My thoughts on what Ryzom will become

[browserice]

If I were a company who baught a game that just went bankrupt, I think my first priority would be to analyse why did it go bankrupt and then analyse the game in its current state to see if sustained as its is for 1-5 years would actualy bring profits or not.

Why would a company buy a game that went bankrupt unless they intend to change things to not have history repeat itself. That would be a very bad investment and stupid. Why revive something and not change anything if you suspect it will die again.

No, they have to think about it and plan what needs to be done to make a profit. Any company's purpose is to make profit.

They know there is a pool of loyal players who are willing to get back to it. They must also know others left. They must calculate if the current pool of players is enough to sustain a decent development process for months/years. If not, they must analyse how to attract new players. You cannot invest into a product and pay for everything out of your pocket. You have to sustain a certain amount of income to help finance the whole product evolution process.

So that is why I believe whomever baught Ryzom has to analyse the situation and WILL make changes. They might decide at the very beginning to bring back Ryzom as it is right now to have a pool of players and that way, starting brining a bit of profit. But then after a few months, start bringing in changes into the game.

Ryzom is in a class of its own. It cannot be compared to others like WOW or the WOW-clones. So they will also have to analyse if they are ready to risk keeping Ryzom in its own class or start creating changes to attract players of other MMORPG. After all, if the majority of the MMORPG players are playing games that are different then Ryzom and by a very big margin, then wouldn't you as a company want to attract players of those other classes by adding similar game process as those to increase your pool of players, and therefore increase your income ? You cannot sustain a game that is in a class of its own if the amount of players isn't enough to have enough income to give you profit AND to pay for a constant development process.

Saying this, I am expecting to see Ryzom change a bit to be more like the rest of the MMORPG games out there. But I am still willing to play it because there will still be a part of Ryzom that will attract me.

[ajsuk]

deja vu? I hope not.

I hope what you say comes true, but we all thought the same when Gameforge took over and absolutely nothing changed at all. =(

It's all speculation at this point of course with the new owners keeping schtum, but it's not looking good so far from my viewpoint.

[zangan]

I believe the low population of the game was more from lack of advertising than anything. Other things of course played a role, but if they would instead of spending money trying to change features and just advertised a bit more, the population would grow and they'd have more funds to do the changes then. Thats just my personal speculation, but I think if they really want to revive it, it should start with advertising.

[gcaldani]

Well, my answer is here:

http://forums.ryzom.com/showpost.php?p=434687&postcount=9

I'm not against more quests in game, but i will be against a change that would turn Ryzom an item-centric game, making quests mandatory to get the good items and loosing the power and satisfaction to be a crafter.

That's just some. You said truth, you cannot compare Ryzom to most other game, because Ryzom is *sandbox*. I think changing it to a quest-based game need a lot more work than adding the features it needs to be enjoyable by a bigger community: customizables, more stanzas, more automated (triggered) events and such...

And Ryzom got raids: we have 4 NPC raids, many other mmo just have ONE raid; add kitin nests and we have even more raids;

And Ryzom got pvp: many other games, need specific servers to serve the pvp needs, splitting the community. Ryzom have *all* kind of pvp all in one and it really depends on players politics and not just mechanics; and the pvp don't waste the pve aspect.

And Ryzom got invasions: something unique, much bigger than a single raid, something that *if* new players get the chance to see and 'live', it can turn them as true fans.

If the owners will change the original concept it will be no more Ryzom, I could just go playing any other game or maybe add myself to the bunch of peeps that still waiting for a skill-based, sandbox game.

[ajsuk]

I believe the low population of the game was more from lack of advertising than anything. Other things of course played a role, but if they would instead of spending money trying to change features and just advertised a bit more, the population would grow and they'd have more funds to do the changes then. Thats just my personal speculation, but I think if they really want to revive it, it should start with advertising.

^^ Give the man a prize! And for Jena's sake, listen to him.

[bruare]

Just the liquidation this time should clear up a lot of the financial problems of Ryzom.
The first liquidation saddled GF with too much overhead as the French courts put a premium on saving jobs.
This time there are no employees that have to be kept on.
So the new owners just have to evaluate how large a workforce the game can support.
If Ryzom doesn't have enough paying customers to pay for servers, subscription collection services, and 1 or 2 salaries -- well guess it doesn't look good.
Otherwise given time Ryzom should be able to survive and personally I think thrive. Heck Istaria is financially sound and imo not even close to Ryzom's class of game.

[arfindel]

If I were a company who baught a game that just went bankrupt, I think my first priority would be to analyse why did it go bankrupt [...]

I rather think that this process should be a little ...vice versa in terms of time axis.
So, I want to buy a bankrupt game I first analyse why did it go bankrupt and then buy. If I throw the money first and then stop to analyse, well... let's say the risks are pretty high

So if somebody decided his company will pay X hundred thousands for a game then they did it with a plan. The plan could be have Ryzom alive, have Ryzom2 alive (as you imply further) or use parts of it into a totally different game. And these possibilities can be either exclusive, or on an "if" branch: if Ryzom becomes profitable then develop, else develop Ryzom2 etc.
But that has been decided before signing a contract and giving the money away.

If it's a company. If it's just a person or two who had these money available then emotional reasons might be implied and we cannot infere anything.

Ryzom is in a class of its own. It cannot be compared to others like WOW or the WOW-clones. So they will also have to analyse if they are ready to risk keeping Ryzom in its own class or start creating changes to attract players of other MMORPG. After all, if the majority of the MMORPG players are playing games that are different then Ryzom and by a very big margin, then wouldn't you as a company want to attract players of those other classes by adding similar game process as those to increase your pool of players, and therefore increase your income ? You cannot sustain a game that is in a class of its own if the amount of players isn't enough to have enough income to give you profit AND to pay for a constant development process.

Sorry to contradict a little, Ryzom is not a class on its own. SWG, Horizons, part of AC are just some examples that come to mind. It is not WoW class, this doesn't mean it addresses masses of people... at this precise time (I'l come back to this last thing). Anyway to equal not being same class with WoW to being its own singular class is extreme, and probably not well informed.

Ryzom can be made pay to play, can be made quest based, can be pvp dedicated. True. All these receipes seemed to work elsewhere. But can Ryzom be revamped to successfully work as any of these things? I doubt.

Let's have a closer look:
- Ryzom is not small, it is tiny compared to WoW, LotrO, Eve and the sort.
Make it fast-easy-fast, reward quests with levels and most population will be 2 250 in a month. What happens for the average player who gets two masters? Generally he pays another month till he hunts all bosses, then... the end.
Quest driven advancement works in big games with large masses of land and mainly with raidable dungeons that give fun to the people who finish fast their quests sequels. Remember average WoW player might be shallow but he's skilled and clever when it comes to getting levels.

- Ryzom doesn't have a good pve system. While migrations and conflict between mobs are amazing, you seldom have any reason to go hunt, hunt for itself. Developping a new pve system is a huge team work mainly on a ready made game, more or less documented. Revamping the pve is certainly a desideratum but it's a years work.

- Go and have a look to the pvp thread now. The teams are broken. The lag in wars unbearable. A ton of skills are unusable (ask the meleers), the animation in close combat poor. More important the faction system is too complicated for the average WoW player who needs pvp in a 1/0 equation. What chance would you give a pvp dedicated Ryzom against the new modern AoC? Leave alone the other games. Ancient SWG was much better at it whatever disbalanced it was.

The idea is yes you can follow an existant receipe but you'll be successful if 1. have a big capital, 2. start from the scratch. Ryzom is already meant in a certain way and there are serious doubts its current owners have the industrial power of Sony.

I invite you to treat Ryzom as it were your kid in this respect. You love it but you have open eyes to see its limitations, he may do a great lawyer but you cannot reasonably dream he wins the olympic games. You can, nevertheless, force him to strive for the gymnastics....

Besides it has been done before. SWG went fps and lost most player base, more than that when in a year or so they acknowledged they were mistaken and re-introduced part of the stuff erased... guess what, the player base didn't come back running and servers went still empty.
It has been done before in Ryzom itself. The island, the new one, gave the impression the game is quest based. Guess what, when the players saw what is it all about, all who fit in WoW class left.

Pay to play is a successful system in games where competition is fierce. Everybody plays "for free" intially, but ambition makes people start paying. Now what so strong competition can one create in Ryzom as to open the purses? Ryzom, like all games in its class is a place to be not a race to win. Whoever will prefer to pay for his skills will grow fast bored of the game and again leave (and not pay anymore of course).

To lure a wrong player base might be more costly than having a very small one growing a a very low rate. Some players will leave just because their friends leave, so with the WOW type player you'll lose a percentage of the Ryzom genuine customers.

I said I'll come back to the majority thing. While Ryzom (same as old SWG and AC and Horizons) addresses a different population it might not be so small as it seems. How long have been the MMOs on the market? 96-97?
That's 10 years. Who was playing MMOs when WoW was released? People from say 7 to 25 years old in average. What happened to them? The oldest are 35. As education and age itself evolved, these people might want less easy games, because what is easy in 2008 was not so easy in 1997, because the knowledge base increased tremendously, because instruments like Google and Wikipedia induce permanently change in population, and because people learned well the skills to level up fast any game available.

Let's take another segment of population. Who worked with computers in 97? They were freshly introduced in american universities, right? People of 40-70 years in a large majority had no idea how a mouse works. What happened with all these people in these 10 years? Well it happened that they jump from their bed to the email to see what's new, among many other subtle changes *

At 40-50 a big segment of the population has some free time. The wife/husband generally is the same for some good years, no need to reconquer, kids are on their feet, job generally is stable (and starts to be boring too). The other segment, 60-70 years old, get slowly retired so they have even more spare time. Loneliness advances as well, we constantly lose friends who go live elsewhere, who can be reached exclusively over the internet, and, unfortunately, who also die. The need for community is growing.

So we talking about a potential market of half the age range available. These people might go in quests, no doubt, and be happy, but let's not forget quests are not infinite. No joy repeating any of them and raids are a problem for anyone with a job. This area of age generally appreciates politenes and fairness, too aggressive pvp environment might make them leave; contrary to the teens, they had their fair share of RL aggressiveness to ask a game to provide a better life, be it virtual.

They have vivid minds, a lot of time underemployed because modern world only seldom asks you to stay challenged 24/7. If MMOs cannot challenge them they will go play bridge, go, name it. And here Ryzom can boast to offer probably the most.

So to resume a long story short: the MMO industry is newborn, the public is growing up and Ryzom failed mainly because it was released about 3-5 years too early for the market.

Changes are of course required, be it only because Ryzom is an old game, and here you're completely right. But I pray they won't repeat the mistake to change the chore of the game. It won't bring more players for more than a month or two but it might make the slowly growing player base to leave.

* I have the example of at least two people 71 and 80 - none with any knowledge about the PC, none, nada, nothing. Living both in Romania, where the pressure to learn PC is not so hard on seniors. They are CRAZY over the internet. The 71 one is daily writing on blogs and newspapers, she loves politics, the 80 one is fishing, playing all games he can put hand on and interconnected in big spam pps networks of friends. If the connection drops they go awry, panic, disaster etc etc
** I came back to this message and corrected it a bit, I was writing at 2 am when my brain was a little lousy (not sure if it was the hour or the Bloody Mary teehee).

[acridiel]

So what, Browserice?

Its all been said before and while I agree with you, why open a new topic for it when several other threads already discuss this?

My answer can be read over here.
http://forums.ryzom.com/showpost.php?p= ... stcount=35

CU
Acridiel

[acridiel]

- Go and have a look to the pvp thread now. The teams are broken. The lag in wars unbearable. A ton of skills are unusable (ask the meleers), the animation in close combat poor. What chance would you give a pvp dedicated Ryzom against the new modern AoC? Leave alone the other games. Ancient SWG was much better at it whatever disbalanced it was.

Sorry to go offtopic here, but what??? 0ô
Did any of those stating these conditions check their system specks lately?
I nearly never experienced any lag in PvP infested areas, even if 200 and more people were present. I never saw "poor animations" in close quarters.
Compared to other games animations Ryzoms are a feast to the eye. Just look at LotRos Toons doing one and the same move with whatever weapon they´ve got equipped!
I wish they had something like Ryzoms "dagger-fight-dance".
Some people realy should check their priorities, least of all their realities here it seems. *sigh* A bit more RAM can do wonders on performance, even in Ryzoms "old" engine, witch btw. was made to reduce quality a bit, to fit these masses of players on screen, regarding the systems power.

NeL engine features

Ryzom was built using Nevrax's NeL engine. Its features include:

* Dynamic model degradation: Model quality and polygon count lowers as more entities appear on the screen, allowing several hundred entities rendered at once for massive combats. Fully customizable settings allow this feature to improve as hardware does.
* Dynamic terrain degradation: Terrain polygon complexity lowers as the maximum polygon count is approached.

So, if you want "better" models in fights, should they throw the engine overboard, to reduce the number of present players?

CU
Acridiel

[gcaldani]

Sorry to go offtopic here, but what??? 0ô
Did any of those stating these conditions check their system specks lately?
I nearly never experienced any lag in PvP infested areas, even if 200 and more people were present. I never saw "poor animations" in close quarters.
Compared to other games animations Ryzoms are a feast to the eye. Just look at LotRos Toons doing one and the same move with whatever weapon they´ve got equipped!
I wish they had something like Ryzoms "dagger-fight-dance".
Some people realy should check their priorities, least of all their realities here it seems. *sigh* A bit more RAM can do wonders on performance, even in Ryzoms "old" engine, witch btw. was made to reduce quality a bit, to fit these masses of players on screen, regarding the systems power.

CU
Acridiel

I agree, i never got bad lag (during normal game time, ofc, not the painful last days) even during big OP battles. Animations in Ryzom are smooth and fun to watch. And in 2005 my pc was a lot worse than my actual.
I was always surprised of how good was the performance of the game, with so many entities around (you have to count the mobs too). Maybe only the spawn at FH altar was a bit slowly, just because the game got so many npc to render around... nothing too bad anyway.

LOL, if I just remember the heavy lag in CoX Hamidon raids, just with 40-50 people into zone, considering I never was able to play it full settings at 1600x1200, that's how I played Ryzom since 2004.