As a former player, and customer service representative of the game, i can say confidently that the reason Ryzom failed had nothing to do with bad luck, and everything with bad decisions and incompetence.
They had no qualms about changing large parts of the game. The prime example being that they changed the experience distribution in the game such that where it was first that any large group of players could play together and cooperate, after beta it was changed such that only squad-sized groups could cooperate and squads being in the same area only meant difficulties, since experience could not be shared anymore.
On the technical side they had a lot of terrible code as a result of much of their 50 man staff being students doing an internship for free there. They also had a very bad attitude towards volunteer support staff, where, for example, an issue on the web site would be reported, the dev in question would say nothing, and when asked five minutes later would say "What problem, i see none?" after obviously having fixed it.
Lastly, they also had a very bad attitude to players. The game had guilds and an ingame browser (kind of hidden, since it was the backend for 90% of the game UI), so some enterprising players had figured out how to use that to provide guild forums. The result being legal threats.
As much as i love the game still to this day, and still hold on fondly to the screenshots and memories i collected in its wonderful world, it wasn't luck that killed it. It was Nevrax' incompetence and shortsightedness.
They had no qualms about changing large parts of the game. The prime example being that they changed the experience distribution in the game such that where it was first that any large group of players could play together and cooperate, after beta it was changed such that only squad-sized groups could cooperate and squads being in the same area only meant difficulties, since experience could not be shared anymore.
On the technical side they had a lot of terrible code as a result of much of their 50 man staff being students doing an internship for free there. They also had a very bad attitude towards volunteer support staff, where, for example, an issue on the web site would be reported, the dev in question would say nothing, and when asked five minutes later would say "What problem, i see none?" after obviously having fixed it.
Lastly, they also had a very bad attitude to players. The game had guilds and an ingame browser (kind of hidden, since it was the backend for 90% of the game UI), so some enterprising players had figured out how to use that to provide guild forums. The result being legal threats.
As much as i love the game still to this day, and still hold on fondly to the screenshots and memories i collected in its wonderful world, it wasn't luck that killed it. It was Nevrax' incompetence and shortsightedness.