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Whats the difference between how WU is treated and how ogwo is slated to be treated in the future? Sounds eerily similiar.

This has to happen, or the whole release of WO on Steam is doomed to fail in the long term. This is 2019. Subscriptions are simply a thing of the past. They work only with a selected few, old, and much more established, well known AAA games like WoW, Final Fantasy and a few more games. Even Blizzard have realized over the years that they needed changes, hence they tried things like RaF, free trials and a bunch more things, with the biggest thing being the ability to buy premium purely with ingame gold, which is extremely easy to get nowadays. While you can do the same in Wurm, it is much more difficult and time consuming especially in todays economy. The only source of income comes from people buying coins for real life money. The economy needs actual internal sustenance, paying for money shouldn't be the core sustenance, but thats going off topic A lot of people whom i have played with over almost a decade by now, have been turned off by the subscriptions, even when it used to be cheaper, it was a huge undertaking to convince them to buy and play. Now with the release of WU and WO dying and revenues down (as Rolf have said) and the imminent release of WO for Steam, i believe it is finally time to change the system. People have fled to WU to escape the subscriptions, which is only a one time buy or pretty much free if you know where to look (you can buy it for 1 dollar in bundles). It has almost the exact same features present, if not more due to modding and GM tools, and more options for players on how they want to play. Those who did not leave to WU because of their characters or investements, have also started to quit due to the low player numbers or their friends leaving the game. While i dont call myself an expert on this situation, here are a few ideas that i have that could work, Reduce premium prices to what they originally were or even less. Keep the same premium price, but create an account system (that every normal game has) where you buy premium for the account and are allowed to have several characters that also benefit from premium instead of having to pay seperately for each character. I mean seriously, can you imagine WoW charging you 10 euros a month per character, and if you dont, you are restricted to lvl 20? Or a similiar system to EvE where there is a default subscription say at 7euro for one premium, but if you pay 10 euro you can have several premium characters. More bonuses to premium players. The referral system and simply allowing the person to grind their skills above 20 isn't enough. Skills should be restricted to at LEAST 50 or not restricted at all, and instead allow only premiums to be priests and only premiums to make deeds. There are plenty of things that might not be hugely important for a lot of players and can be overlooked. Giving bonuses to skillgain or anything like that however should be a big no-no. Remove subscriptions altogether and instead offer a cash shop sort of thing that sells customization stuff. Make unique items such as: past christmas gifts and other gifts and titles that are not available anymore or are hard to get to be bought with real life money. Increase deed prices or deed upkeep (though this would upset many people) and other small bonuses that would generally not upset the balance of the game. Maybe merchants, traders or hell even bartenders for your deed could be bought with real life money as well? Maybe you could pay real life money for your deed to become a spawn point for people who died, regardless of where they died on the server? Custom banners, etc..? Huge possibilities here

NOTICE: i realized after i was getting argumentative earlier i had forgotten to take my mental meds a few days and was going psychotic.. so i logged off the forums and took my meds Don't go insane kids, it sux

After helping charge a rite with the help of three other people, I think I've gained a fresh view of the situation. For the sake of not losing any staff member reading this, I'll list the community issues with it in the spoiler below, and then go into what I think is a better goal. So, what's a better alternative? The rite is charged by prayers done by followers and priests of that god and their template playergods (Nathan, Gary and Tosiek are examples of template playergods, as they're all blacklight gods, their prayers are counted towards the rite of death, also casted by Libila). It acts as a seperate favour pool, where each prayer gives a certain amount of favour, and sermons with listeners (the more the better)give a higher amount of favour into that pool. So...why not track the amount of favour each player has put into that pool? Being able to have a visual tracker of the progress you've made will really help keep groups of people motivated to keep praying and sermoning. When me and my friends grouped together, it was hell to see the message stay the same even after a week of 24/7 praying and sermons while one side slept and the other side was working, alternating the two to keep making progress. It also removes that need to be the person casting the rite or being linked for it, meaning you totally eliminate the potential for snipes. Seeing the progress jumps that would come from actually making a sermon group and being active in it would also help people see that sermons are actually great for this goal, rather than the current feelings of it being totally worthless. People aren't making sermon groups or being social for this goal like the team hoped, we can see that, so why not make it easier and more beneficial to actually work as a team? With luck, this would also help with the issue of lower follower/priest counts of certain gods too as people are more likely to actually band together to see these progress jumps, even if they are small. I don't know the exact number of favour needed for the rites to be casted, though I assume it's 1000 favour. It would make sense to make the goal to contribute a certain amount of favour to the pool, maybe along the lines of 200 if the above number is correct. It's still a hard task, and it needs to be for the kind of benefit you're given, but at least makes it look more approachable and more appealing to all players.

