IDEAS FOR RYZOM

"What you currently see is only 5% of Atys." Was the infamous quote :)

Aye Canya, I remember reading something to that effect. It would be amazing to see. I would even be happy if there were no ingame maps of these "other" lands. Fits with the current ones being civilized and the others barely even explored. Make players construct their own maps. (But then I would be here +1'ing an ingame sketch pad).

You see a bit of that in Almati woods (and more specifically the Kitin Lair) where there's an unexplored (as of yet) part of the map that's greyed out on your minimap, with tantalising views of the area if you survive to reach the (blocked) entranceways to it.

Atys was envisioned to be a constantly changing and growing world, with new areas becoming available over time. Of course budget problems (to put it mildly) prevented that from happening, but given time and effort new zones could still be developed (it's just that the current dev team is very small and probably lacks the resources to do so in any reasonably short amount of time (as in, an amount of time that can lead to a marketable product).

I'd say this has more to do with how few players Ryzom has, than whether or not the level cap gets raised.
Without new players, of course everyone hits the cap.

The last OP war I was in, I showed up too late to stop our side from losing, but early enough to run around with a ~190 in 2h axe and kill a much larger number of healers than someone over 50 levels below the cap should be able to, if everyone was truly 250 at the OPs. Blame my lack of squishiness on the addition of Ryzom to the Mac App Store, and continue to push for new ways to advertise the game.

Increasing the level cap allows high end players to once again be differentiated by more than their equipment, but diversity still comes from the size of your player base. As far as people not wanting to level the extra 50 levels, to me that just sounds like people who don't enjoy the game but want to hold on to their elitist attitudes. Maybe MMOs aren't the right fit for them? Sorry if it sounds harsh, but I agree with Loryen about playing the game for fun and levelling as a byproduct.





What I would like to see most is new regions of Atys that are currently hinted at or blocked off, like deeper into Kitin's Lair. Whether or not the level cap needs to be raised should ultimately depend on the difficulty of the creatures that inhabit those areas.

There very well could be some truth to the aversion of grinding 50 more levels, particularly once you've had to grind through the last 20 or so. When you get to that point, you'll understand better =) But grinding is just one aspect of MMO life, and I think it's one of the lamest methods used to ensure players keep playing.

Another purpose for level caps is to ensure that newer players can reach semi-equal footing to older players. There are games that do not have a "cap", and veteran players are guaranteed to decimate any newer player no matter how well that player is able to play the character.

Raising the level cap also increases the barrier-to-entry for newer players. In most MMOs, you accept that as a new player, or player still leveling, that you are weaker than others who have been there longer. You also know that with enough time and/or effort, you can reach that peak and be able to compete with those veterans. The longer it takes to equalize your skills with the old-timers, the more likely it is for someone to begin to lose interest. Even WoW faces that obstacle and has had public discussions about continually raising the level cap.


I don't think Ryzom needs to raise the level cap. It doesn't serve any useful purpose to how the game is structured, and it would require a lot of effort that could, instead, be spent adding other features to the game. Raising the level cap is more than just changing a couple of maximum values in the code, whipping up some new grind fodder in a new randomly-generated zone, and boom you're done.

I would rather the Devs spend valuable development time on adding more things for us to do at the current max level, and even lower levels, instead of spending the time on raising the cap and then re-balancing the game around the increased level ... and STILL not have anything to do at max level.

One question and one suggestion:
If instead the level cap just gets raised infinite whithout creating new environments/mobs with higher then current level so that some "mad" people could still grind to achieve higher levels, would that be an option? The 250+ levels only provide better percentages in 250er skills and some new titles (and maybe only a handful of new (and expensive) skills). I still think that some people would still think it's great. As with every level increase the XP goes down and to level up harder there will be a kind of natural end to it at some stage.

Do you still think it would require great re-balancing of the game?

