Tinkerer

Unlike anything else that requires the item to be 'glowing from heat' (smithing lumps, improving tools or weapons etc etc) smelting actually requires the item to have been not just glowing from heat but some unknown stage beyond that. While it might not necessarily be a bug, it most definately feels like one. It is also very confusing, causing a player to question if they are 'attempting the process correctly'. It seems like the smelter is checking the heat of the item against a wrong value.. one set too high. I honestly can't think of any idea why it *needs* to be like this or even why it *should* be like this, so it feels like a bug. Just another bit of wogic that is there to confuse and frustrate new players?

While shooting shafts at my target (nowhere near water) I noticed this kept popping up in my combat tab in between several messages about the arrows breaking. [04:40:27] The arrow disappears into the water. With a target against a mountainside and not anywhere with water in range, it seemed somewhat absurd. Granted its not a gamebreaking issue in any way, but thought it ought to be mentioned and recorded here.

Guessing you already got there and chose one.. but I'll chime in with "Highly strung"

Would certainly seem much more in-keeping and not open to abuse - different items being different max amounts just as a BSB, so you could drop a few of them at the edge of your deed and if one is full, a player could try adding to the next one.

Actually I think this is a superb idea. +1 (Must be no-drop but mailable) It also allows the future option of expanding on it (as an item) and having other values - e.g. a 10 days of premium coupon which could then be purchased from traders and so on, or given as loyalty rewards.

With scissors activated and sheep selected, there is no 'shear' option in the select bar. (only exists in the rclick menu or presumably as a keybind)

Every other MMO is Free to play? Don't think so... only the ones that didn't do very well or that are dying due to being poor copies of other games or not living up to their hype. Many switched to a FTP system to try and hold onto a vanishing audience. A huge game world with no players is no good to anyone. But regardless of this, Wurm is Free to play. It even allows you to buy premium with in game coins. Difficult - yes. Time consuming - yes. Grindy - Yes. So it is with other games too. I have a feeling it's only non-premiums spouting this argument. Timers are too slow? Really? If they really were quicker, you finish modelling your deed quicker and stick around playing longer? With everything sped up you just hit endgame much earlier finish building everything you wanted to build earlier.. get bored earlier.. leave earlier. Dunno.. I kind of like the pace personally. Never even wanted to go to Epic for the faster skill gain curve. To me, wurm is the jounery, the challenge of living within your current skill limitations, being creative to get around things that you are not yet skilled enough to do on your own. Having 100 in every skill would be tediously boring in my book. There's nothing left to aim for, nothing you can't easily do. Change the bleedin' game engine? Other than the stupendous amount of work that requires (despite one person's somewhat naive ideology) and huge amount of 'downtime' with only the promise that afterwards, new features would take less time to develop and be easier to implement (but hey.. it would also be simpler or modders in WU - yay... I don't care about that. I play WO). I also find that, like Amedee, most games using an out-of-the-box engine all feel 'samey'. It's very easy to spot a game using the unreal engine, or unity engine - in much the same way as its painfully obvious if a game is made in Flash or RPGmaker. What I never saw mentioned though was that no Engine is ideal. No engine can do everything. Every engine has things it really doesn't do well, wasn't designed to do, or was never intended to do. Every engine that is except the one you custom built - but even that runs into problems when the scope of the game changes and new features beyond the initial scope are implemented. I like the look and feel of Wurm. It is somewhat unique and certainly a lot prettier now than 8 or 9 years ago. It also runs pretty well on old platforms (even though most of the settings need to be turned right down). Several other developers out there tried to make a Wurm style game using different engines - none seemed to do overly well though, but they did succeed enough to take away a lot of the griefers in Wurm A different engine.. nah. really not a big enough boost, certainly not worth the time, and with the big possibility that the end result might simply lose the Wurm charm and much of it's existing playerbase along with it. 3D mines? I'm really not sure how that would greatly improve things. It would be different - granted. It would change a lot of things for miners and those who revel in having a nice mine. Will it really boost Wurm's popularity? Not as much as being able to build structures or houses, walls and doors inside mines I think. Lower premium cost - supplemented by more shop items (and reasonable prices of existing ones)? Possibly might increase premium count and possibly more total income. But lots of novelty items, novelty costumes and so on would heavily increase in-game textures, download sizes and memory usage. More QoL improvements to the game? I think so. More visual variety in the game world (e.g. having the old wood textures back on wooden items, having realistic and relative quantities of dye for various items - BSB needs more than a collosus? - really?). I think so. A better trade system. One that doesn't rely on chat and being online at the same time as the other person, one that doesn't rely on forums, or outside tools, one that doesn't require huge amounts of time and effort in-game and gives everyone a place in the market - not just for the top crafters and top gear. More uses for some materials and skills. Make every weapon or shield a viable choice. Lots of little things from the fabulous suggestions forums could hugely affect the enjoyment and gameplay. More events, and not just ones geared towards those with 70+ fighting skills... ones for younger characters and which include freemium players too. Freemiums have it pretty rough in wurm capped at 20 and unable to do many things most of us take for granted in wurm, but without the freemium players the world would be far emptier and far less enjoyable. They need some love too. Even if its just something like after 100hrs of play, they can buy a month of premium for only 2s in-game. Something they can easily afford in order to find out the joy of being premium. And heck.. have a craftable tent that doesn't require cordage rope - so that they can at least make a replacement after their starter tent decays away!

