impression.
* Other individuals may have desired to complete the offline portion of the game before entering the online game. Some of us with this "one thing at a time" mentality would undoubtedly still be wandering about "offline" in Kadish Tolesa or even Gahreesen had we not referenced hint information from commercial guides or internet sites such as GameFaqs. There may yet be substantial numbers of Uru owners who are attempting to complete the offline game by themselves without help before joining Live, knowing that when they join Live they will be tempted to ask for help. Solution: Show patience and factor this crowd into your numbers.
* Pricing for Uru Live was never formally announced. While we understand that you may have intended to announce pricing based upon the number of potential subscribers, quite possibily the refusal to state a cost up front may have dissuaded some people from subscribing at all. Undoubtedly, some individuals were reluctant to join an online game and risk getting "hooked" when they might find out later that the subscription price would be too high to justify continued play. Solution: Sometimes, you just have to set your estimates and pick a price point. The opportunity to stop and cut losses before taking payments is still available if the numbers don't bear out, and you'll have a more accurate measure of customer interest in the product.
* The MYST franchise began on the Macintosh platform. In some respects, the Macintosh, promoted as the platform of choice for thinkers and artists, represents an audience to which Uru should hold a greater appeal than the PC market. Furthermore, the market saturation for MMORPG games on the Macintosh is much less than on the PC side, so although the overall Mac market may be smaller than the PC market, again, Cyan could have expected a tremendous success with the Macintosh release. The determination by Cyan to end the Uru Live program based solely on the PC market response seems like a shortsighted approach that ignores the Macintosh market entirely. Solution: Don't forget who and where your customers are likely to be.
* The MYST franchise has always been known for its puzzles, not for its action sequences. In the offline version of Uru, some puzzles depended on timing (in particular, the "dreaded Gahreesen jump".) These puzzles created a perception that Cyan had lost grasp of its roots in proper "thinking" puzzles and had turned to action/platform jumping challenges. Two things furthered this perception: The hiding of the Bahro Cave entrances in sometimes difficult-to-reach places, and the marker hunts in the online game, while embraced by many players as a way to while away time during the Prologue and help Cyan and Ubi in stress testing the system, were criticized by others with complaints of Uru becoming a trigger-reflex game. As with the first point above, word of mouth about these issues may have dissuaded many potential customers from signing up for Uru Live or even from purchasing Uru at all. Solution: We understand that the jumping puzzle in Gahreesen was meant to add to the flavor of the age, and to emphasize how the age was designed to be secure. However, the game must be designed with your audience in mind. A simple solution for such puzzles is to restrict the usual total freedom of control that the player enjoys in such positions, automating certain actions. Where the game may be too frustrating to someone with less than razor sharp motor skills, take control away from the player and always have them jump to a safe position when they move off of an edge.

The second point we want to address involves the technical problems that plagued Uru Live and we believe contributed to your decision to discontinue the game. Obviously, subscriber numbers alone are not the only factor in determing the success or failure of the Uru Live project. Total subscription payments must offset the cost not only of new development but also defect repair and general server maintenance, and after deducting these expenses the project must still be sufficiently profitable. To reduce the potential risk of these profits being eaten by the costs of continued operation, several key methodologies must be embraced:

* New software changes must be rigorously tested in a controlled environment before placing them online. Small betas must precede large public betas. Before a large audience has access to the changes, you must be certain that it will not break things for 99.99% of that audience. If you aren't careful, you'll not only make a lot of players angry (and lose subscriptions), you'll also create a Quality Assurance report flood (see next methodology). Solution: Keeping new defects to a minimum reduces your maintenance costs.
* You must be public about defects and you must make the defect reporting system simple yet sufficiently instructive. While /bug, /harrass, etc were an innovative way of letting users submit defect reports, they contained no mechanism to guarantee that a player would submit sufficient information about a defect to make resolution quick or even possible. First, consider the public angle: Somewhere, Ubi should have posted a list of known issues with a method for viewers to add a "me too!" note. You would have gained two important benefits from such a system; the flood of duplicate QA issues would be stymied, and you could gather more accurate information regarding the prevalance of any specific defect. Furthermore, users, not just your own QA people, would perform the job of identifying duplicate QA entries. Second, consider "simple yet instructive": Every defect report should always contain three parts: 1) What was the user doing, 2) what did the user observe, and 3) what did the user expect to occur instead? A simple template with fill-in fields would reduce QA overhead by guiding users to provide adequate information. Solution: Follow these simple QA system rules to save money.

