Talkirc
hmmm, got my attention. i could see this bringing a few old players back, and for some of them, that could prove to help guide newer players in the ryzom world. it would also encourage old long time players to stick around, keeping population of the game up.
i know of many that left because there was such a lack of population, not just the "no new content" reason that's most common.
while ryzom is old, it's still a gem unlike any other game, and this change will help to level ryzom in the current mmo world. let's face it, games that are giving options like this (eve runescape, gw & gw2, ect) are thriving. people play those games as a f2p, then one day they hit the wall and say hey, i can pay for X and never have to stop playing because funds get tight and i can no longer play.
sure there are still many things that don't compare to other games, but while some are bad, others are good.
ryzom will run on a sever that cost as little as 100 US dollars a month, so as long as there are 10 people paying, the server will survive. this false idea that the server costs 1000's of dollars a month is just insane. games like WoW might pay 1000's, but they're in need of not one server but dozens, due to population size. even if ryzom did gain a large number of old players comming back, and new players comming in, the server cost isn't going to reach 1000's a month untill there's well over 10,000 active players every day, until that point, a single low to mid level server will do fine. (for that matter, a privetly owned server is an investment, and since they will have more power then ryzom alone would need, the owner could run other services to make money, eg. teamspeak 3 servers, ventrillo, other voice chat services, a privet dns lookup service, ect. these things could make as much or MORE then the ryzom sub's provide, thus allowing other profit for the privet server owner.)
anyway, i know i'm just living up to my namesake, but i'll cut this long post short by saying this: it's a nice move forward for ryzom and is likely to more good then the nay sayers think.
talk
First im pretty sure ryzom is not just running on one single machine but is spread out over a few machines (when you see terms like shard or shards used this means server and servers) While theres only one play server there are multiple servers running that single play server. On even a low end server a single part say a stick of ram can and often does cost a few hundred us. Were not talking a white box gaming rig where ram tops at say 200 a stick were talking a server where a single stick of ram costs upwards of 300. Just to properly run this single server atys would require a server were say 16+gb ram minimal a raid array for sorage multiple gigabit high end nics likely 12 cores min to 16 or 24 cores for cpu. Now being that there will be at least 3 server machines running atys your talking each of them having this (data base server log in server play server) it could be ore than this. Theres a big difference between running a private server for some fps or even mmo where you have a 100 to 200 max and down time is no b ig deal and running a full blown mmo server. Even a web server costs a good chunk of cash ive built a few web servers even built a mmo server cluster.
Then there is the cost for bandwidth for even a basic leased t3 the absolute min you could run a small mmo on your talking a couple grand a month. Then you have fall over protection (redunency) where if the line goes down another picks it up. This is something that most providers will require you to have and is non optional but is extra if your running something like a mmo.