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#86 Added by Mjollren 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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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.

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#87 Added by Daomei 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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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.

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Daomei die Streunerin - religionsneutral, zivilisationsneutral, gildenneutral

#88 Added by Arkil(arispotle) 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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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.

#89 Added by Glaz 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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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.

#90 Added by Korva(arispotle) 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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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

#91 Added by Karnig 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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Korva

I'm not so sure it'd be as simple as a pure lvl boost - what about all the skills that go with the levels, I'd have thought it would be FAR more time consuming to do it on a 1-1 request basis than a database merge... I still think they must be lacking the database know-how, maybe they made their main DBA's and designers redundant a while back in order to save money and just kept people with enough knowledge to keep the existing databases maintained

"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.

#92 Added by Kalean 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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Glaz

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

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

Last edited by Kalean (1 decade ago)

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Kaléan McFerty
Pirate of the Lakes

#93 Added by Sliar 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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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.

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#94 Added by Karnig 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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I have a couple of questions.

Glaz

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.

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

Glaz

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

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

Glaz

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 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.

#95 Added by Daomei 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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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.

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Daomei die Streunerin - religionsneutral, zivilisationsneutral, gildenneutral

#96 Added by Azarrakk(arispotle) 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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Karniq it isn't as hard as you are making it sound. At most they would need to add an export function to the character loading code where the export function would then dump the relevant character data to an ordinary sql type db. This is exactly the approach I've used in professional datamining/recovery where an OODBMS is involved. Now it may well be they can't afford to pay someone to do the necessary work, but it is not an insurmountable or even difficult technical problem.

[EDIT: duh they already *have* an export - the character web api - technical problems my rear end]

Last edited by Azarrakk(arispotle) (1 decade ago) | Reason: new info

#97 Added by Karnig 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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Kalean (Aniro)

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

Yeah - that was his basis. He's completely rewritten that achievement code and is working on real-time achievements and more advanced stuff. The new code that'll go live is a lot better and more directly integrated into the game. I think his existing achievement system is a pretty good demonstration though.

#98 Added by Daomei 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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It is even easier. They could store the data in a simple blank or comma separated list, primitive ascii stuff. Any database is able to convert that into a table of which structure wanted ever.

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Daomei die Streunerin - religionsneutral, zivilisationsneutral, gildenneutral

#99 Added by Korva(arispotle) 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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Karnig

"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.

That would certainly explain a lot, must admit my experience of inner workings is with WoW and Lineage2 which are both very much database driven, but if it's a case of it being a huge manual task then I still believe they have to weigh that against the huge loss of long term revenue if they drive all their long term subscribers away.

If they've already genuinely done that and it really isn't viable then in my view this move is a hopeless attempt to save a ship that's already sunk :( They'd be better off cutting their losses now rather than drawing out the inevitable for a short period longer

Edited 2 times | Last edited by Korva(arispotle) (1 decade ago)

#100 Added by Soularis(arispotle) 1 decade ago Report | Quote [en]

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The fair thing to do is to delete all the f2p accounts and somehow transfer all the p2p accounts. People are paying you to keep this data save on your servers afterall....

This is at the moment really lousy customer service in my honest opinion and I cannot blame people cancelling their current subscriptions. You will loose quite a bit of trust from the customers as well, I mean; can you promise them that this will not happen again?

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