Marshlander

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About Marshlander

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  1. Just a heads-up, been playing since last week here and I like the mix a lot! The starting equipment means it's not your standard first wurm hours to get set up, you have to think and prioritize.You're not given gear that will be better than what you can craft for many hours into the game at all - I love that! In my opinion the somewhat tougher start is offset by the easy and open landscape (gentle hills instead of mountains and lots of plains as opposed to forests everywhere). Normally I love struggling with slopes and terrain a lot, here I enjoy the beautiful map and coastline more than the challenge. Also the skill and action modifiers mean that you can quickly get started on anything you put your mind to. So all in all I don't think it's a very rough server to play on at all, just a very interesting challenge and progression on a laid-back and very open landscape. I hope more players find their way here!
  2. Everyone totally agrees, but tbh the suggestion is very unclear. Do you want an option on any kind of permission to apply to all alts on that account? Or to do that automatically? Or some kind of setting on the deed to apply all settings to all alts? AFAIK, the devs are working on a system where you can define groups for your permissions (for instance, your list of alts), then give that group some permission. To me that sounds like it would solve all your problems, but instead of automatically detecting alts, you just maintain the list of accounts centrally.
  3. Just to make sure I understand this correctly... you want to redirect the redistribution from foraging and similar in-game activities back to traders? Wouldn't people just lock up their traders like they did before, set the trade goods prices really high, buy the "useless" trade goods components from other players at low price and then go and milk that redistribution pool like crazy from the prices they set for their trade goods? What is wrong with the wider redistribution that you want to hand it back to the trader owners?
  4. As for the scavenging/foraging goods: personally I can bear with the random coin stuff because it's a) really a rare occurrence and b.) wasn't hard to implement (it was one of Rolf's ninja updates). Any embellishments on this random lottery-like system I'd find a waste of time and effort. I'm all for introducing special ingredients, just don't make them too random (simply spawn them on a particular type of tile - amber on sand, coal inside rock in mines, truffels on tree tiles, and make them simply pickup items like mushrooms - this encourages exploration rather than lots of clicking). I'm not keen on an NPC shadow economy and I don't understand where the silver comes from in your trader suggestion. If I own a trader I want to set the prices higher for the trade goods so people actually sell to my trader? But isn't that my silver that he hands out to other people? Where do I even profit from this? Or is silver somehow created for this purpose and I get a share from this? Just not sure why I would want to buy those trade goods via a trader. I'd much rather that these things have an intrinsic value for the players - for instance there could be a distinction between dyes (for cloth items) and paint (for wood items), and these ingredients might be used as powerful ingredients for either of those. Or they could be one-time boosters for the imping process when applied (allowing a huge jump in ql if successful, based on skill etc of course). Or they could prevent shattering on a cast on an item for a single cast. Or they could have some special saccing purpose. It's always more fun if people actually seek these items out for their use, rather than just have them be a dead commodity / treasure. Other than that I like your line of thought very much.
  5. It's called PvE for a reason, you know. Not "play the interface". And yes, each and every aspect could and should be improved, but they shouldn't be scrapped from the trade experience. There are little enough reasons to leave your deed as it is, and player/merchant trade are an important reason to do so for now. That's a thoughtless statement. If markets move to a Global Auction interface, then you MUST participate in order to find a buyer. People will adopt things not because they are better, but because they are more convenient. I think we should get new, better mechanics for player-to-player trade, but nothing tied to traders. Let them become like the bartenders - something you go to once or twice at the starter deeds, then forget about.
  6. That is true. I don't think these are regular interventions, though, and they seem to be performed at Rolf's discretion. A lot of giveaways were also aimed at the Challenge servers. I'm not including these because they are a hidden factor, and one that is controlled by Rolf to further his vision. I wouldn't therefore assume that this is a case of players taking advantage of the creators of this game. I actually mentioned that under anti-social ways of making money, although this system is now abolished. I wouldn't have written my post if I hadn't seen this system go the way of the dodo. And I was an advocate of getting rid of it, if you remember. I didn't want to make a mathematical post, but I did a simple estimation: following the silver sales on the forums, I'm guessing these amount to no more than 250 silvers per month on average. I did not take sales for euros instead of silver into account - maybe this is a mistake, maybe not. In order for this figure to be 1% of the premium earnings (add 0.5 silver for deed upkeep on average, perhaps), you'd need to have no more than around 4500 premium accounts in total. Actually less, since this would mean that no one buys silver from the shop for their other needs, only upkeep and premium. Then you can see that this cannot be that far from the truth, not by a huge margin at least. Actually, I would like to see those who raise accusations back up their fear-mongering with some estimations or numbers. And please don't tell me that everyone lives from recirculated silver, tell me how to do it. Post-trader, that is. All I've gotten from recirculation was a pittance. It actually has to be that way, Ayes. With nearly infinite resources, with ever-increasing skill, and a still much higher rate of production than of decay, there's more and more goods on the market that are looking for their customer. What is the market for tools below 70ql? Or without CoC? That's stuff you get at impalongs or from neighbours for free. As prices plummet, services become unavailable since they are simply not worth doing anymore, except at one's own leisure or for friends. In Wurm, nobody is born as a consumer, we are producers from day one. Who hasn't made their own first mallet, but bought it instead? Unlike RL, there is a choice to become a consumer here. And the role of a consumer here is a very active one, too. Certainly an interesting topic. As I tried to point out with my 1% guestimate, I don't think we're nearing that point any time soon. While you're at it, you might as well question why Rolf pays wages to developers since it has a detrimental effect to his company balance. Of course he does that to stimulate the growth of his game. Just like he did with freebies and the Challenge server rewards. None of which I've partaken in, in case you were wondering. I'm simply arguing against this second myth. As in RL, there are sociable folks with a lot of superficial contacts, and there are more introverted folks with a few really intimate friends. In game I tend firmly towards the latter end of the spectrum, and play the part of a reclusive hermit (when I actually play, that is). Half my friendlist is from people I've bought from, and while they aren't real friends in the narrower sense, I do welcome their addition as one window to the outside world.
