Etherdrifter

For free followers - probably Fo, for other followers its Vyn For priests - the money is all in Vyn/Lib, but Fo/Mag priests get to travel more. The former are better for alts, the latter are better for life.

Honestly, this sounds like the superior option. A nice easy way to send your critter home, one that relies on player agency and design. Of course, those of us who choose hermitage wouldn't have such options, but I think it would help those who do!

There is already a system in place for recipe drops on some critters, adding treasure maps to the mix on sentient humanoids (goblins, trolls, arguable lava fiends) could be a good way to go (just tweak the odds to match the current rare roll ones).

Finally, a reason to re-premium.

Ahh, I see. I assumed this was a priest spell that just zapped 1000 karma over. This sounds much more reasonable.

Sounds like an increased reason to run priest alts to me! It gets a -1 for me unless it is gated behind high channeling.

So, nextgaussian is normally distributed. This (essentially) means that values towards the center are much more likely than values at the extremes. Depending on how the difficulty displayed to the player is calculated, that may be why failures might feel "sticky". It might be you have a linearly calculated difficulty [i.e. if you need to roll a 10/100 or above, it would be 10% chance of failure] but a non-linear distribution of values rolled [X~N(50,33^2) might fit if they multiply the value calculated by 33 and add 50 (which means >99% of rolls will fall between 0 and 100), and so P(X<10)=11.27% instead, giving a much higher rate of failure compared to the advertised one over a long period]. This would give inflated chances of failure at positive extremes, and an increased chance of success at negative extremes With rejection thrown in you're just eliminating very very extreme values (whose probability is already so close to 0 it beggars belief, again due to the Normal nature of nextgaussian). This is unlikely to created noticeable skew.

Well, they're the only time on wurm folks actually want or need healers; but yes. There are 0 rewards for the healers, mostly we do it for the fun of it.

Herbalist->Botanist->Loremaster->Rhizotomist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crateuas_(physician))

Trust me, I used to give away most of my rift rewards since few of them are really useful for priests. Rifts are about as non-priest as you can get: we're locked out of rune crafting by the skill level required (impossible to grind with creation ticks), most rewards are aimed at either crafting (artisan rings) or combat (shoulder pads/jewellery). However, for healers they are a godsend!

This feels like a decent stopgap measure till the dev team come up with a better solution to the current terrible mechanics.

I'd advise against reinventing the wheel! If you know the random number generator functions wurm uses, and you can find some documentation confirming that they pass some basic randomness tests, you're good. I always thought wurm used nextgaussian rather than nextint, but I may be wrong there.

This is a discrete event so... F - fixed number of trials (Just fix the number of rolls, but this is definitely a place the study could be challenged) I - independence (All good here) C - consistent probability of success (All good here) T - two outcomes (Not rare/some category of rare) Then try a binomial test against the old p value. (Your H_0 is that the probability has not declined (p>=old value), and your H_1 is that it has) https://www.real-statistics.com/binomial-and-related-distributions/hypothesis-testing-binomial-distribution/L It isn't perfect (your experiment design will need to make sure those FICT conditions are met, and game mechanics make this tough). Also, you are relying on wurms PRNG being random (passing a randomness test), which would need to be checked to ensure the I condition is met.

Will maps use the quality system at all (and thus require improvement/creation luck)? If so, what is the planned impact?

I mean, whenever I need charcoal I go for... 0 silver, created by JAS slave labour from trees I planted and dirt I conjured...