I felt upset about this announcement at first. It seems like a bad decision, a wrongminded decision, and I still have some objections to it. But soon I realized that Winch Gate has a choice between certainly closing Ryzom now and probably closing it a little later. They have gone for the second option, taking a huge risk by dumping the current playerbase in favor of a new one that may or may not exist (or be sufficient to sustain Ryzom longer than 6-12 more months). Maybe they're aware that the chances of that idea working are slim, but they make their decision in the spirit of desperate hope.
In my opinion it's silly to mourn skill levels because of cold numbers: time spent, money spent, numbers raised. If it were about the history attached to those numbers, e.g. "friends I've since lost contact with helped me get this master" or "how am I supposed to play my character at all when they've lost the skills that defined them", all this rage would be more justifiable. But the latter is not what most people here are talking about; most seem to be concerned only with the former.
My main objection to Winch Gate's course of action is that, for all their apparent focus on live events and community and supporting RP, they have said nothing about how the different histories of the servers are going to be combined, about how the player governments will work from now on, etc. For a tangible example, one server built different Kami/Karavan temples in different places than another server did.
In my opinion it's silly to mourn skill levels because of cold numbers: time spent, money spent, numbers raised. If it were about the history attached to those numbers, e.g. "friends I've since lost contact with helped me get this master" or "how am I supposed to play my character at all when they've lost the skills that defined them", all this rage would be more justifiable. But the latter is not what most people here are talking about; most seem to be concerned only with the former.
My main objection to Winch Gate's course of action is that, for all their apparent focus on live events and community and supporting RP, they have said nothing about how the different histories of the servers are going to be combined, about how the player governments will work from now on, etc. For a tangible example, one server built different Kami/Karavan temples in different places than another server did.