Arilou's a big meanie

[Arilou]

"Ten years ago I opened Wyvern's doors to the public after 18 months of frantic full-time development. I felt like I was on to something big -- something that the game industry would never understand. I was thrilled that within minutes there were already people trying it out. One guy even stuck it out for a few weeks, despite the bugs and overall raw experience. If you think there are bugs today, you'd be amazed at what he put up with in 2001!

Over the years we fixed bugs, added features, created content and built a community. And the player base just kept on growing. Watching people play Wyvern and become hooked was what kept me going for another five or six years. During that time we had unprecedented contributions from amazing volunteers like Teshuvah, Arilou, Legolas, Janica, Kiz the Wiz and dozens of others. I told the game publishers that you could build a world entirely out of volunteer contributions, and they didn't believe me. They just didn't understand how addictive this thing would turn out to be, I guess.

Wyvern has been held back for the past few years by technology . Wyvern's world is a rich, extensible ecosystem, and it has pushed the available technologies to their limits and sometimes beyond. Java did not offer the dynamic features we needed, and still does not today. Databases could not deal well with our loosely tree-structured data model. Browsers didn't have quite enough "oomph" to let us create a compelling replacement for the browser client. And so on. In retrospect it's almost amazing that Wyvern works at all. And right around 2005, we finally hit the wall. Wyvern was just a little ahead of its time.

Since 2005, Wyvern's core development has been in temporal stasis as we wait for the technology to catch up. Wizards are busy creating new content, which is wonderful, and we all owe them our thanks and appreciation for their continued contributions. But for Wyvern to achieve its full potential, we need to solve the hurdle of scaling up to thousands of players. And we also need to offer a cross-platform client experience in browsers and mobile devices. We need to do these things while simultaneously making the game faster, more secure, more robust, and easier to build and manage.

I still believe we will get there.

In the past five years we've seen tremendous advances in exactly the technologies that Wyvern needs. We've watched as cloud computing services like Amazon's EC2 have made massive scaling accessible to small companies. We've seen fantastic new JVM languages appear, languages like Clojure and Scala, which should allow us to make the Wyvern world come alive with far less effort than it is today. We've seen huge advances in XML databases and other NoSQL-style storage frameworks. We've seen the emerging HTML5 standard pushing browsers to become powerful enough to host full-featured thin game clients, and we've seen matching protocols like Comet that can give us a rich channel from the browser to the servers.

The pieces are all lining up. They're all still fairly new, but they all show great promise. Wyvern should finally be able to get fancy new plumbing to replace the technological outhouses it's running on today.

The game industry produces a few hit games each year that people play and forget, as well as a few MMORPGs that -- in my opinion -- lack both the charm of Wyvern and its user-extensibility. The rest of what they produce is me-too throwaway titles that they fund because frankly they have no idea what they want.

Fortunately, with the way the industry is evolving, it's increasingly clear that we don't need game publishers anymore. Minecraft has been massive slap in their faces, and yet the publishing houses still think that Minecraft is somehow an accident, a one-off. They just don't get it, and fortunately for us, we don't need them to get it.

For years I labored away on Wyvern knowing that a game's greatness is entirely independent of how it looks. And for all those years, you folks -- both the players and wizards -- have labored with me, knowing that we're on to something amazing here. If anything, games like Zelda: The Wind Waker and Minecraft have shown us that simple graphics are *timeless*. If you want a game to remain new and fresh forever, then you need to sidestep the graphics race and focus on letting peoples' imaginations run wild. I believe Wyvern has the purest vision and the best execution of this idea in the entire history of computer gaming. It might sound immodest, but those of you who've stuck with it for the past decade know exactly what I mean.

It's worth observing that in the past ten years, not one thing has changed about my vision for Wyvern. Wyvern is still the game I want to play most. In fact the only reason I don't play it is to avoid getting sucked in and disappearing. I need to get my ducks lined up before the next massive push to scale it up. For the past few years it's been a waiting game on the technology and infrastructure. Now that we're approaching the end of that wait -- or so it seems to me -- I have some critical decisions ahead of me. I'm faced with decisions about the right way to scale the game, about game balance at massive scale, about monetization while keeping the game free, about the trade-off between security and openness, and many other choices that I believe I need to get mostly right before embarking on a big overhaul.

But I'm patient. And I know you are too, since Wyvern is still going pretty strong after ten years. I think the next ten years has great things in store for us. I hope you're looking forward to it as much as I am!"

-Rhialto

[Arilou]

"Greetings!