Can I feel comfortable and continue my game or will you decide to delete original WO after the new Steam release? @Retrograde@Rolf Is there a possibility if the original game will be depopulated? I feel sorry for the questions, but as a loyal customer i must know if i have to interrupt my loyalty after 10 years of premium non stop. (I'm not the only one) What i wanna know is if in case of low population the game will be sustainable for the company. I just wanna make sure if is it worth keep playing. And if more update/merging options might be a real option.

@rolf @retrograde Thanks for keeping the playerbase in the loop about possible future developments. I played Wurm Online for many years. I am wondering if you can please let us know whether our current deeds and skillsets will be merged with the Steam plans or will we have to start from scratch? Will we retain what we have now, e.g. armor, tools, deeds, and previous unique presents or will we lose it all to have to start again? What is the timeframe for all of this to happen (if at all)? If it does not happen, what is the future plans for current Wurm Online servers? These are important questions for quite a few of the current playerbase and it would be great if we could get some answers. Thanks

I feel I need to balance out my overall comments because I feel I've gone a bit rough on people recently. The quality of life updates on the list a dev mentioned humble me coz with them and the building update (whenever that happens) it makes me feel like you have listened to me and considered each suggestion I have made. You sound like you are all still hard at work, so for someone like to feel like I have contributed to the game in a significant way I feel a bit overwhelmed. The controls are exactly the type of thinking I was thinking about when I first mentioned "quality of life improvements" I think WO is may be a "Diamond in the rough" that still has alot of hidden room for cut & polish *insert picture here of my Cave Of Wonders WOW face I don't get much time to be nice on the forums so when we & I push plz know it's because you are doing your job well that we feel we can *Extra kudos mention to the community, same goes for you..!

Is that a bad thing? I like having vast regions of wild land to explore. As long as population centers exist and people can get to them, I don't see the problem.

The settlement token is a sundial

Ogwo isn't going anywhere, we will be working on a quality of life focused update in preparing for launch on steam, and some features of ogwo may change, but it will receive most updates that steam wo does, likely some will be added to steam only due to differences in platform and market but we won't be removing ogwo or letting it fall behind. As for shift of players from ogwo to steam wo, it's a hard thing to quantify, it will likely have some appeal for those seeking a fresh start, but we won't be seeking to push players from ogwo to steam

I agree, especially with the cash shop idea. It would probably make way more money than subscriptions anyway because it's all about the looks in this game lol

Its a game i grew up with and its a 1 of a kind game that i just love the building aspect of anything terraforming/deed creation i love I will happily sit there mining out veins for days on end make 300 high dirt walls raise a 50x50 200+ high on steepest point above a steppe(was working on this when jkh went down ) i love this game a lot so ya did i ever enjoy this game? yes do i still right now? yes The reason im this vocal is because i love this game but i also know that the market is a lucrative thing and without using and abusing that you cant get certain things you need when you are a person who hates improving so i will happily sit there grind my mining to 90+ and fill a bsb with ql 90 iron ore and sell that on the market so that i can use that silver to buy things i cant get(like i do right now) I live paycheck to paycheck and even when i was in periods where i didnt have a job i still set aside money bit by bit so that i can keep my prem going for wurm even if i go periods without actually doing anything meaningful but click the button on the side of my mouse and hold it down every 12-14 seconds for an entire day as i mine out yet another vein or spend an entire week or month clearing a forest Even if they added in stupid mini games to prevent bots(like at 1 point they where thinking of because rs did it) and 99% off the players would quit id still keep playing it and still find ways to enjoy it I will sit there and complain about how the game is run and the direction it goes but i will sit there on the last day of this game on the last server gathering resources or building a deed until the last server shuts down there isnt anything like wurm and for me wurm is what i want in a game sure with some changes here and there(well a lot) but the core of what wurm is is what i always looked for in a game before i found wurm years upon years ago on the java forums where rolf asked a question about an issue he had for a game he was working on since those early days i have been hooked and i will prob still be there right at the end Meanwhile i will ###### and moan and complain and air my frustration all the while paying for 3-4 accounts and happily working away edit: Too add if i could i would happily pay to keep all my 4 priests prem next to my 2 "mains" that i have but with an exchange rate of 1 Euro equals 1.75 New Zealand Dollar that becomes quite expensive to do once a year

