My
Top Ten list is a short one (well 10 is a small number even if I blabber at length) and some ideas are long standing and somehwat refined and others are just thrown out for the sake of discussion.
1. Fix the things that are broken. Most have already been mentioned comprehensive lists but hi on my list are:
a) Encyclopedia
b) Z-Axis issues......like when I'm in underground cave and a vorax's area attack hits me when he's 60m above my head, and then later when the yelk he attacked gets killed I get gassed this is silly.
c) Lag issues that are not lag issues. For example if Sysinfo says:
-----You begin to feel effects of melee protection aura
-----The horrific cuttler hits you for 937 (1897)
lag or no lag, if server recorded the action first, it should be in effect.
2. OP Cats are a double edged sword. We all can count the number of maxed level players who are here no more. I certainly don't have anough fingers etc. to count on. When nekid, I can only count to 21....ok, no 20 and a half jokes.
How many of you haven't suffered PMD (Post Master Depression) and taken a small or large break from having finished a goal and then lacked the incentive to start a similar one righta way. Perhaps limit cats usage to a) crafting b) crafting and digging or 3) a limited number of levels in each range of 50.
Cats can be real handy to balance a team.....a tank, ele, healer team is less effective at mixed levels of 82 / 73 / 65. If lower skill level players use cats till they all even up at say 90, then they team can go on progressing reasonably well together. Or if cats only worked for say 10 levels in 1-50, 10- levels in 50-100, etc, you could still use them to have team members get their levels more balanced without effectively reducing the effort by half.
And yes, I was surprised to see comments to the contrary but OP ownership and cats is a
huge advantage. It's like saying the NY Yankees huge payroll isn't really an advantage. Let's say two guilds contest for an OP and one wins 13-11. All things being equal, who wins the next battle a month later ? Forget the what ifs.....yeah what if the loser recruited more players,....what stops the winning guld from dong the same. No matter what other "what if" ya come up with, their is an equal footing alternative for the other side. Cats vs no cats is simply uneven footing.
3. Don't go freebie. Free games attract too many l33t kids with a distorted portion of them being the kids who get beat up in school everyday and who wanna immerse themselves in a game world where they can do the somewhat socially acceptable online equivalent of beating up the guys on the football team and blasting their triumph over the school PA.
4. Encourage family participation. Do something unique which should generate a lot of favorable press. I know many, many hubby and wife pairs in ryzom, many sons and daughters of players in Ryzom. We have grandfathers, dads and moms and their kids playing in our guild. We have many kids of other players, many of them GL's or HO's kids playing in our guild.
How about a "family pak" pricing or diminished cost for additional accounts. Say $15/mo for 1st account, $10 for 2nd, $5 for each additional account paid on same credit card on the same billing cycle ?
Now before ya say, doesn't that comflict with what I said in 3 above, no it's not contradictory. The difference is parental supervision. We have had issues with kids behavior, a pm to a parent and a parent to child chat about why it may be impolite to keep begging people for cats solves the problem. Trash talk would be non existent as parent is right there to address. Of course we have adults misbehaving too but I don't think family accounts would make the condition any worse.
5. Guild management system...the who's here suppossed to be in next patch but fix the guild chat window so it doesn't resize on every relog. Add "last viisted in this date" column to guild listb (and and fix guild list). Add a log for Guild inventory in and outs.
6. Here's on of the items thrown out for discussion. I'm not in a position to judge how to fix PvP but am concerned about the effect on the community.
But from the feelings of peeps posted here and conversations in game, add some balance to PvP. I served as little league coach, manager, director. We had parents and coaches with "win at all costs" approaches to game. Over the years we had a pretty darn good team, several undefeated yeara and went to the county final one year. But our approach at even the most competive senior level when playing a team that could give us a run for the money was to play our best players to start and then adjust as game went on substituting to make game competitive. We didn't want to win 12-0, we wanted every game to go 4-3 and losing 4-3 was betetr than winning 18-0.
So against a less skilled team, we'd start unskilled players at key positions, there had to be some reward and recognition for kids who won a starting position. We always tried our best to win but "stacked the deck" to first make the game challenging and exciting. We'd move our all star shortstop to outfield and laughed along with him about how he misjudged a fly ball. We'd put a guy in as pitcher who never pitched before. Every player wound up playing every position. While this was common in entry levels, it was uncommon in senior levels.
And when we did beat a team 8-7, the kids on the losing side went home thinking they gave a really good team a run for their money. When we went home losing 8-7, the kids maybe had alittle air let outta their heads, worked a little harder and were all psyched up and excited to do better next time.
I don't PvP. My mom taught me and I teach my boys that it's not nice to take other people's toys away. I won't entertain the argument that life is tough. To me this is a game, it's suppossed to be an escape from real life not a substitute for RL. I'll take my strife, challenges, competition and aggravation for where it counts for something. For me, fun is only fun when it's not at someone else's expense. But I have no interet in imposing my morals / play style on anyone else. This isn't a justification of my choices, just so the reader understand where I am sitting.
But if ya gonna do PvP, is it actually fun to win a battle 24 to zip ? Why not "stack the deck" a bit like we did in little league to make each battle a challenge and exciting such that the outcome is in question till the very end ? Again, as an outsider, it's hard to make suggestions but the following would seem to have some merit.
For example, why not introduce a means where the battle system works to balance the fight to at least some extent. Based upon the participant count, and accounting for their highest level or level in use, adjust the amount of npc's that can be brough to bear.
