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Tabula Rasa Going Out With A Bang
Mytob notes that sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa is set to close down tomorrow, and the development team has something special planned for the game's final hours. The decision to close the game was made in November, and it went free-to-play a month later, while the developers continued to roll out the new content they had planned. Now, after a round of patches and server merges, the beleaguered MMO has reached its shutdown date. The game's primary enemies, the Bane, are launching an all-out offensive on Allied forces, which will culminate in a battle beginning at 8PM on Saturday and lasting until midnight. All players are being called in as reinforcements in this apocalyptic fight, though the final announcement says, "Penumbra has been informed of the situation and is standing by on the use of their last resort weapon. We can not afford to be complacent or uncertain, but if it is truly our destiny to be destroyed, we are taking them all with us."
they should release an open server even if it lacks the content and patch the client to allow the user to specify a server.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have to give NCSoft some serious credit here - it was a great game. I started when it was first released, and there's not much I didn't like about it. It's a damned shame they have to close it.
Apparently, yes. The neat thing about this is that these guys _care_ about their users. They could have kept things going business as usual, letting it whimper. If I see their names attached to a project, I'll know to give it a longer look.
What would be better is to release the source to the client and the server so atleast it could live on in the community.
Unfortunately the bankruptcy officials may consider it part of the company's assets, to potentially be sold to pay off creditors.
If the stockholders had put something like that in the company charter BEFORE THEY TOOK ON DEBT it would be another story. Ditto if the creditors could be persuaded to release claims on the source for this purpose.
Also: Some players might form a consortium and make a bid on the source. (They could probably make a rather SMALL bid and still get it.) Once they own it they can do what they want with it - including releasing it under any license terms that don't violate those of any licensed IP it contains.
At least that's how I understand it. (Insert obligatory IANAL disclaimer here.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way