The third and final point on Uru Live's demise regards the history and marketing of Uru Live. The backstepping of Ubisoft to make Uru a single player game before a MMORPG in some respects signalled to everyone that Uru Live might fail. From that point forward, Uru Live must have lacked the same level of committment that it would have enjoyed had it been an "all or nothing" project slated for online-only play. Clearly, if Uru Live had been the priority all along, the game would not have shipped at the premature November date when Cyan was not yet ready to fully launch the online game. Furthermore, most of the marketing of Uru itself seemed to come from MYST enthusiasts and gaming websites. The launches of Riven and Exile featured prominent displays in some stores, and even previews before theatrical movie audiences. Uru simply didn't receive this level of attention, although it was a far more ambitious and promising project. If subscriptions were so important, you should have marketed the game (and particularly the online portion of the game) far more aggressively and innovatively. Remember the involvement of Peter Gabriel? Not once did I hear on the radio, "... and that was Peter Gabriel's new song, featured in the new computer game Uru, Ages Beyond MYST." Solution: Market the product!

What should come after Uru Live?

We believe that Uru should continue to have an online component. The Online aspect of Uru was the key premise of Uru in its original conception. Uru as an offline-only game does not satisfy our desire for multiplayer puzzles and involving plots with real role play. While Uru Live may have missed some of its objectives, it still raised the proverbial bar for our expectations in a MMORPG. You can not just lower that bar back to its original position.

We understand that certain solutions are unpalatable or untenable. Forum moderators have made clear already Cyan's position that the server code will not be made open source. This position is understandable as Cyan may still desire to integrate the work into a future product.

Several options then remain. Here are a few ideas.

* Cyan could still release a subset of the server support, sufficient only to provide the Nexus, Neighborhoods, and intra-age travel so that players with matching expansion packs may continue to work together. The best way to manage this solution is to turn the client for a single player into a mini-server so that they can host other players within their own personal ages. We believe that the effort to implement this work would be worthwhile to Cyan because, quite frankly, it might pacify a great number of the customers that Cyan has jilted.
* Cyan and Ubi could instead continue to operate the servers at a small nominal monthly fee of $2 to $5, with no promise of new content through the subscription system. Expansion packs, sold commercially, could add new content which the servers would be upgraded to support, but two players could only visit the same age or area if they both had the expansion pack. The expansion packs could include small bonus items (such as special clothing or Relto changes) only available to people accessing the online content, which would help sustain the interest in monthly subscriptions. We feel that Cyan has greatly underestimated the impact that being able to share our ages together has made on the MYST audience, and we reiterate that we do not want to lose that ability.
* Ubi should consider bundle plans for the parallel operation of its MMORPGs. A serious hindrance to MMORPG adoption today is the level of market saturation and the costs imposed by game companies. At $12 to $15 a month, few game players are willing to embrace multiple MMORPGs simultaneously. As a result, players either select one MMORPG and stick with it, if it is good and content updates are frequent, or they churn from MMORPG to MMORPG, never staying with one game for more than a few months. Ubi should recognize the revenue potential of providing multi-MMORPG discounts. If Shadowbane cost $12 and Uru cost $12 but together they cost $18, with a 50% discount on a second subscription, the barrier to entry for players who wish to play multiple MMORPGs would be lowered and greater profits may be realized.

FIXME: What should I add here? For starters, I need a summary.

