As for the gathering over the weekend,i wasn't invited,am i sad? no. I find Ryzom for me something quite special. It's not world of warcraft,running from mission to mission,it's not guild wars where everything is instanced. What i find Ryzom to be is, a mmoRPG,i don't PLAY ryzom doing missions to get xp becouse thats all there is to do, in fact you could proberly count the amount of missions i have done on one hand,what i find that happens is that i exist in Ryzom, I set my own goals,i decide what i have to do. Some nights my guildies just want to level and whilst we do that we chat on other occasions i will have a wander and basicaly do nothing but stroll and chat,stopping here and there to do a bit of harvesting (have you ever know anything so therapeutic).
Am I a roleplayer?,no i am not,but i do appreciate the efforts that the CSR/devs do to try and bring this game alive. I know of no other game where i have had so much interaction with the guides in an event or through customer support,hell i have played WOW,EQ2,city of heros,Guildwars to name a few and i haven't seen 1 member of their csr team in game at all.
Now the point I'm trying to make is there are going to be things that happen that we have not come across before,not something radically new,but just done differently to other mmorpgs,to my mind an event is unfolding and maybee Jena is coming,a war could be brewing and in the roleplaying context as in real life a secret meeting was held,it wasn't a huge event with exclusive content,but a meeting to relay a message,to create a buzz, and to stay in character. All we homins can do is see how it pans out,catch the wave and ride it.
Am i a fanboy? (my god just read this back, how many questions am i going to ask myself

so before we all go crazy.lets just wait and see,if it all goes wrong flame the boards
(sorry for any spelling mistakes and grammer,i'm a crap writer,hence the amount of post i have done)