It's been years since I was last subbed, and about that long since I last visited these forums. That being said, I visit the GSIV site every few months or so, just to see if anything has changed. Today, I saw an article about Gemstone IV from Massively, a well known MMO blog, which is part of the same blog network as joystiq and engadget.

What a perfect opportunity to appeal to people like me, past subscribers who would be more than willing to resub to an old favorite like Gemstone. Unfortunately, I can't bring myself to do it, since it seems any significant game development was brought to a near standstill after Paladins were released in 2004.

Yes, you can argue that it isn't true, since between then and now X spell was released, Y mechanic was tweaked, or Z verb was introduced, but the fact remains that there is an obvious list of things which should have been out by 2005(actually much earlier), like the unarmed combat system, Monks, and Savants. And now that it's 2012, more than 8 years from the release of Paladins, all the other obvious stuff should have been already released as well, like the thrown weapons review, other reviews, all profession guilds, major demon summoning, other missing spells, and of course the release of other unnamed professions beyond Monks and Savants.

If it's an issue of lack of funds due to dwindling subscribers, why has no effort been made to change the pricing structure of the game? Likewise, why has no effort been made to contact past subscribers and offer re-subscription deals? Like the Massively article implied, the price of this game is ridiculously steep, so steep in fact that people who would love to be playing are forced to give it up because they can't justify the cost. I can think of several ways to drastically increase revenue, the most obvious of which would be some form of free to play on the shattered instance, along with a level cap of 20 or something like that, to encourage people who like the game to pay a (reduced) subscription fee.

All that aside, I know that Gemstone runs off of volunteers, and there are a lot of people who would be willing to donate their time in order to improve the game. Yet for some reason, when looking at the 2012 goals post, it appears as if only a handful of people are responsible for game mechanics and development. What's worse is that they each seem to be tasked with far too many areas of the game. There is a running joke about how long it takes Simutronics to release stuff, with predictions being off by years. We've all come to expect that from them, but to me, it almost seems as if game development is deliberately being sabotaged. Clearly, nobody at the company thinks it's odd for a new feature in a text game to take ten years from announcement to release. Why is no one looking for the bottleneck and addressing it?

Despite how it may appear, I'm not here to rant, rather I want to ask all of you bitter Gemstone veterans a few important questions.

1. Why has nothing significant changed in GemstoneIV since Paladins were released in 2004?

2. Ultimately, who is responsible for the direction and well-being of the game?

3. What can be done to encourage those in charge to change the game, in order to hasten the rate of development and drastically increase the player population?