  7. I had a similar knee-jerk reaction to the in-game economy when I started to get familiar with the finer points of it. But it was mostly just that, some assumptions from RL carried over into the game mixed with some popular myths. I'll go through a few assumptions and the conclusions I came to over time: 1. "Having players earn silvers in-game and then selling the silver to other players hurts the game and developer, because it reduces the amount of silver sales through the game shop site" This is an obvious analysis, although often grossly exaggerated. If you totalled up the silver/gold being sold on the forums I doubt you'd even come close to 1% of the total of silver and premium sold through the shop. What people also don't realize is that the game benefits from rewarding extraordinary in-game activity. The fact that people come up with new in-game services, trades and infrastructure is a healthy core to the game, and helps to keep prices from falling. This leads to people like me (who just likes to be a little homesteader) to have incentives to buy more silver from the shop in order to participate more in the economy. 2. "People who profit are anti-social" While I think there are (or were) a few anti-social avenues of making money (the old trader system, the rare lottery and exploit windows), overall the people who make the most money are typically very active in the game and the in-game community. I would even say this is a prerequisite to making a good surplus. Yes, you can just buy a high blacksmith account and Vynora priest and flood the market with enchanted tools, but this needs a lot of investment and requires you to participate in the economy for the trades. Being a good seller has a strong social component, typically, as you want to set up relationships in order to have regular and not random buyers. You'd then also probably buy saccing stuff and gems from other people to stay efficient. The people who make the most money out of the least investment are those offering direct face-to-face services (terraforming, pan-filling, and the buying, sale and delivery of bulk items). Even in PvP you need a social brothers-in-arms circle around you to be remotely successful. There are a couple of avenues of making money in-game that I resent, such as you just get lucky and get a rare or the trade of HotA items for ridiculous prices on Freedom. But these kinds of luxury markets are the extreme end of a healthy economy I guess, and these items the mark of successful traders when they match up with the buyers in-game interest. Typically I don't see the intrinsic value that justifies those prices and as a result, I simply don't participate in these sorts of trades (unless it's something I really, really want ). A lot of people spend RL money in one way or another for the buying power to participate in such trades, though (I know I have, in the past). In effect, just buying silver from the shop is more anti-social than earning it in-game, if you look at it from the perspective of the in-game community and economy. Yes, we could have a game that doesn't reward extra effort, and instead have daily grind tasks like "make 50 planks for the king for 10 copper" for everyone, but then we'd see the game becoming more of a medieval suburbia simulator, with people just paying that silver to make up for their little needs, and fewer incentives to participate in the economy. EDIT: I put the mythical statements in quotes to make it clearer that I'm trying to debunk them rather than agree with them.
  8. Eh... this would lead to people packing up their traders and micro-managing with the server payouts to get multiple times their premium back. You missed two parts: A1. A trader doesn't earn any money from the king's envoy the month he is placed or repositioned. A2. A premium player may place a maximum of one trader per account per server. Even then it's a lacklustre game feature with the new system, except for those people who will try to maximize gains by micro-management and playing this particular system.
  9. This suggestion would put many people out of business: local craftsmen selling to their neighbourhoods, transportation services. But I agree that the trader system should be revamped from the ground up mechanics-wise.
  10. Instead of somehow mystically moving the ships around, why not decay them at a super-fast rate but keep them stored in the database. If a returning player premiums up after a longer period of inactivity, they can reclaim one of their defunct ships once every 18 months or so. It returns repaired at the ql it had when the super-fast decay began. Normally decayed ships may not be reclaimed in this way. I'd rather see the ship plop back into existence with the returning player than have it stay - in its original location or elsewhere - as an unwanted testimonial.
  11. I agree with the OP. I mean all games try to "stretch their content" and use different methods to do so (long and boring quest texts, walk back and forth just to click on something, etc) but for me in Wurm this is going too far. I'm not saying things should be quicker to produce. Wurm lives because of its pace. I'd like to see more thought being put into gathering resources and the crafting process, and the logistics of that. If you spent time looking for the right type of wood, needing feathers to attach to the arrow shafts, and perhaps oiling the wood after sanding it (again using up another ingredient - although for arrows this might be a bit overdone), then there would be less need for repetitive long timer actions. At the moment you can just walk up to the BSB, take out any ql wood of the type you want to make (which recombines conveniently into larger pieces), and later use any generic wood which is just high enough ql to improve. What if you needed the same wood type to improve and couldn't mix-and-match? What if original ql mattered a little, too? Too much convenience in the wrong places.
  12. I think the current implementation mirrors what happens over time in real-life relationships pretty well. Ah, wait - this is about forges/campfires . +1 then
  13. Please explain how tracking is less broken at higher skill? What the server remembers and how long is rather random, and you seem to get more info from tiles further away the higher your skill - making it even less precise.
  14. What exactly is the benefit of knowing there are other servers that cannot produce those things that you can? Why are you concerned about what happens on these other servers?
  15. I think giving players the ability to use skateboards would upset the balance for PvE - with the increased movement and the ability to block damage with the board during stunts. If this gets implemented, trolls should get roller skates and hockey sticks and spiders get stilts to make up for the additional capabilities handed to the player base. Obviously this change could potentially draw a huge crowd in who had to go to skateboard-specific games before.