The prevailing trend in most modern societies appears to be quite far along the “trade-a-little-quality-for-money” curve. The effects of this were, at first, minimal and seemingly trivial. Some years (decades, perhaps?) along, and we accept as routine the need to repair our new automobiles after only a few months of ownership, reboot our (Windows) PC’s once per day (if we’re lucky), and gorge ourselves on food which tastes only slightly better than the cardboard container in which it arrived.

In this context, I think you should be congratulated not only as an organization — for having the courage to build a product which holds users to a higher standard — but also as an individual. Quietly bucking convention is one thing; it’s something entirely different to brag about it on the web. (And we both know blog posts such as this are recorded for essentially all time in a myriad of highly-accessible, highly-searchable archives, so this will endure for many years.)

As a footnote, I think you should also be congratulated for such innovative use of the word “nerfing”. A real accomplishment, that. (-:

I think you said in one line that todays dev´s remove difficult content or they make it much more easy to just give a wider range of people access to the game. I mean those people who maybe otherwise would quit the game early. So these decisions are there to maximize the user base. Me and my friends talked about this problem as we think we are core gamer, we do really have problems with this.

This is my opinion and experience from other games. I do not know Emerald Kingdom right now but your story was interesting and I will take a look and go further into detail what Emerald Kingdom is. Thank you.

Daniel James:

Thanks for this post, it’s heartfelt.

You’re welcome. Without wanting to sound like I am pandering, you would be surprised at how much of an impression The Ringers have made here at Double Cluepon. There are things we do, and are designing that are in the very same vein/attitude of TRD. From Lists and Anti lists..down to rethinking how user facing metrics should work. I, and the rest of us have you folks to thank for that.

Three Rings will be inspiring and promoting game development no matter what happens as a part of Sega. If nothing else, take to heart that Double Cluepon has adapted some (but more importantly, not all…we could not be different if we took it all! ) of TRD’s ways. They will go on in some ways. =)

I can’t really address the issues that might or might not have led to us being acquired, but I hope to post my own heartfelt thoughts at some point soon.

As for whether we’ll keep doing the good stuff — time will tell and the proof will be in the pudding. I think we will, but all I ask is keep your mind and eyes open and see how things go.

- Daniel