Daomei (Leanon)
TgmageP.S. I have not subbed yet because I dont really want to pay commercial prices for a niche game. Make it ~$50/year and then well talk but >$100 isnt appropriate for this. :(
Well, if you lack the money, I am not in the position to criticize you for. As a matter of fact, Ryzom is a good deal cheaper than other games, at least here in Europe. I am paying for 2 subs what I would have to pay for a single one in certain mainstream games.
And as to "niche game" vs "commercial" ones, I am regularly paying more for niche products, services, and applications than for mass products. This is true for clothes, furniture, and often even music where a hand-made CD covering barely more than production cost is more expensive than mainstream stuff ordered over Amazon.
I do not know any game matching the game idea, the atmosphere, or the hand-woven events I enjoy in Ryzom. And though I am not blind for the drawbacks and problems here, I would not want to exchange it for any of the technichally more perfect and better funded games. Your mileage may vary.
Well the difference between those games and this one is clearly support. I could give Ryzom $100 today and it could be shut off tomorrow or simply stop working. If I pay and then I get a black screen, who's to help me? Who will fix my problem? What kind of service do I actually get for my money? None of these things are made clear. The direction of the game is not clear. The road-map of the game is not clear. What new content is coming? Why should I stick around? All of these things one takes into consideration when one pays for a product. Any product. The value of these things is of course relative.
The biggest thing that concerns me so far about this game is that there doesn't seem to be any point to it.
Whats the point of doing all this work on a toon and building it up? Whats it for? There are no instances. There are no tournaments. There is no competition as there is no way for me to see how I stack up against another player. There is nothing that I can see that I'm shooting for. There is no overall user level (which I'm slowly coming to terms with). There is no colored gear. Its very difficult here to get any kind of sense of progress or those moments when you find that rare item and its awesome cause your toon is a little bit better (again) for that end game content.
I like to strive for something but there doesn't seem to be anything to strive for here and thats causing me some hesitation.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining I'm simply sharing my thoughts. I _want_ to love this game. I'm just trying to figure out how.
-tg
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Tgwaste