A few of us have been playing Saga of Ryzom and I thought it would be handy to write a little mini guide to hopefully help you all out.

General Notes:

Ryzom is unlike other MMORPGs that force you to choose one particular “track” and stick to it. Every character may, with sufficient levelling, perform every action, get every spell, every melee skill, etc. You are not limited as to the kind of character you wish to make!

With that said, on the Ruins of Silan (the starter Island) I would personally recommend that you have a balanced character up till about level 30 at least and in fact I’d expand that up to level 70 or so.

While it may be tempting to only do the Fighter quests or only the Magic ones, your character will be much stronger if you do them all as opposed to one track. The reason is simple: You get a much larger skill point pool for critical upgrades such as more HP, more Sap, a faster HP regeneration time and so on. These upgrades may often be purchased at multiple trainers, so you can gain a quick few levels in Harvest or Craft and easily get an Hp or Sap boost.

This is also important for working in a team. While there will often be a specific person who does harvesting, another who has high craft, a tank and a magic user, and a healer, it is recommended that everybody get basic Magic skills like Heal Life. When you come out of a fight, you then have much less “downtime” waiting for healing that if you have only one healer, who must wait to regenerate thier sap.

Notes about Action bars:

In Ryzom you get a lot of different actions to do - and the key thing to remember is that every one of them can be customised and also that they all get added to your number 1 action bar.

What I would recommend is that on Silan you have 1 action bar per skillset type. So, for example, I have:

- Action bar 1 - Pure fighting skills (I use only 2 or 3, explained later) plus Self Heal Life and Self Heal Focus, and Use Item Enchantment
- Action bar 2 - Pure Magic skills (again, I use 4 or 5 at the most, generally 2 variations of Acid, Root and Root) plus Self Heal Life, Self Heal Sap and Use Item Enchantment
- Action bar 10 - Pure Crafting Skills (again, only 3 here I use), plus Self Heal Focus
- Action bar 9 - Pure Harvest skills (3 prospects, 1 or 2 extract), plus Self Heal Life and Self Heal Focus

To keep your action bars organised I recommend that every time you get a new action you remove it from bar 1 and re-add it to the relevant other bar. It is critical that you “know” your actions and where they are.

Always upgrade any actions with new upgrades or skills as you get them!

I recommend that every action bar except Crafting has a Self Heal Life! This is important - the Self Heal Life is recommended to be in the same position on every bar. For example, mine is in the shift-8 position. I would also recommend that every action bar (as mentioned above) have a Self Heal X (where X is Focus or Stamina or Sap) depending on the bar type (Harvest, Melee, Magic) and that it, too, stays in the same position on each bar.

Here is the setup of my 4 bars:

Melee Fighting:

You’ll notice I have very few actual actions here - this is becuase most people tend to prefer one type of weapon - slashing (swords, axes), piercing (daggers), and blunt (maces). So you only need to go for one set of skills - Bleeding for Slashing weapons, Ignore Armour for Piercing, etc.

Due to this, it is recommended that you have a very small set of actual attack buttons - generally I have 3:

- A main “first attack” which uses the most stamina - this stanza consists of the highest Bleeding/Ignore Armour, etc plus the highest Increase Damage skill

- A secondary attack, which uses little stamina but still does more damage that the default attack. This action consists of essentially just an Increase Damage stanza.

- A tertiary attack, which uses Increase Damage plus Accurate Attack, for those hard to hit enemies.

A note on Taunt. It has a very small range compared to magic - so it’s often better to lob an Acid1 at the enemy to lure them instead.

You’ll notice I have the “Speeding up Power” on this bar too. This is a very good skill and, in my opinion, is way better than “Invulnerability”. It takes only 10 skill points, lasts 4 seconds longer, and you can use other actions too. This means you can be running hell for leather away from your enemies, but, using the numpad 0 to look backwards, still fire item enchanted spells backwards! This can be the difference between life and death.

I also have the healing skills:
- Self Heal Life (this is upgraded as you get new upgrades so will always heal the most)
- Self Heal Stamina

As noted above, I recommend that every time you get a new skill you delete it from this panel and recreate it on another panel.

You may duplicate default actions by dragging them from the Actions panel (B) to the action bar.

You may not duplicate actions that you have already customised.

