I've maintained radio silence for years, but I'm going to put this out there for those looking for a Pern game: this is more like Pern coming out of a time capsule than Pern breaking new ground.
The people running it seem very nice, and my interactions with them have been positive, but I feel like they need a while actually playing Pern games to understand how and why the genre has evolved over the years. They're taking positive steps - building a real website, for example, because the doors opened with a Facebook page as their web presence - but it's still a little bit of a train-wreck over there. Things they're billing as "new and inventive" are either things other games have been doing for years, or things other games STOPPED doing years ago because they just don't work.
They still don't have a full separation of IC and OOC responsibilities. Their head Weyr and Search admin is also their Weyrwoman, who is already massively idle and not RPing; when asked how they plan to cope with her not being an RP presence, the answer was essentially that the head wiz would badger her to get back online (which is exactly what you want - the most high-ranking PC in the hands of someone that doesn't actually want to roleplay), or wait 3 months and replace her (which means you have a minimum of 90 days with the head IC and OOC presence completely incommunicado).
The last time I was poking around, they had a finite number of insta-riders (who were only being offered grudgingly, it felt like), so you basically HAVE to play a teenager if you want to eventually play a dragonrider. They're running 4:1 time, which most games abandoned because most of us who actually play Pern are now grown-ups with jobs and kids and can't RP every day but don't want to miss huge swathes of our characters' lives if we take a week or two off for RL.
All that said, I do wish the game luck. If they manage to get over the initial year or so of growing pains, realize why a lot of the things above don't work and make changes, it would be nice to have another decent Pern game. Right now, the only really solid (and active) one is Harper's Tale, running on MOO, which turns off lots and lots of people just because of the code base.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I do play currently on HT. It definitely has its problems - hello, crazies~ so nice to see you hanging around Pern still~ - but it's a little more in-touch with modern M*ers than ToP has shown itself to be thus far.)
