Ryzom

naib73 wrote:Well to be honest.. i hate SOE myself more then you prolly. But a startup company from germany with no expierence in the MMORPG market.. thats even more worse then seeing Ryzom going into SOE hands thats all i am saying. Well its time to move on when the news with gameforge become true thats all i can say...

Edit: It would have been better to see this game going to the folks from ryzom.org then this gameforge thing.

Well there is no offical news about who is taking over yet so it's a wait and see.

but I'd take one man in his garage over SoE, at least he'd leave the game alone instead of the changes SoE would inflict on Ryzom trying to turn it into a kill and loot game. At least gameforge would have good intentions, I'll take that any day over SoE and their experiance in the market.

I have only very recently joined Ryzom, and am so impressed that I hope to become a member regardless of what happens with its distribution. I do want to say though that (at least as a new player), I am crossing my fingers and hoping that my subscription fee will be going towards an organization which is entirely dedicated to the quality and ongoing development of the game rather than a small company whose primary goal is profit.

Having read back over some of the posts, it is clear that Nevrax have set an excellent standard in community support, but I'm not sure that is a common thing. Certainly some of the known and unknown companies recently mentioned don't inspire much confidence. For me, I would prefer to see Ryzom in the hands of a group who have the best interests of the game as their number one priority. I'm really quite surprised to see the fervour with which the established playerbase resists the open and transparent model being presented, but I know there are a lot of difficult issues to be addressed should this groundbreaking event go ahead.

Anyway, I'm very relieved to see the passion of the community in general, and it looks like the players will be able to keep Ryzom as wonderful as it is now - either explicitly by uniting together in the Ryzom.org community effort, or implicitly by standing up to detrimental changes proposed to suit competing commercial interests. I know I'm just a newbie, but whatever happens, I'm looking forward to being part of it!

avaeran wrote:Certainly some of the known and unknown companies recently mentioned don't inspire much confidence.

That is normal, people are expressing their fears, mainly. I have heard good rumours regarding a very big company with no experience in MMO, what could be very good, but that are only rumours, and probably inventions. It's true that the only know side is ryzom.org, and yeah, it could look good in side with this little comapy before mentioned or SoE, but I really prefer some other compay like Turbine (Sometimes make it very good, and they always give a very good service).

ashling wrote: at least he'd leave the game alone

unfortunately a static game would probably do more damage then turning it into something else hehe

static games dont tend to gain much ground, but they do loose ground. I was reading an article on games the other night about classification of them. It spoke of games created for end game and games created for levelling that leave out the endgame. From what I can see ryzom is a levelling game with a weak end game (you hit a wall once you reach 250 which takes awhile due to the skill tree set up but it happens never-the-less) anyhow the new company has to do a lot of worrying about end game in order to retain its present customer base and gain new ones (and keep them as well) that is the stage that ryzom is at and appears to be where it fails at the present.

In early years you worry about the levelling up part (that's been done) as the game matures you have to worry about the end game (from what I have been reading and from what I am being told this has not been done well so boredom starts and people say bye). This particular game has a solid community so they stuck together quite awhile once they master it all, but in the end expensive chat rooms are just that and then people move on.

I'm not sure a single person or small group can make decent end game PLUS keep the rest of the game running and update stuff like graphics etc etc. Since I do play other smaller games with communities only numbering 2k the problem always lies in manpower at the end. They simply cannot keep up with the demand for new content. I'm in a game presently that is showing these symptoms. IN this case he didn't sell his sole to make the game and the game does well financially but the staff is small (very small) and the result is lack of manpower to keep up with hundreds of people devouring content at light speed .. (which to be honest is what most people do hehe)

Anyhow so in conclusion I think the company that takes this on has a whole lot to worry about and do
-create a good endgame
-repair any bugs that may have been missed
-hopefully retain and finish items like the encyclopedia (probably will get tossed though..)
-keep the graphics up to snuff (create a newer engine for the future etc)
-run servers keep them up 24/7 keep the paying customers happy also 24/7

its a lot of work and requires more then a couple or even a small handful of people to do it well and properly.

Excellent writing ummax.

You managed to nail it head-on. Could you please pass on a reference to the article you mention?

