Scribble

In a game where people need to eat half a cow a day in order to not starve to death, expecting newbies to live on simple low quality meals made from tiny fish and a blade of foraged grass is insane. I feel like the developers really have no idea what it's like to be a new player in Wurm Online.

The new player doesn't have access to any of this, and even if he did, 1-2 weeks is an insanely mindboggling long time to expect a person to spend on grinding a single skill to what is considered a 'competitive' level. Years ago, the devs still spoke of the "the dream". A final version of Wurm Online where there were no progress bars. Where you would click on trees to chop them down, click to swing your sword, etcetera etcetera. That game exists now. It's called Minecraft, and it was and still is a smash hit. Made by Notch when he left the team because he disagreed with Rolf on what the game should be. Not some kind of progress quest with shiny graphics where you have to cancel your day job, become a hermit and prepare your poop sock and pee bottle in order to play the game 'properly'. Underneath the surface, Wurm Online is a great game, but the grind is dragging it down like a malicious cancer, making it really difficult to enjoy the game, and it's the main reason new players last about a week before they log off never to be seen again, and the old userbase has gotten so used to it that they don't or can't see the elephant in the room. Unless anything is done, Wurm Online will die a slow death where the playercount gradually decreases as one by one the veterans grow up and carry on with their lives, and nobody comes in to replace them.

There's always going to be top dogs in MMOs. The problem is that in typical crafter MMOs it either doesn't take as long for people to get up to a competitive level with the top dogs, or alternatively lowbies are valuable to the top dogs because they can provide a service or access to materials that isn't feasible for the top dog to do himself. In the first case, Wurm performs absolutely horribly. Not only does leveling skills to a competitive level take a very long time, in many cases skills got rebalanced around high skill players at the detriment of the new player (farming), or methods that allowed a player to get a lot of skill rapidly where patched out after some players had already abused them and thus had an unfair competitive advantage. This makes Wurm Online feel like an old boys club that cares only about the high skill level whales while neglecting the new player experience, or even making it worse. In the latter case, there are ways where new players can be of use to top dogs by either getting lucky and mining gems, which they can sell to priests, or by just doing a lot of menial labor that produces material where quantity is more important than quality (digging dirt for terraforming projects, mining out bothersome ore veins, etc). This latter is boring, though, and not necessarily how you want your newbies to experience the game.

The issue with the economy is that you have goods going in, but very little coming out. Even if you boost the rate at which items decay or get damaged, this will not lead to the prices of items going up, it will lead to prices of improving and upgrading going up. The longer a server is running, the worse the economy gets. People get more skilled and the standard rises. Eventually the average skill rises enough that the market gets flooded with 'standard' quality items, and the value of these things approaches worthlessness. Wurm Online sought to alleviate this problem by introducing rarities. Creating a rare item is largely out of a player's control, and thus the market can not be flooded by them easily. Eventually enough of these items get created that they too become worthless, but depending on the rarity that can take a long time. If economy is your concern, then focusing on rarity and systems like it (rune upgrades?) are the way to go.

I've been saying for a long time that Wurm needs a reset server that basically resets every three months or so with a new map, etc. A seasonal reset, pretty much. People get to keep their characters, skills, money and remaining upkeep, but everything else goes poof. People can travel in and out of the server, but they can't take items with them. People on the server during the reset simply spawn at the starting town with a set of basic tools. Maybe have a hall of fame that gets updated after every reset with the top players of that season. Most players killed, most monsters killed, most money earned, etc etc. Have some aesthetic item rewards, like for instance a monocle for the player that earned the most money the previous season. That kind of stuff.

The reason people fight in PVP games is not for the rewards. They fight because of the community. They want to prove their guild is the best, so they go around killing dudes and flattening castles and towns to get a reputation for being a force on the server. Wurm just doesn't have a large enough community for that to happen. There are too many people who live secret hermit lives out innawoods, and of the other players over half are owned by the same couple of dudes. From my experience, people want to fight. The problem is that there just aren't enough people to fight.