Again, I'm hardly in a position to judge, but wouldn't it me more fun for both sides to not have 24-0 battles ? Yes, of course not everyone goes that way but why should 35% of them be exciting ?.....why not all ? If people say the do PvP for the challenge, where was the challenge if ya won 24-0 ?
On a side note, I have to give the community a lot of credit here. Despite game mechanics which literally force everyone into a faction or be penalized in some way, the game community has decided that it's OK to a large extent for neutrals to exist and thrive. Neutral guild OP's are not often attacked which is a result I honestly didn't think would continue for very long.
7. Provide an alternate means of obtaining an OP or the bennies that go with them other than battle. What about diplomatic ouposts ? Why not say have a means where if a guild can satisfy a certain number of re-requisites, and accomplish certain amount of missions / tasks for BOTH the kami and karavan, they be able to PvE contest for a diplomatic outpost ? Whereas PvP guilds with O's must invest time and money to maintain them, have these guilds required to continue certain services to keep them. Of course the time involved should not be so burdensome that it leaves the guild little opportunity to do anything else.
8. Provide an outlet for excesses. I'm finishing up HA crafting. In doing so I finished desert dig and PR dig, and even considered doing lake, jungle and forest. I have since decided they are best reserved for my next crafting area, be it weps, jools or whatever. The problem is the dig levels and craft levels would be far too far apart to make starting a new region dig to continue to craft HA efficiently.
Other than an automatic choice for DP removal, can the game give us some reward for all that time spent obtaining mats to craft ? An xp "bank" or something where I could at least get "partial" credit for all that digging after 250. To sit there and dig for 7 hours to get enough mats for a craft session ... well it would be a lot more enjoyable if I felt I was getting something for all that effort.
Could xp after 250 generate cats or better yet "skill specific" cats ? Not at an obscene level of course but it would give non OP owning peeps a source at least. How about "college credits" where if I say dug desert to the equivalent of 250 a 2nd time, I could use these credits to accelerate Forest, Lake or Jungle dig. These credits could not be used until you mastered two regions (one above ground and PR) ....after that i think, it would seem I'd know enough to work a bit faster than a n00b in leveling other regions.
Same with dappers. What can i do with my 200,000,000 dappers. Again, with limitations, say having mastered two skills in a branch, why not let me pay obscene amounts of money for an "education". I can earn about 7 million in a typical day digging / crafting and get about 7 levels at 200+. So buying a level at college for say 10 million means that if I did that every day for a month...earning 210 levels in the process, the cash I earned would move me to 230 levels.....not exactly a great impact but makes dappers of some significance again.
9. I'm convinced every armor and jool crafter in Atys visits the town apothacary weekly for his / her medication. A weapon crafter can become useful to his / her community in 1/6th the time of a jooler or HA crafter....LA/MA crafters get off with only slightly less. I come up short on ideas with this one but Jooler and Armor crafters are becoming fodder for folk tales
"yeah I heard of him...he went off into the wilds many years ago to search for mats and though there are tales of him returning to civilization every few years, methinks this is just stuff of legend."
Again, the college / trade school idea previoulsy mentioned might be applied ONLY to similar skills. For example, after mastering a required 2 or 3 skill trees in the same area, say jools (earings/ rings / [third item ?]), dappers for trade school only for the remaining ones.
10. Create an economy. How many auctions are for dapper ? Crafters just have no use for it, sales of grind pieces to npc's has them in the 100's of millions already.....so everyone just wants mats cause they are digging long after they have mastered two regions for no xp and no reward. Dappers could be used for honor points, cats, rent, trade school or whatver .... as long as they weren't cheap it works. I don't ike the idea that if I want a piece crafted I have to turn myself into someone's personal dig slave. Another option would be npc mats. Instead of "dig me 6000 mats" for this crafted item" one could say "give me 50,000 dappers [so I can buy those 6000 mats]".
Again, in some instances I am just addressing things I dream about being "fixed" in soem shape or form. I doubt I have come up with best examples of how to fix them but hopefully it will serve as a start of
constructive discussion which recognizing that while each suggestion might be best for each individual's play style or the status they have already obtained, it might be best overall for the community at large an the future of the game.
OK I said top ten ...afflict me....but here's my 11th
11. No jumping.
Actually that's not a fix so I guess top ten still works, but after finally getting into LOTR beta and having 5 - 6 peeps standing in front of me jumping up and down within 3 minutes of arriving in town, I uninstalled it.
And since I already made my excuse for breaking the top ten

....
12. Eliminate camping. There's no way to ToS it but it sure would be nice to have a shot at some of the cool things with out using phone trees to get everyone together for a boss hunt and having half the team risking their jobs for playing at work cause there was a server rest or setting alarms for 4 am to dig supernodes cause that's when the season will change.
Every idea I come up with comes up short.....if ya dig a sup area / kill a boss in one season you / ya team can''t dig it for next [insert number here] seasons .....well then couldn't the same 4 peeps go each season not in team and still effectively own the spot / kill. Perhaps knock out the diggers guild or team leaders guild for that period. Again, I still see a lot of shortcomings....each alternate I can think of has a downside and an exploit or two.
Instanced also seems promising. Or perhaps random spawns where bounty's were placed on bosses by npc's who "notified" regsitered hunting teams who would receive scouting messages that the boss was seen and expected to be at certain location and time range. The "corpse" would have to returned to the npc for the reward and "mat refinement". That is the boss only got so powerful because of goo corruption and the npc would de-goo-ify it. Once de-goo-ified, the team participants could come and pick up their share of the loot. Each team member gets one shot per season.
Again, no one likes camping....even when you the one doing it, it's boring just waiting, but I sure having a tough time figuring out what would be a workable solution.