Q&A - Round VI

[lawrence]

Round VI of our Q&A with Nevrax has just begun. Please post your new questions to the folks over at Nevrax in this thread. Players from North-America are more than welcome to join us here in this thread.

In case you've missed it, answers from Nevrax to our last Q&A can be found here: http://www.ryzom.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13154

Below you can find some general information on the Q&A and about what kind of questions have the best chances of getting an answer to:

The goal of the current HOWTO is to provide you with a short overview of how to participate in one of the Questions & Answers rounds that I publish weekly. If you want to get a chance to have your questions included, I highly recommand that you read the current article, as there are a number of rules you will need to take into account.

A]What is a Q&A round ?

It is my main mean to interact with you. Community managers from each community interact directly with you in the forums, but due to time and language constraints, I do not intervene directly in these boards. But since I want to be able to answer your questions anyway, we have set up the Q&A rounds to create a feedback loop.

To keep the process smooth and the reading of the Q&A article interesting, we have also established a few rules as to which questions I answer and how.

B] Asking a question

1) Check that your question is on-topic

The number of topics for the Q&A is large, but since we have other feedback loops, it does not cover everything. Choose carefuly the topic of your question, since it will definitely influence the chances to get your question included in the chosen set.

The Q&A is a good place to ask about gameplay related questions, anything that's currently in the game, things you are confused about or would like more information on, things that are inadequately documented. You can also ask us here about policies, processes or procedures regarding patches, customer support, events, the website or the game itself.

As explained in the patch-release proccess article and in this Q&A article (7th question), questions related to ETA's ("when will feature XYZ be added to the game?", "will we ever see feature XYZ?") are tough to get an answer on. Very few get included in the Q&As.

Questions which simply suggest new features and "wishlists" do not belong in this Q&A. If you have suggestions or ideas for the game, the best way to submit them is to use the in-game support tool - there's a category dedicated to suggestions.

2) Check that your question wasn't posted before

You should definitely have a look at the previous QnAs I posted. You will perhaps get your answer sooner than expected.

Please also consider having a look at the questions the other players posted before you. Also, sometimes, we do not select some questions, because they were already answered by others directly.

3) Post your question !

Finally, if your question meets all the previous criterias, post it in your community-specific forum :

English community - General forum
French community - General forum
German community - General forum

There is always a specific Q&A topic sticked in which you can post your question.

C] What happens next ?

Every Wednesday, the community managers for each language choose a set of about five questions among those in the Q&A thread opened for you to post in. They do their selection according to the rules given in this HOWTO and try to pick the ones which represents the best the current interrogations of the community they represent. Once they have made their choice, they send it to me on our internal mailing-list.

Once I have got all the questions, I start looking at them to know if I already know the answer. If not, I sit with the relevant developpers to see if we have an answer to provide. Sometimes we don't (for example, if the question is about details of a feature design which is not definitive yet, or about a bug which we have just begun to investigate), so I can either postpone the question or scratch it if it won't be relevant to answer later. I also answer some questions more in depth as separate articles (such as the current one, the patch release process, etc.) - that's good to know if you want to influence the topics of these separate articles. During this phase, I also add questions to the list sometimes, if I see some to which I want to answer on the boards or in-game.

When I have got all my answers from production, I write the answer to them (or sometimes I directly quote a dev's answer) in an article, which I post on the beginning of the following week.

--
Xavier.

[marct]

Do we need to post past wuestions again that have yet to be answered, or are you selecting from our previous lists as well? The NA previous lists?

[tobaran]

A few questions on my mind:

* During the last stress test in Beta, just before retail release, I believed I harvested a knowledge amber. At the time, I didn't know what to do with it as at that time, the Encyclopedia wasn't setup. Sometime later I read in the history of Atys that the ancients store their knowledge in amber cubes, and from time to time, these were found and brought to the sages. Will this concept be introduced in the near future, or planned for Ryzom 2, or was never planned at all?

* On the equipment screen, I can load my armor by right clicking on the particular area of the body. However, I have never figured out what the hands do..... you can't load a weapon there when left or right clicked on....
Can you explain it's purpose?

