OFFICIAL NEWS

I think it is a reaction out of desperation. There were a couple of attempts to increase the playerbase, without too much success. Now they are running out of money, and have to do something. Reducing the number of servers is comprehensible.

Possibly somebody had the "bright" idea that the lots of old seasoned players abhor new ones to start a career. While that may have some point, sometimes, I think it is a grave misconception. Without experienced players who helped me with advice, and sometimes equip (note I never accepted a single dapper from anybody), I would not have managed to progress in the way I did. Though I seldom accepted outside help, I won 18 master levels (all eco, jools, light armour, dagger, and off ele) in 19 months, and completed all occupations, basic and extended.

Different to others, I won't quit. My sub runs til Jan, that of my alt til August. If Ryzom survives til Jan, I'll renew for half a year. But I won't grind anymore as I do not see a future or perspective for Ryzom. Sadly.

If that is the case and they do no longer have anyone with the knowledge and expertise to combine the servers then what hope is there that this move will help, since they dont have the abilty to change anything else about the game apart from a full delete of all servers and the hope that people will make new Toons on this new server and that magicly new players will apear from no where due to there being no advertising and a pissed off comunity

Basicly it comes down to...
This is what we are doing, sucks to be you, deal with it.
( im sure i got told off for saying the same thing myself once :P )

-Basic

Level boosting is very easy and was done frequently during better. The GM simply types a command with the skill and what level to set it too. It is not time consuming and doesn't even require the player to be online. The GM can simply do it when they have the chance.

The levels players have won't be what differentiates old players from the new ones, only experience and knowledge can do that.

Well yeah quite, in one sentence they say it'll provide a better prospect for new players, and in another sentence they say new MMO's are popping up every month, it's a very competetive environment, and they can't afford to advertise.

After hacking off all the old players no-one new will be introduced by word of mouth, so where do they think these supposed new players are going to materialise from ??

Does not compute....!!

They 'should' be doing everything they can to keep loyal subscribers, the fact that they aren't strongly suggests to me that they simply can't

(edit: response to Basic's post 2 above)

Incidentally, if that really is the true situation then I think they'd have a lot more sympathy and support if they just came out and admitted it

This is my thought also. At this point in time it's a crazy thing to do. If they think it's going to be like the old days where Kippy Mull is full of leveling diggers all chatting and ressing each other I think someones in for a disappointment.

What a joke. Has anyone watched the Uni channel today? It's literally flooded with pissed-off people.

It's like watching a trainwreck in progress. Thankfully, I don't stand to lose much after this move, but OTOH you won't see me paying this company any cent after the reset - for the fear they might pull the same idiotic move sometime in the future too.

Korva,

I agree to much you write, but please consider that the devs are acting out of desperation rather the fun or deliberation. I think that the decision to merge is correct though painful, same with losing beasts, apts, guilds, items.

Losing skill levels, occ grads, and titles like elder, guardian etc. is a grave misconception, and likely to kill the game. That is the message we have to spread, and the devs and owners of Winchgate would be wise to listen.

We should look for a middle way. Achieving the goal to attract new players without driving away old players.

A path could be to give back the achievements, but not immediately. Everybody had to pass Silan. reach a capital, venture for all 4 continents. Afterwards. missions would be offered to regain the old skills, in magic, combat, crafting, and harvesting, and occupations as well. Even if it would take weeks to regain old levels, that might be fun and invite cooperation as well as competition. Any "old char" might be offered that. Inconvenient, yet a challenge. I do not see many would complain.

Good idea would be to remove the strict barrier between sub and f2p. Any former or elapsed sub should be allowed to do f2p, with the limitations it brings as no packers (former greyed out), apt storage (greyed out) and gl and ho privileges (revoked). An f2p paying sub for a mth should be able to go f2p afterwards and so on. That might speel more incentive to sub and more turnover.

If money is lacking urgently and recently, please communicate the situation to the playerhood and ask for crowdfunding. Many love Ryzom deeply and are willing to help in case of emergency.

Devs and Admins, you are on a wrong and suicidal path. Kindly rethink and take action.

You're saying that by clipping the stem of the proverbial plant that is Ryzom, you're helping it grow. What you're actually doing is clipping the roots. The plant will die.

This game survives solely via the support of the elder players. Your plan will alienate your most loyal customers. Therefore, Ryzom (and your company) in its current form will die from this. No amount of event goodies is going to make up for 8 years of digital culture lost.

I played SWG after the infamous Combat Upgrade. I saw whole player-built cities deserted. Entire fields of mining equipment untended, churning away until their upkeep ran out. The game was dying, because it was made "better".

Like it was said before, any new player will not pay until it's necessary, or eases the grind. By all means provide incentive for paying: $-bought brown potatoes, for instance? XP boosters? I have a job, I can and have paid for those things.

