Letter to the SoR community, from David Cohen Corval
Dear players,
I am David Cohen Corval, the Founder and CEO of Nevrax, and the Editorial Director on the Saga of Ryzom (SoR). In short, I am responsible for the company, the SoR story arch and world design. Today, I am writing this letter to you, players of the Saga of Ryzom, because we are about to take an important new step for both our company and our game.
The first version of SoR shipped in the western world in September 2004. "Great potential" is the comment I heard the most about our game since then, and despite the patches we brought into the game over the last 6 months, we still haven't got the right number of players in SoR to support both the in-game dynamics and the company. In order to successfully confront this present situation, and deliver the most awaited SoR experience, we have decided to adapt Nevrax itself on different levels of its organization and priorities.
I am aware that this letter is a little sudden, and comes just a few days before the first actions below are taken. But everything won't happen over night, and our reorganization will go through several steps. The first step, which I call the "operations step", is as follows :
We are modifying the CS / GM / EM / CM organization.
The Customer Support (CS), Game Mastering (GM), Event Management (EM) and Community Management (CM) organization will be modified by the end of this month (march 2005). Jolt Online Gaming will now be taking care of all the SoR shards in addition to what they were already handling (Jolt has been a partner since the launch of SoR in charge of all the servers infrastructure - machines and bandwidth - as well as the CS / GM / EM / CM for the European shard).
Jolt's teams have themselves been expanded to meet the requirements of this new organization, but the Nevrax CS/GM/EM/CM internal teams don't change.
We are merging the Euro English shard (Arispotle) with the US shard (Windermeer).
We have prepared a separate document to explain the details of this operation with the CS team, but I can already tell you that this new shard will keep the Arispotle name. The main purpose of this new shard is to increase the in-game player population for the English speaking community. Other steps will soon follow to address other aspects of our organization. We will keep you posted on this when the time comes.
Our primary objective with this course of action is to guaranty the bright future that for the Saga of Ryzom deserves. I personnally wouldn't have authorized this procedure if I didn't believe in the existing SoR community, the interest of our vision for the Saga or Ryzom, and our will to make it happen. The entire reorganization process should not be too long, and the SoR teams are determined to make this ride as smooth as possible for you. In the mean time, our development teams remain focussed on the game features that we are all expecting to enjoy soon. Here is a rapid glance on the curent development side things :
The game software and tools software are being cleaned and optimized.
This is a very important part of the job that has to be done before we can properly add new features to the game. There is nothing really sexy here, except that it will make the existing game smoother to play and easier to manage.
New features are being developped and tested.
An important SoR extension will soon be announced.
- The Outposts. They are an important but still missing feature in the game to date. They will give you the opportunity to conquer and control pieces of Atys. They are also a very important basis on the top of which other features will later arrive in the game.
- A new user interface is under construction featuring a better ergonomy and an immersive look.
- The events dimension of the game will be grown bigger as new tools are being released.
- A new website will soon be released featuring better tools for us to communicate more and better. It will also be closer to the in-game story evolution.
- New Kami and Karavan contents (I can't tell you more without spoiling it
).
All I can tell you for now about this new extension, is that it will be free, and that it is designed to give you never seen means to impact both the game world and the game story. This extension will officially be announced at this year's E3, and I personnally believe that it will open entirely new horizons for the players of SoR. It also represents a huge part of my personal motivation in creating Nevrax, and the Saga of Ryzom.
Nevertheless, this extension is not here to replace the existing game which still has the biggest part of our attention and development resources. Before I end this letter, I wanted to personnally thank MDO and the Themis Group who supported us and our game since the closed beta of SoR. The choices we had to make in our reorganization process didn't have anything to do with their level of passion and dedication to the game which meant a lot to me.
Good Bye MDO, Welcome Jolt! ;( Mal sehen was für eine großartige Erweiterung uns da erwartet.