* The weather in Ryzom is one of the best I've seen for a MMORPG. It is visually stunning. The weather interaction with the characters and NPC however is quite limited. The only affect I can see from the weather is location and time of harvesting, and of mob migrations. Is there any plan for an augmentation to the weather's interaction? (e.g. - snowing so character takes some damage, or is slowed a little bit, or possibly introduce cloaks to ward off affects - raining will impair vision a bit, and reduce mobility a bit, etc)

Frithos -
"Dang, if I could bottle the Lakeland water, I'd be drowning in dappers in Pyr"

[altomesa]

hmm...we're on round VI already and the most asked question continues to be ignored.

Weather!

PR weather seems completly random. When a node pops and when it doesn't. What other factors besides the weather conditions and time of day control when a node pops? And will we be given access to that information to better track it?

[holina]

Could you please give a detailed description about the new tools the event team got? So we know what can be done with the new toys, and perhaps give feedback/ideas how to improove them (part of these might depend on the capabilites of the RAID engine I guess).

To be a bit more specific:
- are you able to spawn a specific entity in the active gameworld at a specific time and place
- can the spawning of an entity be bound to triggers in the gameworld (player crosses lineX, player completes missionY, player kills entityZ etc.)
- can an entity be assigned to guard a specific npc/pc they otherwise wouldn't guard
- can you change the behaviour (aggro, social) of an entity
- can entities change behaviour/location depending on a player activated trigger (players killed entity 10x in a row, entity switches to social behaviour, players killed entity 50x in a row, entity moves/spawns 50m north next time etc.)

(entity can mean a single mob [which is just a spawn with one member i guess] or an entire spawn)

Thanks!

[borg9]

hmm...we're on round VI already and the most asked question continues to be ignored.

Weather!

PR weather seems completly random. When a node pops and when it doesn't. What other factors besides the weather conditions and time of day control when a node pops? And will we be given access to that information to better track it?

Factors that effect nodes

Time of day - now with the clock on the map this is easy to check.
Season - again the map tells us this
Weather - again the map tells us this

Note not all of the conditions have to apply.

Some mats are seasonal
Some mats are time of day
Some mats are weather dependant

You will find that it may be a combination of ANY of them, however once you know the right conditions, they are predicitable.

As for other factors, I have not encountered any others, but hey I don't know everything.

(sorry to reply on the Q&A thread .... but hopefully this is a constructive answer)

[mmatto]

(sorry to reply on the Q&A thread .... but hopefully this is a constructive answer)

Neun's answer seem to apply on surface digging, but doesn't seem to completely answer question about PR digging. In PR weather seems to be more or less random (at least compared to surface digging).

[borg9]

Neun's answer seem to apply on surface digging, but doesn't seem to completely answer question about PR digging. In PR weather seems to be more or less random (at least compared to surface digging).

The PR has a completely different weather system, but the rules are the same.

Fair weather or Sap Storm.

PR is every much dependant of time of day, find out how the day/night morning/afternoon/evening/night cycles relate to the clock.

Anyway back on topic

[raynes]

1) Atys is suppose to be an alive ecosystem, what happened? Where are the animal migrations? Where are the changes in animal populations? What about weather effecting the landscape? Shouldn't the water levels rise and fall depending on the amount of rain that occurs?

2) When are we going to start to see the storyline actually be in the game?


3) Are we ever going to see puzzle based content in game?

4) Is there ever going to be a point where there are areas only accessable if you meet certain criteria?

5) What are the devs planning (if anything) to encourage roleplaying in the game? Are their plans for any of the main characters of the story to make an appearance?

6) Will the npcs ever have personalities or will they forever be mindless zombies walking around with no purpose?

7) When will areas like the secret Kami Oasis and all those teleports be finished?

8) Anymore hints on what is going to shown at E3? Are we talking about something like neverwinter nights where players create their own levels and areas? Or is it something completely different?

[altomesa]

The PR has a completely different weather system, but the rules are the same.

Fair weather or Sap Storm.

PR is every much dependant of time of day, find out how the day/night morning/afternoon/evening/night cycles relate to the clock.

Anyway back on topic

There's more to it than that. I have dug the same node for over 6 Ryzom days straight tracking the results and there was nothing to suggest any repeating cycle based on just the weather condition and time of day. After 6 days straight the results say that either....the cycle is longer than 6 days, it's totaly friggin random, or there are other factors that come into play in PR node's. I (along with many others) want to know what it is.