Ani, as always, your posts are well written and right on the money
Ryzom was my first MMO and one that I played for close to 2 years without considering another game. However, since leaving Ryzom, I've often reflected on how broken the end-game aspect of Ryzom was.
A little something I wrote on the Kami Alliance forums a while back
The other option is that the game is revamped and retooled to gain new players. As it exists now, Ryzom is a dig and grind game. I've played grind games (Silk Road, RF Online to name a few) and they aren't much fun. They're even less fun when there isn't anything to do with the skills you've ground up. To use the games I mentioned before, in Silk Road you could pick a profession and go run merchant runs/protect merchants/raid caravans. For RF Online there were Chip Wars to control the rich resources of the mines. In Ryzom, we have OP wars. These can be fun for sure, but the grind requirements for OP wars make end-game all the more boring. To do well in an OP war you need: 250 melee for hp, 250 nuke for dmg, 200+ heals to heal those around you. Those are minimum for doing well. Infinity's core team had about 10 of us with 250 melee/nuke/heal, if not more... and if you want that extra edge over people, you level DA for the fear. Thats a whole lot of grinding that doesn't leave a whole lot to do with yourself end-game.
To further make the matter worse, its not like you can log on at any time and go to an OP war.
Bored?
go dig.
doesn't interest you? well, I suppose you can go work daggers?
no? ok... well... uh... bosses maybe? not up huh? hm....
you can see the issue here... If you're tired of grinding, what is there to do. Trek, be social, count the freaking flies flying around a lamp. sure, but it won't keep players around. Let me give you an example from WoW (yes, its WoW, but both me and Praha have had many a discussion on why this is why we keep playing WoW). You log in to game, but don't feel like leveling. With a quick visit to your home town you can go join a battleground (6 in total, all with varying goals from capture the flag to killing the opposing factions leader (a boss like NPC with guards)).
Don't want to PvP? fine. Offer your wares in the trade channel. Go complete some daily quests to earn reputation and some cash. Run a dungeon with 5 people. Run a raid with 10 or 25 people. Work on your accomplishments by exploring the land, petting animals, eating various foods, etc. Go level Fishing.
And doing each of these activities has its own rewards associated with them. Earning reputation gains you new crafting plans, discounts when buying from people of that reputation, and gear. PvP has its own gear focused on PvP. Raids have better loot that can be found with 5 man dungeons. Accomplishments are a boasting point and you can right click on people to compare your accomplishments to theirs.
My point here is that within 5 minutes of logging in, I can be off doing something that I enjoy and find entertaining. Once I'm bored of it, I can go do something else. Ryzom doesn't really have that. If you don't want to grind anything, you don't have much to do. and the numerous flaws in the game make this even harder. Ring is crap. there are no pvp battlegrounds and the pvp areas we do have are rarely used. etc.
My point was pretty obvious: there isn't a whole lot to do end-game, save leveling a new skill.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed helping other players and I was always up for a trek, but if all that I did was trek people around and help newbies, then that would have become old and boring as well. In order to keep people playing the game, there needs to be a variety of different things players can do.
One thing that WoW did right was distinguish between pvp and pve content. PvPers had their own gear that they earned through pvp. PvEers earned their gear through pve. In Ryzom, to be good at PvP, you have to know the right people or spend your entire life camping mats so that you can make the right resist jewels or amps or whatever. Its a flawed system. The bosses themselves are flawed as well. SWG and WoW have them right. They're all in an instance which has a lock out timer. You go in, kill it, you can't touch that boss for a week, 4 days, or however long the lock out is. That way everyone has the chance at getting those mats and doesn't have to invest their life in camping the boss or digging thousands of mats to get the mats off the person who did camp it. Will gear be easier to get? sure. Will it break the game? Not a chance. Boosting amazing gear will actually be a viable option. To make the best HA in-game, it took Infinity about a years worth of collecting mats. One year. for one and a half sets of heavy armor. And its not like that armor won't break either. and you can guess that it won't last that year that I'd need to gather the mats together again either. Flawed system? you betcha.
The main issue in my mind is that Ryzom was never finished. For the 2 days I logged in when Ryzom went F2P, I saw lots of jokes from old timers (myself included) about how Ryzom was still in Beta. And, really, it is. The game was never finished. All the elements that were broken and incomplete when I started playing ('05) and still broken and incomplete. There is no end-game content, encyclopedia is still fubar'd, server resets still reset mats, no marketing for the game, development is slower than a glaciers movement, low population/high player turnover, etc. The list can go on and on. There was a player competition a long time ago about what Ryzom meant to all of us. My entry into it was that Ryzom was an idea and nothing more. Its a glorious idea of players with children, deep and enveloping lore, races and religions, war and salvation. But none of that was ever made into a game that came close to what we all wanted to see. Instead, we're left with a game thats barely a whisper of what could have been.
Edit: I'm sure some RPer or fanboi will jump in here and tell me 'you've not done everything' or that 'I create my own content' or something equally as lame. You're right... I haven't sat around and chased yubo or counted the flies in the dyron lamps. You know why? because if I wanted to do stupid stuff like that, I'd go outside and count the REAL flies flying around a REAL lamp. You know why I don't? its boring. And I don't know anyone who would pay to do that. How many movies have you seen where all they showed you were some flies buzzing around a lightbulb? Perhaps a broadway hit named "Varinx Spots! Can you Count em?"? hm... wonder why... Theres plenty of room for RPers at the moment (specially if they bring back the lore) so how about actually admitting there isn't anything for the other folks to do?
) LOLZ Val *hugs* 
so even if I've been pretty much everywhere by now I still love running around Atys, either on my own or with guildies and newbies messing around and getting us dp 