It's been that way for many years now. https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Settlement Free players can plant a deed, but won't be able to invite other players using /vinvite until they turn premium. Ever since they added the use of "make one yourself" DEED STAKES as opposed to the 10s settlement writ. You still have to pay for the purchase of the land tiles, and the monthly upkeep of those tiles.

I hope that's enough of an answer? Thorin

The peak was at when Xanadu was released. Not surprising Then it started dropping after WU release. Not surprising It isn't really about how hard the game is or might be for new players, or the sloweness of the game, it is the subscription that turns people off, even with a free trial. Most people i used to play with both in WU and WO and spoke to are fed up with the subscriptions and the way the economy works in WO, hence they went over to WU and or just quit altogether. These people will not come back until the subscription is removed, reduced, or the system is changed drastically. Most are also not interested in WO Steam until that happens. While i myself don't really have much issues with the subscription system, and you can also earn it purely by playing ingame, it is a huge, if not one of the biggest issues WO is dying, and the steam release won't fix either. There needs to be more bonuses and huge changes to the whole subscription system to see players returning

Allright, so I thought I'd quench some of the will I stay or will I go-rumours by starting a new thread about an idea I've had quite a while. Back in 2015 we put WU on Steam and it has worked out allright. Now sales there are dwindling but Steam remains the best place to promote and sell PC and Linux games. Trying to promote your game via Facebook or Google ads is very expensive to the point of being pointless unless your game looks and has a really triple A newbie experience. The attempts we make have very poor conversion rate. Not to mention larger expensive ads on websites which simply are huge costs per click for us. Also trying to SEO the top rated search places for sandbox games isn't easy either even if we actually show up which I guess yields some traffic. But trying to improve there won't give much bang for the buck. So I figured, how can we go about putting WO where the PC players are and words spread nowadays - on Steam? If someone searches for a type of game they'll get one hit per game instead so it's a democratic search of sorts. Free to play games are highly sought after and I think A LOT of people look for and try free to play MMOs there. Compared to finding us online and download our client via custom links and registration, on Steam we would work exactly like all other games. We would probably get a fairly stable stream of players who look for games like these and decide to try them out. I asked the other devs and while moderately to very positive they raised the same initial questions many of you will. So I thought I'll start with them and a couple of my answers and then we'll discuss the rest. Here goes: Q1) Would we be risking more fracturing of our player base? I think it would be best to start clean server/s for a couple of reasons and aim to keep it/them in a separate cluster a good while. One is that new players deserve the feeling of being a newbie among other newbies with fresh land. This means that I believe their experience and inclination to stick around could be hampered by encountering very experienced accounts and high quality items. As the servers mature we merge them into the main cluster. Exactly when this merge would take place would depend on how well the release goes. If we receive virtually no new players and it's basically a failure, the server would merge very quickly so fracturing wouldn't really happen. If, on the other hand thousands of players come we would have to consider more carefully when the right time to merge is. This would mean Wurm becomes more sustainable which surely must be good for everyone. If we are extremely lucky, we receive so many new players that we can merge earlier because the old accounts and items will be quickly dispersed among the new population (but then we're probably talking about tens of thousands of new players). Q2) Steam gets a bit fussy with real money transactions. Can we abide by Steam Guidelines? I don't see how we wouldn't abide by Steam guidelines. We aren't involved in RMT or account sales. Our players may be but that's not unusual for online games. We would look into what we can do with the Steam shop though so we support their systems. Q3) How about the code base? Won't another branch be too much to handle? We'll see about branches and code base. Basically the server shouldn't need a new branch as far as I can see. There will be new clients though but it sure must be worth it if we want to get thousands of new players. Q4) How about staffing the servers? Will there be enough volunteers around to help out? We don't know at this time. We can't require anyone to help out. Hopefully some will of course and perhaps some GM's might consider returning if they see Wurm on Steam. I'll be interested in pitching in as well at least around launch. It's also related to Q1: If it's a success there will probably be resources to staff the servers, if it's not the server will merge fairly quickly. The initial success of the game shouldn't be based on whether people get help from GM's really - the thrill of encountering Wurm should be the main attraction. I'm fairly sure there will be players to answer questions in chat channels though. When it comes to answering questions in the Steam forum, hopefully Retro can manage some there as well or we suggest they visit these forums. Depends on the pressure. Q5) Will we be able to deal with the added cost of infrastructure? I am fairly certain the amount of new players will be able to sustain the cost of at least one server. If we need more servers the revenue is good so then we should be safe from other perspectives as well. Q6) Would we release both Freedom and Epic servers? We'd start with a Freedom server and be ready to launch more. You will have to discuss moving the Epic server there but from what I gather it would help with some multi account issues and might be a good solution for that. Q7) What timeframe are we looking at? Well, we would want the client to feel really polished. There are quite a lot of improvements planned and from what I understand we're looking at around Q1-Q2 (let's say February to April sometime) next year. Okay so these are the initial thoughts I have. I am sure you have more so let's discuss more pros and cons!

