Post: #2

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Sphere is simply more flexible. It however doesn't have a good basic set up.

To get Sphere's populairity up we need good Sphere shards running with large amounts of players. We need to catch up to EA in terms of stuff. I'm all for a working clone out of the box and having those systems scripted gives people a basis for custom work. I'm honestly not sure we'll ever supplant RunUO because clones are going to be a large portion of shard regardless. We can however show that Sphere is still a viable, even superior, alternative for non-clone shards.

One of Sphere's biggest weakness has traditionally been the inability to access the hardcode. In early versions the scripts weren't robust enough to handle full work-arounds. That's changed. We still can't hit the hardcode but the tools to do total workarounds are in place. Once a system has been rewritten as script it's much easier to adapt that script to a shard than to try and work from scratch to re-do a system.

Also having lots of Devs active doesn't translate to more players. Most of the players who play RunUO shards don't have any particular loyalty to RunUO, just the shards. They won't have significant barriers to trying an interesting shard just because it's Sphere. It's not a factor to most of them as long as the shard is good.