English

Hi again,

I have been sitting here thinking and reading through various threads on the forums to understand the Saga of Ryzom and I have a essential question:

Beyond just:

1. Fighting the mobs and/or OP battles
2. Crafting items for you guild and others for trading purposes
3. Digging mats for purposes of crafting and/or trading
4. Leveling your toon through fighting, spell casting, crafting and digging.
5. The environment being organic (Migration, rainfall, seasons)

How do the players, ourselves actually really change or effect anything?

1. Sure I could fight mob after mob but what does that change since they re-spawn? (Am I clearing an area to expand civilization, for example or is it just mindless killing?)

2. Sure I can craft items for sale or to improve my guilds equipment hoard but does that propel my guild (faction) or toon to a level where they can either:
A. Conquer the world (or at least region)
B. You can carve out your OWN small kingdom

3. In my digging am I going to come across some ancient technology that is going to tip the scales for my faction?

I realizing that this is a MMORPG but I do ask this question:

Is this, in reality, a static game where things have the appearance of being dynamic
but basically come down to doing things over and over again
(Fighting, Crafting, chatting, exploring, etc..)?

I have watched several hours of game-play video and haven't seen anything (other than the environment) that encourages me to think any different.

Thanks.

I think you haven't been reading as much as you say you have, or you would already know the answers to many of these questions.

Like almost every MMO, the core is practicing skills in order to increase your level, i.e. grinding. That is to say the list of five things that you listed first. Yes -- it's mostly grinding. However there are techniques and tricks to all the skills and they aren't always obvious or well known.

How do the players change things?
By organizing a super guild so that that guild can hold more OPs than other guilds (has been done - currently no single guild is dominant). By being such an awesome crafter that people proudly display "A set of superb heavy Armor made by ....." By running a player event that everyone is talking about for months afterwards.

By picking up on clues in Event Team events that lead to one outcome or another. This was more significant when we had three servers. Events (run by the event team) had different outcomes based on what the actual population of the server did within the event. Emperor Dexton lived (or died), Prince Stevano burned Thesos (or player diplomacy calmed the hot-heads on both sides).

Player willingness to put in effort created (with the aid of the event team) the Marauder "faction". It isn't as well developed as many players would like, but it came about because players wanted it and players played it even before it was official. The same is happening with the Ranger "faction". Things change slowly here, but change does happen.

Are you going to rule the world? No. For one thing, homins tend to be a fractious lot.
Are you going to conquer your own kingdom? Not when you cannot force PvP.
Are you going to discover something new that will destabilize the balance of the game? Don't be ridiculous. But the possibility exists of new discoveries.
There are new discoveries going on -- A fragment of a plan has been discovered in the Lakes. Something called a "boat". There are rumors that the Powers are going to call for the building of Temples, and we cannot be sure if they will be finished or not. (Or even if they ought to be.) A scouting party of aspirant Rangers has been gathered to do preliminary exploration of far portions of the Old Lands. New discoveries are made, well not daily, but often. Player content becomes Lore.
Most of this is role-play content, but it does change the world.

If there were millions of dollars available and a team of artists, programmers, skinners and animators, and the Event Team was larger and paid (at all), then there would probably be even more things, but they wouldn't be player changes.

-- My 2 dappers worth.

Well thanks for confirming my conclusions. It is not "ridiculous" to ask questions since the availability of lore and actual in-game footage (videos) information of the past is limited it is the only realistic way obtaining information or drawing conclusions.

Plus there are literally 1,000's of pages of forum questions in this and the old forum, so QUESTIONS are the way to obtain definitive answers. Moreover, I spent over an hour trying to access the Wiki but got an error message about "To heavy load..."

I am sorry that you think I am attacking your game but I am just stating what I see and wanting confirmation whether or not they were correct based on my supposed little bit of reading.

Peace!

My apologies. I did not mean to imply that all your questions were ridiculous or even futile. As you can see, I went to a deal of trouble to answer them, which I would not have done if they were not reasonable questions. Certainly I do not think that you are attacking the game I enjoy.

