You will have to excuse me....

[malkor]

I've read through this Thread, and (as usual) find mai-self pulled back and forth, but there are a few things that I'd like to offer up, not so much as points one way or the other, but as food-for-thought:

1) Monthly Fee: This is generally most people's turn-off to MMORPGs, the fact that after you buy a game, you keep paying for it. The way it's made up for is expanded content, and oodles of player interaction and such. EQ and UoL definitly set the stage for how monthly fee's go, and SoR definitly follows suit with that, to a degree.

So here are a few things...
If we're paying a monthly fee, what is it going toward?

Bug fixes? While that's definitly a concern, just about any game you can play has bugs, and there are fixes provided, generally pretty quickly. Ryzom seems to fail here, IMHO. Bugs are just a part of life, we even come to depend on some (ie: stuck mobs blocking respawns, etc). So far as I see, thats a failure of game support, regardless of MMORPG status.

Online play? here again, that's not something that's excusive to MMORPGS, lots of games have online content, and I'm sure many popular ones are quite demanding on servers as well. Granted, games like Ryzom are heavily dependent on servers for information storage, and as I'm ignorant on the details therein, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Still, with games like Guild Wars, which challenge convention in MMORPGs, it's something to keep in mind.

New content? Here is what I think is the crux of Monthly fees. You're paying the dev's to think up new mechanics, and new story archs, etc...or atleast, that's what it seems SHOULD be going on. This is kind of like paying $15 every month for an expanssion pack, along with greater community size, etc. But as has been pointed out, there havn't been new patches in a while, muchless content. Disregarding story input, we arn't seeing many changes in the mechanics of the game, which makes me wonder how much stock the devs are putting into the Outposts, especially when it seem that the community, atleast by the polls i've seen, tends not to favor PvP.

All in all, I started this out planning on providing objective points, but I guess I'm a bit slanted. I'd think most of us have been playing Ryzom for nearing on 6 months, which is atleast worth double the cost of the game. If we're judging on content vs. $, we should have recieved enough content to effectivly double the stage ryzom was at it's release, and so far I don't see it.

I'm involved with 3 different MMORPGs (Ryzom, GW, WoW) and I think each has their strenghts. GW has extensive PvP involvement, WoW has a heavy-basis in interactive quests and a utterly MASSIVE player-base, and ryzom has one of the most advanced skill systems and crafting systems to hit any game.

Mai gripes w/ ryzom are the miserable failures with bug fixes (I've never seen any other games with such persistant, and unattended problems, for God's sake some of these problems have been around since the Beta and would take 2 hours to fix [IE gender in emotes. Take 1 staff-lacky, sit him in a chair, have him manually retype the emotes using "her" instead of "him", block them together, and assign them to female characters. If armor can be designed to know the difference between male and female characters, why the hell are emotes hard to fix?].

Ryzom's first priority needs to be to fix itself as a game, before it worries about being a MMORPG. If I were running a buisness like this, I couldn't justify taking people's money every month when I don't even fix the problems which have been around for half a year. Shape up, please.