DKSprocket

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Posts posted by DKSprocket

  2. Posted · Edited by DKSprocket

    The new "destroy structure" option when right-clicking a wall is way too easy to get mixed up with "Wall->Destroy". Destroying a building is not something you need to do often so it's really not a problem if you have to go through the manage interface. The reason it's easy to mix up is that when you want to destroy something (in this case a wall) then it's not unexpected to get a "Do you want to destroy [...]?" warning and just click it because "yes, i do want to destroy.." - especially when people are only expecting one destroy option on walls.


     


    If you want the option to stay then you could move destroy wall and destroy structure to the same sub-menu so it's clear that there's two different destroy options, but in that case please rename "destroy structure" to "DESTROY BUILDING" so it's 100% clear what it does (a wall built from parts is technically also a structure).


     


    Here is an example of someone making the mistake: http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/132482-click-click-house-is-gone/ - I am sure many of those who accidentally destroy their house will call a gm, so fixing this would avoid wasting everyone's time.


  3. Posted · Edited by DKSprocket

    It's definitely way easy to get it mixed if you're trying to destroy a wall and don't realize that you can now destroy the entire house by right clicking a wall. It should either be moved next to the destroy wall and renamed to "DESTROY BUILDING" - or even better: just remove it from right clicking the building. If you want to destroy a building then it's not a problem that you have to go through the manage interface.


     


    Edit: Just re-checked it in the game - it's called "Demolish" -> "Destroy Structure". That's way too ambiguous when the expected option is to destroy a wall ("structure" can mean pretty much anything, even a wall). If you want to destroy something (in this case a wall) and you get a pop-up saying "Do you really want to destroy [...]" it's understandable if some people click it automatically.


  6. Posted

    This is similar to the issue with the Nahjo nerf that was rolled back. Ignoring an issue when it arises and letting it become part of the game, then much much later address it with a "fix" that screws everyone over. This makes the players lose trust in the game and drives people away. Who knows what's going to get "fixed" next? Removing all drake sets because the sets were obtained by penning dragons which wasn't intended? Removing skills people gained years ago because you've now changed skill gain? Who knows and when we don't know what policies management will flip-flop on next then it seems pointless to invest time/money in the game.


     


    All online games have an issue with "legacy" items that are no longer obtainable after changes/fixes. Some games address this by removing the old items when they make the change. Other games allow the legacy items to exist and it becomes part of the game. Old items such as fountain containers has been around so long that they have become part of the game. By doing nothing about them for 5+ years people have figured it was safe to invest real life money in such items. You can't flip-flop on policies like that without driving people away from the game.


     


    As a side note - why are you making these incredibly short-sighted changes that are pissing the playerbase off days before release Wurm Unlimited? Now is when you need positive word of mouth the most and veteran players who've just lost hundreds of dollars worth of items are probably not going to be in the mood to defend the game when the Steam audience starts to complain about the buggy nature of the game, primitive server management options etc.


  8. Posted

    Lets be honest there, the biggest imbalance is the favor. You can't have a priest casting hard spells (120 favor - linking required) for 1/10 of the favor price.

     

    If you want to get things balanced on a PvE side. Make all kind of favor as easilly obtainable (be it by tweaking the values... or removing the mosts OPs).

     

    For highlevel players that mainly care about enchanting and channeling grind then sacrificing is certainly the biggest issue by far, but not it's no the only PvE issue. Currently there's literally zero reasons to have a Magnaron priest and Fo priests are reduced to a very narrow niche. For casual players this has a bigger impact than sacrificing for favor.

  9. Posted · Edited by DKSprocket


    First of all - this is a starting point for a debate, not a specific suggestion set in stone. I'm sure the specifics can be improved - this is just to get the ball rolling and to give our devs an alternative to simply nerfing Nahjo priests. This is also the reason I'm posting it here and not in the suggestions forum, but the mods are of course welcome to move it. :)

     

    The reason for this post is because the devs have stated they are considering nerfing Nahjo priests.

     

    Core Assumption: Nahjo priests should not be nerfed too much. There was a good time to balance Nahjo to make it fit the balance of the old priests, but that time was 5 months ago. Since then people have re-grinded faith to high levels, some have bought/sold characters and some casual players have started a priest which they otherwise wouldn't have. Instead of nerfing Nahjo give the other priests a boost in PvE.