Gimping priests by putting all kinds of skill restrictions on them doesn't make people play a priest character as a part of a group/community, it makes people play priest characters on an alt.

You can't really expand the endgame. Grinding skills is not the endgame. Skills are merely a means to an end. The game is ultimately about exploring and creation. The problem with Wurm Online is that exploring after a certain point isn't going to happen, because there's nothing left to explore. Creation is very slow and tedious, so you're not going to suddenly decide one day to rebuild your entire deed either. This means that you eventually just run out of things to do and the game becomes a chore of maintenance jobs. To make Wurm more fun, I would suggest to drastically reduce timers for the more tedious actions, such as building and terraforming the land. Then after that I would suggest to add some kind of 'ladder' or scoreboard system where deeds strive to become the best at certain things. Deed that grew the most crops, deed that made the most/best tools/weapons/armor, deed that bred the most/best horses, deed that slew the most trolls, deed that slew the most enemy players, etc etc etc. Then after the end of a ladder period, reward the winners with some kind of relevant loot or artifact and reset the server with a new map to start again (but not resetting players). It's not perfect and you could make a lot of changes to it, but in my opinion this would focus gameplay on the most fun aspects of Wurm. Exploring and settling. While also catering to those who enjoy the grinding and skilling aspect. The fact that opening a new map or server always brings a ton of people back from the dead should be a big indicator that this is what people love about the game.

This is only an argument if your ultimate goal is to kill your server. By letting the players handle things in a PVP game with abusable mechanics, you will always end up with one group of players that hold a monopoly over everything. It shouldn't need to be said that for the health of the game, that is a terrible thing to happen. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the Wurm PVP scene (and Wurm as a whole in a less impactful way) is marred by Old Boys' clubs more concerned with their own supremacy rather than the health of the game.

The reason no one wants to PVP is because the PVP scene for Wurm is incredibly toxic. This is not a surprise, since this is the case for almost all PVP communities in RPG games. However the problem with Wurm is that the community is so tiny that you can't get away from the toxic people. The moment a promising PVP server opens up, the same toxic trash will instantly flock to it and chase each other off with /pol/ memes and a very, very generous dose of cheats, hacks and glitch/bug abuse. Not enough PVPing? Pining for the old glory days? Maybe you should stop using tiny tree mods, player/monster ESP hacks and stop yelling alt-right crap at other kingdoms. Maybe you should stop trying to literally inconvenience other players in the most cowardly and infuriating ways "just for the lulz". Wurm's mechanics aren't that bad. People are able to deal with a lot if it means they can have a fun experience, and Wurm is no different. The problem with Wurm PVP is 100% the people.

It doesn't help that the Wurm PVP playerbase is one of the most toxic group of people I've ever seen. You can't escape it either, because the moment a new PVP server opens up in Wurm Unlimited, they all flock there, you get non-stop sh*t talking and /pol/ memes, and then the server dies a month later because anyone who isn't a part of the original hardcore Wurm PVP community flees since they want to have nothing to do with that. Repeat every six months or so.

What if instead we add a dagger class weapon? I always thought it weird that Wurm had no daggers.

I think there would be interest in a PVP server with a win condition. When the win condition is met, that kingdom wins the campaign and gets a reward. The server then reboots with a new map a week later. All premium characters carry over their skills, money, and as much stuff as they can carry in their inventory. All deeds are partially refunded. I don't know what the win condition would be. Maybe the world just ends after a few months and the kingdom with the most kills wins? I'm sure people can figure out something more exciting than that, though. The problem I have with Wurm PVP is that once the exploration and building phase is over, PVP turns into a turtle fest where all kingdoms are too well protected and it's too much of a hassle to raid. If you make a timed world server, you avoid the problem of kingdoms turtling up so heavily, the world ending up spammed with ruins and unused roads, and every inch of the world mapped and safe. Allow non-premium characters as well, but delete them at the end of every cycle, or just reset them back to newbie status.

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Can't wait to borrow my friend's car when mine is in the shop, and then sell it on the internet. "Dude, you didn't tell me I couldn't sell it. It was free money!"