Ryzom

Chapter 2 is coming! We are pleased to announce the imminent arrival of the first set of Chapter 2 features on the Ryzom Shards.
Due to the quantity of new content in Chapter 2, the release will be spread over three successive patches.

The first of these will go live on Tuesday December 14th. It will feature new bosses, unique new items for players to collect, new hair styles and tattoos, and more...

There will be subsequent patches on December 21st and January 6th. These patches will introduce free for all PvP in certain areas of the world, animal riding, the Encyclopedia, the first set of 'Rite' missions and their associated unique rewards.

Further information will be available soon. Stay tuned!

Update:

- Nevrax will perform a series of tests tonight. Depending on the results, the first out of three Chapter 2 content patches should hit the Live Servers throughout the next few days.

- The patch is planned to take place from 10.00 - 17.00 CET (09.00 - 16.00 GMT/UK Time). The extended downtime is necessary in order to restructure the ingame forums and activate ingame email.

Current Patch Planning

• If everything goes as planned, all Servers will be going down tomorrow morning at 10:00 CET (09:00 GMT/UK Time). As previously stated, we expect a longer downtime due to Server infrastructure modifications, in order to reintegrate the ingame forums and email system.

• Unless any unforeseen issues arise, we expect all Servers to be back online around 17:00 CET (16:00 GMT / UK Time).

Among other new features, this patch will include:


New unique Boss Mobs
A fourth Boss will be unleashed tomorrow in the Matis lands, along with the three others that have been roaming the lands on the ATS already. All of these four Boss Mobs are outlaw leaders, camping with their followers. They are extraordinarily strong and well-assisted by their minions. Those who feel strong and brave enough to challenge one of the Bosses, should not attempt to engage in combat with them alone. Only a large, well organized and well equipped hunting group will be able to defeat these mighty creatures.

Each of the Boss mobs comes along with unique strengths and resistances. Not much is known about them and it could prove to be a challenging task to reveal one of their few weaknesses.

Once defeated, the bosses will need some time to recover from the battle. It may take several days before they can be found and challenged again.


New Haircuts & Tattoos
This patch will include a limited number of new haircuts and tattoos. More will become available in a future patch when "Styling" becomes a skill of its own.


Range Combat
A new rapid fire action will be added to the Game. The damage inflicted by a row of ranged weapons will be increased slightly.

Future patches will include further changes to ranged combat, in order to balance the skill with melee and magic, and in order to make ranged combat more interesting. The changes will include mixed concepts from melee combat and link magic to provide an enjoyable alternative for both solo and group play.


Shield Absorbtion
Shields will now absorb more damage than before and will modify the parry chances for players who are using 'parry' mode (as opposed to players using 'dodge' mode).

Can I just add that during the server modifications you can download the patch ready for when they come back online - just go through your game launcher as normal and it will automatically download the patch. Patch size is 68Mb.

Update:

The Re-opening of all Shards will take a little while longer. We are currently experiencing a few problems with the hairstyle changes. As soon as this problem has been fixed, we will reopen all Servers.

This just in from Nevrax:

As previously stated, We are experiencing some problems with players haircut
due to the introduction of new haircuts ingame. Due to this when you
will log in The Saga of Ryzom, you might have a different haircut than before. Because of this, we will offer a free haircut change to
anyone who logs ingame until the fix for that.

The fix is scheduled to go live asap either tomorrow or
the day after. When the fix will go live, everybody will be rollbacked
to their previous haircuts.

All shards are scheduled to re-open in the next 20 minutes.