Yes, this is indeed my first ***** in a hundred zillion years. Happy anniversary!

I basically took this year off from Wyvern. Technically I worked on it in January and about half of February, and it's not quite December yet, so I'm only sitting at about 9 1/2 months so far. But when all is said and done, it'll have been a year.


*****


******


As it happens, in roughly mid-2003 Wyvern reached a certain critical "mass", by which I refer to both the number of players and the size of the code base, at which I felt I was no longer able to innovate like I'd been able to do when I began the project in 1996. There were bugs to fix, and features to add, and none of them were being fixed or added to my liking. It was just getting too hard.

Let me be precise about what I mean by "too hard". It wasn't vague or fuzzy; it wasn't a sense that things were just generally "taking too long". It was more specific than that. I had reached a point in my programming career such that I could look at any task, large or small, and I would know how many days it would take me to finish it. That ability, in some sense, is the Holy Grail of software estimation. You want to know how long things will take, so you can arrange suitable plans.

However, the Holy Grail in this case turned out to be more of a Holy Tin Cup, because the actual answer was approximately ten times longer than it should have been. That is: when I thought something should take me an hour, it would take a day. And when I thought it would take a day, it would take a week or two. This didn't happen overnight, but it happened all the same, over the course of eight years working on Wyvern, and it disturbed me greatly.

Because whenever I saw something that I thought should take a month, it meant it would take a year. And something that I thought would take a year -- ten years. Oh dear. I don't have many bunches of ten years to spare, you know. Nor do you! I knew you were waiting for these things as well.

Of course, there aren't ten days in a week, nor are there ten months in a year. But there are about ten days in a week, on average, and about ten hours in a working day, and about ten months in a year. The United States hasn't switched to a pure-decimal or vigesimal numbering (or time-measurement) system; nevertheless the principles still apply. If you're off by a factor of 7, or 12, then you might as well be off by ten: an Order of Magnitude.

That hurt me, because I knew I could type almost as fast as a regular human being should be expected to type -- something like 130 words per minute, when I'm warmed up and I know what I'm supposed to be typing. And I knew the Java APIs like the back of my hand: this might not sound like much, but if you take a quick glance at the back of your own hand, you'll see that there isn't much unfamiliar ground there. I had reached the point where I was as good as I was going to get, using my current tools and technologies.

Now someone else in my shoes might have been tempted to say: "If I am as good as a person can get, then perhaps I should try to enlist the support of others in getting my project accomplished." And to some extent, I did that. The Wizards -- notably Binyamin and Teshuvah, Kiz, Janica, Arilou, Raeden, Zerth, and several others whose names also deserve along with Legolas to be in the Wizard Hall of Fame -- these folks have performed superhuman feats and given of themselves to an extraordinary extent, all in the name of producing the world's greatest game. I am grateful to all of them for their support, and although their only reward has been the work itself, I hope that it has been worth it.

Nevertheless, I've been unable to address their needs and concerns at the rate at which I felt accustomed. Initially, the Java platform served me well, and my limitations were my own, not Java's. But by 2003, the situation had changed for the worse: Java was rapidly outstripping my abilities to incorporate its advances into Wyvern!

This is, in no small part, because Java has (as I boldly wagered in 1996 when I began the Wyvern project) become the world's dominant programming environment. I am not unaware of the power of the Win32 and .NET frameworks, nor the Gnu/Linux environment and the Gnu tools and operating system, and I study and use them regularly in my own work. Java has fierce competitors. Yet as of today ******** Java reigns supreme. In fact, the work being done on Java-related technologies like Hibernate transcends and supercedes much of the work that I've put into Wyvern over the past * years.

Alas that it wasn't available at the time. I would love to discard reams of Wyvern code in favor of well-supported open-source software, but such a thing will, as I have noted, take me ten times longer than I feel it should. So while I could take this approach, I continue to look for other solutions.

My best solution appears to be to polish off Wyvern, and deliver and run it as an open-source application. There's a fair amount of work required before I could open-source it, because open-source Java applications nowadays have certain expectations: an Ant buildfile (and Wyvern has many complex build targets, although you might not realize it), documentation of the code and data organization, a process for checkins and version control... a great many things I would love to provide, but they all take time.

Time is the ultimate constraint on human endeavors.

I've spent the past year trying to resolve these issues for myself. I want to code faster, to reorganize the Wyvern code base to be more amenable to open-sourcing, to be able to create things almost as fast as I can think of them. I've studied functional programming and mathematics, linguistics and philosophy, languages and compilers, tools and productivity, and the foundations of innovation -- all important for getting me closer to my goal.


