RG was forced out
I'm no RG fanboy, I never played a single one of his games prior to TabRasa, but it was obvious to me when his barely-there "farewell letter" was published on the official game site that something was obviously amiss.
Frankly, from the bits and pieces I had been able to discern from various sources, RG always struck me as a bit odd and quirky, but that doesn't explain how a man can be intimately involved with a project for several years and then leave with only a few sentence farewell? It had the overtones of a gun-to-the-head confession, as if perhaps he was frantically blinking in code while signing his name.
No, NCSoft execs knew that before they cut TabRasa off at the knees they would have to get rid of the guy whose name was all over every game box and page of the website. They did scour his name from every page of the official website and even from the logon screen of the game itself not long after the shutdown announcement was made.
I played TabRasa from beta all the way up until the final few seconds when the ominous "You have been disconnected from the server" message box splashed across the screen for the final time. Was TR a perfect game? Of course not, but was it a solid game in many -- if not most -- respects. You bet your @$$ it was. Sure, some mistakes were made; possibly it was launched too early, perhaps too many players were permitted in the open beta, not all of the content was "quite done" and the devs kept referring to new content "just around the corner" that never quite materialized. However, almost all of the issues present at release were fixed or otherwise updated by the time the servers went dark. Once the game went to free-to-play, the server populations SOARED, proving the game could have easily been run as a microtrans game or one of the other F2P models.
During this F2P period, I literally saw in general chat at least 3 times an hour, "Wow, this game is awesome! I never heard of it before now, it's a shame it's getting shutdown" or comments very much along those lines. Obviously, the word about TabRasa never made it very far prior to NCSoft's mandate to shutter the title. It's funny how a game "going free" can spread the word so efficiently, far easier and faster than NCSoft was willing to achieve deliberately. Following initial release, almost nothing was put forth to advertise the game or attract any more players than those who had already tried it and moved on for one reason or another. Many of those players returned during the F2P period and were very pleased by the fixes and new content, but were similarly bewildered by NCSoft's decision to demolish what now seemed to be working well. A grassroots website and movement sprung forth to attempt to preserve TabRasa, proving that at least someone loved it enough to put forth the effort. Letters were posted to the site detailing some discussions and proposals offered to various NCSoft execs, but apparently the decision was firm, and no amount of common-sense bargaining would sway them. It gave the impression of "cutting off the nose to spite the face," but I was only tacitly involved with the preservation effort and am only relying on outward appearances here.
Whatever the outcome of RG's tussle with NCSoft, I will miss Tabula Rasa more than any game I've played in the last 5 years. If there's anyway it could be resurrected I would welcome it with open arms. I can only wish RG would also demand the rights to the game that bore his name and reopen it under another publisher, or perhaps privately, but the only request I've seen so far is for money.
"Tabula Rasa is dead... long live Tabula Rasa!"
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