Gross over-simplification 
intended just to help explain why I don’t believe it’s possible for SimServer to do any damage to a community or otherwise - again, just to be clear, I’m not implying it would!
FYI whilst I’m sure it’s true, it does often require a large mental shift for people to understand and accept that. I know that I would have found it very hard to believe until I started looking in depth at particular JSR’s and tracking them long-term.
This is part of my confusion: I’ve not yet said a bad word about it, from my perspective ???. To me, commenting upon the product strategy that led to a product being developed is completely unrelated to commenting on the efficacy or quality of the product itself. With hindsight, it occurs to me that perhaps you don’t draw the same strong line between them?
e.g. When I’ve worked in or with corporate dev teams, I’ve seen several cases of absolute crud project specs which should NEVER have been authorised… being implemented outstandingly well by a brilliant team! Often, of course, they sell very poorly compared to predictions, simply because the requirements were inappropriate - no reflection on the implementation team!
Equally, I’ve seen brilliant projects (e.g. Lotus Notes) ruined by a dev team who blundered about not quite knowing what they were doing (that’s what happens when the chief architect sells his shares and retires, I think ;)).
I’ve been pitching product to games developers for the last 2 years. When you come along and say you have “the holy grail”, and it does something that at least 3 other companies could have done if they wanted to several years previously - and incidentally which at least some of them have already done, functionally if not to anything like the same performance - then I find it hard to say something positive about that bold claim. Perhaps, in all seriousness, I should at least have saluted you for sticking your neck out :).
There are other things that you said which I found equally hard to swallow. Perhaps it’s fair that you hoped for a more supportive and excited reaction - especially given how much positive reaction you’d already had - and I should have been less blunt. Probably my frustration that on something like 7 occasions you (or Jeff, or someone else) said “sign an NDA and we’ll talk” but never actually sent me the NDA, and then came out with something we could - and would - have helped you with, made me more judgemental than I normally would be.
e.g. if I came along to these forums for the first time and said “Forget Java, I’ve written a cool new language. It’s C++ syntax, but…it uses a virtual machine to run on ANY platform! The performance is really really bad, but no-one cares about performance.” how would you react? How well could you let them down gently? PS: this is only an illustrative analogy - it probably doesn’t bear up too well, so don’t over-analyse it :).
EDIT: the next sentence is perhaps unfair: there may well be some major fora I’m ignorant of where you are indeed very active. I’d appreciate it if you could point them out to me.
In addition, no-one from the GTG participates in any of the key fora for MMOG development (I’ve seen fewer than 5 GTG posts across all the different media, and I am very widely involved) - even though I’ve given the URL’s for the key ones several times on this board. I may have been less than generous partly because I saw a group who don’t participate with the industry expert fora coming along with something old, claiming it was new, and claiming it solved the problem that everyone else had been struggling with (and so far not probably succeeeded in doing). When in fact everyone currently working in this area has moved on to solving other problems which are felt to be far more important.
If I came across as arrogant or feeling superior, it’s because I know what reactions your claims would get in particular circles, and they’re not complimentary (although they needn’t be unfriendly). Your claims sound naive and ignorant to me, and I protest them because - IF I’m right - and if no-one else does, how much time and money will you lose learning from your mistakes? I always allow that I could be wrong, but I’ve probably been made at making that allowance clear in recent weeks. Partly because we’re in crunch time at the moment, and we’re all a bit bad at keeping our tempers right now :(.
Most of all, I hope this softens some of what I’ve said before. I also hope this explains better the points I’m trying to make. If you still feel that I’m just completely wrong, or that my claims are without merit, then that’s fine. I can at least be sure I tried to persuade you otherwise, and we can compare notes in 5 years time :).