Magic Skills:

While some creatures have special resistances to, say, acid or cold, generally Acid is the best to go for at first. So, all you need to survive on Silan is Acid and the Root/Rot spells. This is why in my magic bar I have 3 Acid spells (Acid over Time, Acid 2 and Acid 3) plus Root and Rot.

I also have Fear, and my healing spells:
- Self Heal Life
- Self Heal Sap
- Heal Life (maximum heal spell here)
- Heal Sap

This means I can act as both an offensive magician, throwing spells, as well as a healer, if need be.

Like action Bar 1 I have the Speeding up power here - this is so I can quickly escape from combat and come back to rez people if need be.

In addition I have Create Sap Crystal and Use Item Enchantment, as on bar 1. This is so I can easily create crystals and recharge my weapons.

In terms of magic skills, concentrate on one spell set (Acid, Cold etc) becuase you’ll get more powerful with a single type instead of only have all the level 1 spells.

Crafting:

You really only need the basic crafting actions here, and you should just upgrade your existing ones with any HP / Sap boost upgrades you get.

Not much to say here really.

Harvesting / Foraging:

Here I have split the Foraging into 4. I use 1 (or 2, max) Extraction plans, and 3 Prospecting plans. This is done like so:

- Extraction plan. This has my highest Harmful extraction skill on it
- Extraction plan 2. (Not shown) This has my highest gentle extraction plan on it.

You only need one or 2 extraction plans.

- Prospect (Basic). This is your prospecting for default (basic) materials. It has the following stanzas (and I recommend you get them too): Extraction Time Bonus (highest you have), Range bonus. That’s it.

- Prospect (Fine only). This is your prospecting for fine materials needed for some quests and in general. It has the following stanzas: Extraction Time Bonus (highest you have), Range Bonus, Only Fine Materials. You may also use Multiple Spots if you wish.

My last prospect is simply this:
- Prospect (Find spots), containing: Deposit Tracking Range 50m (or higher), Only Fine materials.

I also have the standard Self Heal Life and Focus, since those clouds can damage you, and you can use it without having to back off foraging.

It can sometimes be confusing to have the icons all the same type - but the underlying actions be different. You can control the look of the icon by whatever you add to the action last. So, if I add the Extraction Time Bonus last I’ll get an hourglass. If I add the Fine Materials I get the Sun icon, and so on. Generally though, just using 3 prospect actions will help since you wont have too many to remember.

That’s it for Harvesting.

Enchanting weapons:

You’ll notice that some weapons have a Sap Load of more than 0. (For instance, the two handed sword you get, or the Frost touch, etc) This means that they can have a spell embedded in them.

The key things to remember are this:
- Any spell can be crystallized to add to a weapon, and
- using embedded spells requires sap crystals!

I often have either Acid2 or 3 (whatever your highest Acid spell is), or Fear enchanted onto a weapon. This allows you to do the maximum damage to an enemy.

I use it in the following way:
- Fire a high level acid spell (Acid 2 or 3) then immediately follow it with
- Fire the item enchantment multiple times

So long as your initial spell connects, you will get XP for the kill even if you then subsequently kill the enemy with your enchantment. However, it is worth nothing that if you kill an enemy purely using the enchantment you wont gain XP for the kill!

It is also worth noting as I mentioned above, that you can be running away very fast from an enemy, and using the backwards view, target and then fire spells backwards from your enchanted weapon.

The initial Sap Crystal spell sucks ass (5 sap per charge) but Sap 2 gets you 20 which is much better. If you are a fighter, then you can get sap 1 but otherwise just ask a mage on your team (or me) to make crystals for you.

By correct usage of sap crystals, a good embedded spell and a high damage initial strike, it’s possible for you to solo the 4 goohead looters in the Ruins without dying while still only at level 25.

Final Notes:

Much of this you already know, so apologies if you have seen it before.

To keep a balanced character, as I mentioned above, try and do all the different types of quests - and also remember that you can upgrade your HP/SAP etc through crafting or foraging.

If you have any questions on skills to get, or upgrades, then ask me - I’ve been playing Ryzom for a while so can offer advice. Obviously with this all said my own personal preference for playing can be different (I prefer magic heavy but with a mix of combat skills too), however, for Silan and on up to level 50-70 it’s best to try and have a balanced character so you can take on any position in a team.

