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Posts: 1958

Back to When we had a Future

In the summer of 2006, Scott Brown had a Plan: We were going to finally take Jumpgate and spruce it up a bit. I really liked his Plan, and I was excited to be a part of it. I gladly joined the team that was being assembled to undertake the project, though it meant I would have to stop work on what we then began to call Jumpgate "Classic".

There's more than one expression about the "best-laid plans", and I know I don't need to tell you that the Plan changed. It's now 2010, and the "spruced-up Jumpgate", Jumpgate Evolution, is still in progress today. However, for more than one reason, that project has become something very different from what in 2006 we were originally planning to make.

To me, Jumpgate always has held a huge untapped potential. Over these last few years, as I increasingly recognized that our new game was striking out on its own, and was less and less an inheritor of the legacy of the original Jumpgate, I found myself looking upon my years supporting Jumpgate Classic with increasing fondness.

For many reasons, Scott and I now agree that it is past time that the original Jumpgate receive attention again. I have been asked to resume my duties managing Jumpgate Classic, full-time.

I return to Jumpgate Classic joyfully, with the benefit of knowledge and experience gained from nearly four years on the Evolution team. My resources, though, are tightly limited, just as they were in the years before 2006. For a while at least, things will seem much as they did back then.

The powerful difference today is that there is an opportunity now to learn from and reconsider in our own turn the course that set us on the road to Evolution. Every single issue that motivated us to act in 2006 is still wholly valid, and those issues weigh heavily on the prospects for the continuing operation of Jumpgate Classic. To survive and succeed, those issues must be addressed.

More than ten years ago, I began my involvement with Jumpgate as a player and beta tester. I believe that talking to the community is helpful to the process of improving the game. As before, I will communicate publicly and regularly. As before, you will know what I am doing, and why, and as often as I can reliably tell you, when. You will have opportunities to make suggestions, and with your opinions to impact and contribute to the process of changing our game.

I'm undertaking a return to regular patches for Jumpgate, and to that end I am reactivating the Test Team. I am also resuming contact with the Events Team. Both groups will shortly need additional volunteers. I have begun taking equipment out of mothballs and getting things ready for a resumption of normal updates to the game. I intend to make a small test patch to the client within ten days.

I will start cautiously, and begin with minor adjustments and the solving of small problems. This is mostly to regain confidence that the processes and equipment still work after four years of disuse! After that, it will be time to start solving the real problems and making some serious noise.

Things have been quiet far too long, and we need to ensure a future for this game we all love.

Once again, for good or ill, there is a Plan.

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Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me. - Firefly theme