There will also be an Atys-wide event on Saturday, June 13th at 19:00 GMT:

In autumn of the 1st AC in 2546*, the leaders of the four peoples were each seeking to assemble their people. Thus it was that during that time, the town criers of the Desert Empire, of the Forest Kingdom, of the Federation of New Trykoth and of the Theocracy of the Witherings called for all homins to gather.

Following the announcements, Patriots, Subjects, Citizens, Initiates and non-citizens of all races met their respective leaders at the same time*, converging on the Agora in Pyr, the Yrkanis Stage, Fairhaven’s Frogmore Place and the Grand Place of Zora.

Even though none of the announcers gave reason for the meetings, rumor ran rampant across the bark of Atys. The activities of the imperial, royal, federal and dynastic agents gave reason to believe that the leaders were, each on their own, working on comparable projects and would be calling for their peoples’ help and good will in short time.

– Source

To me, the dubious parts are the slightly dumbed-down missions that seem to be appearing, and which I wouldn’t like to see multiply all over the place. The good part is, this last patch shows an intent to strengthen the core and get the fundamentals in place.

One visible online update is the integration of the suggestion box. I’d be particularly excited to see something like the involvement of tribes in “politics” put forward eventually, but there’s many other suggestions that could be worth implementing, that don’t take as much development effort.

Of course, developers are not bound to implementing what’s posted there just because it’s popular, and they need to be leading the project and take their own decisions if it is to keep integrity and cohesion; nevertheless, the suggestions should give them welcome ideas to keep Atys evolving, as it should.

Angry Kami

Pissed off Kami

I shall have my revenge!!!!

It might be hard to believe, but The Strahl was spotted in the early AM hours of March 12. Many residents were frightened by the sight of a sharp, stubby ponytail, or would have been if they were not sleeping soundly and had any idea who the hell he was. There was one eye-witness, though he was traumatized and we kept the interview short.

Dallae, a local member of the beloved Aeden Artisans and avid Jewel crafter said he saw the grimy Fyros.

“That’s right, I saw him with my own two eyes. He called me DillyDallae and his very voice scared the local wildlife. I think one of the yubos even cursed at him. He was frightening, but I easily outsmarted him. I told him of the returned PvP elements, and promptly requested his aid to test a new stanza. As the inept Fyros tried to use his odd method of elemental magic, I clobbered him repeatedly with my mace. He fell three times before giving up!”

We had to stop the interview there because Dallae was either too frightened or didn’t care. He did further comment later, that the eccentric desert baby was spouting insane ramblings and claims such as Second Life has not overtaken his first life, and that he misses talking to his Guildies immensely. Along with other barely intelligible speech he actually claimed that he is making an effort to get on more often and even “hop on vent” as it was put by the madman. We are unsure if his absence because of what he calls an “[expletive deleted] boss!” but it may be a possible cause. Further investigation is needed.

We truly don’t know whether these frightening statements are true, but we can only pray to Jena that everything will still be safe in the end. All we can say is, keep your pet yubo safe, and to be wary of anyone with a pike.

This has been an Atysan special report, and may Jena and the power of teal protect us all!

The patch is scheduled for Monday January 26, and is expected to last from 9AM to ~11AM, GMT time.

First of all, about pricing:

Ryzom cannot develop and prosper as a “free to play” game forever, and therefore we have released Ryzom’s New pricing structure as follows. [..]

• 1 month: 7.95 € / $ 10.95 / £ 7.75
• 3 months: 22.50 € / $ 30.75 / £ 20.95
• 6 months: 41.95 € / $ 56.95 / £ 39.75
• 12 months: 77.95 € / $ 105.95 / £ 73.75

Then, a patch was announced for tomorrow Wednesday:

We are planning to temporarily shut down the servers, starting at 9AM GMT [..] on Wednesday 7 January, for a period of approximately 4 hours (until about 1PM GMT), though it might take a bit longer depending on how things go.