And I still find today's knowledge, today's technology, wanting. Fred Brooks Jr. has said that there is no silver bullet, but I fervently believe that the silver bullet exists, and that I can find it.

My vantage point today is one of knowledge, of proficiency: I've studied much of what Man has to offer in the realms and disciplines of creating code and managing computational complexity. I remain unsatisfied, and I study daily to improve my state of affairs. Math every day, languages every day: I aim not for a silver bullet of 10x improvement, but a silver maelstrom that gives me 1000x. You may believe that I'm on a futile quest, but my online gaming blood has instilled the Quest in my soul, and I intend to solve this one.

I have a vision for Wyvern that surpasses the current client-server model -- a fantasy, a chimera, a dazzling white conception of Wyvern's future, in which any player can create a story of great imagination, with little or no knowledge of technical detail... my future Wyvern will be the game of the century, precisely because it's the game you've always wanted.

The technology does not yet exist. But I can envision it, and with the right people, I can build it. I am working on a proposal, a specification, a grand plan for how Internet and online gaming technology will evolve to support my vision for Wyvern. My plan requires a great Benefactor, a Billionaire of a man both in wealth and in spirit, but I will persuade such with such means as are within my power. My plan requires staunch persistence from the greatest programmers known to the World today, but I believe I will prevail. I know the way.

If you love Wyvern, or have loved Wyvern at any point in your gaming career, then I would have you rejoice, because a new Wyvern, a Fiery Dragon no less, is poised to take the online gaming world by the storm of its very breath, by the fierceness of its gaze. You are welcome to wait, to take respite in anticipation of this new world. **** *** ***


*******

I've spent most of my life gaming, most of my life building Wyvern. If there's anything at all that I can offer you, it's Hope. I can build something that nobody else has been able to build, because I have a unique perspective -- one that only you could give me -- that will compel me to build the Right Thing.

Stay tuned ****. It might seem a long way away to many of you, but most of you who read this will be thinking of * as a year in your Past. A year in which Wyvern made history."

Cheers,
Rhialto

[Arilou]

"I finally located a new ISP yesterday. I've been -very- reticent to put the game
back online until I had a trustworthy one, since my old/current ISP has been getting
gradually flakier (and has consistently overcharged me by 50% or more each month).
This new guy is in the same data center in downtown Seattle, but he also happens to
live across the street. I checked him out thoroughly and he's solid, so I'll be moving
the game server back downtown this week.

It'll probably take a few days of testing before I'm confident that my firewall is
reasonably secure. And I need a few days to run through basic tests of the game
server, since I made a bunch of really fundamental changes to the database in order
to support future web-based clients.

My guess is that I should have things back up by the end of the month, and all will
be back to normal. Well, hopefully. There -will- be bugs and stuff, but I'll try to fix
'em as people report them.

None of the game data has changed in any way - the player data, maps, areas, etc.
are all unchanged from when the server went down, so the game should be able to
continue normally."

R

[Arilou]

Okay, so as you've probably figured out by now, I posted old quotes from Rhialto above. The first was from our big 10 year anniversary, (a little over a month before the game went down) the second was taken from Rhialto's old blog, (posted November 28, 2004) and the third was posted as part of an update for the last downtime on March 12th, 2007 (nine months before the game returned last time).

Links:
1 - http://web.archive.org/web/201102230.../cabochon.com/
2 - http://web.archive.org/web/200504032...s/2004_11.html
3 - http://www.wyvernrpg.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1052

The first two are pure irony. You could take the anniversary post verbatim and people would get excited that it was talking about our future today. The second needed some dates edited out, but otherwise it has the same basic effect. The third was just mean. In my defense, I thought you guys would catch on faster since I grouped it in with the above and it was lifted right from the forum archive. Truly, I didn't think there was any way you'd fall for it unless I moved that old thread to a private forum for a bit, but I thought that would be too mean so I left it for you guys discover it quickly so I could follow it up with this post. However, even though Frosten caught on right away, people totally ignored his chatbox message and kept posting their excitement. Funny stuff.

But more importantly than my amusement, I did this to illustrate a point... which is that there's been a pattern of lofty ideas and dragging things out. Hence why I specifically said in the actual downtime thread that I would not be posting any updates from Rhialto. I was dead serious, but apparently nobody paid attention or they wouldn't have fallen for the above. Well in another moment of seriousness I'll say this; I have nothing to do with anything outside of the forum. I don't know what Rhialto plans to do with the game right now and I have no intention of ever asking either for your benefit of just for my own. I spent the entire last downtime acting as a go between and that's just not going to happen again.

