Badly Designed newb area!

[katriell]

So is this game 90% grinding exp like the old EQ style?

Read the quote in my signature. ^_^

Grinding = working.
"Quests" = getting groceries.

You normally do more than those two activities in life, so presumably there's more to a deep game like Ryzom as well.

[xenofur]

jenna, while i agree that, gameplay-wise, there are LOTS of quest, it's safer to say that there are not, because the average mmorpg gamer will not recognize them as quests, because what they are used to differs wildly from what is in ryzom.

[mugendo]

Why don’t I start there with some info on picking a path?

You just need to..............


Follow the Yellow brick road

http://thewizardofoz.warnerbros.com/

and welcome to Atys Jamesl, it's a lot to learn. But it's worth the effort.

[mithur]

Yep

If you find out you want something you don't have, get a few more levels and train it. There are enough skill points in the game to learn all skills, eventually.

For all I've heard, that's true except for crafting. Yo haven't enought skill points for all crafting stanzas, I think.

But you can worry about that when you be a 150lvl crafter. Then the question: I have the Matis armour branch... do I take the Zora branch too? could be a very good one. But at your level, any choice you do, will be a good choice.

[sehracii]

For all I've heard, that's true except for crafting. Yo haven't enought skill points for all crafting stanzas, I think.

There are enough points in crafting as well. In theory.
It jsut takes much much much longer to get enough. You'll want to be more careful where you spend the ones you have, as opposed to other skills.

[mithur]

jenna, while i agree that, gameplay-wise, there are LOTS of quest, it's safer to say that there are not, because the average mmorpg gamer will not recognize them as quests, because what they are used to differs wildly from what is in ryzom.

When I first come to mainland I thought that there aren't quest. I though then that I have to hunt, explore... but then I find a damn lot of quest. For fame or story it's the same... the point is that you ahve a path for start, and things to do.

And, I think, that's the main point. Even so, I think that for newbs in mainland could be very helpfull a city/village base system to give him a identity (City guards, city scouts, city foragers, city hunters, with prestige an titles for them, and even some invasions that long short time in a timely basis -the city guards and hunters repel the invasions, and the city scouts have the mission to find (sometimes foraging, sometimes going to places and cleaning it) the exact time for the next invasion.

Damn. I'm dreaming again

[sophi459]

i think the starting area is good ive played for 5 mins and im owning

[sluggo0]

I too was worried about not having enough skill points but a Seracii has said there are enough points to get all of the skills as a matter of fact from what I've heard there are more skill points than skills! So no worries and have fun

Yup, I haven't been able to find anything to spend magic skill points on (at least all of them in one go) for over half a year, and I still have room to grow in some of the branches, by the time I've mastered all four branches of magic, I'll have something like 500(or more) extra skill points to spend in magic, and other skill trees are similar.

Crafting is arguably more stingy than other areas, but even there, you just go and craft a different sort of 'thing' and you get rewarded with 1000's of skill points easily. In fact, once your dig is high enough (>150), you can easily generate well over 1000 skill points in crafting in only about 4 hours just by doing something you had kept fairly low until then.

There is NO way to gimp a character here, there's ways to make progress challenging, but Ryzom is not for people that want to be lead by the nose, you'll just get too bored, 60 levels in a straight line vs a branched and varied 250, well you can easily figure out why WoW appeals to those with milli-second attention spans and Ryzom does not.

I made some less than optimal choices in Harvest in the beginning, but through the help of my guild mates finding me new gear far more often than was 'normal' and a little help from OP flowers and doing careplanning for friends, I managed to fix the mistake, and even enjoyed doing so. Plus, I spend countless hours interacting with and thereby bonding more with my guildies.. . How CAN you even do that in a game about epic loot and cookie cutter quests?? It's not possible in my opinion

[gretchen]

People are coming from games where the quests give you a long stream of armor, weapon and gear upgrades. Fair to say there are a lot of quests but for profit, fame and fun. Of course you can use that profit to buy gear...

It may not be evident when just starting how many skillpoints you will eventually be working with. Someone told me that the cost of skills doesn't just keep exponentially growing, that's good to know.

If you look at the starting Skills window and you see 20 potential levels in 4 main skill branches, people may do the easy math and say, wait, I can only get 20x4x10 skillpoints. But these 4 areas branch again and again all offering more levels to gain so it really adds up from what I'm told.

My only concern is the crafting tree, I heard it was a bit tighter but only after I had already bought some stat upgrades and fast running from the crafter trainer but if I understand correctly, the most you can really do to yourself is increase some temporary grinding to get the points you need to advance, because you will have to spend longer say, making quality 20 items instead of advancing to the greater xp of quality 30 items, because you can't afford the upgrade yet.

Soooo....

If you can only get specialized racial patterns from each racial city, does that mean that if you potentially get enough negative fame with the opposite allied races that you can't enter their cities, and can't buy at their merchants?

So if you want to be able to make diverse racial goods, it's a good idea to stay close to midrange famewise? So no one hates you too much?

[sluggo0]

My only concern is the crafting tree, I heard it was a bit tighter but only after I had already bought some stat upgrades and fast running from the crafter trainer but if I understand correctly, the most you can really do to yourself is increase some temporary grinding to get the points you need to advance, because you will have to spend longer say, making quality 20 items instead of advancing to the greater xp of quality 30 items, because you can't afford the upgrade yet.

Crafting is not that terrible, except its' the hardest one at first. It's possible the most optimal method is to simply make one item, and keep upgrading it's Q plus it's 'grade' (basic plan, medium quality plan, and high quality plan), every chance you can, saving your skill points.

But that's BOORING! .

The basic premise is that instead of buying 'other stuff', upgrade the q level and the best 'grade' plan you can immediately that it becomes available to you, or you will get poor XP for your efforts.

As an example, after level 180 in amps, it was taking me nearly 2 bags of amber (800), 1 bag of fiber(400), and 1+(500ish) bags of bark to gain a couple levels in an evening (maybe 3 or 4).

If I had not bothered to buy the Q upgrade when it became available I'd get about 2/3 or 1/2 the XP, so take those numbers and start multiplying .

Soooo....

If you can only get specialized racial patterns from each racial city, does that mean that if you potentially get enough negative fame with the opposite allied races that you can't enter their cities, and can't buy at their merchants?

So if you want to be able to make diverse racial goods, it's a good idea to stay close to midrange famewise? So no one hates you too much?

Your fame does not affect your ability to enter cities. It affects how well you can sell your goods for dappers with that race, so if you don't have high fame, don't sell your wares there.

Even with Spires as they were conceived a while ago anyhow (they may be redesigning them soon), the cities and the TP's near them for both factions will always be available, no matter what spire is there, so I expect that Nevrax won't nerf crafters or mages (which also have racial plans) or even harvesters, who need to get specs for the lands they dig, as a result of the 'faction war' .