Editing Myst Online: Uru Live (section)

===Prologue===
'''Prologue''', launched on November 17, 2003, was an aborted attempt by Ubisoft and Cyan at bringing ''Uru: Ages Beyond Myst'' to the masses for the first time.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.magma.ca/~daylmer/Urulive/index.html|title=Toria's Uru Explorers|website=|access-date=November 29, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110107023623/http://www.magma.ca/~daylmer/Urulive/index.html|archive-date=June 18, 2018}}</ref> It was public and NDA-less, though it did require an invitation. People who bought the game at retail were invited to apply for entry into the online portion of the game. Upon acceptance, in the form of an email from [[Jeff Zandi]], they would then be allowed to sign on to one or multiple of the [[shard]]s.

Prologue was unique in that it already had a story arc, surrounding a conflict between the DRC on the one side, and [[Douglas Sharper]] and followers of his on the other.

====Rehearsal====
For a while, Prologue grew at a continuous route, with two public shards by the names of [[Atrus]] and [[Katran]], plus a third one used as a '''Rehearsal shard'''.

The Rehearsal was a test under NDA, an ongoing quality assurance of newly deployed Uru content, done by fans but overseen 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 CE|2003]]. The GameTap version of ''Uru Live'' featured a similar shard, also known as Staging shard. 

====The Clerical Error====
While it was to continue past Prologue and throughout actual subcriptions, none of this ended up happening, due to a mistake that became known as the '''Clerical Error''', the Rehearsal in fact ended much earlier than the Prologue itself. On January 2, [[2004 CE|2004]], 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 were completely unprepared to handle the added node, and, in an effort to minimize the damage, the Rehearsal shard became a public one 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 that time.

On February 9, [[2004 CE|2004]], the shards were switched off; this event left many people deeply saddened that their long-sought dream was, apparently, dead forever.