Rehearsal (2003)

From MYSTlore

In the original Uru Live, the Rehearsal was a test under NDA on a secret shard, in essence an ongoing quality assurance of newly deployed Uru content, done by fans but overlooked by Cyan. The NDA kept testers from talking about this little-known aspect for a year.

Each time new content was to roll out, once deemed ready by internal testing at Cyan, would be passed to those in Rehearsal, a group of a few hundred, in order to test for problems. It would then be deployed to the public shards a week or two later. This concept was introduced while, publicly, Prologue was still going on, around early December 2003 ^{(Leevobro 9659)}.

While it was to continue past Prologue and throughout actual subcriptions, none of this ended up happening; due to a slip, the Rehearsal in fact ended much earlier than the Prologue itself. On January 2, 2004 ^{(Leevobro 29, 9659)}, mere weeks after Rehearsal had begun, an Ubisoft employee in Montreal accidentally invited all pending Prologue registrations, causing a script to send out thousands of invitations simultaneously, and many to actually join within the day. The two public shards that ran at the time, Atrus and Sirrus, were completely unprepared to handle the added node, and, in an effort to minimize the damage, what was previously the private, publicly unknown Rehearsal shard now became a public shard under the name Achenar; to undo the invitations was deemed unethical, even though it had been a mistake.

Due to the lack of an actual subscription-based Uru Live launch, and due to the premature Rehearsal cancellation even during Prologue, the idea was not truly tested at its time.

However, the new Myst Online: Uru Live features a similar aspect by the same name.