The graphics are truely amazing... I shudder to think of the amount of time that went in to create the scenery. Not to mention my favorite "Machbirds" appear to be evolving and showing themselves in different color schemes. The trees actually move with the wind... talk about an immersive in game enviroment. I could go on and on about the beautiful enviroment that has been created.
The critter AI... whomever decided to make the animals actually seem real, and perform bodily functions on my boots... nice touch
However, I do feel there should be atleast one shoe shine guy/gal in each town, free of charge of course.
Combat... while not being twitch based, is still nice. A clopper clobbers me over the head, I get a wee bit dizzy for a moment or two. Works for me... I knock it a good one, and it also sways for a moment. To be honest, I dislike the mob level "indication" system, but am learning to deal with it. To my way of thinking if there is a green box indicating docile, the mob shouldn't aggro without provocation. And perhaps a number system instead of colors would be more user friendly, but that's just my opinion.
Harvesting needs a bit of work yet, but it's still fun... and somewhat addictive in Ryzom. The majority of past mmorpg's I've played, have never been much of a gatherer... always the warrior type. For whatever reason, my harvest is a good 10 levels above my combat. Most likely because I've been spending too much time attempting to figure out what mat is going to gas me, and what one is going to explode. One more nice touch in my opinion.
Which leads to crafting. There again, in previous games would only build (if possible in the game) weapons or ammo. Apparently I have found my softer side and am collecting skill points to make jewelery?!? True, i'll be saving a ton of points, 100sp for each plan is a wee bit out of line, but, it stops everyone from doing it I suppose. In any economy there has to be niche markets.
Let's talk about the GM's for a few sentences. Fast... Quick...Responsive... Courteous... Sense of Humor... Painfully restricted by policies. Never have I seen such rapid response, not to mention a personal response. I'm used to the "canned" messages from other games. You know, the auto-responder type. First and foremost, I think they should be allowed to slap self admitted morons who ask for it. I.E. lost all my spawn points but one, which was in a bad area, died too many times only to realize that I had a ticket. Yes, the GM should of slapped me silly for wasting his/her time on something like that. Either way, they are doing a fine job... name any other game that beats there response time... they need more freedom to help players on a case to case basis.
Last subject... The infamous Dev's. Yeah, true... we can all blame them for almost all of the problems in game. However, while they don't always communicate with us, they are aware of the problems. To my count, there have been atleast 5 updates since the game went live. The thing I like seeing the most is that they are placing the bug fixes in the front of the line. I think I remember reading "Let us fix most of the bugs before we add the content." Hmmm... works for me. The lag on the NA server has improved, atleast from my chair.
*As a side note concerning the bugged patches of recent... perhaps we as a community should stress the fact that we want the current bugs fixed before whining about new content and other related items, and perhaps provide useful info instead of "this gmae is the suxxors cancelling meh account." For example, state in a nice manor what the problem is, where it occured and what you where doing when it occured*
In closing, I love this game... actually, my favorite game of all time. I am certainly looking forward to how it evolves. And trust me, I have played a few games in my time. I still have a working "Odyssey" with the static screen TV overlays in my garage.
Just my opinion... ya don't like it, Ignore it
) to phrase it any better myself. All that aside though, there is one point I'd like to add to your post -
