Ryzom Expands with Player-Made Content

[HaemishM]

But can you make a Blue Lagoon?

[schild]

I wonder if they even have enough people at peak hours to support a single zone let alone an entire expansion to a world.

I have however heard that their playerbase is an incredible community that is surprisingly mature. Of course, the genre doesn't exactly set the bar very high.

[Glazius]

This is a nice shiny, but... well, you'd need someone inside Ryzom to actually report on the current state of the game. What I saw in beta made me not really want to go back.

It had a use-based skill growth system that lumped all skill together at a low level and had increasingly more detailed individual meters as you climbed higher and higher - not bad in and of itself.

Except that at weapons/melee/2-handed/claymores/Matis claymore skill 500, you were using Critical Hit 50, and at weapons skill 20 you were using Critical Hit 2. Repeat across essentially all skill trees. Without branching out and grinding up divergent skills, you were basically locked into one special attack path with enough hit points to stand up to whatever the new monsters were and enough stamina to keep the special attack using about the same percentage of your max.

Yes, they were actually called "Critical hit 2" and "Critical hit 50". I mean, there's something to be said for access to the primitive components of character building, but it made me painfully aware that all I had to look forward to was the same thing with larger numbers.

--GF

[Driakos]

Weird timing.  Or is it?

I got this from Mourning in my email today.  I'm sure half of everyone here was spammed with it as well.

   
Mourning™ is a new persistent online world project set in turbulent medieval times. Mourning™ plunges players into a beautifully detailed world to explore, which includes underground caverns, woodlands, mountain ranges, forests, ice lands, wastelands, cities and towns.
Mourning™ provides players the unique ability to craft characters, items, armor, weapons and structures offline via applications such as 3DSMAX or Maya and have them imported into the world after approval by the developers. Mourning™ also provides players with a powerful suite of proprietary tools that will aide in the offline crafting process by players.

Mourning will attempt something new, that blah blah blah blah
 

In Earth and Beyond, you could submit your guild logo's for publishing.  You submitted it, CSRs reviewed it, and if it passed, they'd foward it along to the designers who would get it published after awhile.  No 3D game content, but user submitted.  Too bad only 8k players saw it.

This just seems like another Mourning, we got everything!  Come on down to Big Bobs Discount MMG, House O' Credit Card Rackateering and digital non-consensual fornicatin'.  Todays special: Pristine fields of corn for your backwards nude jogging pleasure.

Is this the start of a nice new trend, or the beginning of West Virginia/Ohio border Trailer Park Online?  In games like TSO and UO, where you can customize your own house, there's a few kinds of players.  The bare minimums.  The Martha Stewarts (bullying included)  The Christopher Lowells (for the hide the penis sub-game that happens every time you offer player made content), and the Griefers. 

Maybe a review process will circumvent most of the trouble, and leave us with masterpieces of fiction and architecture.  But I still think tailored sculpted worlds, just look nicer.  E.g. WoW's level design.  Final Fantasy XI had a nice world map as well.  User submitted content makes me think of shack and shanty wastelands dotted with Playboy Mansions every-so-often.

[Pococurante]

Player-made content is the next marketing opportunity.  Player-hosted communities as well.  It's just not profitable yet for houses to push out content at the same volumes as a large fanbase, nor to provide the customer support needed to police communities that peer-managed fans happily provide each other for free.

It's not that this is news to game publishers.  Just that most are of the conviction there is no viable business model to promote this approach.  Raph himself manages to encapsulate both the awareness that there is demand for such products (he tells us he floated the idea to OSI early in UO's lifecycle) along with the belief it can't be profitable.  We've seen Near Death Studios and Mythic employees slide the scale as well, Scott & Brian having been particularly adamant that selling community-oriented products that players host themselves just can't be sufficiently profitable.

And yet Bioware is doing well.  More games are released with modding engines, even literal mom & pop operations like TaleWorld's Mount & Blade.  Spore promises to be the next step in the mainstream commercial offerings.

StGabe currently tells us that this extremely young industry knows more than we the customers do and that's why publishers churn out derivation after derivation. This is one of those "everyone knows" things that hobbles the houses most capable of delivering such products while creating room for the scrappier more nimble companies to create their own market.  Shareholders and executives will wring their hands and wonder how they could let the opportunity slip by.

Same old story.  Creative destruction.

[tazelbain]

All anyone has to do look at quality of player names to known how player made content will work out.   There is a reason why Second Life is a themeless MMOG (unless you count sex and advertising as a theme).

[Comstar]

What about content made by other companies instead of player made content? In other words, D20 the MMOG. You made your MMOG but other companies can make additons to it? Bascicaly like all those additons you can get for Flight Simulator. players still have to buy the basic edition and pay you for the monthly access, but can install 3rd party zones, advetures and new games to play, 'Corse BALANCING it would be impossible, but it's just an idea.

[HaemishM]

I have however heard that their playerbase is an incredible community that is surprisingly mature. Of course, the genre doesn't exactly set the bar very high.

Yeah, that's more evidence for my theory that MMOG's try too hard to pack too many people into games, upping the asshat quotient and lowering the quality of the community.