Check your inboxes people.

[dakhound]

If they have been I'm sure we'll be notified.

I still think our little thief should be prosectued since he has obviously stolen our contact details at least.

tis is my opinion too, I believe it is a crime to steal peoples details.

[rushin]

take a deep breath those getting hysterical.

having access to a mailing list is a little different from our credit card details i would imagine. I don't know why ppl think straight away its some kind of scam, but this forum isnt going to be the place to have constructive debate imo.

As eluded to earlier Jolt/Nevrax are hardly neutral parties and have vested interests in opposition to a community effort, Souls has already started the propaganda war - not very professional either hmm? I might be completely wrong and its an evil plot to take over the world but seriously i doubt it, i know how much i care about Ryzom and i am sure others do equally.

[sprite]

Xavier got fired and is begging for money using contact details he "stole".
Souls didn't do either of those.

Who would you trust?

Edit: How rare, I have 2 accts registered to the same email addy and I didn't get this email O_o

[kostika]

take a deep breath those getting hysterical.

having access to a mailing list is a little different from our credit card details i would imagine. I don't know why ppl think straight away its some kind of scam, but this forum isnt going to be the place to have constructive debate imo.

As eluded to earlier Jolt/Nevrax are hardly neutral parties and have vested interests in opposition to a community effort, Souls has already started the propaganda war - not very professional either hmm? I might be completely wrong and its an evil plot to take over the world but seriously i doubt it, i know how much i care about Ryzom and i am sure others do equally.

Actually unsolicited email is against the law in most countries. Contact details aquired through nefarious means is also illegal in most countries. Oh and DPA for those in the UK.

And Rushin have a look at my first post in this thread. Sorry, but those questions are valid and make the whole "community driven" thing a bit of an impossibility. An MMO is a company, not a community project.

I love Ryzom as much as the next person, but I wanna see it continue to exist in a playable form, not a hunk of junk.

[acridiel]

Allright, I´ll step in now and admit that I have read this Mail, the site and was convinced the thing was pretty geniue and did pledge a bit of money.

After reading some of the posts here I´m not that sure anymore so let me sum up what we have here:

1. Negatives:


- A strange "whois" and an even stranger registration on some french e-mail
- A post from Souls that declares Xavier as a disgruntled ex-employer. Who is he to tell?
- sketchy details on "how they´ll do it". Technically and finacially.
- Some hysterical speculations on Data theft. No proof at all on that!!

2. the Positives:

- a serious looking attempt at helping the game we all love

- Names of people that have a reputation for contributing to Ryzom and are well known throughout the Community.

- No attempt at gathering any Account Data via said site, not even a "please send your money here."
Just asking for a pledge to send money IF they are succsessful:

For now, we do not accept money, to avoid reimbursing everyone if the project fails. However, you can make a donation pledge below. If we get enough donation pledges to convince the official presiding over liquidation process, we will contact you back by email to cash your donation.

So for me there is no risk involved. And even if so, I´d chalk it up to Lives-Experiences.
And yes, chances are rather slim, even without us going ballistic here.

To the suspected data theft:

- I´d be able to get your e-mail Addys in no time too. Most of you made them public anyway somewhere. So again no proof of data theft of any kind. Just using public information.

- Login´s were given to you to a site built by whoever is behind that, mind you but I´d be able to give all of you access to my sites as well and in the same way.

So, why don´t we all calm down and look where this takes us, or them?

As said in an earlier post, me and some friends have been discussing a simmilar attempt at letting Ryzom stay up, and we certainly had no scamming in mind. So why not give these guys the benefit of doubt?
I must say I find the blattand attempts at denouncement here rather disturbing.
What if they are for real? Even IF there were technical and finacial problems, it would be a great idea IMHO.
There are enough legal and illegal free-shards of other games out there that run rather smoothely, so why couldn´t this one?

I´ll for my self wait and see.
Nobody could force me to give money based on that Mail and site.

Acridiel

[rundll32]

Im with rushin, pulling off a scam under your own name seems a tad unlikely, especially when he's an ex employee.

The question is wether you want this to become public property...I echo others in that id support it as a last resort, but Im holding out for a real company to come and shake things up

[kirzen]

*puts on his Vizzard hat*

Lets do some math people.

An ex-employee, possiblity embittered with the company for his dismissal has in his possession a copy of the contact details for a number of players playing Ryzom. He also has a name that can be credibly applied to the game itself and he has a situation infront of him where the management of the company that holds the intellectual rights to the software has to be very careful with how much information they give out about the future direction the company is going to take.

1 > He offers no guarentees about what will happen to your 'donation' if he doesn't raise enough money to buy "Ryzom" that is, the intellectual property of the game, the server contracts, etc.

2 > He has created a web address that is a direct breach of copyright. (Understand that currently he doesn't own any portion of the rights to Ryzom, which means the use of the Ryzom trademark as his URL is in breach)

3 > He probably hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of raising enough capital to purchase the rights to Ryzom. If everyone playing the game sent him $100, he still might not have enough money. Intellectual property is big business... Consider that every subscribed individual is -currently- paying $14.95 USD and it hasn't been enough to pull Nevrax away from their debts, BUT selling their game might? That means that the value of their intellectual property must be a sizable portion of their debt. If they have 'real' companies looking at purchasing the rights to the game, these real companies are probably putting up millions of dollars to purchase the rights to this software... Do you honestly think that this man is going to put together millions of dollars from your donations?

4 > How will this game continue to be run? If you're thinking that third parties are going to pick it up as a 3rd party piece of software and run it for free out of their own pocket, you're seriously delusional. If you think that you can run a shard out of your basement and afford to let all of your friends play, you're similarily braindead. If the game were released as an open source commodity the only useful things to come of it would be free access to the art and story concepts. For a large scale MMO to actually be useful its 1/2 content and 1/2 management. This means dedicated servers and management that the third party community honestly doesn't have.

The Bottom Line : I think that Nevrax is being honest with us when they say that there are real companies involved that are fielding offers for the intellectual rights to Ryzom. If that is the case, I can honestly guarentee you that they have a lot more financial backing that this scammer is going to be able to put together even if he's being honest about his intentions. And if he's not being honest about his intentions, which seems pretty likely considering that we're dealing with an employee who was fired from the company, during a volitile time, with no guarantees and very little information. Then you can bet you're going to get -burned- and badly if you put any financial muscle behind this.

What he's saying is "Please put money into my pocket, and if I get enough money in my pocket to buy Ryzom, then I'll buy it and give it to you."

What he's not telling you is what will happen if he doesn't get enough money in his pocket, and all this is -assuming- that he's being honest and actually 'has' an intention to buy Ryzom in the first place... he might just be a scammer looking to strike it rich off of other people's frustration and love of the game.

[grimjim]

From what I can see they're only asking for pledges at this point. Not actually for money.

Community oriented projects don't necessarily go bad.

That said, I don't think this is the best, or a particularly viable option.

Here's the real problem from a community point of view.

This is the ONLY one of the possibilities that we actually have any hard information on and we're all on tenterhooks worried about the future of our game. Of course we're going to get worked up about this and, so long as we don't have any other data on the other supposed offers, this is all we have to speculate on, so we'll go nuts.

Just try and bear that in mind WHILE you're going nuts

[kirzen]

<Edits his own post for late night brainlessness>

I assume he's providing login and password in the emails asking for pledges? Or is he asking for your Ryzom username and password?

[acridiel]

But on the other hand, he's asking for your Username and Password .

Nothing beats account theft! Mmm, account theft.

Uhm, no.
We were sent a Username and a PW.

Acridiel