If you add new abilities, then it would definitely require careful analysis. Even if you just increase the stats, it would need some extra attention to make sure it doesn't break anything else.

If nothing is added except the level increase, then it probably wouldn't matter; it would just be a superficial number. However, I do think it would be amusing to be plodding with a small-ish group and get 6 exp per plod =)

People would be hunting lvl 270 bosses just for the sake of XP and throwing the supremes on the market just because they have more than they can deal with ?

Raising lvl caps is also far different then a game with 1 overall lvl. So in WoW they raise it to 100 and you need 15 lvls to again max your toon. On Ryzom you want to add 50 lvls to a game with 63 skills. That's a lot of grinding even for those who love to grind-Kilgoretrout

Read Forum / Official news / Future Development Projects ?

-New PVP zone
-Faction events based on the Temple War
-Kitins and Marauders invasions
-Arrival of Gooified mobs and dynamic progression of the Goo
-Development of Encyclopedia v2

Removed off-topic and personal discussion posts.

This is a hard one on one side rising lvl cap could bring old players back in the short run and it would mean that an old guild can't just return and take over server since they would have to grind first to be on same lvl as others. On the other side ppl thinking of returning in 6 months might not feel like it because they would have to grind old skills again.

I'm against rising lvl cap, but I think rising stanza lvl might be cool.
For example, if you are lvl 250 in every jewel skills, you can buy a new stanza to craft lvl 260 jewels.

Same thing with harvesting, if you mastered the five lands you get a Ql 260 digging stanza that you can use on higher quality nodes in the kitin lair or in a new area...

We can also imagine lvl 270 stanza to meet the highest bosses drops.
Potions would improve the succes rate.

I'm not opposed to raising the level cap, but only if it's accompanied by new content to exploit those skills.
Grinding another 50 levels on q250 mobs and mats would be way too painful, we'd need q300 and areas :)

And they'd need to be different enough from the current areas that it remains interesting.
Whether new zones in the current regions, or something completely different, both can work. But something does need to be done.
We see too many high level players spending most of their days hanging around town, chatting, being bored (and that includes me at times).
New things to do, new sights to see, would work to keep them around.
The main thing of course where Ryzom is different from the composition is that there is not one level to increase when the cap goes up, but 60+, which no doubt goes a long way to explaining why people are opposed to the idea (ask in other mmos, and people clamor for level cap increases, only to then rush in 2-3 days through the new content and scream that it wasn't enough, quite the opposite).

So a tradeoff needs to be found between keeping people from getting bored because there's nothing new for them once they reach the cap, and them getting frustrated with mindless grinding towards that cap (whatever it is).
This can mean either a higher cap with new things to do to get there, or more new things to do at the current cap.
A hybrid might be new skills unlocked only once the current cap is reached, and new areas to employ those skills in (and train them to their cap).
What those skills would be I can't tell, the new areas might include the upper roots, new zones added to the current ones, deep roots, or completely new regions (with maybe major events to unlock them for exploration).

Perhaps we all have frogotten that miniscule 1 pixel jump in our progress bar while doing level 249-250 ..... I can't imagine the pace at 299-300 .... and let's not forget, how many peeps are doing those 240+ level w/o cats. I'm doing MA in the 240's and its a gdrag bringing up the 4 trees (and yes, I do still use cats for crafting).

What would be nice is what some have touched on. Give peeps a reason to bring up the rest of the trees. Master all 4 above ground lands for harvest and you can "improve" 250 dig mats to 260 dig mats.....the "improve feature" already exists fro occupations so most of the programming in place.

Master HA's 1st tree and get the 85% success rate. Master 2nd and increase another 3% ...... Masters 3rd and another 3%......Master all and get the ability to do 270 but, cuz toom still 250, your success rate at the 20 point OC will drop down to 80 again ... but w/ the 14% scrolls, the 84% would just about work out. Same for mastering all 2h wep trees, 1h wep trees, jools, etc