ИДЕЯ ДЛЯ РИЗОМА

Silan is good enough in my opinion.
Maybe fix some missions and add explanation on enchant might be nice.

But the issue with Silan is the same than mainland : The leak of players, population is too small to make it working properly.
So yes, there is things to fix on Silan to make it more "solo game".

And saying, see bmsite ... is really bad, cause when you are new players on a game you wonna try the game not scroll multiples website while playing. Explanations should be in the game.

I've always viewed BM as more of a reference work (maps, mob levels, mat stats...) than anything actually instructive.

I was a newbie once, and didn't have any of the stuff in modern Silan and I am not a person who joins teams easily (I'm only a little better now.)  At the time I couldn't get past level 20 without going to the ML and I couldn't go to the ML.  I stayed because the game fascinated me, not because it was easy.

I'm not saying that all is perfect on Silan.  However, I only think only a few small additions are needed, not a massive change.  Ryzom is not a game that holds your hand.  Newcomers need to figure that out.  (This is why I say that the transition to the ML is "harsh".  It goes from Silan with a well-defined mission setup to the barely-needed mission chains of the ML that give you no bonus xp.)

For instance, the famous q15 amps mission to kill rendors.  It teaches you two very important things that you won't learn if you get them before the mission.
1.) There is often another, easier, way to do something that seems hard. (I.e. kill the rendors with your melee weapons.)
2.) Bigger is not always better.  Using the less than highest spells using the q10 amps with the bonus gives you more killing power than using the higher spell and not having the bonus.  This lesson will be important again and again on the ML.

As for jewels, it would be nice if the vendor jewels had hp on them and didn't cost as much, but some jewels and some armor is always on sale from new people doing the missions.  I think that would be a nice change, but I don't know how easy it would be.

Having an easily available link to a runthrough / explanation book is a good idea (I said so earlier, and I meant it). Having a message that says "Please use Universe chat for questions and play nice," rather than the current message would be nice. Changing a few introductory balloons might help.  That being said, everything that an NPC says has to be translated and checked in four or five different languages, and that takes time. It's not going to happen overnight.  (I don't know how it works, but I suspect that it's not even that easy, since long known typos in NPC speech have not been corrected even with a wider helper base in recent years.)

Finally, Ryzom is not a game for everyone. If we are keeping 10% of the people who come to Silan, then I think that's a reasonable number.  There is no way in this day and age that we are going to keep more than about a third even with a "perfect" setup in Silan.  Even WoW doesn't get anything like 100% retention.

Here are other Silan guides: http://en.wiki.ryzom.com/wiki/Silan_Guide (EN) and http://fr.wiki.ryzom.com/wiki/Le_petit_guide_de_Silan (FR), and a Ryzom user manual.

More over, it's scheduled to open an access to Silan from Main Land in the next months, as explained here.

It appears that the message displayed to new players when they first click on the Universe Channel tab has been changed, it now reads:

The Universe Channel is first of all intended for players asking help about the game and for those helping them. It's a friendly channel that also can be used for general chatting. Misuse of this channel will be dealt with by Support Team.

This was a good idea!

realy? That is good news, took me about a week or 3 to ask my first question there, just becaus of the warning...

I noticed it by accident as I am recording a video play through of Silan and adding comments and explanations while editing, I had planned to make a comment about not taking the original message too seriously and realised it had been changed :)