In-game content, versus behind-the-scene tools ?

[seawe]

Who doesn't want more or new content in any game?
...
I find it refreshing that Ryzom has the behind-the-sceen tools and offers us a different chance to interact with our world
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I look over the evolution of the past year since the Ryzom servers have been rebooted and I think the progress has been great. More patches in the last year than I recall in any year previous in Ryzom. Considering they bascially had to look at everything from scratch adds time into determining what needs to be fixed, implemented, deleted and where the new path will lead. They have addressed a bit of ALL these issues throughout the last year and it appears they do not plan to stop.

As far as the marketing side, I personally think that they are smart to wait until they feel they have a product that will appeal to and retain the new people coming in. If they do not believe the product is at that point, then they should wait. Just marketing the game will not make people stay, it will only bring them here, the product needs to hold retention value. If what has been said in this post is true (more content), then what will retain the new players? That should be addressed before mass marketing ensues, imo.

Inifuss

Yep Yep, agree with all that, the devs have done more game enhancing patches than any other year so far as i can remember. Its a pretty good start.

The new in-game 'behind-the-sceen tools', including in-game notice boards are very definite content imo. We been asking for ingame news boards/newspapers, and player-created mission boards forever, and these could very nearly give us that.

Its a great beginning to creating these features. Which is content. Not all new content needs to be shiny looking mobs or lands after all, and I doubt that would please many people anyway... Atys needs more homin involvement, more depth, to keep people playing and coming back for more. Can almost say it needs to make better use of what it has already than to make completely new things, but people always like shiny new things too.

The Ring is one of those 'make better use of what it has already' things. I am amazed that we hardly ever see official ryzom ring events, the fact that there isn't _one_ official ring scenario on all the time is baffling...

[browserice]

Then instead of asking the community for behind the game tools help, why not go with something along the line of one of my feedback ideas :

Design a new mob community contest

They could also add other community interests like :

- custom texture community contest
- new NPC/mission community contest
- new land/region community contest
- new story community contest
- and so on ....

The thing about these is that the participants would have to do really good job on them. I mean, present a concept from A to Z (like supplying a mini game MOD content to be added to the game). Something that if chosen, will save the dev alot time to implement because the majority of it had already been designed.

With these kind of concepts, Ryzom would turn out to be a community/dev updated game, new contents would not be entirely from the Devs. The community supply the goods, the dev implements them. I am pretty sure the Devs are pretty busy with code fixes, events to plan and so on. This would speed up the process of getting new game contents.

[seawe]

@browserice, its a good idea and would be awesome. But the main problem is probably that the devs don't have the time to spend going thru alot of player submissions. They would need to hire more devs and testers just to work on the submissions... Small things like new skins might work easily enough, but I think the Ring is the major player-made-content in the near future and it would be nice to see it worked on and given the features it needs to be a substantial aspect of the game.