Anissa wrote:Hehe thanks there are many, some of them have already been partially answered, but here they go:

OMG Anissa I'm starting to regret this lol. I'll have to ask the community to help me answer these questions (will respond ASAP).

ummax wrote:unfortunately a static game would probably do more damage then turning it into something else hehe

static games dont tend to gain much ground, but they do loose ground. I was reading an article on games the other night about classification of them. It spoke of games created for end game and games created for levelling that leave out the endgame. From what I can see ryzom is a levelling game with a weak end game (you hit a wall once you reach 250 which takes awhile due to the skill tree set up but it happens never-the-less) anyhow the new company has to do a lot of worrying about end game in order to retain its present customer base and gain new ones (and keep them as well) that is the stage that ryzom is at and appears to be where it fails at the present.

In early years you worry about the levelling up part (that's been done) as the game matures you have to worry about the end game (from what I have been reading and from what I am being told this has not been done well so boredom starts and people say bye). This particular game has a solid community so they stuck together quite awhile once they master it all, but in the end expensive chat rooms are just that and then people move on.

I'm not sure a single person or small group can make decent end game PLUS keep the rest of the game running and update stuff like graphics etc etc. Since I do play other smaller games with communities only numbering 2k the problem always lies in manpower at the end. They simply cannot keep up with the demand for new content. I'm in a game presently that is showing these symptoms. IN this case he didn't sell his sole to make the game and the game does well financially but the staff is small (very small) and the result is lack of manpower to keep up with hundreds of people devouring content at light speed .. (which to be honest is what most people do hehe)

Anyhow so in conclusion I think the company that takes this on has a whole lot to worry about and do
-create a good endgame
-repair any bugs that may have been missed
-hopefully retain and finish items like the encyclopedia (probably will get tossed though..)
-keep the graphics up to snuff (create a newer engine for the future etc)
-run servers keep them up 24/7 keep the paying customers happy also 24/7

its a lot of work and requires more then a couple or even a small handful of people to do it well and properly.

Normaly I'd agree with all that ummax but after being a SWG player I've seen that there is indeed something worse then stagnation for a game ..... I'll admit SoE is an extreme example though

why do all u guys need to bash Soe constantly?

tr808 wrote:why do all u guys need to bash Soe constantly?

Well, well i'm not a former star wars galaxies (SWG) player, sony (the owner of SWG) damaged the game pretty badly a year or so ago. It was a semi-mature, not necessarily new player friendly (similar to ryzom from what i hear) kind of game, with many many classes.

Basically what sony did was release what they called the NGE (new game enhancements) which were supposed to be a fantasic update, but turned out totally destroying and remaking the current game. The cut the number of classes down from many to 12 or so from what i hear, and the previously near impossible to obtain class of Jedi was made significantly easier to obtain so that most could reach that level from what i know. They probably did all sorts of other things to the game, but since i wasnt there, i dont really know.

Their intention was to make it a user friendly experience in hopes to draw new players to a game that was getting long in the tooth, what they essentially did was alienate and force out all/most of their existing playerbase at the time effectively ******* the entire game for older players pre-NGE. Thats sony from a SWG perspective.

As a former EQ/EQ2 player however, i personally see a large company such as sony, as one of the better options for ryzom. I had no problem with sony's handling (for the most part) of those games. They have a large art department, as well as programming pool to draw from to support games, both of which nevrax appears to have neither.

EQ2 has bugs fixed promptly, and major updates monthly, with smaller patches weekly/bi-weekly. I seriously think that sony has learned its lesson from star wars, they have bought matrix online as well, which was in a similar place as ryzom a year or so back, and it seems to at the very least survived intact and is at least alive and kicking, with relatively better success since being bought out. I would assume that Matrix online would be a better thing to compare how they would treat Ryzom than comparing it to SWG, but thats just my take on it.

If what we want is for ryzom to stay the same, then yea, a small company would do fine, ryzom.org also, but without more resourses than nevrax had, they probably wouldnt have any better luck i wouldnt assume. Without better graphics updates, new content, and regular updates patches, the player base will continue to die out slowly over time.

At least with a company with SOME money to spend on developing the game, we have some sort of chance for improvement. Sony may not be the ideal candidate for this in manys eyes, but it'd be hard to think of a more likely company to be able to fulfill all these "wishes" that we write about endlessly in other threads.

fattus wrote:Excellent writing ummax.

You managed to nail it head-on. Could you please pass on a reference to the article you mention?

heh sure i can send you the link it actualy uses another game as a comparison but it applies to a lot of games