As an example my character on the mainland carries with her both a set of heavy duty armour and a 2 handed axe, as well as a set of light armour and good amps. She can be either a tank or a healer, or a nuker. It’s your preference but one of the beauties of the game is that you don’t have to just be one. You can be it all! It takes a bit more time but is well worth it.

To those of you who don’t play Ryzom… ignore this thread.

Delphy

Disclaimer: No sites, webpages, downloads or gerbils where harmed in any way during the writing of this text. These are my personal feelings and as such are to be held as such - I realise that some of the stuff I say might piss people off, but the Sims 2 community as a whole isn’t without *some* kind of drama from day to day, so what the heck.

No offense is intended towards anybody or any site - this is really just a collection of thoughts that I’ve said and talked about in part or in full over the past couple of years, but does go some way towards explaining why things are the way they are.

If, after you have read this, you feel like leaving an angry, hatefilled post about how “Delphy is teh ebil” and how I should get off my high horse, or whatever, then please go take a running jump of a short pier. :) This essay should be approached with a clear mind and a sense of accomplishment and what needs to be done to improve everybodies experiences in the Sims world, not with a “omg u slagged off dis site!!11 u suxxors da big 111oneone”.

You have been warned. :)

And now, for the more link….

Part 1: Of quality control assurance…

A thought struck me yesterday when I was reading some replies to a thread on MTS2: The poster essentially was complaining about the standards and quality control that we have there. At MTS2 we have an ethos – a sense of quality and of “the best” - which has been there ever since the foundation of the site, or more specifically, since we started to put up creations for download.

In essence, the Sims 2 community as a whole can be compared to various car manufacturers. Some sites cater for very high end needs, or cost a lot more than their counterparts. Others allow anybody and anything to be uploaded with little to no regard for quality controls. A vast majority are creator-centric and only have uploads from specific people or groups, which in itself is a kind of quality control. Of those sites that allow uploads from the general public, it is my firm belief that some kind of control mechanism needs to be put in place.

Let me explain that point somewhat, to use the continuing analogy above: If you wanted a quality car you’d buy a BMW or a Mercedes. If you wanted something cheap you’d buy another brand. Each type has their strengths and their weaknesses, and specifications as well as word of mouth can both be used to determine which is “best” - when in reality there really isn’t one unless you start comparing metrics. To expand this into the realm of websites, I have seen examples of “X files uploaded this month, X bandwidth used, X new members” - is this actually important to a growing site? Does the number of files that exist on a site consist in any way towards peoples appreciation of the quality? The answer is, of course, probably not. If you have to resort to saying that you have X more of something, then that is simply a meaningless figure unless you can also say that you have X more and it’s the same quality as another site.

Consider the Exchange – the official site of the Sims 2 game – this has an area where you can upload Sims and Lots for other people to look at. A lot of people see the exchange as, essentially, useless for the quality concerned downloader – since anybody can upload anything regardless of who made it, how much time they spent or actual “worthiness”, this means that the majority is box houses, generic Sims that can be made in 5 mins with the right content, and so on.

A site like the exchange that allows anybody to upload anything with little to no regard of quality is one that, while promoting people to share their work, is also saying “anybody can do anything”, and then it becomes a rat race – who can upload the most, or who gets the most “benes”. Tantamount to that problem is this: Somebody uploads something that really should have stayed on their hard drives and is obvious that they put little to no effort into creating that item – and yet they get “this is great, thanks!” and “wow, good job”. Does this encourage the person to do better, or to simply upload more of the same?

It’s a thin line that one must follow in the pursuit of knowledge and excellence – a dedicated person will always try and improve what they do, and to strive for better quality and better textures and better use of custom content (or, in fact, less reliance on it). Somebody who just uploads something that can, as I have mentioned, be done in 5 mins flat, but then gets a lot of positive response would not, in the majority of cases, be inclined to actually do any better.

Essentially what it boils down to is constructive criticism. If somebody says “Okay that’s good but you could achieve a better effect by doing X” and that then improves the quality of the item, that’s great for all concerned. A commenter could point them towards a tutorial that explains things much better and how to achieve better quality, and thus the cycle goes on.