However, it just seemed to me that the idea that an artifact would be included in the game that would break the balance of the game was ridiculous, or perhaps merely ludicrous -- at very least bad game design.

"Definitive answers...." No such luck here, Evilar. Lots of opinions, many of them based on years of experience and full of observational knowledge, but "definitive"? For that you would need a dev or a CSR.

Come play.

-- Bittty

P.S. Do you know one Nicholas Knock?

No worries Bitty.

Actually this is a really relevant question since Ryzom has been trying for years to be a truly dynamic world and bills itself as that. But in reality it is pretty static. Many of the more dynamic features proposed were just never implemented sadly. So players still can't clear short term trade routes to other lands, the outposts are still pretty static in design, new skill bricks haven't been added etc..

So the game play is still pretty static, broken up by live events which further a story which are said to affect the world but sometimes its hard to tell if they did.

(semi off-topic but in some way on topic too)
i'm shocked to read something here bitty, "A scouting party of aspirant Rangers has been gathered to do preliminary exploration of far portions of the Old Lands." the reason i am shocked is that i've offered up this idea in the past though not by the rangers directly, and in the last 8 to 12 months i've been slowly adding to that, and in the last month i've had a large amount of extra time to work on it, taking what was 3,000 words of an outline of ideas to implament into a project of over 15,000 words, where more then 10,000 of them are the roleplay story i've been writting to explain the entire process. i had no intentions of putting it all on the forums until it's complete (which should be in the next few weeks i think), now i read that my very idea, i only touched on a time or two in the past has suddenly grown into something the rangers are doing solo, i wonder how my story is going to clash and/or follow the ideas they already had. this is the part where i look at the dev's for not giving the players that shape and mold the world a clear clue as to what's being done, even if only a vaguely clear clue. it will truely sadden me to think that i've spent so long personally on a project for the very idea of it to be taken and used in another "story". regardless i'll still share it, and perhaps the player base can choose the story they like most, and the dev's can build off those. (the secrets of everyone working on things like this {which i'm sure is only a few of us} is what adds to the complex nature of ryzom.)


so as you can see evilar, we all try our hands at changing ryzom, and in the end it's up to the dev's what's used and not used, more often then not what we try to do does NOTHING, but some of us keep hope always that what we try next will get SOMETHING.

Umm... Talk?

The expedition only been in the minutes of the Rangers meetings for much of this last year. (Since September, 2013 in fact) and Wilk was mentioning his travels in the far lands even before that.  I think that's a pretty big "clue".  Explicit statement is more like it.

Would you care to share the link where you mentioned it first?  An idle wish does not count as a suggestion, in my opinion, or I could lay claim to the idea of exploring the Canopy. If you mentioned it in any detail, I must have missed it.

It sounds to me as if you went off the deep end in writing it up without sending any communication directly to the event team.  Any time you do that, you risk having it contradicted by canon Lore.

-- B

i'll get you a link for the first mention of it, it's not very detailed if i recall, i took the work offline durring my "vacation" from the internet, the upside is that my stories include the rangers as members of the overall story, as well as the mara's, and ANY other group of homins. i can't go into serious detail due to spoiling the overall story, i highly doubt that any part of what i am working towards will likely be something we get, i've still put in the time effort and work to try to make it happen.

my first offical post about it was here:

http://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/18442/7

however this idea is now much more involved at this point, since i know that none of what i have created will likely ever be used, my stories and the idea's that spawned the stories will simply be more clutter in both the RP forums and the ideas forums.

my vacation from the internet is over now and soon i'll be posting the ideas and the stories, they will be released over time, as who would want to read over 20,000 words in one sitting? all the various stories will be released in small chapters in an order that will allow them to work together with eachother as well as show progression of events related to it.

i'd also like to say i'm sorry if i sounded negitive in my previous post, my work also started roughly a year ago give or take a few months, but was not posted on the forums at that time, i played with the idea and discussed it with a few of my friends for some time prior to my first post. who's to say that the rangers that went out are not still out there looking? and who know's maybe they will have a place in my stories that would support their efforts (can't spoil my stories and give a solid yes or no)

take care my friends, who know's what the future holds.