Some Crow Kingdom items for sale (The kingdom is drained so prices a bit more expensive than expected. So the quantity of PMK items is limited in the game.) Accept s or e Taking orders PM, and in-game (Gofs / Qoi) Press Like if you like design ALL Gone Prices are: Wagon 18s; Tent 8s; Tall banner 5,25s; Banner 4,5s(almost gone); Flag 2,25s. Prices in euro: Wagon 17e, tent 7e, tall banner 4e, banner 3e, flag 1.5e. Tall banner no more Banner 4,5s no more Flag 2.25s no more Tent Wagon Friends! I'm quitung! and I wanna sell all my CK gear asap. If somebody going to buyout all of it, I will make 25% discount more to prices that you see atm!

Great! Thank you very much. 🙂

Favourite: Working with wood Least Favourite: Chopping Wood. When I say there's never enough of it there's always an entire forest on the side of the deed

It's even craftable and decorative

Really? I thought that advertising would be your least favourite thing.

As i have said, the subscription system doesnt nessecarily need to go away. It just needs to be looked into and changed as to how it works right now. Simply allowing non premiums to raise their skills to 100 in exchange of giving them other restrictions and giving more bonuses to being premium would also work and does not require a cash shop. For example, a premium only server, with unique mobs, and unique items that does not exist on other servers and cannot be transferred to other servers, and more deed restrictions for non premiums would go a long way in tackling the problem.

Which will result in veterans moving to those new servers, thus the current servers become even more deserted. It encourages new players to go to the new servers, thus even less new blood arriving at the current servers. The feeling of them being abandoned, specially without a hard date for when the new servers are merged into the current cluster, does not seem invalid to me. Though this does assume that new accounts made through steam can only go to the new servers, if they can also go to the existing servers then this is less of an issue, as all the player made wonders on those servers can be very enticing, especially after a few months once the enticing part of a new start has completely worn off. Why would veterans move to those new servers? Well, there's one thing that's far more valuable and impactful than their skillset and the stuff they own, that's their knowledge of how the game works. That knowledge allows them to easily dominate in a new environment. So while new players are still trying to grasp the game the veterans will already have shops up and dominate the market. It really doesn't matter if they get to bring their stuff and skillset to the party or not, it's their knowledge that gives them a massive head start on new players, you can't wipe that unless you change the way the entire game works.

I would limit the size of non-premium players to something small like 5x5x5x5, rather than eliminate entirely from deeding. As you well know, deeds are about the only protection new players have from being griefed, and having at least a tiny deed of one's own is likely to make one much "hungrier" for more.

