IDEAS FOR RYZOM

Oh i hate that one lol pet peave item heheh. Last night i upgraded my self heal stamy allot been neglecting it big time and had something like 8 of them on my action bar neglected bleeding had 5 of those etc.

A buglet (workable around) I discovered recently...

Using the animals interface, clicking Mount on my Mek doesn't mount, just runs up and admires the Mek.

Right clicking the Mek and selecting Mount from the interface works.

Not a big problem, but when in the Void 'Packer Park' isolating your own mount from the crush of packers can sometimes be difficult.

As a workaround, do you have the option Follow from the animals menu? This way, the mount could be pulled a little bit away from the other animals.

Oh its not a problem really finding the mek so much,as having to right click it after identification, sometimes not entirely sure I have hit my own mek, but I guess theothers wouldn't listen to me.

Just thought the lords of code might like to know of the issue with the Animals Menu not perofrming as expected.

Timing issue? When the mount command is sent to server, server might see char to be too far or still moving.

The possibility to create your own actions is quite nice. Never seen it anywhere else.

• mouse-only navigation. There is no way to target with keyboard, pickup with keyboard, gather with keyboard. This is the reason I never reached the maximum free level in WoW and this is the reason I will probably not play Ryzom either.

• resources are mysterious green globs. There is no way to tell what you are gathering which is kind of lame and annoying. This may be a game mechanic decision but it is an ui issue in the end as well. It does not even make sense. You cannot really gather something without knowing what it is. If you gather bark then you must have peeled bark and not chipped off shell pieces.

• The 'radar' is very hard to read. You really need both the map and the 'radar' to make any sense of anything. At least on the tutorial island the map is small enough to have it open all the time but until you figure out how to use these two together there is no way to get anywhere.

Those I do not know exist. There are probably quite a few. There is no in-game tutorial about the controls.

You have an option in the stanza for naming the source before digging, and another one for choosing what you are looking for. But I don't remember at wich level you can do that...

@Llana
You can target with the keyboard (hit k for the keys settings, action keys), if thats not sufficient you can use macros, to target very specific and even combine the target action with other actions.
In fact we have no auto-loot or key for that, it’s a feature in maybe all other mmos I ever played.

You train, spend the skill points and eventually learn to see what is inside a node before you dig it. And you learn to prospect only specific materials and qualities. When you are on main land, you can care plan for a high lvl player, that gives usually very good xp.

The radar and the map are ok in combination. You can right click the map and create own landmarks, then set the landmark in the radar. Best Ryzom map ever, bmsite.net, check out the little half transparent button thats in the middle of the map navigation.

Thanks fore the replies. Seems some of the problems fall in the "no tutorial for it" category - because they work differently in Ryzom and because new people need to learn about it anyway even if it's the same as in every other game.
I find the lack of looting key annoying. Since looting is kind of required to progress in some quests and crafting and it's annoying my overall impression of the game is not positive.I can understand it may take skill to see quality of a piece of bark or to prospect for it but once it is on the ground you should be able to see it is a piece of bark without any skill whasoever.

It is against logic and against new people to have only mysterious green globs.

Maybe the User Manual page at Ryzom Wiki should be mandatory reading, or at least more publicized.

There are ways to target with the keyboard. There are even more if you use the macro system. When I dig, I can just hit one key and that will make me run over to the nearest dig spot with my name on it and start digging. I have other macros to target various entities.

Sadly, those are not exactly the sort of functions you would figure out on your own. There is not NPC in Silan that tells you about macros or / commands like /tar. Those are the sort of things you have to dig a little to find they even exist unless someone tells you.

With the Knowledge stanza, it's easy to scout an area  and dig only the spots that have what you want. With the material specializations and different grades of "Find better materials" stanza, you can go into an area that has 5 different mats in three different grades (many spots have Basic, Fine, and Choice) and pop ONLY what you want. Sure, I may be in an area with Basic resin and Choice node, but if I want Fine wood, then the only spots that I pop are all Fine wood. Such are the perks of being a high-level digger.

That said, it's really rough at lower levels, especially if you don't have a lot of flags on your map denoting where to dig for what. I recall having the same complaint when I first started, and I can safely say that it gets MUCH better if you persist. Digging is probably the hardest and most frustrating of the four skill trees to start out, but it's also the branch that improves the most as you level up. The other three branches just have you doing the same things against higher-level enemies or making gear with a couple of stats higher than what a lower-level crafter can do, but the difference between a low-level digger and a master digger is just phenomenal.

Yes, it is a bit daunting at first, but I've found that the only way to avoid a learning curve is to sacrifice usefulness.

The compass/radar has many uses, including but not limited to a rangefinder. Knowing the exact distance to your target is immensely helpful for casters, shooters, and those trying to tip-toe through agro-filled areas though. When zoomed in to 50m range, it's quite effective at finding safe paths too. Or maybe you want to know where the next waypoint is for occupations. Of course, multiple functions means a slight lack of ease of use.