MTS2 has been accused of being elitist, and some people have complained that we reject things that they believe to be “good enough”. Obviously, the entire thing is based on perceptions – one persons garbage is another persons treasure is an adage that comes to mind. But from the beginning we’ve always striven to be “the best” - not just in terms of member count or terabytes transferred or any of the stats like that that, but in areas that count – when somebody thinks “Okay where can I go to get quality clothing, or quality lots, or quality something else without having to wade through 50 recolours of the exact same item?” - the answer in a lot of cases is MTS2. By aiming to have the best tutorials and the best help and the best downloads, we can provide a great all-round experience to anybody coming here, but obviously if the creators don’t want to upload – for fear of being rejected – then it might not be the best solution.

I’ve seen people comment that they only started uploading to MTS2 when their work was “good enough” - in other words, they use MTS2 only after they have honed and perfected their arts, and to me that says a lot about the general quality control and the ethos that exists here.

It’s one that has been in place from the beginning – we didn’t want to allow everybody and anybody to upload, because that is what the Exchange is for. I wanted it to be quality items and have some kind of moderation queue – but above all, to allow feedback to the creators so that they can improve their work, and to them I say this:

Don’t let yourself rest on your laurels, examine perhaps why you got rejected, read the messages closely, check out the guidelines, check out the other threads in the same area, then go back and sit down and think to yourself “What can I do to make this better?” instead “Why did my thing get rejected and not download XYZ?”. We are here to make your life as a creator easier and better through improving tutorials, great help and great feedback. It’s up to you to use it.

So, the next time you or another creator gets something rejected, remember that the controls run back for 3 years, that we encourage people to -learn- and to -improve- themselves, and that you are in the esteemed presence of people like Numenor, or Echo, or V1ND1CARE or Tiggerypum or HystericalParoxysm, or Lethe_s or the multitude of other creators that call MTS2 their home. Some of those creators that are now considered the best of the best got their first uploads to MTS2 rejected, but they took the feedback and striven to do better – and if they can build themselves up to become great, so can you.

Part 2: On making a great site…

There are multiple parts to this, but first let me touch on a point that I think is important, one that I’ve expanded on in various places: Creator Control. Now, I’m not knocking the other forum based download sites in the community, but all to often I’ve seen people leave MTS2 and move to another site because they have “their own section”, and they become moderators or super-moderators or whatever – in other words, they feel they have some “control” of the areas in which they are given.

My question is: What, exactly, do you have control over? What, in essence, does having your own “area” actually achieve, as a creator? You still upload items, you still create, you still do all the day to day things that others do, replying to posts, commenting on other peoples downloads etc. What makes it so special?

Perhaps it’s -because- of that control, in terms of the ability to actually be able to delete peoples posts on your creations – if somebody posts anything other than positive “Hey this is great!”, then just go in and zap it, warn somebody or whatever. Easy, isn’t it? Creators tend to get very possessive of their creations and don’t like bad or non positive comments, and to an extent this is fine but only up to a point. Who decides what is good or bad? Why warn somebody – or worse still, ban somebody from a site – just because of one bad comment that may be perfectly accurate, especially if it’s constructive; pointing towards tutorials on how to improve a seam or shading or any number of other things.

My own personal belief – and the way that I have run MTS2 – is that creators need to concentrate on one primary thing – the art of creating, and of improving themselves. They shouldn’t have to worry about deleting posts or banning people or people spamming their own sections – why should they? On the vast majority of sites, people simply don’t get that chance – it’s a totally different mindset to actually -moderate- forums than it is to create items for upload, and not one that is always mutually compatible with the other.

The better solution would be to have the actual staff remove messages, determine bans, hand out warnings and so on, with the ability for creators – or anybody for that matter – to flag a post as being offensive. This is the system that we have on MTS2 (this sounds like an ad, doesn’t it? Come visit MTS2 now! They pay me 0.001 cents every time I mention MTS2 you know. MTS2. MTS2. MTS2… anyway…), this system works very well and I rarely here of creators who have problems with this setup.

However, I suspect that people don’t move sites just because of that – obviously since we are talking about my site, I’m going to be focused on that, but I know of other places and have a lot of contacts, so I’m going to try and broaden the point a bit. In some cases it’s because the creators (who can also be moderators), don’t agree with the actual administrators on particular things, or because not enough gets done to improve the sites with new features, upgrades, coding and all those yucky things that the average creator (and site owner, for that matter, especially in this community) has little to no clue about.

