Hi there!

And nice to see a (very) few familiar faces!

It's a good intention, and a few good points have already been made by other posters above. 

The question of why people leave and whether we should try and get them back is a recurrent one. There have been squabbles, yes, but people also went to other games, moved on to other passions, saw the atmosphere change and decided it wasn't what they were looking for any more, and so on.

When I was first here, there was very little game mechanics (except collecting crystals, if that still rings a bell), and most of what we did was roleplaying. Then the whole game was revamped and looked completely different. It also went through a very unstable phase, which was the final push for many fans. I'm sure the next generations saw other changes and had their own reason to move on. What matters is that new generations keep coming and bring fresh air in the community.

Something I notice, whenever I happen to come back and peek at this website: it's almost abandoned. Most of the subforums haven't been touched in years. I know there's a Discord, but it can't replace a forum and will feel very different to old-timers. The forums, which were the primary point of contact, really give the impression the project has closed - that's what I first thought months ago when I went by and logged in, and it's only after looking deeper that I saw the activity had moved elsewhere. I'm not sure how many will take the time to look and register on a real-time chat platform like Discord.

The fact the login cookie expires after 1 hour only is also quite off-putting and unnecessary.

But who knows? If you throw a message in a bottle, chances are people who still have that email address will feel a pang of nostalgia and check in, just to see if other past friends do the same. I doubt they'll go as far as trying the game, though (I have no idea if it's stable and easy to set up).

FWIW, I corrected a few things in the "letter". Of course, some of it should be adapted to the timing if such an email were to be sent (for ex, it's not the beginning of a new year any more). I'm also a little confused about "what started out as a migration project", because that's not at all what I remember PS being back then, in 2003 (granted, I'm not the oldest around). What migration?

I would definitely NOT try to get hold of people's email address, as it's against the law, at least in European countries. Just seeing that makes me want to quickly change and give a fake email. Please, just don't even think about it.

Cheers

----

Dear friend,

It has been a long time since you last ventured to Yliakum, and much has changed since. What started out as a migration project over the years finally became a new version with plenty of new content:

• Since April 2023, Planeshift is running on the Unreal Engine.
• New locations with new NPCs and new quests.
• A dungeon filled with traps and treasure.
• Crafting improvements.
• Everything simply looks a bit nicer - except that players still want the Legacy transport pterosaurs back - they simply looked more impressive!
• And so much more, check news for all details: https://www.planeshift.it/news

So what could be a better start of the new year than a new experience of PlaneShift?

Download it, meet old friends again, and make new ones - or enemies, for two things will never change: PlaneShift is Fully Free to Play, and RP-oriented.

See you soon!

The PlaneShift team

Wibble, WiseKran! 

Always a pleasure to hear a Molecular Blue fan who hasn't forgotten about this place!

Usually I'd stop at the tavern first. I knocked at the door but the place was apparently closed, it's been for ... yikes! so long? Hm.
So I walked past it and went straight here instead, hopefully there are a few familiar faces. There are definitely friendly faces, I'm sure, it's always worth stopping by.

And yet, so many travels, such long journeys. So, yeah, time has passed since I last stopped by. Again. But I do recognize the place, even if bits have changed here and there. New buildings, missing crystals.

So glad to see Hydlaa Plaza is still there, so relieved there's still a home to come back to!

Now let's see if the ale still tastes the same...

Hey friends, how are y'all doing? 

Ah but the Internet also allows us to find the paper behind the sensational headlines

Hum, it looks more serious *gawks at the tables and beautiful graphs*

"articipants  completed  the  Trier  Social  Stress  Test  (Kirschbaum  et  al.,  1993)  to  induce  acute  psychological  stress. Briefly,  this  standardized  laboratory  stressor  consisted  of  a 5  min  impromptu  speech  on  a  given  topic  followed  by  5  min  of mental  arithmetic,  performed  standing  in  front  of  a  microphone  before  a  panel  of  two  (one  male,  one  female)  judges and  a  video  camera."

That ought to do it

More seriously, it is quite interesting and, well, tempting. That should be the "soft" version of the gene switching, surely offering less possibilities but yet a safer practice we should acquire to reduce the common problems.

In my opinion, even with a "perfect" dna, we will never be able to live for centuries and this for a reason: each time a chromosome replicates the telomeres get shortened, so the replication process doesn't produce a perfect copy of the starting chromosome. With years of chromosome replication you'll end with telomeres so short that replication is no more possible and that is... well... the end! 

Some species don't have this problem, I'm pretty sure it can be re-engineered at some point. There are quite a few other issues as well, it's apparently addressed in Rigwyn's video (I'll watch it tomorrow, looks interesting). That should be the "easy" part. It's the starting point of this thread, really, extrapolated beyond genetic disorders - ageing as a genetic disorder is probably far stretched

Even not keeping into account this process you should think that our immune system is more related to environmental factors than genetics: the more you are exposed to viruses the stronger your immune system will be. So a perfect dna doesn't imply automatically no diseases.

It can be taught with vaccines.

But again, even not keeping into account this other issue, and thinking that a perfect dna leads to a strong immune system you have to think that all these "human improvements" don't happen instantly. Moreover you live in a world where everything point toward an equilibrium so the more evolved humans will be and the more the surrounding nature will evolve. This imply that human evolution means viruses evolution: yes, mother nature doesn't watch us while remaining idle! 
It's like an eternal arm wrestling with viruses: at some point you believe to be winning and all of a sudden the situation seems in favor to viruses.

Viruses, bacteria, fungi, and free mutations for everyone, and a lot of people everywhere for them to feed, that's probably a tricky part indeed...

And another thought:will eugenics be available to all people equally? Or some (rich) category will benefits and some other not? Will this lead to wars? If so, you have another factor to prevent overpopulation.

Well, we went through that earlier, there's a moral problem attached for sure!


... and I'm surprised nobody mentioned this as another possible way to enhance the gene pool 

Did you have to go back to the MB forum, Cad? I wanted to see the one right after that.

I wanted everyone who didn't see them to realize what they missed :p

Thanks for the tip! I should probably hang out on IRC and ask. I'm just scared, the damn thing is so addictive and I was so proud of my successful attempt at quitting But I must be strong and take my chance, I can't forsake my good ol' faithful other self!

Tried the myplane gizmo, unfortunately I couldn't find my password back - I'm not even sure of which email / account it was linked to, back then. I must say I'm baffled it wasn't wiped out during all this time! (btw, you're probably the only one here I remember so far )