Karl from Chicago.
I'm mostly playing Ryzom to occupy myself when I'm not at work and weather prevents me from working on my cars. (There isn't even anyone playing CS:CZ at 4am!)
I like the crafting in Ryzom, and my creative side (well, the bottom half actually) digs the RP potential. I like my characters to be self-sufficient when possible.
My first character was Kalehar the Firey Fyros Forager (I wanted to name her Kale'uhar but someone just HAD to disallow all non-alpanumerics. Bummer.) She fell afoul of the gaps between existing documentation and what actually is in the game. After about a month it was just too difficult to gain levels. So we bade farewell to our guildmates, made a sudden deposit at the Guild hall, and vanished from the streets of Pyr.
Enter the prim and violent Matis-woman Chtomelji. Naturally I couldn't help but fabricate a back-story outlining whom this was and her relationship to Kale'uhar. In about two weeks I surpassed my first character in experience with all disciplines (yay us!). Currently I'm still hanging around Yrkanis, because its SO easy for a forager/crafter to level there. It's about time to move on and break ground in the other lands.
And in case anyone was curious, I use a custom string to generate names with the RinkWorks Name Generator:
http://rinkworks.com/namegen/