The map is also small enough to keep open on Mainland, though you may wind up zooming in/out on it a bit depending on what you are doing. While I can see some merit in combining the two, I think doing so would actually make things more complicated than keeping them separate, as well as reduce/eliminate some of the utility of the current system.

Hit 'k' to see the keybindings and you'll find quite a few things you wouldn't even suspect. The list takes a bit of scrolling so I won't try to post a screenshot, but suffice it to say that I learned a lot by being curious and pushing buttons.

That said, there is quite a lot of stuff that is non-intuitive that only the intensely curious would ever have a chance of finding out. And lets be honest, not everyone has the blend of patience, curiousity, and computer savviness to dig around and learn from it. In fact, relatively few people do. Ryzaom could do a better job accomodating those outside of that small demographic of intensly curious people with too much free time.

I've always felt Silan was a little lacking, but much of that is because there is no opportunity to review. If you don't learn something when the NPCs teach you, your only real recourse is to ask in Uni. Given how many people skip through dialogs they feel will have no relevance to their future, that means a lot of players run into trouble with magic, digging, and crafting.

I find it an effective anti-botting measure. Sure, it's sometimes a hassle to run up to your kill and press a button on a pop-up window, but when the alternative is a world full of bots, I think the effort of looting a kill the way we do it is a small price to pay. Think about it; how worthwhile would it be to try to hunt mobs if a few hundred homins had a script that targeted the nearest mob, killed it, looted it, and repeated the cycle with no human intervention at all? That'd make for a boring game, right? But with the macro system built into Ryzom, it'd be almost trivial to make such a script if there were a way to loot easier than we do now.

Besides, double-clicking on a dead mob will make you run over to the corpse and pop open the loot dialog anyways. Three clicks and you got loot! Why not use a button you already have a finger on all the time anyways instead of having to remeber yet another keybind?

The mats you pop are not on the ground; they are still under the ground, hence the need to dig for it after you prospect. Picks are not for lifting stuff off the ground, but for making a hole in the ground. The green globs are more of a "Dig here for mats!" than the actual mats themselves. It seems perfectly logical to me.

What I feel is illogical is to have even a beginner forager be able to "meditate" for a few seconds and have stuff buried underground materialize on the surface. When I think "forage", I think of the effort it takes just to find what you are looking for, then a bit more effort to actually obtain what you found. A more skilled forager will find stuff easier and obtain it quicker, but even a master forager is not a conjurer or transmuter.

It is not a working anti-botting measure at all. It was somewhat effective for that 12 or 10 years ago, but not anymore for a very long time.
And other game publishers know that a measures like this doesn’t keep ppl from botting, thats why in every other game I can loot with a keyboard key or even fully automatic.

What would be the advantage of looting while botting anyway? Faster re-spawn, but while you are botting what would you need faster re spawn for? The mats from fight training are not worth anything on sale either.
And for digging, I’m sure a bot for digging needs to be so advanced that looting is not really the matter there.

And I have different habits, I don’t have my finger on the mouse button all the time, I have to move my right hand back and forth from the keyboard.

@Yubina - While you are correct that it's not 100% effective, Ryzom's macro system would make botting easy enough that my cat could do it if not for little things like lack of auto/one-key looting. Other games lack the macro system, so one-button looting is less of an issue, but getting the enemy to a lootable state is easier in Ryzom than in many other games. Sure, a competent bot-maker could still make an effective bot, but even that one little detail that macros cannot handle requires enough added effort to get around to weed out the majority of script-kiddies. Remember, many who would even think of botting are lazy, and even a dramatic reduction is a good thing, especially if it's trivial to implement.

Maximizing XP/hr is important to some folks. Very important. Even if the bot is doing all the work, it's still good to optimize. Even if you must empty your bag manually every 20 minutes, the ROI on time saved waiting for respawns would be too big a temptation if you made it easier than three aimed mouse-clicks.

That truly is different. The only time I take my hand off the mouse is when I'm chatting. I also play enough FPS and RTS that my right hand is on the mouse most of the time I game. I can't think of anyone I know who does it differently either. But if that's what you do and it works, then keep on doing it your way.

I hope you are still reading because there are two different ways to navigate using the keyboard. Either with the arrow keys (works together with mouse navigation) or WASD.

Targeting with keyboard has been covered (including the use of macros for special targeting. The lack of easy pickup has also been addressed.

The reason I hope that you are still reading is that I would like to urge you to reconsider. The world you haven't seen much of yet (since you are still in Silan) is amazing, beautiful, and challenging. There is a reason there are so many of us old farts still around: even when we have all (or at least a whole lot) of high level skills, Atys continues to challenge us.