This gave me something to think about in that the mechanics of the rite were developed long in advance of a new player motivation to take upon it en masse vs a person here or there in happenstance. Where the mechanics were fine prior for there was little pressure and openly optional to do, with the new journal goals it pushes people into a system that wouldn't be used this intensely and not made for that where there end up being losers on the short end of the stick simply because the mechanic was designed ahead of the journal feature and not planned and fitted for it. As to how we can level it out more so that players receive in proportion to their efforts, i'm ill equipped with solution , yet see something in that direction is needed.

The funny thing about F2P games with cosmetic cash shop or QoL improvements is I almost always end up spending way more on those than I do on the ones which just demand money. I've spent hundreds on Hearthstone, LoL, Fortnite, TFT and I'm playing PoE now and trying really hard to resist the urge to dump £50 on it. Contrast that with my recent experience playing WoW classic and quitting after exactly 1 month when I realized my sub was about to renew and I think you might have a point.

he is better than us in that

Yes in principle but no to increase deed price or deed upkeep. If a premium char can make a deed, the deed itself should be relatively free to keep and be able to be kept with money generated from within the game itself, with little rewards you get from just playing the game.

I guess by your reasoning the game should just be trashed and given up then cuz the kids today want flashy particles, twitch combat and flashy smooth graphics and wurm is looking as old as dinosaur turds

Current situation is that even developers doesn't know exactly how the game works and thats a huge issue, code is ancient and it needs updating. People complaining here are those who haven't got their opinions/wishes listened or simply just ignored are now complaining here because, this is where all the devs are atm. Game policies/standards and code base needs to be updated to this day. Few dozen different coders have left their mark and now no one understand whats truly going on behind the scenes. Maybe when you hire people, make a contract which requires the coder to explain his work to the new guy or at least finish what he has started. I understand this game is ran by mostly volunteers which is also an issue if you want to succeed nowadays. Maybe hire one or two active fresh fellas to rewrite wurm base game from scratch? make wurm 2.0? i mean, wurm has a lot of potential because of the terraforming is unique, but the game needs to be thought out clearly, what needs to be done and why. Don't know how much game chest is ready to invest in wurm, but money does wonders and this game could be rekindled with proper amount of staff behind it with clear vision, but what i know right? Less is usually more, when its quality content.

15s may be achievable. I was looking for an account just like this a year ago, and PCs of 5s/eur were made then too. I got zero offers after many weeks of bumping (no surprise) and had to grind for myself. For someone who only wants a competent deed keeper or mule alt that will never need prem'ing up, this could well be a great deal. Having made a few such accounts, I know it takes dozens of hours of optimum grinding to get those stats. A lot of people value that kind of time highly, or at least they ought to.

Shame I missed you, would have popped back from Jackal to show you around... That pond is very nice, there is a fairly large flat area in that crater area and a few more nice little ponds around the edge. There is even a route for riding back up to the highway, but it takes a little finding...

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Most people live in countries with free speech, the majority though are too dumb to understand what it means...

Favourite: playing the game Least favourite: reading the forums

Favorite: Daily cleaning of the huge amount of fragments, pumpkins, branches etc off my lawn. Feeding the pigs and chickens. Least favorite: Cooking for its own sake.

My favourite chore: going to check on my nanimals when I log in, horses and champs of all sort My least favourite: .. oh, dear, where should I start? Perhaps repairing the insane amount of decay on deed on almost anything that is not nailed down; by the time I finish everything, I have to start over, because first things repaired already took damage again.

Favourite : Standing around doing nothing. Least Favourite : Doing something. I don't know if it counts but it's the unfortunate truth LOL

+1 Increase overall time some to provide a choice of manually blazing through them if short on time or doing a bit more hands off a bit slower.

A permanent non fading compass and improve improve are about the greatest things ever that won't actually affect the economy any in a negative way, but are nice little QoLs. Also whomever made that awesome crop mod where they never die. Bdew maybe? This means that if you can't get back online for some reason all your work isn't magically wasted just because you couldn't log on at 4 AM to rake and harvest your frickin' digital crops.

