all iv heard is good from this game and im wondering why did the game die.....i mean...what happend

I believe the matter is before the French Courts.  There are a lot of rumors floating about, but few actual facts.

The servers have been shutdown, but the community is still alive, hurting but still alive.

You can still log onto Klients and www.Ryzom.com

There has been a little bit of news:

www.ryzom.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=6238#6238

Moonlightmist

Probably just lack of user-base to support the cost of running the servers, paying the support, energy bill, renewing licences and paying for it's maintenence. Even a skeleton crew requires a few hundred grand per year. 

If you're asking why I think the game didn't do well, I'd have to say that it had a very interesting setting, but very little happened and the great foe was a swarm of mindless giant insects which occasionally attacked towns. All in all you didn't feel like you were fighting a evil foe, just pushing back a hill of ants. Ryzom was very interesting and a skill based game I really enjoyed in beta and early on. But I found that a strong lack of quests, a lack of dungeons or varrying environments made the world feel small. The outdoor areas were hunting fields of roaming mobs, but there wasn't a strong sense of progression or character growth.

Plus the four races (or was it 3?) seemed to be at peace with one another. There was a deffinit lack of conflict or foe to overcome. No unique items to seek, no epic content. After a while of walking around the same zones farming animal parts to craft people got bored. The developers couldn't produce enough interesting content to keep the game alive so they made a tool to allow users to create instances and tailor the story (which would have been cool if there was already a large ammount of game content but there was a vast lack, so this felt like a bandaid measure). It was well received but the already dwindling player base was not enought o draw in new players and over time the player base atrophied and they had to shut down the servers.

A company wanted to buy it and make it F2P but another came and payed more for it.  I'm betting now that they wish they would have made it F2P.  I played it when it was free for a while and I really enjoyed it.  I like that the animals roamed, and they looked at you and such.  I liked the game play and that there was spontanious things happening.  To me it felt more like a living world than any other MMO I've played.  Granted I could have thought of other ideas to make it feel more living, but it was going in a good direction.  I hope they can make it F2P, and make more content for it.  The game does have promise and I think F2P is the only way people are going to give the game a chance, its been around far to long to go back to P2P...and if its totally shut down that would be a sad thing.

This was a great game. My only thoughts on it's demise is the huge outlay of cash the original dev team spent on trying to promote the game before it was really ready for release. They attempted to set CDs in stores and when funds ran out to continue that, they allowed free D/Ls. They seemed to have incurred so much debt that they went bankrupt and the company that bought it never really advertised it either. Most of the decent sized population the servers had came from either word of mouth or from great reviews here on MMORG and other similiar websites.

Lack of advertising cost this game its life and not the game itself.

- It is too oblique, ambiguous, and challenging for the average MMO gamer. Logically, after a stressful day at work/school, many people would want their entertainment to be relatively mindless and ego-stroking. Ryzom doesn't easily fit that desire. It caters to a niche who want a more complex game which does not hold their hand, tell them what to do, or spoonfeed them. Ryzom is to mainstream MMOGs what LEGOs (without instructions), Rubik's Cubes, and chess are to Twister mats, Hopscotch, and checkers.

- It encourages/enforces a degree of interdependence among players that makes it difficult to become powerful in-game under certain circumstances (i.e. living in a timezone that consistently places your logins at a lull on your language's server's activity level, within a population that is low at the best of times). It also makes it difficult for certain types of players.

- Ryzom has never been marketed properly, and for most of its existence, it has not been marketed at all. Of the few people who would enjoy it, far fewer would ever hear about it.

- There were many fantastic features promised at various points in time, particularly during initial development, which never made it into the game. Some players felt disenfranchised about this.

- For a third of its lifetime, Ryzom has been owned by Gameforge, who...dropped the ball. For the other two thirds, it was owned by Nevrax, who weren't good enough at managing and developing the game either.

- On that note, there were several occurrences in Ryzom's history which precluded opportunities to gain players, or alienated existing players.

--- Ryzom was released around the same time as World of Warcraft.

--- First patch after release ("Patch 1") was very problematic and caused many players to leave. Even one, two, and three years later, some people still had a bad taste in their mouth from that and therefore never bothered to give Ryzom another chance.

--- There have been two server merges, one early on (North American shard "Windermeer" into what was formerly the European shard, "Arispotle," to form a single English shard) and one later (secondary English server "Cho," which appealed to old players who wanted a fresh start and new players who worried about being eclipsed in an established community, was reunified with Arispotle not long after being started).

