[Yumeroh]

Originally Posted by iphdrunk

Thank you for keeping us updated.

<private joke> the following post is dedicated to Jackoba's verbosity </>


I do have one comment, though, which I am afraid is not original and somehow expected.

It is quite possible that, after the free period, some players including yours truly will consider subscribing (or to be more optimistic, will subscribe more willingly...) if we have an idea of the development plan and general roadmap. I do hope that you have been working not only on setting up the billing system, opennel and the webpage, but also on the game itself, as you may have hinted in previous communication, even if it is simply defining a generic roadmap.

Plainly speaking (and without going now into whether there are plenty of things to do, roses to smell, the greatness of sandbox games, and how to spend hours "counting the spots in a varynx skin during sunset", etc.. that's offtopic) it is easier to wait for news while the game remains free, which, in my opinion, it is something to be grateful for, and serves the purpose of keeping the community "tight". However, since we do have now more and more concrete details, it would be great if we could also have more concrete aspects on the game itself.

Let's consider this in 2 ways:

a) Without going into the details if you cannot or do not want to provide them, Could you give some hints i.e., be more especific concerning global game aspects and scenario evolution, such as if there will be minor / major updates to the game at the same time of the new "release"? Can we expect a simultaneous patch during the new "rererelease"?

b) Otherwise, can you confirm that the game will be back to pay-to-play, "as is", with exactly the same feature set? Can you give a "stalled lower bound" i.e., time with monthly subscription in which no changes are planned / considered?

I hope that having this information around could help players make (more) informed decisions, and even the hint of a minor update could be a strong reason to attract and convince the player population segment that are in a "wait and see" state, or who may think that if game remains "as is", it may be worth suspending the subscription until when new features are added. I don't want to think that it is naive to expect some of these questions to be answered


My optimistic side says that it would be quite reasonable, even from the marketing point of view, to expect some candy at "release", rather than a disappointing "switch to pay mode now", despite how realistic and necessary this may be...

Yours
Ani

Many of you have been playing the game for four years now - or even longer if you were part of one or more of the pre-release stages. The fact that you have stuck around this long shows that you care so much about the game, just as we do, and want to see it succeed and be the best it can be. The fact that the game has elicited such devotion from many of you is something that we're very proud of and very glad to be a part of; to be blunt, we hope to be one more reason that you stay with the game for even longer

Thank you for understanding that we can't always give you absolutely all of the details; it's simply not possible in every situation, regardless of the industry you are in. Having said that, we strive to be able to claim that when we say we're going to do something, it happens. Hopefully you have already seen some evidence of this mantra in what we've done so far but we also understand that you need some more "future-oriented" information alongside things that we have been telling you thus far.

To start with, we bought the game because we love Ryzom dearly and strongly believe that it has what it takes to "make it" and become what we all dream it can be. Before we start "dreaming" and putting those dreams into practice, we need to stabilise the game and rectify some of the issues that might put off new players. We need to get profitable first and to do that we need to tidy things up and make the game a lot more user-friendly and accessible to as many people as possible, without diluting what makes Ryzom special. With that in mind we've already started on creating new ways of marketing and translating the game among other things.

To answer your direct questions ( http://forums.ryzom.com/showpost.php...92&postcount=3 ), we also have fixes written for some of the bugs that annoy you the most and we plan to put those on the live server as soon as we have the infrastructure in place to ensure that our code reaches you all effectively and in its proper state. To be specific that means test servers and processes, as well as the patch system - these are "in the works" at the moment, but *hopefully* should be ready for deployment at somewhere around the same time as the billing system goes live. We're not yet quite ready to talk about "large-scale evolution" of the game; obviously the game must evolve to survive and we have some ideas floating around regarding that, but changing the game so that it's not "Ryzom" anymore is most definitely not our goal

As an aside, we also plan to fully support and re-introduce Live Events to the game. The whole way we handle and manage events is being reorganised; the lore pages and chronicles website are currently being reviewed as part of this so that we can bring them back in a centralised and easier to use manner once the reorganisation is complete.