WELCOME

Greetings dear homins / humans!

I - one of the new additions to Atys' population - want to introduce myself. ;)

I did play Ryzom for a couple of months back in the mid-2000s but did not really follow its progress in the following years (besides reading news about big changes like the sale).
So I was caught by surprise when Ryzom suddenly popped up on my recommendations-list on steam.
I immediately got curious and downloaded the game.

But my curiosity is not only that of a gamer - I also have a "professional" interest in playing Ryzom:
In "real life" I am a student of ethnography. And, since I am interested in online- and MMO-ethnography, I chose Ryzom as my new field of research.
I am going to use participant-observation as my principal research method - meaning that I am going to play the game (and read the forums) pretty much the same way everybody else does, with the exception that I keep chatlogs, take notes of ingame occurences I deem important for my research or take screenshots for the same reason. Later on I'll probably conduct some interviews as well. Of course I will anonymize all the information that I gather during my research.

Bottomline: I'm happy to be back on Atys (it is as beautiful as I remember it) and am looking forward to rekindle my relationship with the game and its community.

See you on Atys! :)

Welcome back :D

Wellcome back :)


What is your work about? mmo-ethnography can means lot of thigs... I knwo i'm quite curious :)

I am trying to figure out the amorphous thing called "community". ;)

To be more precise, I want to find out what made / makes Ryzom's community "strong" enough to endure events like the game being sold twice and the merge / "soft wipe" - and to accomplish things like Ryzom being "re-released" on steam.

Also I am interested into seeing how the established playerbase reacts to the new players streaming into the game due to the steam release and what impact this population shift has onto the community.

Just my 2 dappers: I hope you understand French, German and Spanish, because these players are parts of the community also. (And yes, I know they are other languages, so if you speak Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, or anything else, the better :) )

Unfortunately I only speak German and English - but I might be able to decipher some French and Spanish as well, if I manage to remember some of the stuff I have learned in the respective beginners language courses which I once visited... (or if I harness the power of google translate ;)).

Will you write your research in english or german , Does the research will be avaible somewhere online to read or for players of Ryzom . Actually I m interrested too because I begin to digg into sociology of Virtual World