--- Focus on PvP was increased after the community had been accustomed to primarily PvE gameplay for a long time already.

The faction PvP began with an event about fighting for special materials in regions opened specifically for this purpose, to build temples for the two main religions.

It continued with the introduction of outposts, which allow guilds to own small pieces of land where drills can be (and of course, always are) installed to produce consumables (xp doublers, minor and temporary stat increasers, and special crafting materials). Although outposts are not mechanically faction vs. faction, because guilds tend to choose allies of the same faction as themselves the battles to obtain and hold outposts usually consisted of the defenders being mainly one faction and the attackers being mainly another. There were plenty of exceptions and grey areas, though, which created politics I personally found very intriguing...but some others found them tiring and irritating.

Anyway, on at least the Arispotle and Leanon servers some circumstance or other led to numerical imbalance between the factions. On Arispotle the Karavaneers outnumbered the Kamists and thus owned more of the outposts, and on Leanon it was the Kamists who outnumbered the Karavaneers.

Because outposts produce xp-doubling consumables, the faction with more outposts was able to skill up their constituents faster. You can probably extrapolate why this evoked whining and quitting from the underdog faction.

- The Ruins of Silan, with its quest-like tutorial missions and general atmosphere of obvious (a.k.a. contrived) goal orientation, is quite unlike the mainland. The people who liked the former were disappointed by the latter.

Also, RoS did not always exist. It was introduced later on. Before that, new players started on one of four separate islands according to race. The less popular races' islands were usually empty. There were no missions or tutorials, and no Universe channel.

- Gameforge severed the deal with Jolt that provided the volunteer CSR/GM program that had been in place, at least for Arispotle, for a long time. They replaced it with what appears to be a simpler in-house volunteer system, but I'm not sure since I was never a CSR/GM in either. This disturbed some people, who proceeded to leave. It took a while for the new personnel to learn the event tools, and even after they did, there were few events held.

- The first bankruptcy, of Nevrax, may have flipped the switch of "How I Should Perceive Ryzom" in some minds from "Extant" to "Dead."

- The releases of LotRO and Vanguard.

- The small population was a turn-off for some prospective players, which didn't make it easy for the population to increase. Argh, circular logic.

- A lot of the people claiming to want something different from the standard cookie-cutter MMO fare are pansies who got cold feet upon experiencing Ryzom's degree of difference (if they somehow knew of it at all). =P *semi-joking on this point*

Katriell did an excellent job, but if you didn't want to read all of that you could sum it up into one simple statement.  The game was always under-funded, and that led to its ultimate demise.

Originally posted by Arioc

Probably just lack of user-base to support the cost of running the servers, paying the support, energy bill, renewing licences and paying for it's maintenence. Even a skeleton crew requires a few hundred grand per year. 

If you're asking why I think the game didn't do well, I'd have to say that it had a very interesting setting, but very little happened and the great foe was a swarm of mindless giant insects which occasionally attacked towns. All in all you didn't feel like you were fighting a evil foe, just pushing back a hill of ants. Ryzom was very interesting and a skill based game I really enjoyed in beta and early on. But I found that a strong lack of quests, a lack of dungeons or varrying environments made the world feel small. The outdoor areas were hunting fields of roaming mobs, but there wasn't a strong sense of progression or character growth.

Plus the four races (or was it 3?) seemed to be at peace with one another. There was a deffinit lack of conflict or foe to overcome. No unique items to seek, no epic content. After a while of walking around the same zones farming animal parts to craft people got bored. The developers couldn't produce enough interesting content to keep the game alive so they made a tool to allow users to create instances and tailor the story (which would have been cool if there was already a large ammount of game content but there was a vast lack, so this felt like a bandaid measure). It was well received but the already dwindling player base was not enought o draw in new players and over time the player base atrophied and they had to shut down the servers.

Ariok, seems u are speaking of  WoW, so you are very superficial in your statements.

Telling 'mindless insects' means u didn't seen anything of the game as one of the best part of Ryzom is the mob AI, and their 'living acts'.

It's clear that u never went killing bosses.

Ryzom is 'sandbox' so telling that ther is a lack of quests (guided-quests to be precise as the game is full of quests) simply means you can't play a 'free-minded' game.

Lack of dungeons? You should know that in a single instanced world, dungeons are in the world and not instanced. There are dungeons.