If, as a site owner, you don’t take time out to change, update, or otherwise adapt your site to what your audience wants, then ultimately you will stagnate. You might reach 100 members, or a thousand, or many many more than that – but without change then people will start looking elsewhere. MTS2 started out as a forum based system, (well, actually, that’s not entirely true – it started as a CMS but switched to a forum system very quickly after the game itself was released, so in effect the last statement is true), but very soon I realised that this would actually be a detriment to the overall site itself.

Let me explain that in a little more detail, and bring up one key point: Forum based systems are -not- good for overall download browsing, searching and actually getting to the content. Especially in the case where a site might be sorted in terms of “creator areas”, it can become increasingly difficult to find what you want without knowing the specific name of the nature or item in question.

I’ve seen sites with literally hundreds of forums arranged in a typical vBulletin or PHPBB setup, wherein it becomes incredibly hard to find things. You have to resort to some kind of index, or “picks” which in any case only cover a mere fraction of the available items, or just have no index at all and let people be at the mercy of the forum structure.

Unfortunately, this approach fails in a number of ways: While it may be conducive to discussion as a whole (which is, after all, what forums are for), and can be easily applied to creative chat, tutorial responses and improvements, general game help, site issues and so on, it becomes extremely unwieldy as you add more and more forums, more download sections, throw in a few for Pets, some for Seasons, and so on for the next expansion pack. This becomes a key area that every site owner must, at some point (and preferably at multiple points over the lifespan of a site), address: How do you organise all this data, all those creations?

One answer is simply to not do anything. To keep adding forums, sections, areas, and let yourself grow and grow until it takes the average user 5 or 6 pages of scrolling down to reach the end. This is obviously not an optimal solution. It’s a widely accepted fact that most people only view the first few pages and then move on, so by adding more and more items you run into the problem whereby items – or indeed, creators – simply don’t get seen.

Another answer is to turn everything into subforums and categories but the problem with that in the traditional forum setup is that when you are in the parent category you have little to no visibility of anything that exists in the children. On a standard forum, if you go into the, for example, Body Shop section, you’d have to drill down even more just to see some threads and some things to download. The issue then becomes one of how many drill downs can you expect the average downloader to click through to get to the actual items? Without some visibility of what’s in a section then you lose a lot of the focus for people just “randomly browsing”.

Index pages or “finds” can be another solution, but herein you touch on the same issue as the first problem – you can only have so many items on the page before people just give up and move on, and what happens to creators who are down the list and may not get the same visibility simply because of alphabetical significance? Extremely long pages with long lists of people, items, or creations simply don’t get read. The best web sites are ones that are compact vertically and require little to no scrolling to reach the actual meat of the page. Lists should be kept to 10 items or less and stand out, else they just blend in and pages can overall become too “busy”.

In addition, forum based systems lack a lot of other things that are necessary to the average web user on other sites: Popular innovations here include “Recommendations”, or “Customers also bought…” as on Amazon, a way of Thanking the person without actually writing a message, being able to leave constructive criticism without it being lost in a sea of “Thanks, this is great!”, and a layout that is conducive to the habits of the downloader, such as breadcrumbs, multiple ways to get to the same item, and a good categorisation and classification system. As I mentioned above, on some systems you implicitly must know the creators name to actually find the right area, and this makes it difficult to reach things quickly and easily, which has a knock on effect for returning visitors (which is what much of the community is made up of) – if they remember that your site was hard to browse and to “find” things, why should they come back?

It’s tough as a site admin to actually modify a system to provide everything that a person might want, especially when the actual userbase is split up. You might need to get somebody else in if you don’t want to learn it yourself and then what happens if they need paying? After all, The Sims 2 is supposed to be a hobby and a game, not a money sucking black pit of doom.

As an owner, think about 2 primary “types” of people – downloaders, who make up the majority, and are here to just download and that’s it, and obviously creators, who provide the things that people want to download.