Even if he asked me to post something here for your benefit I would decline and suggest he make an account here. But, let's be real, he's not going to go out of his way to update you on his own. I could have continued this joke by posting more talk from the last downtime, including one where he said he was going to find somewhere else to host the website so you guys could go there for updates. Last time that just never materialized, this time it wasn't brought up at all. Meanwhile, old sites that linked to Wyvern have moved the game into their defunct MMORPG listings (something I had to work to reverse after the last downtime) and so many players just think of the game as gone. All the while I doubt Rhialto is giving the game much thought as, unlike last time, Teshuvah and I are not bothering him about it... at all. As far I'm concerned this is between you guys and him. I have simply taken myself out of things. So if you want someone to bother him for you this time, you'd have to look elsewhere.

In the end, I do not doubt that the game will return. The question is simply how long will that take and in what capacity. All of which depends entirely on Rhialto's motivation. Now, I'm not advocating that you try to light a fire under him yourselves, but you have to decide if you want to fight for the game or continue lurking until Rhialto does something on his own. Although I may amuse myself at your expense, I do feel bad for you forum lurkers and I don't want to leave you with some notion that there's this big thing going on behind the scenes while you patiently wait on the forums. Unlike my character who thinks you're all "bags of worthless meat," I think you deserve more than that and so I leave you with this honest assessment of the situation. It may not be much, but it's all I'm capable of doing.

[Rarkvar]

Originally Posted by Arilou

As you know, Rhialto took the game down to change the static IP and the game has remained down for longer than intended. Short story short, something broke while Rhialto was trying to fix a keyboard problem and that has caused it to remain down all this time. There are, at this time, no estimates on when it will be back and we will not be giving any. If, however, Rhialto assures us that he can get the game back up at a certain time, we will relay that.


We will also be using the forum to email you when the game comes back up so you won't have to lurk here if you don't want. To make sure you receive the email, check your profiles to make sure your email is up-to-date and if you do not currently have an account, make sure to sign up. If you have problems registering an account and you need some assistance you can, for now, use the game's contact email, (wyvern@cabochon.com) but please make sure that you do not use that email for forum issues once the game returns (instead use in-game mail).

You're right. You did say you weren't going to relay that type of information unless Rhialto assured you about getting the game back up.

The quote from the last hiatus however is very believable to anyone who did not experience the last one. Especially because it says that it will be back by the end of January.

I seem to be missing something here. I understand you do not want to be involved because you were last time, and Rhialto puts things off (I know all about how annoying that is), but you did say you would let us know when he assures you all when it will be coming back up. I don't see your point. You wanted to prove to us that you were not going to be involved, which is fine I suppose, but you also contradict yourself, and that isn't cool.

If you hadn't put in that quote from the last Hiatus all would be fine, but that was a bit much. I guess the reason it went on as long as it did is because no one wanted to look for the truth, because they didn't want to find it.

Maybe this will inspire people to find his email and contact him so that you won't have to.

You're not that bad, Arilou, everyone likes to play a joke every now and again. If/when the game does come back up, I would really like to see you active once again. Even if you aren't doing anything for the game, you're a smart, interesting person, and we need more of those types of people. Your help would be nice in this fruitless effort as well, but I understand how you feel after the last hiatus. If you don't, that's fine, we understand. It is what it is, and there is no need in trying to make it anything that it is not.

[Arilou]

Originally Posted by Rarkvar

I seem to be missing something here. I understand you do not want to be involved because you were last time, and Rhialto puts things off (I know all about how annoying that is), but you did say you would let us know when he assures you all when it will be coming back up. I don't see your point. You wanted to prove to us that you were not going to be involved, which is fine I suppose, but you also contradict yourself, and that isn't cool.

The thing that I am not involved in is trying to get information from him or motivate him to actually do something. I think that was pretty clear. The only thing that might have been unclear is the bit where I said that I would tell Rhialto that he had to update you guys himself if he ever wanted to do so without any prodding. However, I meant in regards to these guesstimate updates. If he can seriously convince me that he's just about ready to get the game up, I would not be opposed to passing that along to you (though that would be pretty hard to do outside of a situation where the server is in place and he just needs time to test things before letting you all in). I will also make sure to email you all after the game comes back regardless of my lack of involvement in the game as I promised to do so.