There is no conflict between races but there is a huge conflict between the 2 factions, to conquer/defend Outposts, so your statement is false (or was true during beta).

Unique items? in a game that have as strong part it's crafting items?? lol, it's so banal asking for unique items. Anyway some 'unique' items from npc bosses are in the game.

Even you don't remember the number of races present so, what's the point in speaking of something you absolutely don't know, since the beta finished 3 years ago and you never played?

It's better for you play wow or one of the other quest-based mmo around. You can choose blinded, as they are almost all the same.

What told by Katriell is correct, said from one people that actually *know* the game.

Ryzom is death because people want easy things, ryzom is a hard game  to play and needed an open minded mature players.

Ironically, as said by Katriell, a lot of people, just bored of the mindless mmo around (WoW at top list) where back in game in the last days, asking why they never known anything about ryzom, and finding it as a very fresh environment!!

Seems too late.

Originally posted by Gilgameesh

 

Originally posted by Arioc

Probably just lack of user-base to support the cost of running the servers, paying the support, energy bill, renewing licences and paying for it's maintenence. Even a skeleton crew requires a few hundred grand per year. 

If you're asking why I think the game didn't do well, I'd have to say that it had a very interesting setting, but very little happened and the great foe was a swarm of mindless giant insects which occasionally attacked towns. All in all you didn't feel like you were fighting a evil foe, just pushing back a hill of ants. Ryzom was very interesting and a skill based game I really enjoyed in beta and early on. But I found that a strong lack of quests, a lack of dungeons or varrying environments made the world feel small. The outdoor areas were hunting fields of roaming mobs, but there wasn't a strong sense of progression or character growth.

Plus the four races (or was it 3?) seemed to be at peace with one another. There was a deffinit lack of conflict or foe to overcome. No unique items to seek, no epic content. After a while of walking around the same zones farming animal parts to craft people got bored. The developers couldn't produce enough interesting content to keep the game alive so they made a tool to allow users to create instances and tailor the story (which would have been cool if there was already a large ammount of game content but there was a vast lack, so this felt like a bandaid measure). It was well received but the already dwindling player base was not enought o draw in new players and over time the player base atrophied and they had to shut down the servers.

 

Ariok, seems u are speaking of  WoW, so you are very superficial in your statements.

Telling 'mindless insects' means u didn't seen anything of the game as one of the best part of Ryzom is the mob AI, and their 'living acts'.

It's clear that u never went killing bosses.

Ryzom is 'sandbox' so telling that ther is a lack of quests (guided-quests to be precise as the game is full of quests) simply means you can't play a 'free-minded' game.

Lack of dungeons? You should know that in a single instanced world, dungeons are in the world and not instanced. There are dungeons.

There is no conflict between races but there is a huge conflict between the 2 factions, to conquer/defend Outposts, so your statement is false (or was true during beta).

Unique items? in a game that have as strong part it's crafting items?? lol, it's so banal asking for unique items. Anyway some 'unique' items from npc bosses are in the game.

Even you don't remember the number of races present so, what's the point in speaking of something you absolutely don't know, since the beta finished 3 years ago and you never played?

It's better for you play wow or one of the other quest-based mmo around. You can choose blinded, as they are almost all the same.

What told by Katriell is correct, said from one people that actually *know* the game.

Ryzom is death because people want easy things, ryzom is a hard game  to play and needed an open minded mature players.

Ironically, as said by Katriell, a lot of people, just bored of the mindless mmo around (WoW at top list) where back in game in the last days, asking why they never known anything about ryzom, and finding it as a very fresh environment!!

Seems too late.

 

 

 

 

Thanks Katriell and Gilgameesh, I could not have said it better myself.

Moonlightmist

I truly loved this game until I left the noobie area and found it completely lacking in content of any kind.

There's sandbox and sandbox, and to go from having lots to do to absolutely nothing to do I think that put alot of people off staying longer and making enough social connections to make it worthwhile.

That was the downfall of this game, such a shame because with a bit more content this game would rule all.

 And no that doesn't mean I don't have the imagination to 'handle' a sandbox game, I have played Eve for many years and played 2 years of Face of Mankind and created a huge amount of player content.

The community should of done more in this game to actively produce player content and situations for all levels.  Sandbox doesn't mean leave people to their own imaginations it means working as a community to inspire peoples imagination and to assist in the success of the world and new players interaction and integration in that world.

So look to each other for the reason this game failed not the lack of imagination of new subscribers.