     

    Assumption: Nahjo hasn't broken PvP balance (as far as I know), so this balancing will focus on PvE abilities. Hopefully the changes can work on both PvE and PvP servers.

     

    Assumption: It is ok to "hardcode" some priest abilities even if this doesn't fit entirely within the player god framework.

     

    Assumption: It is acceptable to add a bit more overlap between the priest abilities since this has already happened with the player gods (especially Najho).

     

     

    1 - Make sure the roles of the gods are clearly defined. No big changes here, just some small tweaks.

     

    Nahjo: Good at everything, but master of none. Difficulty: casual

     

    Fo: Master of nature and healing. Difficulty: casual

     

    Magnaron: Mastery of the body and combat. Difficulty: medium

     

    Vynora: Master of the arcane. Difficulty: hard

     

     

    2 - Allow the old gods more abilities to bring them in line with Nahjo having both mining and woodcutting.

     

    Magnaron: Add digging since this fits with the body domain. They could possibly even get woodcutting and paving as well since they are body skills and Magnaron's PvE relevance is somewhat limited.

     

    Fo: Add woodcutting since this relates to nature (perhaps limit it to very old and overaged trees to fit the lore).

     

    Vynora: Add alchemy and natural substances since mixing potions fits with arcane abilities. They could get mining or digging as well, but that doesn't seem to fit the lore that well (and I am not sure they need as big a boost as Mag and Fo).

     

    Nahjo: No changes.

     

     

    3 - Boost favor from sacrificing for the old gods.

     

    First of all double the core price of the current "double" favor items (to the level of cordage ropes). That way people who already grinded the relevant skills won't get nerfed and existing items in stock will still be as useful as before.

     

    Secondly make their new sacrifice items something that fits the lore and require skills that don't take improving to raise efficiently (which makes little sense when they're not allowed to improve).

     

    Fo: Make vegetables (HC items) their favor item like Nahjo (unless this breaks healing in PvP). It fits the lore and I have a hard time seeing how it would make them unbalanced for PvE. They'd be able to mass produce sprouts, but that's about it.

     

    Vynora: Some alchemy or natural substances item. Healing covers or healing salves would work, but perhaps not the most lore appropriate. Healing salves would give a use for all the animal fat sitting in our bsbs.

     

    Magnaron: Door locks still works fine since locksmithing doesn't take improving to skill up. If the core price of door locks is doubled they'd still see a nice boost (unless this breaks pvp). An alternative could be metallurgy lumps since this would fit the lore better than door locks.

     

    Nahjo: No changes to favor item.

     

    Optional nerf: I think most people will agree that sacrificing vegetables is currently extremely powerful. If the favor gain from this was reduced by 50% it would still be really good, so I think that could be an option (but it's a significant nerf).

     

     

    4 - Spell tweaks

     

    This is going to be controversial, so please don't take it for more than an initial suggestion that is open for debate. It includes a bit of nerfing of Nahjo, but this could be omitted.

     

    Vynora: Since they are masters of enchanting it would make sense they get Life Transfer since it's by far the best enchant for that slot.

     

    Magnaron: Add Frostbrand since it's a damage dealing enchant. Improving Mole Sense to be more useful would be nice, but that's another discussion (making it work like "analyze" above ground would be awesome). 

     

    Fo: Give them some more utility spells. Oppulence, Light Token and Reveal Creatures/Settlements would fit well with the lore. Dominate and True Hit are also possibilities.

     

    Nahjo: Optionally remove some of the enchanting spells that aren't top tier. Possible enchants to remove could be the Demise spells, Lurker in the Dark and maybe Aura of Shared Pain. Do not remove Wind of Ages, Courier or Lifetransfer since these were major selling points for the people picking the class.

     

    More changes could probably be made to PvP spells, but I don't know enough about that to make any suggestions there.


     


    (Apologies if I made any mistakes about current priest abilities, some of it is quoted from memory)


  11. Posted · Edited by DKSprocket

    • Due to a permissions bugfixwhich balanced Nahjo the deity lost the ability to mine and cut down trees. We hardcoded those back for now while we consider options.

  13. Posted

    First of all, i'm not saying that this hasty Nahjo nerf was fair to everyone playing the priest. But during these last few months it was very clear that Nahjo was way too OP, it even drove the market way down for other former high value priests such as Vynora and the like.