Catering to both of these camps is difficult, especially if you are working within the confines of an already limited system and with little to no actual hacking or programming experience yourself. For downloaders you need to provide an easy way to drill down while maintaining the visibility of everything underneath the current position. For creators you need to provide incentives for them to stay, and reasons for them to call it “home”, as well as the standard easy upload systems, tagging, keywords and so on.

The key thing to remember is, like creators, not to rest on your laurels – always think to yourself “How can I make my site better?” Don’t be afraid to rip apart the entire thing and put it back together again – sometimes it’s better to go back to basics than to keep adding things to an already inefficient system. Keep in mind that anything you do add or change needs to have a way for people to go back to the old system – regardless of whether you or your immediate friends or staff members might like a change, you can be assured that some of your regular members wont like whatever it is you are doing – so by giving them the option to keep on as before is saying that you are both catering to your “old” customers, as well as improving things for the new.

Being a site admin on MTS2 is not about kicking back, doing the occasional moderating and answering questions – it’s a constant source of frustration and also joy as I develop new systems and new procedures and new ways of doing things: If you, too, can achieve all this and constantly strive to make the site better for you and listen to suggestions and -not- be afraid then you can help make it grow much quicker and with the memberbase on your side, and your site will stand up their with the best of them.

Part 3 – Of mice and men…

All too often I see sites try and copy MTS2 or S2C without realising that, actually, the systems we use have been built up over -years- in the community. I’m not afraid to change MTS2 but I am always conscious of -who- I am changing it for – whether it’s a downloader centric change or a creator-centric one. People create forums, emulate us, and fail – they have empty places with no posts, and wonder why people wont join. Each site needs a unique selling point and a clear way of achieving that without losing site of the reason we are -all- here: to improve the Sims 2 game and provide the best top quality downloads to everybody.

With all that said, I realise that MTS2 itself is not perfect – there are many things that I can change, and things that I can work on to improve general usability. I’m not claiming that the quality control is the best, or that the way the downloads are laid out is the most optimal, but I believe that we are a large part of the way there, and it’s been built up with the help and advice from people over the years and above all the community itself.

This is not how I originally planned the site – I wanted it to become more into tool development, but SimPE quickly took up that role. I wanted it to focus on reverse engineering files and indeed there was promise early on, but the site itself then turned into one that focused on downloads, help and creation and I become involved in system administration and learning how to hack vBulletin and general web and database server setup. I can’t say that I regret the decision to leave tool making to others, since I’ve learnt a lot of good skills – in fact I think it’s partly -because- I am able to code and do system administration as well as having years of admin experience on other forums and so can act as a calm voice when tempers might be frayed; I think that all this means that the staff, the creators, the downloaders – everybody who uses the site, in fact – doesn’t have to worry about all of that. Downloaders can concentrate on downloading, creators on creating and tutorials, people who have help can get the help where they need it, and staff have the resources available to streamline the moderation queue or just general do what they need to do.

I’m proud of the achievements of the site and everybody involved in it – past and present – and although the general attitude of some parts of the community can be negative at times, I try not to let it affect me.

To be perfectly honest, I rarely visit other sites – I pay little to no attention to them, or the politics, or the drama, and I think that’s a good thing. I am only focused on MTS2 and MTS2 alone and to spend too much time on other things in the community would be unfair to people who rely on me to keep the servers running and code new features.

MTS2 is my home on the internet, and the home of many creators and helpers – some of which are recognised in the community as being top of their field – and there are things that I am working on now that will make it even better. When you see a bad comment about us, remember that those people probably still download items, thank creators and visit the site. No matter what people say it -is- one of the best places in the community if you want to learn, for the best tutorials, the best game help and I’d like to think the best overall quality of items with the easiest way to actually get to them.

Let me finish finally by saying that everybody should thank Chii and Freya, the 2 primary MTS2 fileservers, for without those two girls, this entire place would be for nothing. Here’s to you!

Delphy
22nd March 2007

Here’s what I’m going to do:

The General overview is to use a Wii remote to control Oblivion.

The specifics are that I want to use both the mote and the nunchuck to move, look, cast spells, scroll through inventory, drag drop, block, basically everything that people usually do with the mouse. I also want to add the ability to swing the remote like a sword to attack, to move the nunchuk to block and maybe other snazzy stuff.

Who knows if it’ll get done, but it’s a good excuse to get back into Oblivion again. :)