Right well the numbers don't really matter as he's very much aware of Wyvern's potential if work is put into it. He just feels that he's at an impasse with the game and had been putting off deciding how he should proceed for ages now. But he does care about the game and you could probably get him to make some sort of decision just by forcing the issue enough times (you have to get beyond the replies about down the road stuff). It's worked for us in the past, though the situation we were left with was always far from ideal...
First he promoted people to the position of elder wizard on the basis that they would be given more power to change things. However, the only thing that ever really came out of that was the whole bootstrap thing... aka the tool that you'd probably know best for allowing wizards to put boulders over training areas.
Following this he was motivated to ending the last hiatus in December of '07, but his involvement quickly waned, leaving us in a horrible state as far as balance and server performance went. His eventual solution to this was the whole arch wizard thing which we were not very happy with at all. Despite that, we pushed forward and made quite a bit of progress, but we still had no ability to do anything about the server itself, making it so that no matter how much work we did, the game could never truly grow again unless Rhialto did something about it. We were always hoping to try to motivate him to do that after the whole balance/bug fix thing was fixed, but now that he has a chance to look at it, he's saying that it needs to be replaced completely.
And so we come to our current situation where he has to decide if he wants to find a way to host it while continuing to put off getting involved again, push forth with his plans for moving the game forward himself, or give up on his plans and either open source the game or find someone to turn it over to. In my opinion, he truly wants to go with the second one, but he doesn't want to build on the game as it is, he wants to do some altogether non-trivial things that he has long believed couldn't be done until a future date.
Hence, the game got pushed to the side where it became, as you put it, "a side side side project." But, once again, he does care about the game (otherwise he wouldn't have paid to keep it going for so long) and he won't just let the game die, never to be seen again. So you can either wait for him to decide what to do on his own or force the issue which, as I said, has worked for us in the past but the results were much less than ideal. I'm sure most of you hardcore lurkers just want the game back no matter what, but to those who want more, who knows, maybe you'll have better luck this time.
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