Added

I think Ryzom's greatest current weakness may not be so much retention of players, as not getting in front of enough new eyes for the retention rate to lead to enough ongoing players.

I also feel that getting Ryzom on Steam, which I think Project Gorgon's recent Greenlight success suggests is now a possibility, is one possible answer (retention rates would probably go down but if absolute numbers go up, who cares?), & others have been proposed in chats in Universe or English Universe in-game.

Previous proposals:

In English

In French

On the one hand, I had limited my pre-post search for "Steam" to titles to prevent or reduce "false"-positives.

OTOH, I titled the thread the way I did in the hopes that it could be used to discuss all relevant ideas, including any better than my own.

So, "Sorry" and "Thanks" both?

if steam could get ryzom to 10k people, i'd say 1 in 10 might stick around, so that's 1k more players then before. more is better for us all, more players, more fun, more income for the company, more progress for the game.... it's a long road but it would be nice.

I voted in agreement to this post.

I also often felt like there just was a lack of advertising Ryzom. Myself, and for example Virg too, we both randomly came across Ryzom whilst browsing the App Store on our macs and we have both been playing ever since, for myself Ryzom has been my first MMORPG experience and I would not consider playing another game.

Despite this, I will add that for myself, I continue to play for a number of reasons the main one being the relationship I have created with guild members and other friends.

Most of us like to boast about our great community. I'll be bold enough to say that I would fear what Ryzom would become if it isn't advertised in the right way to mature people. Maybe I am being selfish in saying this as I see it for me it's more about quality not quantity but for the game the quantity means funds :(

I searched for free role play ubuntu based games.. tried 3-4 free games and liked Ryzom on its first try.

Ryzom can be advertised depending on player's game search criteria. For me it was some free ubuntu game forum. Steam can be a great boost for advertising, but maybe free forums can be reached first.
+1 for quality being great! I count it awesome! it is the only reason for me to stick to Ryzom. I have discussed some of it's very good game features with my friends and they got impressed too. Eg: very vey low network utilization, multiple chat box, and very complex game chemistry. This was my first time seeing something complex yet beautiful creation :)

I have raised a question to gather some info on ryzom's player base: http://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/21946. I hope we can gather some useful info.

I have my misgivings based on things I've seen happen in other games.

The most egregious of the ones in my experience is World of Tanks. It started as a small MMO 15v15 PvP tank game, but as the game grows and they start advertising more and becoming more visible, the community is growing toxic and the gameplay itself is suffering as a growing percentage of the player base is not only unaware of basic game mechanics, but largely unwilling to learn, preferring instead to just hurl insults and generally become a griefer. Then there are those that are naturally just trollish but leave us alone as they are simply unaware of Ryzom's existence.

While I think there would be plenty of good people that would come in if Ryzom were more heavily marketed, I feel I must point out one potential downside to having more market visibility.

We are all afraid of losing the friendly playerbase as that's the best part of the game. However I don't think advertising would increase the rate of bad players. If we double the amount of active players we'll also double both good and bad players. It shouldn't affect the ratio between good and bad players. We should get more players so there would be more resources to develop the game further.

Done!