1867 is an interesting game experience on Roblox with an intriguing backstory. It started out as a Second Life-based community called Pfaffenthal 1867, associated with a real life museum in Luxembourg City. But as I wrote last year, community leader Hauptmann "Cyberpiper" Weyder moved it to Sansar. Yesterday (completely separate from the news of Sansar's recent woes), Cyberpiper posted an update in Comments to that old post, reflecting on his experience -- and his surprising new move:
I miss what we had in SL. But the problem lies in the rather volatile nature of the SL community. You do something new, nice, interesting, and folks will come. In order to keep it up though you have to put in a bug work load, mainly organizing one event after another. But despite our best efforts, traffic waned. Gosh we offered free housing to our 1867 community!! Rare in SL! The contract with the [RL] museum came to an end, and frankly we could not afford to pay 7000.-€ tier to LL a year out of our own pocket!
Sansar has been a disappointment. We managed to do a whole street eventually, but had to start over because of too much lag, trying to figure out ways of more efficient texturing or building. Also Sansar had promised mobile development, which was then taken off the roadmap, a big disappointment for us. And... we all know it... no traffic in Sansar... for now...
So we have put Sansar development on the backburner, and decided to develop our own MMORPG, starting off by developing a ‘childrens version’ on ROBLOX.... check it out.
Yes, Roblox -- where it's getting way more visits than what it got in Sansar or possibly even Second Life: Nearly 3,500, since its launch last April. (Not a complete surprise, as Roblox has 100 million monthly users.)
"One thing to say is that we are not completely giving up on Sansar," Cyberpiper tells me now by e-mail. "We still like the philosophy behind it, and might continue building there at a later stage, when it is more developed."
Until then, here's how Cyberpiper compares Roblox's building tools and features, to Second Life's and Sansar's own: