VCA/Gameforge Partnership - Proposal

Version 0.1 EN - Early draft, short version.

Introduction

In this introduction, we'll briefly present what was the Free Ryzom Campaign and the reasoning which led to the creation of the Virtual Citizenship Association (VCA), when Nevrax was filling for liquidation process. The VCA was able to get enough support and enthousiasm to raise 300.000 €, including 170 000 € of donation pledges in less than 6 weeks to buy Ryzom assets. The fact that thousands of players around the world were willing to contribute money to the effort is a proof of the potential of Ryzom and of the way it was supposed to be handled.

There is thus a great potential, of both creativity and motivation, united under the banner of the Free Ryzom project, which only waits to be exploited. The only condition is to understand what motivated it, and how Gameforge can benefit from it.

Please also note that this is the short version of the proposal, still being written. You can find the latest version on the VCA wiki.

Goals of the Free Ryzom Campaign

Making the whole Ryzom game libre and contributive, including code, content, LD and story. It is in the same spirit that we open the discussion today, to talk about this goal and see how it could match Gameforge's interests. The VCA gathered a large pool of creativity and competence, but also of complaints of current and past players, and former Nevrax employees. This group is thus offering to share its experience with Ryzom, MMORPGs, roleplay games and technical development.

Breathing life to Ryzom

Here is a summary of the different points the VCA believes to be important to let Ryzom reach its full potential and success:

• Opening the game background to allow players to invest time making it more lively, and create the real social, political and drama setting currently missing from the game. Players/volunteers should have full access to the lore to allow it to grow, and let Ryzom be the first MMORPG friendly to roleplayers (see the numbers below to see how much players could be interested in this).
• Giving out enough power and tools to allow effective collaboration among the community, instead of a rigid hierarchy where volunteers are considered suspiciously and aren't trusted enough.
• Allow more information and more communication between the game studio and the community to filter out, instead of a secret-based policy. More trust toward the community allows to work more efficiently together, instead of one against the other.
• Start community-based marketing efforts; the Free Ryzom Campaign proved there is a lot more to gain from word of mouth than from spending millions in advertisement campaigns.
• Welcome, inform and integrate new players to the Ryzom dynamic, which is a niche game whose greatest asset is its setting, universe and roleplay potential.
• Freeing the source code base and LD/3D/2D assets, to let the community participate to the development of the game.

Ryzom is a niche game, but hasn't reached its potential

In the full version of this document, we discuss more in depth all these elements. There are many sources to demonstrate each of them: Free Software contributors can do incredible things, user-created content has became a buzz word for a reason, open structures work well with the community. But in this short version, we'll assume all that is known to the reader.

However, there is one point which can need some clarification, as this isn't as much part of common knowledge as the remaining items. This point is the first one of the preceding paragraph: about the lore, the story and the universe. Why should we care?

First, if it is handled the right way, it is easy to do with Ryzom, and most of it doesn't require development time. Second, there is a huge roleplay community spread across many games, waiting for the first MMORPG really allowing them to roleplay in the pen&paper style.

World of Warcraft : 35 servers are dedicated to roleplay in the US, 22 on the European territory. This gives 910.000 players on these servers. And, according to roleplayers on these servers, 10% of the players of these servers correspond to the pen&paper style target, this is already 90.000 players ready to move.

Lineage II : No dedicated servers, but a "grey servers" community of 510.000 players. 135 grey servers are roleplay servers, which is one of the main reasons why such illegal servers are created.