MMORPG: What is the state of official Meridian 59?
Gar: Official Meridian 59 is in the hands of its original creator, Zaphod / Andrew Kirmse, and he has promised to keep it up and running forever, so you could say that the official servers are also in the hands of someone that will love them and maintain them permanently.
Daenks: Andrew Kirmse (Zaphod) runs two servers, 101 and 102, and has stated publicly that they will perpetuate for at least as long as he is alive. The Open Meridian Project's code-base has changed pretty significantly since we forked in November 2013, but we have contributed many fixes, including several game-breaking exploits and one server-crash issue. Andrew is usually vocal on the things he would like to see us port to his code-base, and we will continue to contribute any of our code back to the official repository that is requested. Server 101, actually, recently had a massive spike in population due to being picked up by some twitch.tv streamers, which has been a great boon to the community as a whole.
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Keen: Andrew keeps the original Meridian repo in a state I would refer to as "maintenance", by this I mean that he is interested in preserving the game in its current state. The Open Meridian Project, in contrast, has made significant changes to the game both visible, and in the background. We think that this game still has room to grow, and are working towards that.
MMORPG: Are you worried about splintering the player base that still plays Meridian 59?
Jacqueline: No - the more personal and engaging the environment, the better the game becomes. Meridian 59 is built on people’s need for creating and breaking rules. The more this happens, the more diverse the gameplay becomes. Having options and rivalries is one of the strongest assets of the game. Feuds, drama, results from conquering are all ways to keep something fresh and alive. This conflict has become larger, and more meta in nature, as each community seeks to grow its personal server beyond the others.
Gar: No, because of the unified launcher program mentioned above, and because we plan to keep growing the game's population for all servers. Also, there have been huge schisms in our player base in the past - half of us played for the brutal PvP, half of us played for the social aspects - and we were all stuck together in one place, leading to unhappy friction. Multiple servers can cater to multiple communities, and everyone seems a bit happier with some breathing room. Rulesets can cater to their population; there's no longer any need to try to satisfy everyone at the same time.
Daenks: It is true that the community is small, but the size of the community has proven to be more of a boon than a detriment in most situations. When people see the same characters online so frequently, a real server-wide community begins to form. This is something that most RPGs lost during the EverQuest era. We obviously don't want to get into a situation where we split the community into such small parcels that there is little to no interaction, but we hope that we can draw new and old players to the game to offset the slow-but-steady increase in the number of Meridian servers. One of our primary goals as a FOSS project is to build tools that make running, finding, and connecting to various Meridian servers easier.
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Delerium: I think if Meridian had more advertising or development in the past that it would be a much more popular game today. Former players, when they see something on Reddit or Imgur about the game, often say “wow, this still exists?” Many thought the game was finished when 3DO closed its doors, and there are plenty of new and returning players who would play if they knew the game was still running and being actively updated. Server 103 - and the two servers based in Germany (112 and 115) - have sometimes lowered the population on the original servers, but we believe our dedication to improving the game and getting the word out about it will lead to all the current servers (and any more that pop up) enjoying a population boom. In addition, Meridian 59 has a much smaller world than more recently released MMOs, so a server only needs 80+ players on at a time to feel heavily populated.
Keen: No, player accounts are free on our server (103) as well as the two remaining original Meridian servers (101 and 102). There is also a Korean server that uses the Open Meridian codebase, and other servers pop up from time to time in Germany and even Russia. People are free to play on any server they want, and many play on multiple servers. They go where the action is. Sometimes that is on server 103, sometimes it is on 101.
MMORPG: Can you explain how this is legal as opposed to other free server games out there which are not?
Daenks: Yes, Andrew Kirmse (Zaphod) released the code to Meridian 59 under the GPL V2 License on 9/15/2012 (link requires an account). The game name "Meridian" is trademarked, but we are an Open Source project that contributes to the game, and provides a place to play with our changes for free, not the game itself.
Gar: The owner and creator registered the game under an Open Source license, and put all the content on Github for public use. In other words, this was done intentionally by the man at the top - whereas other free game servers are often done without permission, and referred to as 'pirate' servers.
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Keen: The Kirmse brothers released Meridian under the GNU GPL version 2 license. This allows anyone to use, modify, and share the source code to others, provided they adhere to the terms of the license. The project actually uses software from other open source projects like flex and bison. The Open Meridian project adds a few additional third party FOSS products like MySQL and cURL. Open source is good for everyone. Sometimes some of our improvements catch Andrew's interest, so we happily submit it to the original repo. This is the nature of open source, Andrew was kind enough to share his source code with the world, and we are happy to share our source code with him.
