Etherdrifter

It's a performance thing and it might be worth making that light radius "personal" only so it won't show up to other players. That would resolve the issue, and still give folks a reason to carry a lantern.

Priest restrictions are much better than they were a few years back, I say this as someone who has played solely as a Fo priest for a long long time (never converted to Nahjo). I only have an alt to store items and the rest I ask folks for help (I live with a crafter and it works for us). I remember a time when I couldn't make a gate, couldn't clear my caved in access tunnel, or even make a complex tool; hell I can remembe a time when I couldn't shoot a bow and also had nerfed body stat growth (that they NEVER did recompsense us for) The changes you mention would restrict priests more than they would liberate them I think; being able to improve cloth items and cut overaged/shrivled trees would definitely not balance out losing the ability to fish and mine; we'd be in a much worse place than before in that respect. I'd be happy just being able to cut trees to be quite frank, as the inability to cut wood means you have to travel with some everywhere if you want to camp/travel for a long period, which means you can't really travel light and are tethered to a large cart or reasonably sized boat at least. Now lets look at why priests make good alts... All spells are tied to faith, and faith is something best spammed with alts, or at a sermon group (rare as those are these days). If you gated priest spells behind a mixture of faith, other skills and channeling (for example, locking Heal behind 50 first aid and making healing spells give first aid ticks, or genesis behind 70 channeling and 50AH) you'd essentially make it more work to grind up a priest alt than reach out to an existing priest. However, this would reduce QoL since most really useful (non-enchant) priest spells are highly situational and generally require you to be at the location the magic is needed (priests spend a lot of time travelling); which means you'd be waiting for the priest to actually get there (or you'd need to live near one). Which really brings it to the last point; magic on wurm is VERY situational. Courier (once per deed), Genesis (when people are building up to 5-speeds), Lifetransfer (once per player), Humid Drizzle (if someone messes up their deed ratio, rarely more than once a year per deed), Charm (a collector of champions needed help with a champ bear), Light of Fo (events) and Summon Soul (events only) are the only spells people have requested me to cast in the past 3 years. In terms of usefulness that isn't a lot for helping other folks; there just isn't enough call for priestly magic for a player to main a priest without something on the side at the moment. That would change if trickier magic were useful to players in more than a passing way. However, that is very unlikely to come to pass any time soon as the crafters would likely break down and riot.

Alright, first things first... The new data! Next an important note, some of the cells in the spreadsheet borked last month, the summaries were off by a fair bit! The ACTUAL monthly numbers are summarised in the table below: Old New Total Aug 229.3692741 1332.756632 1562.125906 Sep 195.1305556 1031.752778 1226.883333 Oct 186.3627419 769.5721505 955.9348925 Nov 208.9932367 661.1175725 870.1108092 Dec 232.9855391 532.9116941 765.8972332 Jan 233.7135981 465.431696 699.1452941 Feb 236.1310818 407.5313225 643.6624042 Mar 222.7006779 348.7639084 571.4645863 As you can see, the new cluster has been in continual decline, stablility hasn't been approaching, but a slow and steady collapse has been underway. The attrition rate is around about 14% of players per month in the new cluster. At its current rate of delcine, if this doesn't slow down, we can extrapolate that the new cluster will have less players in it than the old cluster in about 3--4 months (though, this is an extrapolation and should be taken with a pinch of salt). The old cluster rallied previously till Feb, and declined in march, indeed, the early data for April suggests that it is continuing to decline further at a slow rate. It is fairly likely to dip below the 200 average again before the year's end and place itself in a critical condition. Looking at population overall (ignoring that many alts exist, and the possiblity of people multi-boxing on different servers) the general trend is downwards. The rate of loss being, on average, about 14% of the total population per month which gives a projected loss in population of 65% over the last 7 months. Both clusters are now in decline, which is somewhat alarming. That is not to say that decline is unexpected, it's generally normal for this month. The old cluster seems to be following traditional patterns, whereas the new cluster is just in absolute freefall. Overall, the news isn't that great for March, I wish I had better to report.

Ok... So I'm not a PvPer, never have been, never will. I had my fill in Salem. If you go play on PvP, you run a risk of losing progress on skills. It seems only fair to slightly increase skillgain to offset that risk. In terms of game design it does make sense to reward heightened risk.

This would be a nice little QoL change with 0 impact on server load. Needs doing.

There have been plans for reworks for years; like many of wurm's systems. Reworks rarely work out!

Archaeology sickle, because then I'd have a fantastic runed golden sickle, and all the other druids would die of envy at the next tree hugging meet up!

Eh, could be interesting to see. No harm in watching it play out!

Let's address these a bit more carefully; you've attempted to counter the first point by muddying the definition of "alt", so let's go with a better term - "zerg" (using more than one toon to gain an advantage, generally implied to be at the detriment of other players). The current system encourages players to zerg hard, and that screams "poor design" (think of all those "not recommended, pay to win" reviews wurm has garnered). So, over the past 6 years, I have walked down most of Xanadu's roads; either for rifts, or to help folks out with free magic, or even just to explore. I have stumbled across one (1) unique in all that time. Maybe I just had bad luck, but let's face it, luck has nothing to do with it. It's all about knowing the spawn mechanics... At the moment, there are generous players hosting public slayings, but basing a mechanic upon the benevolence of your players is generally ill advised; and in the long run the current slaying mechanics are likely to have disenfranchised more players than they've ever helped retain.

Should have just spawned in 100 dragons in central Xanadu Sadly I missed this event, but that's just how it goes. Gratz to the winners!

I'll amble down and try to be of some use!

Going to give this one a bump, since it would make exploring more fun.

April fools, April fools everywhere! Jokes aside, this seems to be more a "we just realised how annoying some bugs are because a joke feature highlighted them" thread rather than one suggesting any form of novel or positive change to the game. Fix the bugs and there would be no problems. -1 from me

So let's assume this epic overhaul was put in place, a 30:50 cap on regular freedom and unbounded on epic. I've just capped out on freedom on a skill that really matters to me. Now I could move over to epic and continue on skilling there as per normal for free at a slower pace, or I could drop 5x my deed cost for premium and stick on the freedom cluster. Anyone who is making that early game choice is going to say "start on epic", because dense population isn't something they would be thinking of. They would be thinking "when I cap out, what do I do". Your creative players are really a social type, are they going to gravitate to a server where everyone sees their works, or one where there is more space for that work? The former seems more likely given their motivation. The logic suggests you'd end up with freedom where it currently is (maybe thinned out even more), or worse off. Then again, let's ask the real question, would everyone ending up on the same two servers really be a bad thing? Probably not.

Now this is an interesting one! The first is a universally positive idea (specific "class paths" in the journal) and would help give players at mid skill levels a reason to keep on going. The only ramification I can see is that it could also widen the gap between newbies and the old guard. The second change would be an active nerf to me in combat, but I can see the need for this is PvP. Remember though, if a new system is added AI for the mobs will also be needed for PvE. The last one I have really mixed feelings on; if implemented it would essentially sunset freedom. The lack of limitations for free players would make it the new de-facto cluster (freedom's 20 cap cannot compete), and the unbound skills would make it the logical place for older players to go. But, on the other hand, it would definitely generate two densely populated servers, and I can see no way of doing this using the existing freedom setup. It would essentially be a wurm reboot, with all the good and bad that entails.