Never seen a more terribly unfriendly game

[iceaxe68]

@zuretal:

I sure hope you come back and see all the homins standing around ready to help you. I'm sorry that you got frustrated in the first place, as well. Given the chance, we WILL get you through the rough spots at the start.

@the rest of us:
Let's not pat ourselves on the back too much for being such great and helpful people. Right now we have a great many new recruits experiencing the joys and frustrations of life on Atys for the first time. We should give serious thought to both putting forth extra effort to find people in need of assistance, and to keep Uni chat from becoming "elitist" or in any way negative. This is the future of our homeworld at stake.

[bruare]

I completely agree with the OP. There are a lot of players that would really enjoy Ryzom but do not want to have to publicly ask for help with things they think and expect they should easily be able to figure out themselves.

Having said that. I hope you stick it out. Ryzom is a truely unique and beautiful game well worth playing. And has been said, you can not really hurt your character much by misspending your skill points, you'll recover rather quickly.

I surely hope the new owners will polish up all the missions on Silan so that new players do not find them unneccessarily frustrating. Hard is fine, but frustrating is just nuts.

[numbie]

While I do agree that Silan missions should have a fix, I feel there's another side to "Silan frustration" problem - people not wishing to put even a tiniest effort for completing their quests.
Silan is a pretty small place, and in 15 mins of exploring one can see all the mob species. Well, maybe besides the Weaned Yubo However, the region chat is full on "where are ragus?" type of questions (and btw they always get an answer, kudos to players). There was even a "where are suckling yubos?" one, I swear. Is this a reason to make some pulsating markers on the map now? Or even a small arrow under your char showing where the mobs are (like in the popular WoW addon)?
Looks like the definition of "having fun in a game" has somehow changed, and I'm not there at all.

[elthunim]

While I do agree that Silan missions should have a fix, I feel there's another side to "Silan frustration" problem - people not wishing to put even a tiniest effort for completing their quests.
Silan is a pretty small place, and in 15 mins of exploring one can see all the mob species. Well, maybe besides the Weaned Yubo However, the region chat is full on "where are ragus?" type of questions (and btw they always get an answer, kudos to players). There was even a "where are suckling yubos?" one, I swear. Is this a reason to make some pulsating markers on the map now? Or even a small arrow under your char showing where the mobs are (like in the popular WoW addon)?
Looks like the definition of "having fun in a game" has somehow changed, and I'm not there at all.

I agree. A great part of the fun of being on Silan for me was just being in and discovering a space that was so pretty and immersive. I found some of the first quests were rather long; digging mats behind the camp took a while, but I saw the quick experience gain and kept at it; digging mats in the east took about 5 hours, but I got it and had loads of mats to craft with; none of the other missions were that hard.

I think the bottom line of this whole discussion, though, and most of all for the poster who started the thread, is that Ryzom isn't quest-based, and Silan does give the wrong impression that way. Running the missions is very useful and shows you the ropes quite nicely, I think, and teaches a good bit of general history in the process. But perhaps it needs to be made clearer that all of the choices you make are reversible, that missions on Silan are provided for preliminary training and that Mainland is egalitarian (all skills to all homins, all choices reversible). You really can't flunk a homin.

Another undercurrent in this thread is the question of patience. I think Silan missions, in the way that they force you to be patient and request help, tend to bring out steady and social behavior in newcomers. I believe that Atys isn't for impatient folks, and those that come in asking around for "gold" simply show they have not bothered to understand the game mechanics; I wager that, in most cases, they find a homin(ette) that will have the patience to explain that to them. Silan region chat has been very good in that respect, too. And that's what makes the community.

[kay22626]

Zuretal, be patient and read all the quest text and pop-up explanation windows very carefully. They DO explain everything with decent detail.
The only serious problem on Silan is the fact you dont have a log where you can read the quest text again.
Yes the game is hard to get into but it pays off.
Dont worry about the skillpoints you spent, they're not wasted. You actually cant waste skillpoints.

[varanis]

The Silan area needs a lot of polish. The starting area questlines are detailed in a Beginner's Guide courtesy of mjoll. That thread also notes various inconsistent or just plain inaccurate mission text.

For example:

"In the service of people #1" is meant to introduce players to the concept of mob weaknesses, and describes using Rot to kill Peaceful Slaveni (plants) that are in the Ruins of Silan. But the mission text takes creative liberties with the actual requirements: (1) learn Rot 1, (2) visit Ruins of Silan, and then (3) kill 15 Peaceful Slaveni -- that aren't in the area named Ruins of Silan, but the similarly named area east of it. But don't go too far east, because even though Peaceful Slaveni populate the entire meadow, only kills made on the side closest to the ruins count. Oh, and you don't actually need to use the Rot spell.

The missions are full of this kind of loose scripting and misleading text. There's so much noise, the real signal -- Rot is strong versus plants! -- is completely lost.

Frustrated players end up shotgunning /r and /u with Where's Mankrik style questions, and receive responses like kay22626's: Read Better. Pointing out obvious lazy player issues is one thing, but defending lazy dev quirks will tend to weed out players who are in Ryzom to actually have fun, RP, and generally hang out. Over time the casual folks will wander off, leaving two types: those who get into arguments on /u, and those who dig down to really nitpick the problems in place only to make really long forum posts (*cough*). That's not really encouraging the social networking metagame.

New players desperately want to love their new home on Atys and learn the Ryzom mechanics, but are presented with a pile of bizarre bugs (kitin lol) that have been around for over two years. I'm not asking why things are still broken, I'm saying they need to be worked on, quickly and thoroughly. With any luck, two years' worth of trouble tickets have been saved in a database somewhere instead of just hitting the circular file between owners, but a couple of quick runthroughs would at least be able to hit the high points for immediate fixing.

[acridiel]

Very good points there
Thanks for "unearthing" them.

CU
Acridiel