Yours sincerely,
Your customers and MYST devotees

[Vormaen]

I think it's fine as is. Very to the point, no facts missed.....or I've been up too late. You sum it up how you feel it should be.
_________________
"The end cannot be written"

[Sa'rUK]

I think it's very well said..
_________________
Saruk

The Lowly Veteran Explorer???
MO:ULagain KI:

[Maharet]

I agree, you covered it all.
Thanks!
_________________

[Durin Mephit]

Thanks everyone. I have actually found a few things to tighten up, and a few things to improve on, in the draft, and will be posting the final copy soon. Because I would not want to bore you with the entire letter again (it is lengthy, isn't it?) here are the highlights of changes:

* Made minor word substitutions here and there to eliminate redundancy, and spelling corrections (lots and lots of spelling corrections).
* Improved beginning of each bullet item to start with a single short sentence stating the concern
* Noted that Word-of-mouth about Prologue difficulties reduced Uru Live subscriptions - we know this happened, it is not idle speculation
* Added more information about the marketing fiasco - television ads were placed primarily towards TechTV and SciFi channel audiences, ignoring that MYST has always been known for its wide appeal transcending typical "gamer" interest groups
* Finished the MMORPG bundling suggestion.
* Reordered the suggestions to make the first point last (as it is a last-ditch suggestion). Reduced its scope to remove Neighborhoods and emphasize more strongly inter-age travel.
* Added this summary: "We all hope that Cyan has additional ideas and plans for a future MYST franchise online. We all feel that Uru Live was a great idea, and perhaps the greatest cause of its demise is that it was "ahead of its time." We fervently hope that indeed the ending has not yet been written, and we eagerly await the next page in our journey together."
* Changed signature to "The cumulative body of Uru Live explorers"

[Trahald]

very well put. I would have said the same stuff as eloquently at our impromptu meeting in GT, but then I would have experienced some major carpal tunnel syndrome.
_________________
No-one has explained WHY a raven is like a writing desk!

[Durin Mephit]

Here is the final letter. This version may be copied to other websites provided that the letter is kept as a whole, and the formatting stays reasonably intact.

--

An open letter to Cyan and Rand Miller:

Uru Live was a fascinating and wonderful attempt at an online extension of the MYST franchise. In just two months, thousands of avid MYST fans came together online and discovered not only each other, but the opportunity for role-playing in a universe with loftier goals than the hack, slash, and take-take-take that predominates the MMORPG genre. Large communities sprang up to embrace different ideals, developing political intrigue from the ground up like no other online game we've seen before.

This letter is divided into two portions; the first speculates on the lessons that can be learned from Uru Live's failure, and the second addresses our recommendations for Uru's future.

What lessons can Cyan learn from Uru Live's failure?

We understand that it can be painful to consider one's mistakes so shortly after suffering a loss. Our desire here is not to rub salt in wounds, but to stress the benefit of learning from one's past actions and becoming stronger as a result of that learning. With that purpose in mind, we have identified three points and eight lessons we feel should be considered.

The first point we'd like to make involves the length of time used to determine Uru's success as a subscription-based game. In your letter, you refer to Cyan's efforts to repackage planned Uru Live content into an expansion pack format and state that this effort has been ongoing "in the past weeks." That statement implies that your decision to drop Uru Live was made (at least in part) shortly after the Christmas holiday. While we are sure that the official announcement was held until you were more certain that subscription numbers would not increase sufficiently, we believe that you may have not considered all of the factors that contributed to the low subscription numbers. These factors include:

* Word-of-mouth about technical difficulties in the Prologue influenced subscriptions. We know for certain that some individuals read or heard about problems in the Prologue and decided to wait for the problems to be corrected. In this age of internet connectivity, information travels at the speed of light. As an example, consider how the Motion Picture Association of America recently bemoaned the internet - not because of the sharing of movies, but because of the sharing of opinions about movies. The difference between block-buster and bomb sales in the film industry has become markedly pronounced because the internet allows people to rapidly disseminate their approval or disapproval of any product or service. The game industry is quickly discovering that while the internet allows products to ship unfinished with the promise of "we'll patch it later", doing so can be a Public Relations disaster that short-changes initial product sales. Solution: Don't ship too early. Leave a good first impression. Refute bad PR with good PR.
* Puzzle game players like to address a challenge one step at a time. Many individuals who purchased Uru desired to complete the off-line portion of the game before entering the online game. Some of us with this "one thing at a time" mentality would undoubtedly still be wandering about "off-line" in Kadish Tolesa or even Gahreesen had we not referenced hint information from commercial guides or internet sites such as GameFaqs. There may yet be substantial numbers of Uru customers who are attempting to complete the off-line game by themselves without help before joining Live, knowing that when they join Live they will be tempted to ask for help. Solution: Show patience and factor this crowd into your numbers.
* Pricing for Uru Live was never formally announced. While we understand that you may have intended to announce pricing based upon the number of potential subscribers, your reluctance to state a cost up-front may have dissuaded some people from subscribing at all. Fiscally responsible individuals will be reluctant to join an online game and risk getting "hooked" when they might find out later that the subscription price would be too high to justify continued play. Solution: Sometimes, you just have to set your estimates and pick a price point. The opportunity to stop and cut losses before taking payments is still available if the numbers don't bear out, and you'll have a more accurate measure of customer interest in the product.
* The absence of a Macintosh Uru product shuts out your original audience. The MYST franchise began on the Macintosh platform. In some respects, the Macintosh, promoted as the platform of choice for thinkers and artists, represents an audience to which Uru should hold a greater appeal than the PC market. Furthermore, the market saturation for MMORPG games on the Macintosh is much less than on the PC side, so although the overall Mac market is smaller than the PC market, again, Cyan could have expected a tremendous success with the Macintosh release. The decision by Cyan to end the Uru Live program based solely on the PC market response seems like a shortsighted approach that ignores the very epitome of your intended audience. Solution: Don't forget who and where your most avid customers are likely to be.
* No part of Uru should have required twitch reflexes. The MYST franchise has always been known for its puzzles, not for its action sequences. In the off-line version of Uru, some puzzles depended on timing (in particular, the "dreaded Gahreesen jump".) These puzzles created a perception that Cyan had lost grasp of its roots in proper "thinking" puzzles and had turned to action/platform jumping challenges. Two things furthered this perception: The hiding of the Bahro Cave entrances in sometimes difficult-to-reach places, and the marker hunts in the online game. While the marker games were embraced by many players as a way to while away time during the Prologue and help Cyan and Ubi in stress testing the system, they were also criticized by others as evidence of Cyan forgetting its core audience. As with the first concern above, word-of-mouth about these issues may have dissuaded many potential customers from signing up for Uru Live or even from purchasing Uru at all. Solution: We understand that the jumping puzzle in Gahreesen was meant to add to the flavor of the age, and to emphasize how the age was designed to be secure. However, the game must be designed with your audience in mind. A simple solution for such puzzles is to restrict the usual total freedom of control that the player enjoys in such positions, automating certain actions. Where the game may be too frustrating to someone with less than razor sharp motor skills, take control away from the player and always have them jump to a safe position when they move off of an edge.

The second point we want to address involves the technical problems that plagued Uru Live and we believe contributed (even if only indirectly) to your decision to discontinue the game. Obviously, subscriber numbers alone are not the only factor in determining the success or failure of the Uru Live project. Total subscription payments must offset the cost not only of new development but also defect repair and general server maintenance, and after deducting these expenses the project must still be sufficiently profitable. To reduce the potential risk of these profits being eaten by the costs of continued operation, several key methodologies must be embraced:

* New software changes must be rigorously tested in a controlled environment before placing them online. Small betas must precede large public betas. Before a large audience has access to the changes, you must be certain that it will not break things for 99.99% of that audience. If you aren't careful, you'll not only make a lot of players angry (and lose subscriptions), you'll also create a Quality Assurance report flood (see next methodology). Solution: Keeping new defects to a minimum reduces your maintenance costs.
* You must be public about defects and you must make the defect reporting system simple yet sufficiently instructive. While /bug, /harass, etc were an innovative way of letting users submit defect reports, they contained no mechanism to guarantee that a player would submit sufficient information about a defect to make resolution quick or even possible. First, consider the public angle: Somewhere, Ubi should have posted a list of known issues with a method for viewers to add a "me too!" note. You would have gained two important benefits from such a system; the flood of duplicate QA issues would be stymied, and you could gather more accurate information regarding the prevalence of any specific defect. Furthermore, users, not just your own QA people, would perform the job of identifying duplicate QA entries. Second, consider "simple yet instructive": Every defect report should always contain three parts: 1) What was the user doing, 2) what did the user observe, and 3) what did the user expect to occur instead? A simple template with fill-in fields would reduce QA overhead by guiding users to provide adequate information. Solution: Follow these simple QA system rules to save money.