Thank you for that concise Answer!

I think Seawe is correct. I haven't been playing since the beginning but I did read about plans that never got implemented to include more permanent dymanic gameplay systems. Such as zone territorial control by factions, player actions causing more permanent changes to mobs respawning locations/cycles, etc.

The live events are the most dynamic experiences you're going to get at this point (and some of the best in any MMO out there tbh). But due to the nature of traditional MMO gaming, even those cannot change or affect the status quo or the core lore too much.

I've seen this done in a MUSH before, and I think the only way to create a truly dynamic environment in a Lore heavy MMO like Ryzom would be to give the server a life expectancy or a deadline and then allow the story to proceed in more drastic and extreme ways.

Example: Matis and Fyros fight, Yrkanis gets burned to the ground in the aftermath because Fyros had more players and were more organized, Matis get pushed underground to make a temporary settlement in the Prime Roots, Goo gets out of control because of Black Circle experiments and Grove of Umbra becomes a completely destroyed Goo wasteland full of infected creatures, etc. Then after all this and the story has been told to a satisfiable conclusion, bam. Server reset and we start all over again (but keeping the toon skills and gear intact or there'd be no end of crying).

As it is, it happens more like this: Matis and Fyros fight a war, since Matis players are more numerous and better organized, they burn Thesos to the ground in the war. However since new players coming to the game expect the core lore to be intact, Thesos cannot stay destroyed forever, so after a couple weeks it's "rebuilt" and reverted back to its original state making the Matis feel like none of their efforts really matter in the long run.

THAT was a great answer and I have to say I am now disappointed because I thought the real draw of this game was

1. Dynamic, organic world that changes due player and npc action

2. I read about Ryzom's RAID engine that is suppose to controlling all of this and was curious if that is true now or not?

Also, I am a new player (I played about 5 hours in 2014) but I was looking forward (and I am sure other newbies) are/were looking forward to permanent, dynamic world gameplay.

Without the possibility of permanent change being possible on the world, I can't see the point in wanting to subscribe because it just becomes pointless to really invest yourelf in this and pretty much like every other MMO.

Thanks for sharing Rikutatis

At this point, I don't think there's a single MMO out there offering anything closely resembling a truly dynamic world that changes permanently due to player actions. Maybe a few in early stages of development claiming that they will provide that, but I've seen many games in development making grandiose claims that never saw the light of day.

I think the closest thing to that was probably Shadowbane, but strictly from a pvp perspective. Since guilds could build their cities anywhere and destroy each other's cities anytime, fighting over resources on the map. But guild politics, city building and destruction was the only thing you could change permanently there. That game had many other problems though, and is long gone.

That's why the single player Elder Scrolls games are so popular, they kinda offer parts of that experience in a single player format.

What Ryzom can offer though is very solid and dynamic story telling through the Event Team and live events. The core lore won't be changed, but players can have very meaningful impact on the outcome of the events and steer them any direction that doesn't break the lore and status quo. But that's more if you're into roleplaying.

What is dynamic story telling and according to a previous post, things get reset a few weeks after the events so nothing permanent happens, its just hamster-wheeling?

Correct me if I am wrong and thanks for your previous reply

Well, let us take an older example. The old Emperor Dexton had a disease. The players were rallied to find ingredients that could at least hold the disease back, if not truly cure it.

In Arispotle they failed -- Dexton died. In Aniro and Leanon they succeeded -- Dexton lived, only to fall in the Second Swarming, defending his people.

The burning of Thesos did not happen on every server. In one server there wasn't even a battle.

Both of these, of course, caused major problems with the merge of the servers during the Second Swarming.

Look at the events in the Empire with the false Emperor Atreus. Players set up that situation, but the event team had to finally solve it, and political reverberations continue.

Yes, we can't blow up Kincher Arch or pull down a section of the canopy into Darkmoor. Yes the changes are small. Howver, they are there.