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Istvan's Update: Jumpgate has levels, it's true. However, Jumpgate is not a game that emphasizes those levels. Levels in Jumpgate restrict access to ships, and to equipment - unless you can pay a broker to grab something you want for you. That's about all that the levels in Jumpgate accomplish. Jumpgate really was designed to be a different kind of game, where the player mattered much more than the level. This is easy to see: Jumpgate is a skill-based flight simulator. There are no avatars. You don't click to choose an action, you have to do it yourself, with your own hand on the throttle. Someone who understands the flight engine and her ship can whip the daylights out of an inexperienced pilot in a ship considered "better". The levels hardly matter at all. Jumpgate isn't an MMORPG. A newbie won't get much benefit from borrowing or buying a Jumpgate Opti account. Jumpgate's most important strength is that the player really matters. Traditional MMORPG concepts like levels and xp diluted the fundamental flight engine and combat features of the game. With all respect to my predecessors, I think they felt they needed to include these MMORPG ideas so that Jumpgate would be accepted. MMORPGs were all that was out there, so to enter the online games market, they naturally tried to blend in a bit. The real game they were offering was too unusual, too foreign. It turns out the blend we ended up with may also have been too unusual. Polite folks use the term "niche market". I believe there is room in the online games market for much more radical thinking. Most successful online games have still just been the standard MMORPG level grind (maybe a skill-tree grind if you're lucky, maybe both if you're not), painted differently for different genres. More novel concepts are scattered here and there, gems in the rough, if you will: games based on player skill, games that set aside the grind, games that include cooperative play as a basic part of their design, and games that create ways for the community or individual players to manage or enhance or affect part of the the game's basic environment. I think Jumpgate is truly one of these gems, but that we haven't carried it far enough, to realize or enable its full potential. My purpose as Jumpgate's developer has become to change Jumpgate in three significant ways. I try to consider at least one of these three in everything I choose to change or add to the game. Firstly, to modernize it: because Jumpgate is over four years old, it can benefit greatly from incorporating some ideas now common in other games. A better, versatile squad/guild system is perhaps the best and simplest example. Secondly, my purpose is to purify Jumpgate's design, removing or changing those features that make gameplay boring, or that impede other features that are in fact Jumpgate's real strengths. The game should focus on flying your ship - and making that experience a fun one. Lastly, I seek to go beyond the original design of Jumpgate and remake this game into the dynamic, player-centric experience it originally promised to be, something many of us expected from tbe box, or from the beta. To accomplish this, imitating other games won't do. I'm talking about trying to break the parallels to other online games and to make something new - yet something that has been visible underneath the familiar Jumpgate all along. I like to think it's this idea of Jumpgate's "real potential" that has kept so many people playing this game for years, or repeatedly coming back to it after long absences, always feeling that there's something compelling about Jumpgate that can't be found elsewhere. This is not to say that Jumpgate is some kind of sleeping giant. But I do believe this game is sleeping, that perhaps it has never been truly awake. I think my job is about making the alarm clock. Some assembly is required. What brings us all back to this game each time are the dreams.
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