English

While reading this post, keep in mind that I am only on Silan with < 20 hours playtime

To me, Ryzom seems like a game with great potential. That potential also seems largely unfulfilled. Before I consider investing much more time into it, I have a few questions and comments:

Questions:
Is the player count for Ryzom going up or down?
How does Ryzom find new players? The only way I found out about it was in the Ubuntu package manager!
Is Ryzom making a profit? How much longer will it be around? I do not want to play if I feel that the servers will shut down soon wasting my effort!
Where is the best community to talk about Ryzom out of game? The forums, twitter, and facebook do not seem very active :( Is there an active IRC or reddit community?
Are there any planned features? Will Ryzom include the improvements to the core from GSOC 2013?
I have no idea how many players are on the mainland. Now many are usually online? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of Thousands?
Which mainland capitol has the most players?

Comments/Observations
Things I like:
Free to play
Open source
Nice players
Cool story
The mechanics of the game are well chsen
Interesting creatures
Things I dislike
Textures are not very detailed, even on high
Silan is nearly empty - It feels lonely and abandoned.
No strong feeling Ryzom will continue into the future
Some tasks on Silan, like walking to the necessary places to do missions and harvesting resources, feel slow and repetitive

Sorry for the wall of text, and I hope this game fulfils Its promise when I get to the mainland

Thank you for clarifying these questions!

- will ryzom be around much longer? They have been bankrupt 2 times and both times the game got back up again they did merge the 3 different language servers into 1 server 10months or so ago. This game has been se many times near death that i'm actually starting to think you can't kill it.
- how many players? see ppl ask this daily in uni and probably weekly on forums => play game go to mainland and see yourself, do not forget once you get trekked you can go to all zones/regions and ryzom is extremly large so ppl are scattered around everywhere
- community? => no irc/reddit that i know about there is "CeB" an irc like chat system where CSR's are on and some ppl like me but that's more death then alive. http://en.ryzomnomnom.com/wiki/Client_en_Bois
- What city to choose? => read abit about the lore kara/kami/races and then decide where you wanna go to (atys.ryzom.com), but it isn't really that important since once you do a trek with some other homins then you can tp everywhere, those treks are mostly done

*stupid char limit ingame*
done in guilds but some guilds offer treks to other homins aswell. Why I say read some lore is then you can make an educated guess to what land you go to find a guild that fits your characters story kara/kami/race.


* for more info read and search trough forums alot of ppl have done much better work then me writing guides and stuff for new players

it will take me a very long time to reply here on what i would like to say so i hope i can find you online in-game to discuss will keep an eye out

some notes though:

i am going to play ryzom till it croaks and even if that is next week i won't feel like it wasted my time, still... many new players do want something more flashy like GW2 or WoW with more regular updates and more obvious flare

thing is ryzom has a lot of charms you will never find in the bigger games with larger communities and higher funding, so i am going to stick it out with them here in hopes that the full potential can be met, some day

what we really need is for one of you hominas to go net a billionaire :P
as much as that is a joke, it isn't

there is #ryzom for the ryzomcore devs on freenode irc, they are not the devs that work directly on ryzom game content but they are related in some ways, very nice helpful people in there

you can always find me in ceb :P (it works for linux and windows easily i have not used the mac one)