What a shame.

Metaplace, the online virtual world company founded by Raph Koster started off as an incredibly exciting and innovative company promising and open standards based MMO/Virtual World platform that could run in a web-browser. Having presumably begun to run out of money they have changed tack to creating a near complete clone of Farmville.

I was a beta tester for Metaplace, and I had very high hopes for it, but where did they go wrong? They had all the right ideas, but sadly none of the execution.

The toolset was a real mixed bag, the flash based level designer, was pretty good. But they fell way short on the scripting tools and documentation. Their system was heavily based on Lua, but even as a professional games developer, with experience in web tech and MMO tech I found their system waaaaay too confusing to bother getting to grips with. I hate to think how much programmer time was sucked up creating and maintaining a text editor in flash for coding whilst all the people who were serious about developing tried their hardest to work out a way not to use it.

Incidentally, they're not unique in making that mistake. I worked on a game once, where not only some of the programmers invent their own scripting language - presumably under the impression that they know better than the rest of the programming community ( he didn't ) - but they also went on to create a custom text editor and debugger to go with it. Once it was all made, guess what? All the designers sacked it off and used they're text editor of choice, big fucking surprise!

Anyway, Metaplace, hopefully you have some other plans underneath this all, because at the moment you are showing a staggering lack of innovation and you look like you're going to end up churning out me-too titles and disappear into obscurity. I think you can do better.