Lisimba

That's for when they want to know how to best find cotton. They'll invariably ask. I'm not saying it's the best place, but that's where you should point them. There was an unusually large amount of running from mobs, and the terrain wasn't the easiest either. I expect most people could do better elsewhere. But that's the result I got. Can't pick and choose your outcome when trying an experiment. Thing is, I was genuinely having *fun*, in a way that the old system never provided. I think it really might help with player retention. It may not have been as efficient for a noob, but that can be fixed with tweaks to the loot table if need be.

What are you talking about? None of this says anything about skill gain. You get a certain number of harvest actions, and you roll on the loot table for each one. If you roll a thing that you can't harvest yet, it says you don't know what it is and you toss it away. You still get the usual chance at a skill tick, and if your skill is low enough you're basically guaranteed one. I tested harvesting earlier with a toon with skill 1 in both foraging and botanizing. I didn't see paprika but I found both potatoes and tomatoes, at a skill somewhere between 1 and 5. Tomatoes were in vines, potatoes in roots&bulbs and animal burrows. I don't know why you got that message. Maybe the difficulty depends on the situation? But it seems F2P players are fine, even if they have to try a few more nodes. For all regular food and materials I think that's alright, but there are some new rares like the Fo holy site ingredients, booze, gems, jewelry, etc. I think it's fine to keep having level requirements for those. This seems good too. But keep in mind it won't get you a better chance at stuff. In the old system if you were for example searching for berries and you rolled a carrot, it would just tell you that you failed to find berries and not actually give you the carrot.

As a noob you don't need to learn each node. If you were looking for edibles you would simply harvest everything that looks like a plant, for example. People always ask for a toggle for everything. If we somehow didn't have trees yet and they were introduced, people would be asking for a way to prevent them growing on deed and a way to toggle them being visible in general. If we didn't have planets in the sky yet and some were introduced, I 100% guarantee you that people would be asking for a toggle. If we didn't have wildlife yet, well, you get the idea. I do not think it is about whether or not it enhances the game, it's because a significant fraction of people are very set in their ways and have trouble with *any* change, even if the result is something they'd have been perfectly fine with if it was there from the start.

I wondered how easy it was for a noob to get by on harvesting nodes, so I tried. TL;DR: Noobs will do fine. If someone is hurt and needs to heal, suggest looking for an animal burrow or critter nest. I took an alt with no foraging or botanizing skill, and basically no fighting skill, to a guard tower at a fallen deed (which fell years ago, nothing left but a few patches of pavement and that tower). It's a fairly hilly forested area. I gave myself half an hour, and any combat would have to be resolved by calling in the guards. No using horses, and no buildings or fences to hide in. To top that off I jumped off a hill and gave myself about 20% damage to start with. Findings: A lot of stuff is harvestable right away even at skill 1. It's poor quality of course, and most of it comes with a bit of damage, but it's all usable. After botanizing a few plants, the first foraging node was an animal burrow. Normally cotton and wool is nearer the end of the lore list, but with my damage it was actually at the top. And it delivered, I got two cotton and one wool out of it, still at skill one. The cotton was enough to heal myself up fully, even though I also had basically no first aid. So this part of the experiment was over quickly. I went on harvesting basically every node I saw within range of the tower (about 20 tiles). There was a lot of running away from mobs and calling the guards in, seems the forest there was busy that day. Highlights include a champion rat and a scorpion. After half an hour, the edible stuff I had was 2 blueberries, 1 carrot, 3 cucumbers, 1 cumin, 1 fennel plant, 1 fresh rosemary, 2 garlic, 3 green grapes, 1 hazelnuts, 1 lingonberries, 1 lovage, 1 olives, 3 onions, 1 parsley, 3 pea pods, 2 potatoes, 2 pumpkins, 1 raspberry and 1 tomato. There was also a bunch of other stuff, like sprouts and woad, but that wasn't really relevant here. Anyway, it's easily enough to eat for a day. The nodes seem to respawn in less than a day so that seems alright. This is more subjective, but it was actually fun looking for nodes and trying to grab them without setting off a rat or whatever. It felt engaging. Notes: It's *possible* I got extremely lucky with that animal burrow, we'd have to test that a couple more times to see if they always deliver healing mats that quickly. I've gotten quite a bunch of cotton and wool out of them on my main though, without even being wounded, so until we know more they seem like a good bet. Critter nests seem to produce cotton/wool the same as animal burrows, so I added them to the recommendation. I tested this in a forested area, as that was easy for me to go to and is a common place to start for noobs. Results may vary in other locations.

