OFFICIAL NEWS

(I wonder if that toon I parked in Galemus still exists?)

This announcement will be long, but we hope it will answer your questions and reassure you. There is no question of closing the game or kill it as we read it, but we absolutely must take into account the economic pressures that are the main reasons for this servers merge. The goal is not to make more money but to stop losing money and thus allow Ryzom continue to live.

Backup of levels

With the active support of the community and the many requests to save your character levels, it was possible to consider, test and now offer an alternative to the avatar reset. See below for details:

All subscribed accounts on the day of closing of the current servers will keep the appearance, the name but also the levels and skill bricks of all characters that are on the account.

We have also made arrangements so that you can, if you wish, restart your Ryzom adventrure from scratch. More information on this subject later in this announcement.

As a result of these changes, we have decided to move the server merge back a week, to (Saturday, 29 September at midnight GMT+2), to give us a little more time and you more chances to win a starter pack.

Starter packs

You may have heard of the starter packs we are now offering. There are three kinds of starter packs. A character can restart with one pack only. The hightest that you have won is selected automatically. You will not be able to exchange the items in the packs. All characters with a starter pack will keep their name and physical characteristics.



Basic Pack

• Keep the name of the character
• Keep the physical characteristics
• 1 Handed Axe (q25 stats)
• q100 Amplifier (q100 stats) 120% heal
• q1 Armor (q25 stats)
• 1 stack of 999 q100 generic raw materials
• 10,000 Dappers

Silver Pack

• Keep the name of the character
• Keep the physical characteristics
• 1 Mektoub Packer
• 1 Handed Axe (q50 stats)
• q100 Amplifier (q200 stats) 120% heal
• q1 Armor (q50 stats)
• q200 Black Marauder Heavy Armor
• 5 stacks of 999 q200 generic raw materials
• 1,000,000 Dappers

Premium Pack

• Keep the name of the character
• Keep the physical characteristics
• 1 Mektoub Packer
• 1 Handed Axe (Q50 stats)
• q100 amplifiers (q200 stats) 120% heal
• q1 Armor (Q50 stats)
• q100 White Marauder Light Armor
• q200 White Marauder Medium Armor
• q150 White Marauder Heavy Armor
• 3 stacks of 999 q100 generic raw materials
• 4 stacks of 999 q150 generic raw materials
• 5 stacks of 999 q200 generic raw materials
• 1,000,000 Dappers

Overview of options

With the merge, you have several options available to you. Below all options are explained..

If you have a paid, currently subscirbed, account, you have the choice between:

• Doing nothing: In this case, all your characters on your account will keep their levels and each will start with a Basic Pack.
• Register one of your characters to the "List of the Reckless": the levels of this character will all be reset and it will start with a Premium Package (other characters of the account keep their levels and get a Basic Pack). You can register only one character per paid account. You have until the close of servers to register. Your account must have an active paid subscription at the time of registration.

If you have a free account, you have the choice between:

• Doing nothing: In this case, all characters of the account will be deleted.
• Involve one or more of your characters in events before the servers close: In this case, their levels will be reset and will start with a Basic Pack.

If your character should win a Silver Pack, it will replace the Basic Pack.

All characters and accounts that will be created after the server merge begin as before, without any starter packs.

Overview of changes brought by the merge

Locations
Digging spots and some creatures may not be where you expect them! Careful!

Dappers
We want to take advantage of the merge to rebalance the economy, so it will necessarily to go through your wallet and steal all your dappers. Sorry.

Inventories
As with dappers, resetting your inventories will help bring more balance to the game. Each server had a different progression, various events... It is therefore necessary to start on a neutral, common basis.

Guilds of different communities come away with a substantive equality and therefore, it will promote competition among other guilds and factions.

Kami Tolerance should be back for the pleasure of diggers.

Apartments and mektoubs
Your apartment will be put up for sale and your mektoubs released into the wild.

Guilds
Guilds require a very specific and complex transfer process, which could lead to bugs and other instabilities detectable only after migration. Transfer simulations will not guarantee that things will work perfectly. To avoid such often unpredictable problems , we have decided not to take risks and let you recreate your guild yourself.

Fames
All fame will be reset to allow everyone to have access to cities in the early days and avoid early factional conflicts. We realize that upgrading fames takes time, so it's a sacrifice that we ask of you to simplify the transfer process.

Occupations
Some parts related to items in the inventories can not be kept. These include experience and levels of basic occupations that are stored in the form of items.

WebIG, mail, forums, craft recipes
WebIG applications, emails, forums and craft recipes will be kept.

WebIG had to be adapted to manage a single server instead of three as at present. Since it was partly OpenSource, we took the opportunity to address an important aspect in the management of characters.

Web applications need to be converted, which will be done gradually. Forums, emails and craft recipes will be available the day of the opening of the new server. The rest of the applications will follow after.

Apartment items
For your apartment items, we will do our best to keep them in a storage for all your characters. We can not promise 100% retention of all your objects, but we will try to so that you can use your old furniture and feel at home when you purchase an apartment.

OOC Events

The OCC Events that are run until the merge are designed to enable you to win Basic and Silver Packs, but to have a good time. There will be small regular events in the week but the big ones will take place on Friday and Saturday evenings.

....

Ryzom Team

bottom line, if you don't pay, you loose everything you ever played for, really sucks too, no real excuse for deleting everything a non paying char has to "balance" things, with the level cap how could we really ever get anything that good to start with? Sad to say but as an IT pro, i know that there's no need to say it's required that you loose everything you played all this time for because of a merge, that's funny in my book, companies don't loose all their data when we move from one server to another, so what gives, instead of trying to do this to FORCE people to pay, offer bonuses or better stuff for those that do pay, on top of that, something like this is the very reason that am now a firm believer that when i did start (and i had planned on it) to pay that there would be another "merge" and all the hard work that i would have put in playing to lvl up would be lost, and as a paying player i would have really been pissed, here in lies the very flaw that kept me form ever playing an MMO, then i find this game and start playing and giving it a chance, start to like it and enjoy it and think to myself hey, if this keeps going good, i'll subscribe to it, then this, what a joke, and thanks for showing me that had i started out over a year ago paying for this game that in just a few short days i would loose everything that i would have been paying to play for over a year would be lost. At one point i was starting to think maybe i had been wrong about mmo's and the logic of payin for a game every month (or year as i would have done) just to one day loose all my hard work and time and effort because of a pointless tactic to force players that play for free to pay, and so forth. enough on this rant, thanks ryzom for showing me i was right about mmo's, if you pay, you still loose, so why bother to pay for something every month (or year) when your just going to loose out in the end.

can't transfer the goodies in premium pack so you would be stuck with all of them on a char you don't wanna play and none of them on a char you do wanna play

Did we get a time for the opening of the new shard yet? Is it Saturday 29th? But when?