One reason why I ended up leaving WO for WU permanently a couple years ago was that the monthly cost of multiple premium characters (main and two priests) plus a deed was far above the value I was getting out of it. If it was the deed only, I could stomach it (or join someone else's deed if I couldn't), but I think this double-dipping for cash is a big reason why so many leave WO once they hit 20. Priest restrictions were another major pain point that led to my move, because it made the monthly cost problem that much worse. There's also the problem of the in-game economy being mostly stagnant, with what little cash flow there is generally going from those at the bottom to those at the top. There needs to be more circulation of coin between players, and with specific attention to how that circulation flows. Some of this also has to do with high-QL tools being priced so low that mid-QL tools can't even sell, so maybe there should be something that makes high-QL stuff much more expensive or difficult to make, scaling the price steeper. Also someone should look at how tool repair prevents tools from leaving circulation, making the problem worse over time, and take steps to change that. If I'm going to come back to WO, I *need* these issues to be addressed, because a new cluster and starting over isn't going to be enough to win me over. I can do that on WU already, without the massive real-money cost per month.

Bigger WU servers usually use the same backup and data-recovery plans as Wurm Online servers. Full dumps every 3 hours are defacto standard in 2019 no matter if you have a Wurm server or very important business information. A new Wurmageddon is extremly unlikely on both Wurm Online and bigger Wurm Unlimited servers.

*cough* https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Wurmageddon

yeah no, half the negative reviews for the lif mmo on steam are people calling the game "too grindy" even tho that game is 1000x less grindier than wurm. I guarantee you day one the game would have negative reviews from all the people who downloaded it expecting a rust-like experience. They'll spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to craft stuff, notice that it takes 20 seconds to carve a shaft and just quit lol, they'll leave a nice fat bad review on their way out as well. Wurm online is just way too niche, at least with WU you get the choice to make the grind softer by changing server stats, in wo you cant do that.

The last thing I want is wurm to fail, but that is inevitable for it's age. It's held on by those that refuse to let go, myself included. My point was that there is minial interest for WU even with all the mods and MTX stores available on some servers. Feature wise WU is ahead of WO by years. WO on the other hand feels like it's just milking the content trickling it in order to extend it's own life, in the mean time people have moved to WU to experience these features. A good example is taxidermy, and so many others. I'm not saying WU is better but I'm saying that people are doing more in WU with no income than WO with subs/deeds upkeep. So if WU has about the same players as WO... while WU has so much more "complexity" like hosting your own server or other server "worries" then it seems like people are willing to overcome those worries for a better player experience, that WO is not offering them.

Also, I'm with a few others who have voiced concerns about how WO would be competing with WU. I love Wurm and played WO for many years, so I'm sorry to say I actually prefer WU over WO these days and not because of the money. The QoL is better, imo, with more of the little conveniences that are always rejected for WO, (often vehemently by old-school forum goers), and some of the WU servers actually have decent population numbers with great communities. Sorry, but logging into WO these days, I'm so annoyed after a short time that I have to log back out. I am really hoping that there isn't going to be some kind of "planned obsolescence" going on for WU, the precursor of which is the "planned superiority" of WO we're now seeing evidence of.

"Well, we would want the client to feel really polished." Going from how rudimentary WU was for server options, having to shut down your own local server before you can restart your player client, and a GM spawning tool that can't actually find things by name because it seems to search by keyword not literal string comparisons, I guess we'll be waiting a very long time? Honestly Wurm doesn't even have UI that supports anything past 1080p yet since there's no doubled-up UI mode to help alleviate the lack of scaling, there's no way it's going to feel really polished without some meaningful TLC. (and just to point out, windowed fullscreen still doesn't even scale to the window resolution yet) And people from WU are going to remember how the wurm dev team wanted them to just roll back drivers and not update their GPU drivers when driver crashes got fixed in WO asap but took 6 months to get a fix for in WU, it shows the kind of support players can expect and just going to steam isn't going to stop that being the reality of Wurm.

Yeah worth considering for sure.

Yeah, although because we lose almost every player who don't want to pay as soon as they hit this ceiling we should consider simply slowing down skillgain instead. We'll see. Also I like the idea of letting people start at 10 or 15 or so.

[17:15:01] <Bozo> (Xan) wts 2x Dragon Hota Statue 20s pick up - or trade PM Offer He went to Xanadu to get away from us because we are neighbors, one of our kingdom was standing there trying to pick up statues as he was loading them into his knarr. He did not care, just kept loading then he had the nuts to sail by a second time to see if there was anything left to take as I was picking up the merchants. Would never buy a thing from this guy myself.