Daniel Voyager has already spread the news that dieselpunk sim Seraph City will soon be closing. Inara Pey has informed people that Anita Witt’s full region art gallery of Dryland is closing down. Over at SLUniverse, Naseby Girl has posted that Realm Of Usk is closing down.
Realm of Usk
Welcome to Usk, a historically-based place where you’ll find friendly folks who enjoy 14th century medieval role-play. Travel back to 1300 AD Wales, where you’ll visit a community for creating and sharing experiences based around the lives of knights, nobles and local citizens.
Visit in Second Life
Realm Of Usk is a roleplaying sim and community, which is the sort of project that is dear to my heart so it’s disappointing to read that they are closing their doors.
I don’t know why Realm Of Usk is closing but I do know about the difficulties of helping a Roleplaying sim in Second Life make its own way. For some the tier is too damn high, for others it’s the amount of time managing the project or keeping content up to date.
Others find getting enough others engaged to help with storylines or management difficult. There’s a lot of work that goes into a roleplaying sim and community, much of it in the background and away from the roleplayers themselves.
However one of the plus points of being involved in Second Life roleplaying is the community building aspect. After six years Realm Of Usk has quite a strong community base. Jousting was a key attraction there. Whereas some people may well give up on Second Life roleplay, others move on. Many of the Realm Of Usk community are moving from 1300’s Wales to 1400’s Cornwall, in the shape and form of Tintagel Bay on the Elizabeth Isle Sim – SLURL : maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Elizabeth%20Isle/99/123/22
Here people will set down their roleplaying roots and whereas one door closes, another opens. Some people are making a success of roleplaying sims in Second Life. Personally I think the tier is too damn high for roleplaying to really prosper within Second Life, but there are certainly enough sims engaging in roleplaying to prove that it is possible, despite the tier costs.
As I said earlier, there are a variety of reasons why sims in Second Life close, in Anita Witt’s case with Dryland, it’s due to a change in RL circumstances. There is no one size fits all solution to this but with every closure a little bit of virtual world history is lost too. On the other side of the fence, new sims arrive and create new experiences, so there’s still plenty of progress being made.
Realm Of Usk is scheduled to close on March 5th, so you still have a few days to visit, the SLURL is in the destination guide widget near the top of this post.
To be fair – Caitlin Tobias deserves the credit for bringing the Dryland closure to wider attention – I caught the news after seeing her blog post on the LivingSL feed,
Is it groundhog day? I think we’ve had this conversation before :p Your credit to Caitlin is in your post and it’s fair to raise it here but unless you’re claiming an exclusive I don’t see it as an issue.
Interesting that is is closing as it does have a strong community. However, i have not seen Gunner around in ages and I believe gunner is the one paying the bills. Perhaps it is Rl interfering.
That may well be the issue, a change in RL circumstances meaning less time for SL is a good reason to call it a day because SL roleplay sims generally require a lot of time to keep them ticking over.