The bleeding stanza increases the damages you're doing to your opponent : it can double them. But all the damages are not inflicted instantly : when you touch the creature, your "normal" damages are inflicted, and the creature starts to bleed. The bleeding damages are then done over a given lapse of time (DoT). Also, bleeding only works with slashing weapons.

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This is typical of the kind of decisions we have to make from time to time, to decide whether realism or gameplay shall prevail.

Even if it would seem logic to have roaming NPCs to draw aggro from NPC creatures, it would have important side-effects over the general gameplay. First, a lot of NPCs would disappear, since they would be attacked and killed by the creatures - we would get the same kind of situation as with the prime roots, where the herbivores get quickly killed and only carnivores remain.

Second, it would open the way to exploits. For example, to kill a NPC boss more easily, you would be able to use the following technique : you would first fetch a hord of aggressive creature, then run to the NPC boss' guardians; the guardians would get the aggro, thus giving an easier shot to your group on the guardians, and allowing you to exterminate them more quickly and then getting more firepower for the boss.

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It wasn't a software problem, but a hardware one : there has been several "kernel panic" on a backup server (the same thing a the "blue screen of death" for Windows, but for Linux ) which led to hard reboots. So, some files which were being written at the time of the crashes weren't properly written on the hard drive. It resulted in files corruption, which we identified and replaced with backups.

As for the future, we are currently fine-tuning our backup architecture to give the backup servers more redundancy, to limit the effects of such a hardware failure.

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It depends on which question you ask. :-)

First, off topic questions aren't investigated at all; if you haven't read it already, I advise you to have a look at the Q&A HOWTO, which defines what is on-topic and what is not.

Second, selected questions to which we can't answer yet are queued on a special list; a good example here is the outpost-related questions, which I keep at hand to be able to answer them during the ATS test phase.

Finally, the rest of the questions are kept : this is one of the reasons why we have questions threads - to be able to have all the questions at one place. The community managers go digging in these threads from time to time, to see if some of the old question would fit in the current Q&A (when all the questions of the week are "wishlist" questions for example ).

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It's not player dependant : it's linked to the zone you're harvesting. When you extract materials from a zone, the Kami tolerance drops; it only increases again with time. So when a zone is harvested too heavily (Ie, too many harvester are working on it), the Kami tolerance depletes and warnings are issued; when it reaches zero, all harvesters currently working on the zone are killed by Kami's wrath. When it happens, you can still go somwhere else and resume your harvesting - but beware, the Kamis will still be watching you. :-)

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All of them. Apart from the quality difference which is inherent to the higher resolutions and settings, all of them are equaly optimized. The only problems you could have regarding resolution would be with the scale of your monitor; Ryzom is designed for 4/3 monitors (which is the type of scale almost everyone has), but some monitors are 16/9, and here the game will look "stretched". Also, if you have an LCD screen, remember that it won't look good if you're not using the resolution your screen has been made for.

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Here is the answer I got from Vince, head of customer support :

"''I would like to remind all SoR players that they are not entitled to any kind of support from the CSR (Customer Support Representative) teams if the game client or any related files have been altered in any way other than by the SoR installation program, the game, the game configuration program or the game client itself.
This is to ensure that all support is accurate and relative to a correct SoR installation, and not a tweaked one, which could cause problems that we wouldn't be able to detect.''"

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These bosses do not respawn at a specific date/time. I won't give the precise respawn time here, as it would be a spoiler, but there is a random time window (there is a delay where the boss can't spawn to avoid immediate respawns, and after that delay it's random), so all timezones have equal chances here. The only special case is when the server is rebooted at fixed hours : between the time of the reboot and the time where the boss can start spawning, it won't be there.

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I've asked Stephane, the dev in charge of that part of the code, who gave me the following answer :

The colors that appear on top of the characters' head are there to give a clearer overview of what's happening during a fight. If you have kept the default values in the game configuration window, here are the different colors you can see and their meaning :

• red : damages that a NPC is doing to me
• blue : damages that another player is doing to me
• orange : damages that I'm doing to my opponent
• green : healing
• grey : damages exchanged by others''"

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Thanks for the proposition, we will happily accept any help here - a lot of MMORPG players do not even know that Ryzom exists, or have only tried it during the open-beta. No advertising campain will ever be able to compete with word of mouth : it's like when you go to the cinema as a group, if nobody is pleading the case of an independant movie, it seems we always end up seeing that last high-budget crappy block buster...

Here are a few ideas :

• Burn copies of the client and distribute it to some of your friends
• Go to an Internet coffee and propose to other players to join you in Ryzom - having someone to begin to play with is always nicer and easier
• Ask the owner of your Internet coffee to have Ryzom installed on his computers
• Setup a stand/demo at your college entrance or in your local Internet coffee to demonstrate Ryzom
• etc.!

And be sure to let me know: it's always good to know that you're helping us, and if your initiative is important enough, it might be worth a news. :-)

--
Xavier.