     

    It was obvious to anyone within the first minute of laying eye on Nahjo's abilities. There were very long forum threads about it that were met with absolute silence from the dev team.

     

    The reasonable way to address the balance issues at this point is to boost the PvE abilities of the other priest types to make them more relevant.

  16. Posted · Edited by DKSprocket

    • Added option for Nahjo to change deity due to them no longer being able to do some actions that they were incorrectly able to perform due to a bug. Deities receive random affinities and apparently Nahjo received few resource gathering ones. When the bug was fixed this became apparent. From being a very popular deity Nahjo may now become more balanced and we want to  offer a conversation because of that.

     

    Nahjo priests still can't mine after today's patch. Does this mean that Nahjo priests were never supposed to be able to mine, but you somehow forgot to tell us during the past five months?

     

     

    Edit - new patch reinstated mining and woodcutting with this note:

     

    • Due to a permissions bugfix which balanced Nahjo the deity lost the ability to mine and cut down trees. We hardcoded those back for now while we consider options.

  17. Posted

    Just to be clear - the owner of an item is the person who last had it in their inventory?  Makes a difference for BSB/FSB's and other lockable containers that are planted outside and not locked.  For example, if I found an abandoned BSB made by someone else, took it back to my place, planted it (let's say off deed) and then someone else puts a lock on it do I loose access to its contents, or will I have manage options?

     

    The owner is the person who dropped/unloaded it. The easiest way to check if you're the owner is to see if you have the "rename" option.

  18. Posted

    Putting alts in the same category as trusted friends is really not a very good option. With permissions not being manageable across servers we need to be sure our alts can manage everything now. While I do give my trusted friends access to most of my stuff I certainly wouldn't want give them "manage" permissions on everything. The friends categories are great for speeding up setting permissions, but it's frustrating we're limited to only two groups for this. As Mordraug says adding just one more would go a long way although I'd personally like to see a few more than that.


     


    I guess the workaround now is to make alts "trusted friends" and make trusted friends "friends" and everyone else acquaintances. It's a little sad when the categories system has so much potential. :)


     


    (And again, thanks a lot for making a new permission system!)


  19. Posted

    A sacrifice key bind is coming very 'soon' (as in: 'within next few updates soon'), along with a bunch of other key binds

     

    I hope you will also make it possible to sacrifice on an empty altar. If not then a keybind isn't very helpful since you still won't be able to queue actions.

  20. Posted

    With the new permission system the existing friends categories quickly become limited if you have a lot of alts and friends. Letting us add more categories would make the new permission system a lot less cumbersome to use.


     


    If letting us add a variable amount of categories is too much work then you could just add a handful more categories and let us rename them.


     


  22. Posted · Edited by DKSprocket

    Thank you for this. A permission overhaul was greatly needed and this looks awesome.


     


    One question:


     


    Is there a way to remove a person from everything at once in the case someone breaks your trust or sell their account? It appears to me that removing them from your friends list doesn't remove them from any permissions.


     


    Opposite scenario: I make an alt character and wants to give it access to everything. Do I need to manually add it to every building, cart, ship etc.?


  23. Posted

    There are a lot, including the "big three" of Java IDE's - personally I like NetBeans the most, but there is IntelliJ Idea and Eclipse as well.

    Netbeans comes in "JDK + IDE" 2 in 1 installation package as one of download options.

     

    Perfect, thanks!

  24. Posted · Edited by DKSprocket

    Someone in the map thread posted about an island generator with MIT source license no commercial use restrictions .  Although it is polygonal Voroni mesh should be easy to interpolate to grid at higher resolution by ripping its pixels from the display routine..  You will need to tweak river and lakes pushing them to sea level or turning them in to dirt.

     

    http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/130605-wu-mapterrain-generator-development/page-7#entry1352673

     

    I think it would be much easier getting up and running quickly if someone writes a 16b greyscale height map .png/.tiff importer though as that would require no SDK at all.  Could use 8b grey scale for defining biomes, maybe an RGB for the various terrain and flora layers.

     

    Sorry I meant IDE, not API. Some kind of development platform (like Visual Studio etc) that lets you compile standard java out of the box.

     

    There's a list here: http://java-source.net/open-source/ides but I wondered if someone could recommend a simple one that has an integrated editor etc. but doesn't come bloated with a million things you don't need for simple java compilation.