As a new player, I wish there were more low-to-mid -level players, so there'd actually be a market for non-über goods. Merging the servers is therefore a viable choice, and I'm not against that. Also, I agree that the economy should be rebalanced. Inflation is usually rampant in old MMOs, due to top-heaviness. So balance that. Reset dappers, tweak prices, make moneysinks.

Just don't clip the roots. Clip the dead branches.

I have a couple of questions.

Paying players are going to get 2X exp that F2P players get
but is that paying players gettng 2X current exp or F2P getting 50% of current exp?
Its a big difference, if 2X current for paying players then getting master skills will be a lot easier than now.

Achievement System? -- any details of exactly what that will be?

Are all the other game elements going to be ingame as they are now -- skills, occupations,
adv occupations, fame system, faction points, encyclopedia, missions, etc.... ?

I never ever expected this to happen to Ryzom.
Its extremely hard to take and does look like a desperate move that has little chance of success.

Daomei die Streunerin - you have some good suggestions, but I wonder - if they aren't technically able to do a data merge, do they still have the technical expertise to implement the type of thing you're suggesting ?

I wish they would come out and state the exact situation and what problems they are actually facing, some have suggested extra financial means could be made available from long term players if that is their hurdle, on the other hand, if it's technical knowledge they now lack, maybe there are some out there who might be willing and able to assist in that area to do the sort of things that have been suggested by yourself and others here.

I guess unless we're given the full picture we're just stabbing in the dark sadly

"Database" is kind of a ubiquitous term. Many people assume that it refers to something like a MySQL database or some other SQL variant. While Ryzom does use a SQL database it is only used for player accounting, shard administration and some of the WebIG apps (such as mail and forum...)

The game itself has its own "database" called a "Persistent Database" which is essentially a serialized tree of world objects. There are no tables or queries - this is essentially a raw representation of the running innards of the shard. I think this is where the technical difficulties lie. I took a look at the code to see for myself and even the existing tools really only assist in generating files for individuals to do this manually. The entire effort, as far as I can tell, is basically a manual process.

So between the technical complexity of manually altering thousands of binary files, mitigating conflicts between three shards, and then actually performing the file moves... there's the expertise on how to do it and the man-power to actually accomplish it.

Guessing - but this is probably the problem.

Add your toon to the ryzom armory ( http://www.3025-game.de/ryzom/en/ ) and you can check his achievements there.

Or check this link to view an example

Yesterday we had a great event hunting Kitins. I never saw so much Homins working together, players having fun.
I decided yesterday night I would finally subscribe my alt. I won't, I will unsubscribe my main now.

There is just so much wrong with the reasons stated for deleting characters I hardly know where to start. With the danger of being long winded I will tell about my experience as a newbie on this game (I've only playing less that 6 months)

When I got to ML (Yrkanis) I immediately met some vets (masters in lots and lots) They helped me, with gear, but most of all with advice and just showing me about.
I fianlly ended up joing the guild of one of those first people I met in Yrkanis. It was nice to get help from veteran players like that. They showed me a lot of wonders of Atys in those first few days and set me a good example. (These are the players you will lose) Getting levels was never about competition for me. I just wanted to be able to help other new players like that. (and yes having lvls helps!)
Competition? You don't know what you are talking about. I have never seen such a community before. The vets aren't competition but inspriration.Now I nearly have my first master (healing) and you say you are going to wipe my character?

I feel betrayed. Knifed in the back.

The message you send out is:
a) we don't care about our veteran(paying!!) players
b) we wiped your chars once, we will do it again. Terrible precedent. Bye bye community TRUST.

The technical difficulty argument reads like: THDT (too hard didn't try)
Well maybe it will be an investment, but you stand a whole lot more to lose if you don't. Not so hard to make a business case on this one.

As you can see you have already drawn the IRE of your community. I had a good time here, I feel like I still had a lot to discover but I will cancel my subscription if you continue to show disdain for you players. I give you till next friday.

I have a couple of questions.

I'm not sure what Winchgate has in mind but I'm pretty sure it is 2X current experience rates.

I think it was mentioned but this was one of our (Ryzom Core) Summer of Code students. You can see his status reports here:
http://dev.ryzom.com/boards/16/topics/5991
His actual source code here:
https://bitbucket.org/SirCotare/ryzom
And his blog, which contains some screenshots, here:
http://ryzom-achievements-gsoc2012.blogspot.com/

I talk about this and other Summer of Code projects at their mid-term on the Ryzom Core developer blog:
http://blog.ryzomcore.org/2012/07/summer-of-code-midterm.html


I believe this is true as this is all static level design data and isn't subject to the same "merger" challenges imposed by the code.

whatever the data structure and representation, we are speaking about less than hundred attributes, fields, or whatever per player. Even if you do not strive to represent them in bitmaps, inverted lists or what else space saving, 2k per toon is an abundant estimate (might be done in 100k). That means 5G if 500k acc are there with 2.5M toons. If putting aside and archiving the roughly 2M inactive ones (no update since 2yrs) the amount of data is ridiculous.