That's unnecessarily reductionist. Not maintaining features you can do without is *always* a focus in software development. That doesn't mean they're just going to cut everything. I just gave several legitimate reasons in the very post you replied to.

Ostentation, in the test thread: "This is simply not going to happen. The point of this update is to replace a very unintuitive and random system with something that both provides better and less random results, and is more intuitive to players, especially those just starting out. Keeping the old system in addition to it would completely undermine that. The goal here is to have a better foraging and botanizing system than we had before, not to have two systems in conflict with each other." On a technical level, yes, they could have kept it. But on the dev side that means keeping yet another system around that needs to be maintained and considered whenever there are balancing issues or new things need to be added. On the player side, it makes it more confusing to understand. Why are there multiple systems? What are they intended for? Why use one over the other? Why don't they give the same loot? And so on. And from a game design point of view it just looks sloppy to have both.

There is code, which you can see via datamining of Wurm Unlimited, that specifically gives you a difficulty boost in HFC and beverages when you drink alcohol. This is not an accident or a side effect, it is deliberately implemented there. I think it's more likely that it simply wasn't worth it for most people. I lost track of how often I've said this already. Fourth or fifth time now? Anyway, we could have alternatives to getting drunk. I recognize that people might not want to get drunk, for whatever reason. I don't care about the drunkenness itself. The relevant game mechanic is that there's a way for you to adjust your relative difficulty, which makes it possible to sweet spot. We already have other implementations of this. In most skills you can sweet spot by adjusting the quality of your tools, for example. So, help come up with an alternative, and we'll propose that to the devs. Quoting a relevant line from a public chat channel is not "stalking".

Yeah. This is part of why I always liked "structured" PvP more. I don't really consider myself a PvP player but even so I've had a lot of fun in various games in large scale battlegrounds. But these end, and then a new one starts, and everyone is on the same footing again.

Alright, then I misunderstood. So out of the complaints I've seen so far, a bunch are things I agree with. The templar thing, snow collection efficiency, mounted foraging, having to enchant two things instead of one, etc. And in fact we've brought all of those up in the test thread in some form or other, so another complaint is that the devs should have addressed more things before releasing it, either by implementing something or by explaining their reasoning about it (Jaytoo did this very well in the rift test thread, a bunch of complaints were addressed because he simply explained why he decided to do or not do a thing). But there are also a decent bunch of complaints that are charitably described as "stuff people made up to get angry about". I'm getting the idea that a couple of people are just salty that there was a chance to something they were really used to (which, to be honest, is a valid thing to feel) but then they try to throw out anything that feels good as a justification for that. And there are also some people who are bitter about the way things have been going, and they latch on to it, and start a complaint tornado. This sort of thing started in the test thread already, and there's even more of it now. And that sort of thing is really bad for the game. On one hand it causes everything to fossilize, which means we can't ever improve anything because *every* change will dissatisfy someone somewhere. On the other hand, it spreads a huge amount of misinformation about how things work, which is something I personally dislike a great deal. And this appears to happen every time there's a patch. I'm tired of it, and so I'm pushing back on it.

I meant "when I was in the game, myself". That's fair enough. So, what alternative could we have? Like with stamina, you can use booze but also stamina sandwiches, and I think lemonade. Could we have a food or drink that gives you "focus" or something instead? Same difficulty raising effect as alcohol has on the same skills it does, but without having to be drunk.