Oh, of this, I am well aware. I have been designing and developing software for the last 20-30 years. Very little ever goes as smoothly as planned. Which is partly why this idea actually is quite elegant. Very little needs to change. UI remains the same, interaction remains the same. Primary changes are just too add a linked list to each merchant object (pointing to the other merchants within radius) and so long as each item involved in a trade can be referenced back to the actual merchant for payment and inventory updating, there is no huge difference. There would also need to be an event driven function to update the linked list of local merchants whenever the merchant was removed or placed. (Finding local merchants would not need to be calculated every time you open the merchant trade window)

Nice idea, though it could be slightly abused as a much larger self-storage solution for one type of item. (simply by paying yourself, or an alt to put your own bulk supplies into it) In principle though, +1

You miss my point. I'm not saying I want a change to increase my QoL. I'm just giving an example of one area that non-elite crafters are missing out on trade opportunities. These are all odd things I, and probably many others, would buy *if* these things were readily available fairly locally. Hence my suggestion of locally linked merchants. Yes, it is a code change to the functionality of merchants, but one that would quite dramatically boost the marketplace within wurm. They would also function the same in a market hub for higher quality gear too. You and 10 others have quality merchants in a hub, any player can just go to any one of them and, because they are all within a local range of each other, can see everything by just visiting one merchant. No more wasting time going up to each individual one to open it's inventory... The (in effect) interfacing with merchants is quite a tedious aspect of wurm and certainly one that certainly puts me off any in-game trading unless I am absolutely desperate to get hold of something.

+1 I think Wurm is (to date) the only game I've ever played that you can't change the sound volume after running it. Doubt it's a 'java' thing... works fine in that other rather famous block-based sandbox game, and that's also java based.

Not really unless those said merchants are viewable and accessible from my deed. I'm not going to waste half an hour wandering around to find the right one. Whatever it was that I wanted the item for, the flow has been broken. I've moved on to something else and got sidetracked on another project until I create or gather the resource myself at a later time. Put it another way.. say I've just finished a new building, but forgot I'd run out of door locks. If one is available to me without having to waste more than a couple of minutes.. I'll buy it. I won't go to trade chat, I won't hang around on local chat hoping a neighbour comes online, I won't pay postage, I wont look on the forums. I could go mine, light a forge wait for the ore to smelt and bash one out myself in about 5 minutes. But.. most likely I'll just leave it as is. Move onto another task. Make a note to myself to make a door lock next time I go to do some smithing. Multiply this up for every odd job that ends up a piece or two short... multiply up by other players who experience the same thing.. they are all missed trades for the low-mid skilled playerbase. Say I was adding some marble slabs for my flooring, but I had a run of bad RNG luck and now don't have enough shards for the last slab... there are 1001 odd scenarios where you just come up short in your current tasks.

