Part of the reason Slipgate took so long to reach alpha is that I had realized some time ago that the MOO system has little to offer anymore. This is a two-fold problem. Firstly, the system itself is extraordinarily dated. We've moved into a time where the hardware has advanced sufficiently to give us, essentially, graphical MOOs. The second part of this problem is the fact that these technological advances have siphoned off most of the people that made MOOs worth participating in to begin with. Who are these people? Creative coders, quality roleplayers, people with imagination and skill have largely moved on to places where that imagination and skill can bear greater and more satisfying fruit. What's left are holdouts who refuse to move up, people incapable of moving up through physical impairment, and nostalgic types who have moved up but can't completely let go of so much history.

   I put myself in the last catagory, and now it's time to be frank. MOOs are what prompted me to teach myself to program when I was 12, that's over a decade ago. At the time, it was the only practical VR system of it's kind that you could find and reliably run on the hardware of the time. Pretty much everything has changed since then. Moving up takes a great deal more investment of time and skill than staying here, which means most of the people left behind are the lazy, impaired or stupid ones. What I've seen since I started has been a steady and gradual decline in the quality of MOO players. There's few left who can hold any sort of decent roleplay, or even understand the meaning of it. Imagination seems to be overrated now. The number of ships we have that bear the name 'Salvage Something' makes me cry. Salvager, Salvage Collector, The Salvager, Salvage Master, Asteroid Salvager, Your Mom Salvager. When that's not the case, they're usually ripoffs of popular SciFi ships. That's the best you can do? I'm being generous too, most of them are actually mis-spelled. That's just one example, but my point is, nobody even tries anymore. What's left of MOOers has turned into a bunch of whiny, illiterate, unimaginitive donkeys running on a treadmill to try and beat the other donkeys for absolutely no reason other than they apparently have no other life and need to spend their days trying to compensate for it by having the biggest virtual dick. That's not roleplaying, that's not what this is about, I started MOOing to have fun, and it used to be fun. It's not anymore. A Miriani host told me that 7 minutes after they reopened Miriani, it had 27 players on it. What the hell is wrong with you people? Did you sit like drooling idiots at your computer for 7 whole days, pressing the connect button and hoping that your miserable life would come back to you with each failed connect while cramming Krispy Kremes in your face? Are you so shallow that you actually define yourself by your avatars and you can't function without them? Read a fucking book, really, you'd be amazed. Watch less television, that shit rots your brain. The imagination stagnates when it gets force fed everything and doesn't have to do any work on it's own. Break out, people.

   So, I'm left with a choice, I could continue to stay here and develop a system for people who don't seem to have anything else to do but try and subvert it and then give me excuses that are so flagrantly bad that I'm left desperately praying they're just hoping I'm stupid and are lying themselves silly, because the only other explanation is that their brain is made of Jell-O. Or, I could let go and move fully up. Nothing I do here, in the past, will ever amount to anything. It can't. There haven't been any advances in the MOO system for over a decade, because everybody knows that it's a dead end system. Everything I do in the modern world is improving myself. I gain new skills, new accomplishments, new contacts, and new revenue, just to name a few. MOOs have pretty much become a complete waste of time, time that I can't justify. I turned down a job working in a particle physics research lab with several huge particle accelerators because I don't have the time for it. If I don't have the time for that, there's no way I'll ever have time for this. Life has an incredible amount of other things to offer.

   So, Slipgate is going to be shutdown, and it's not coming back. What will happen to it I can't say, probably nothing, it'll just collect dust on my hard drive. There was talk one time of open sourcing it, but I don't think that will happen. If I ever do anything like this again, it would be with a purely roleplaying basis, and not another MMO for brainless addicts, but I likely won't ever have time for that either.

   So long.

   Oops, I meant there were over SEVENTY players!

   Well, the first day of alpha testing went very well! We had over 7 players join the fun, with a peak of 35 simultaneously.

   Lots of things broke, lots of things were fixed, and we have all had a lot of fun.

   Keep it up, and let us know how you feel about what's here and how it could be better.

   Oh, yeah, address and port:

   moo.slipgatelegacy.com:7777

   We're open for alpha. Please keep in mind that if you've had an account on Slipgate at any time in the past, it should still be active, so please don't make a new one. Only characters were purged, not accounts.

   It looks like opening might be delayed by a little bit longer than we expected. Still today! STILL TODAY! Don't worry. We're just still waiting for Logan to log on and we have some things to take care of first. I just wanted to give you a quick update to let you know where things stand.

   Wacky time to open for an alpha test, but hey. We'll open approximately 'whenever I get up tomorrow' because I want to be around for the first hours. Things are likely to break, and I don't want them unattended. Expect that to be tomorrow afternoon-ish, around 2-3pm Mountain Time.

   In the meantime, everyone should read this, a reposting of our 'alpha status' help file, which you should be clear on.

   Alpha Status

   Slipgate Legacy is now alpha status. This means two things. A) The game is missing many major features to be complete and B) The completed systems are only internally tested.

   

   WHAT IS EXPECTED OF YOU, AS AN ALPHA PLAYER?

   

   We expect you to play the game as much as is possible with the given feature set, report any bugs or inconsistencies you find, and of course, have fun!

   

   WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM US?

   

   Alpha is a very unstable level of development. This basically amounts to a viability test of many of our core systems. By the time we reach Beta status, many new systems will be added and many of the existing systems may be removed or restructured if they are found to be a hindrance to gameplay.

   

   The economy of the galaxy will also be undergoing potentially dramatic changes as it becomes populated with users. Prices may fluctuate as well as income levels of various activities. It's always our ongoing goal to strike a happy balance between 'taking far too long' and 'I own everything there is to own, now what?'

   

   We will be adding new content to the game as fast as we can, expect to see something new almost every day. New content includes new activities for you to make money, new ways to 'advance' (such as better ships/components/residences/etc), new spaceports and new stores/merchants, to name a few.

   

   Also expect to see tradesman (see the 'tradesmen' help file for more info) on a very regular basis to begin with, at least once or twice a week, possibly more as we have time. Our goal is to use this as a stop-gap for lack of store content as we get going.