Calling it a "weird trick" is mischaracterizing it. It's well known and specifically implemented for this purpose in HFC and beverages. And now it's here in foraging/botanizing too. I gave you a factual reply: "If you really worry about alcoholism, that's easy enough to fix. Just offer an alternative with the same mechanics, like meditative tea" Note that this is now the third time I'm suggesting that. Yeah. I don't believe you. You are digging in your heels over alcohol sweet spotting because if you *would* use that, you'd be skilling faster than before, and so you can no longer claim that the new system nerfed skilling. You keep on using loaded language like this, trying to imply that sweet spotting difficulty with alcohol is strange. It's not. It is a known technique, just like the sips. More loaded language. It's not forceful, you take the booze of your own free will. And I already gave an idea for how to deal with people who don't want booze at all. (Three times so far.) If you really care about alcoholism, work on that idea. I'm open to finding a way to make the mechanism work for people that don't want to drink booze, for roleplay purposes or other purposes. That's just... complete nonsense. I argue with facts. You keep ignoring them.

I've explained why I think it's better. I'm not the only one who likes it better, either. You follow with "Let's be honest." and "It doesn't even bring anything to make it better [...] and only makes it worse." How else would I take that, but you claiming that we're lying? And no, I'm not involved in making it, other than comments in the test thread. Like I said, you have to separate "I think it's worse" from "it is worse". Most of that is your opinion, not fact. (The bit about newbies is plain not true, I've tested it a day ago.)

Bloody hell. Seriously? Me, in the test thread, over a month ago, noting that using a mount while foraging could do with more streamlining: Me, in the test thread, a week or three ago, agreeing with someone who brought up mounted foraging, and suggesting that it could be a level related perk: Me, in discord, the evening after the release: <Lisimba> Another one is being able to forage/botanize while mounted. Like, you can say "no we won't do that because..." or something, but I don't think it was ever addressed at all. <Lisimba> We raised the idea of being able to harvest while mounted, that would fix a lot of the movement worries. <Ostentation> that's another thing I want us to respond to, yes If I don't agree with you that doesn't mean I have to be acting in bad faith. I want mounted harvesting to be a thing, and I think the devs dropped the ball by not at least addressing that before release, whether or not they would have actually implemented it. At the same time, hopping off and on a cart is pretty doable. I've been doing just that. It's not as good as being able to stay on the cart, but it works.

You have to separate "I think it's worse" from "it is worse". I acknowledge that you think it's worse. I don't agree with you, but even so, that's a valid opinion. I've seen quite a few people comment that they like it better though. There's one up thread on this page, a bunch more in other threads, and a bunch in game. I also think this myself. Your quote starting with "let's be honest" basically implies we're all lying about this. Please cut that out.

I quoted two lines from you from Xanadu's public chat. One you wrote yesterday, which I saw while I was playing myself, and one I pulled from my logs after I wondered if you had said that before. You have now called that fanaticism, stalking, and spying. This is, frankly, insane. But you didn't seem to mind them either, until that became pretty much the last way you could complain about the new system.

Yes, that seems to be a common problem. Some of that was in the 90% you ignored. Stuff like "you have no standing beside protecting the thing nobody likes" and "In this case players win nothing but few new models". And insinuating I'm paid for disagreeing with you. There's heaps more in your other posts. But if you're just going to ignore that too, why should I type it again?

I've had no problem sorting it. Just drag it into satchels. Whatever was too big can either be destroyed or dragged into your cart. Remember what I said about making stuff up and then getting angry about it? Chain and plate can be merged as far as I care. For blacksmithing and weaponsmithing, there are some gameplay reasons why weaponsmithing is much harder. Don't want to inflict that on blacksmithing. Beyond that, we have blades smithing and weapon heads smithing, those are basically useless and could be merged into weapon smithing. I'm not paid. Because your stuff is really hard to read. You keep on producing walls of text that go all over the place and claim like ten different things, often contradicting each other. Can't reply to those as one thing because they *aren't* one thing. Plenty of people like it. Should be clear by reading these threads. How can you think that's not the case? What does this even mean? The old system was removed a few days ago, pretty much everybody here will have used it. I certainly have. False, and you know it. Most of that was side stuff. The templar requirement was the biggest one, and fortunately they are reverting that. The second biggest one is snow collection. We're still waiting for an answer on that. Beyond that, the complaints drop off pretty hard. I'm not paid. I'm disagreeing with you on my own time, for the sole fact that I think you're wrong. If you think I have no arguments for it, you *really* have not paid attention.

