Plus, on top of the people not getting too invested with the whole "no telling when everything would get wiped" idea, now it's doubly compounded by the uncertainty for whether or not the entire game outright would get shut down, temporarily or permanently. Because the cruel reality is that passion and enthusiasm will not magically spawn resources, especially given the fact we are not yet existing in a post-scarcity chapter of existence. Post-scarcity, y'all would have until the literal end of time and the Theoretical Heat Death of the Universe (or even the shorter-term Theoretical Heat Death of the Earth) to make this project complete. That's not the reality we must adapt to.
And of course, if I didn't already say this, there is no shortage of ways to pass the time, so I don't blame people for losing interest in a game that's decades old and is little more than a curiosity or a brief glimpse into what life was like from a time long ago. Which is why I suggested some kind of "museum mode". Because as far as community goes, it's extremely niche (even though it's passionate). To visualize this duality, we actually have some data: each person's forum profile will count "x hours within the past 30 days" of being online (I presume that's only for Finalizer, and does not count my time in Nova for example). You'll notice a huge fraction say "inactive" (meaning, 0 activity in-game at all), while the other fraction would clock in hundreds and hundreds of hours. Even with the forum as a microcosm, this is the best sample data an outsider like myself can access in terms of how many people care, and how many people *seriously* care. The other data point is in the launcher, unlike most MMOs that give a vague "light" or "heavy" traffic, here we see some hard numbers, consistently in the range of about 300. (As of me writing this now, it's at 260, which is around the back half of weekday office hours among the USA, which I presume is the primary geographical region of the demographic - the secondary would be around Europe, which is about prime time for them. Weekend numbers would illustrate a "best-case" projection.) The question is that how many of those are bots or alts, and how many are actual human players. (This same question is projected to the forum numbers as well: how many of them are just doing AFK macro tasks, and how many are actively engaging with the game? Because both count towards that data metric.)
I'm not going to sugarcoat it, money in the traditional capitalistic sense could very likely be a no-win situation. Because without befriending the rat, your only option is donation from volunteers (or the staff paying out of pocket, and I don't know if those elite handful can both sustain their real-world bills and the cost of a whole niche MMO), but if you do befriend the rat, chances are you'd have to sell your souls in the process (or, they could, regardless, perform the loathed "cease and desist"). There was a group that was all about preservation and display of games new and old, and that group got itself legally registered as a charity. Has anyone thought about that angle before?
At least Jamie's house in-game has close to a year's worth of maintenance on it, just in case I do find myself enjoying a very long break.