This downtime is intended to install a small update to the servers and also to allow us to test the procedure for updating Ryzom servers in real situations. We appreciate your understanding in advance on this break of several hours.

Most notably, the patch should include reactivation of Kitin Larvae in Desertstock, and the reappearance of Kitin in Demon’s Lap. For more information on patch content, see original post.

Main points of the discussion:

• The Arispotle Events team has been short on members. To help out with Events, a couple more would be needed. Boroshi is leading the team for now, and will try to make the event already staged in Aniro and Leanon happen before Christmas.
• Bringing more meaning to the civilizations. Each of the four civilizations will have events leading to the recovery of amber cubes (which hold the history and memory of Atys), and involvement of tribes in events is also planned. Additionally, player-based governments will be established. There is a broad outline for these events. Mention was made of the civilization languages (a reminder that a first translation of the Aniro Tryker language document is available here, for the hardcore homins).
• The lore site is being worked on as well, none of the old lore was lost or altered, and it’s planned to be moved forward (Some elements are available here, as you know). Numerous calls were made for events that would revive the lore.
• Atys-shaking changes won’t be happening for a little while yet, due to the developer’s team priority being mainly with bug-fixing and not with implementing new content yet. So the events are mainly roleplay, and won’t induce a change in gameplay for now.
• Crippling policies of the past will be made more lenient. The consensus at the meeting was to allow some Event team interaction with homins on Atys, even when no event is happening, or when the event is player-based.
• Soon. Skeptics have noted there is no timeline for development. The developers are working hard.

* an expression meaning the same as the first four in an old language that is rarely used today.

We are (very) proud to announce the return of official events to the Ryzom servers. The Fourth Events Team has been working for several weeks and is ready to lead Atys into the future, to restore life to the Saga. Events will return; either stand-alone or in long sequences, and along with you they will be writing and telling the history of all hominkind. In the near future, the Events Team also wants to give more weight to the Civilisations and give the homins that are most involved with this some more responsibilities and concrete roles ingame.

Some of your posts in the recent months have indicated that you are all eagerly anticipating the return of events and we hope to live up to your expectations. More than just events aimed at homins in general, we will try to create events that cater specifically to all groups of homins on Atys; whether Fyros, Matis, Trykers or Zoraïs, Kamists or followers of the Karavan, Marauders, Trytonists, old voyagers who have risen from the roots to the bark, or young refugees freshly arrived in the New Lands.

In order to get to know you better, we will be happy to meet with you in game or enter into discussions on the forums; this should let us get a better understanding of the expectations and hopes you have and the place that you would like to have in the future of Atys.

In the coming weeks, four events will be played on Atys to mark the return of the Event Team. There will be one event for each Civilisation; each story will involve some short “prologue” events and then one main evening event.

See you soon, and good Saga.

The Fourth Event Team

There followed quite a few inquisitive questions, as this announcement did nothing to clear up doubts, although it pointed with near-certainty that Ryzom wouldn’t go Free-to-Play (F2P).

Yumeroh just responded to address those doubts with these words (highlights are mine):

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 [stated here], 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.

I think this is the best piece of news, and very clearly stated, that we’ve had for months, even years. There is a plan, there will be consistency with lore, there will be events, there will be bug hunts. One day, we’ll have to learn who that Spiderweb is, but in the meanwhile, we’re here!

Atys: A demigod who was turned into a giant pine tree.

Karavan: Persian Pilgrims

Kami and Ma-duk: It is a big ole pdf, check out words 172 and 189 on the word list if you decide to look at the whole thing.

Jena: Simple word play on Genesis.

Goo: Runaway nanobots

Kitin: Armored bugs

Matis: Look familiar?

Zoari: Ancient religion

Fyros: I think it is just cause they like to burn things but the name could be tied to Former Yugoslavian Republic of Slovenia (FYROS) and they just liked the sound of it.

Tryker: Really couldn’t find anything, maybe something to do with Elias Tryton?

Enjoy the links.