...so for stamina it's fine to have a non-alcoholic alternative, but for skill it's an "overcomplicated quirk"? In the same post? It's from Xanadu's server wide chat. If you think that's spying you may have misunderstood a thing or two about what a server wide chat is. Look, I understand you don't like the change. That's valid. But you're desperately trying to justify the old system, and making a mess of it. You've gotten to the point where you're trying to paint people who disagree with you as malevolent entities hellbent on ruining everyone's life. This sort of stuff is just grasping at straws.

You will likely be just fine if you log in again. The vast body of water is what you get when the land fails to load in (the water is always there, you can see it if you ever happen to clip through the terrain). You were floating high above it because that's how high your bed is. Stamina I think is the same thing, it defaults to 0 until the server tells your client the actual value. It sounds like you had a connection issue right after login.

An option is to simply add the efforts for both together. If you spent 100 hours on each, you'd get the equivalent of 200 hours in the merged skill. The way skilling works in Wurm, each nine is about the same amount of work. If you had both at 90, the combined skill would be about 99. If you had both at 99, the combined skill would be about 99.99, and so on. It's fairly easy to come up with a formula that can merge any two numbers this way. (Yes, this means that 99.99 is only halfway to 100. Actually it's a bit below halfway because the first 9 is easier than the rest.)

If you really worry about alcoholism, that's easy enough to fix. Just offer an alternative with the same mechanics, like meditative tea: You don't seem to have a problem suggesting booze for stamina regen, by the way: <Ekcin> you should switch to booze,a water skin of booze,consumed through a 1g measuring jug, never runs out for practical use <Ekcin> btw I would recommend high ql booze e.g. in a water skin filled to a 1g set measuring jug then drinking, rinse repeat. Stam gain does not depend on sip size I have a hard time believing your concern for alcoholism is genuine.

Stop spreading this nonsense. You know you can sweet spot difficulty with alcohol. Yes, you don't want to, I know that. But that doesn't mean you can't. You can literally still do this. Don't make things extra difficult for no reason. Go around in a large cart. Hop on (one keybind), drive to next node, hop off (one keybind), harvest. Dump any extras in the cart. Easy. Hopefully we'll get the ability to harvest while mounted, that would improve things even more. The old system heavily encouraged walking in strips, so people were usually limited by inventory size, and would try to keep their inventory light so they walked faster. This encouraged dumping your loot regularly. The new system encourages mounts and carts. I expect there to be *less* littering once people catch on.

Those pass the very low bar of at least feeling different. Strictly herbs. Mostly. Except for barley, oats, rye, and wheat of course. And the spices, of course. And... acorns? And garlic. Best you can say about it is that it's plant parts. But then it turns out that foraging is also basically plant parts, only with a few rocks and eggs thrown in. Barley, oats, rye, wheat, rice? They're all grains. First four were botanizing, last one was foraging. Woad and wemp plants? Both non-edible utility plants. Woad was botanizing, wemp was foraging. All of the vegetables? Foraging, for some reason. Except for garlic! Garlic was botanizing again. Acorns were botanizing, but all of the seedlings were foraging. This would make more sense if it was swapped. Both skills have an identity crisis because they don't really have separate identities. Botanizing kind of tries to be herbalizing. Foraging is mostly botanizing. It seems things were just randomly distributed over both in an attempt to give each roughly the same amount of stuff to do. They should be just one skill. I find it pretty chill to hop from node to node. More chill than before, as now I don't have to keep track of what bits of terrain I already covered. It would help you a lot if you stopped with making stuff up and then getting angry about it.

"sadistic joy to cause harm and distress"? That's like a 9 out of 10 on the drama scale. You should try for maybe a 3 or a 4. We don't hate them, that's a stupid leading question. I think it's a net negative to the game to have both. It's not just that they work exactly the same mechanically, they don't even have a separate identity in my mind. It's like having a "picking stuff up" skill and a "picking up stuff" skill. And yet, we do have to level them up separately, and nodes only give one or the other. It sucks if that interrupts your grind but we can't keep the game in stasis for everyone who's used to something working a certain way. If it's combined you should get the higher of the two in the new skill, and you should keep all titles if new titles would be made, but we need to be able to move on.

No, but they can eat from whatever tile the node is on, assuming that tile is edible to begin with.