Only for any 'planned projects' or big enough purchases to warrant the time and effort to travel to such a hub. But most time, if I really wanted something in bulk, I'd still probably just ask in Trade chat rather than trekking all the way to a trade hub to see if it was even available, and to get an idea of price. Going to a market hub is just so off-putting. Sure, for me it's only 10-15minutes to get to my nearest (providing there are no mobs on route) but then it's also getting back and checking the merchants... it ends up being most of a play-session and only something I'll bother to do if I am pretty certain I'll be able to get what I wanted in the first place. Most of the things I 'want' or 'wish I had' are spur of the moment things... imping something but run out of good enough ore... but going to a market to get some means that the forge will go out, and the flow of whatever small task I was doing would end up completely broken. It's these 'small' and 'sudden' needs for things that makes me wish there was a simple and immediate way to see if the odd things here and there where available locally. Say you're making something and realise you've run out of iron ribbons... do I really want to stop my furniture making to go and mine some iron, then fire up the forge to make a new ribbon.. if I could quickly and easily buy it from a local merchant, I would. Instead, that usually ends my current tasks and I go do something else instead. It's all these small needs that can potentially create a large marketplace for other mid-range players. I don't care what QL the iron ribbon is in this scenario.. I just hope someone has one. I also don't want to go to a market hub, or wait 45 minutes for a mail and pay over-the-top prices to cover a simple iron-ribbon, or door lock, or reasonable QL log, or nails, or a few pieces of leather...

Suddenly this would become the defacto place to look when in urgent need of something, and most of these needs would not be for the top-end items or bulk items for future plans. Suddenly there's a big market for anything less than 'top quality'. Not only that, but checking merchants can let you see what other local players might be wanting, and possibly gives you something new to do when you log in. How many times have you logged in - done your basic deed chores and tended your fields then thought.. hmm.. ok what shall I do today? And then been unsure of what to work on. Check you merchant.. perhaps there's an item on a neighbours merchant asking for someone to enchant their pickaxe, perhaps there's a note for 20 concrete,.. you have tasks to do that will actually earn you some coin! On top of that, you get to semi-socialise with neighbours despite them being in different time-zones and not online at the same time as you. Small items like a few kg of mid ranged cotton, or strings, or lumps of metals, mid-ql logs and other 'imping materials' have great small-scale saleability. You can advertise locally to sell your wares without having to be online together or use out-of-game systems. Localised resources can now be simply traded - even chained across the server, one merchant at a time. For example: A has lead, puts some on his merchant to test the water.. B (80 tiles away) buys but doesn't really need, but knows the lead vein is quite a walk away.. keeps some, and put some back on his merchant with a markup. C has no idea where lead is and is about 150 from A but sees 'B's merchant with lead... buys it all. A knows lead sells, B knows lead sells.. C (and possible D, E, F getting further and further away) are all interested in small amounts of lead. Not enough to warrant a forum post or a 'bulk shipment order' or even anyone's time in physically delivering it or even the mail costs involved, but there IS a market for small amounts locally.

Well (for example) your merchant kept on your own deed, would just list everything on other merchants within a 100 or <insert better value here> tiles radius from his current position. You can then buy anything from any of them from your merchant. Likewise, anyone else within that radius will be able to see your merchant's goods and purchase from their own location. (in effect it could be thought of as your merchant actually wanders off to scout the local area and does the fetching or delivery of items - almost like it's taken for granted that a templar repairs structures and lights lamps.. even though you never see him do it) Without huge loads of extra code to set up a 'buy orders' system, that can be easily overcome by the players. I could just put a uselsss item into my merchants inventory (as some people already do for various services) and rename it 'looking for 500 bricks'. Anyone within radius who has spare bricks to sell, can then pop them onto their own merchant for you to see and purchase from them next time you are online. A lower purchase cost of buying a merchant contract would also encourage a lot more players to have merchants (if the 'linked merchants' feature wasn't enough on it's own), but for me the single biggest hassle is having to click individually on countless merchants and slowly walk around comparing and writing down notes on a piece of paper to remember what was where... not to mention all the merchants with items for sale but not within a market hub that I will probably never come across.