The third and final point on Uru Live's demise regards the history and marketing of Uru Live. The back-stepping of Ubisoft to make Uru a single player game before a MMORPG in some respects signalled to everyone that Uru Live might fail. From that point forward, Uru Live must have lacked the same level of commitment that it would have enjoyed had it been an "all or nothing" project slated for online-only play. Clearly, if Uru Live had been the priority all along, the game would not have shipped at the premature November date when Cyan was not yet ready to fully launch the online game. Furthermore, most of the marketing for Uru seemed to come from MYST enthusiasts, gaming magazines and web sites, and television commercials. The original MYST franchise dazzled the game industry by its widespread appeal to "ordinary people." The launches of Riven and Exile attempted to capitalize on MYST's large audience with prominent displays in computer stores and even previews before theatrical movies. Uru's media blitz consisted primarily of television ads on TechTV and the Sci-Fi channel. Regardless of the perceived success of Uru as an off-line game, it was clearly marketed towards a narrower audience than its predecessors. If subscriptions were so important, you should have marketed the game (and particularly the online portion of the game) far more aggressively and innovatively. Remember the involvement of Peter Gabriel? Not once did I hear on the radio, "... and that was Peter Gabriel's new song, featured in the new computer game Uru, Ages Beyond MYST." Solution: Market the product to your audience!

What should come after Uru Live?

We believe that Uru should continue to have an online component. The online aspect of Uru was the key premise of Uru in its original conception. Uru as an off-line-only game does not satisfy our desire for multi-player puzzles and involving plots with real role play. While Uru Live may have missed some of its objectives, it still raised the proverbial bar for our expectations in a MMORPG. You can not just lower that bar back to its original position.

We understand that certain solutions are unpalatable or untenable. Forum moderators have made clear already Cyan's position that the server code will not be made open source. This position is understandable as Cyan may still desire to integrate the work into a future product.

Several options then remain. Here are a few ideas.

* Cyan and Ubi could instead continue to operate the servers at a small nominal monthly fee of $2 to $5, with no promise of new content through the subscription system. Expansion packs, sold commercially, could add new content which the servers would be upgraded to support, but two players could only visit the same age or area if they both had the expansion pack. The expansion packs could include small bonus items (such as special clothing or Relto changes) only available to people accessing the online content, which would help sustain the interest in monthly subscriptions. We feel that Cyan has greatly underestimated the impact that being able to share our ages together has made on the MYST audience, and we reiterate that we do not want to lose that ability.
* Ubi should consider bundle plans for the parallel operation of its MMORPGs. A serious hindrance to MMORPG adoption today is the level of market saturation and the costs imposed by game companies. At $12 to $15 a month, few game players are willing to embrace multiple online games simultaneously. As a result, players either select one game and stick with it, if it is good and content updates are frequent, or they churn from title to title, never staying with one game for more than a few months. Ubi should recognize the revenue potential of providing multi-MMORPG discounts. If Shadowbane costs $12 and Uru costs $12 but together they cost $18, with a 50% discount on a second subscription, the barrier to entry for players who wish to play multiple MMORPGs would be lowered and greater profits might be realized. Best of all, this solution is unlikely to dilute current profits; you have little to lose for trying it. With the right package offer, you may yet see subscriptions rise to a more sustainable number.
* Cyan could still release a subset of the server support, sufficient only for small groups to enjoy inter-age travel so that players with matching expansion packs may continue to work together. The best way to manage this solution is to turn the client for a single player into a mini-server so that he or she can host other players within their own personal ages. We believe that the effort to implement this work would be worthwhile to Cyan (if none of the other suggestions above are possible) because, quite frankly, it might pacify a great number of the customers that Cyan has jilted.

We all hope that Cyan has additional ideas and plans for a future MYST franchise online. We all feel that Uru Live was a great idea, and perhaps the greatest cause of its demise is that it was "ahead of its time." We fervently hope that indeed the ending has not yet been written, and we eagerly await the next page in our journey together.

Yours sincerely,
The cumulative body of Uru Live explorers

[Trahald]

beautiful. except that there should neer have been the need for such a letter.
_________________
No-one has explained WHY a raven is like a writing desk!