dreadlordnaf

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About dreadlordnaf

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  1. If people really didnt care or like the game, they wouldnt bother to make a post when they leave with suggestions for improvement. People do that, and I have done that, when I feel the game has so much potential, but is frustrating or being held back for ridiculous reasons. Most people don't bother to make an "exit post" when they stop playing totally crappy games.... I think for a lot of people, including me, Wurm will remain that niche odd indy game that could've been great, but never was and probably never will be, but players who have enough sunk costs, financial or emotional into this game, will still find some type of joy in it and I'm happy for them. I am just glad sandbox games are making a comeback and things like Life is Feudal and many others are on the horizon.
  2. There is exploration in this game? Exploration implies finding something new... Last i recall every tree, every ore, every plant or herb is the exact same everywhere on the map. Running 5 hours to some remote place results in the exact same features as where you started, just organized slightly different. It's not so much exploration as just traveling to different places on the map.
  3. I also forgot to mention that the other day I logged on and all my gear was unequipped so not sure if that means a GM was messing around with my char or not trying to fix it. Anyway after further testing of some of the suggestions above i finally got my shield skill to increase after months of zero increase. I am not sure if this is just from being persistent or if the GM did something. Seems like one of the above posters was correct that it seems like viscous cycle at first. You cant raise shield skill until you block but you cant get any successful blocks until your shield skill is higher. So I shield bashed to get my skill started and shortly after I got it to 1.8 skill from bashing i got my first auto block with the shield which raised it further. Now it blocks more regularly and seems to be raising normally. It is up to about 5 now. thanks for all the tips helping here on the forum. I guess to summarize, raising your shield from its initial 1.0 is painful (either due to the in-game mechanic or a bug), but after that, at least on my char, it seems to block and raise more regularly.
  4. Ok so I tried many of the suggestions here and today a I talked to a GM. He suggested i make sure I can view all skill gain so I enabled it so I can see on the skill tracker my large shield skill out to 6 decimal places. As I guessed, my large shield skill was still 1.000000. After a few months of playing and quite a bit of fighting not even a .000001 gain. I then fought a number of creatures tonight, my own horses and bison, some mountain lions and a hell hound. Tried normal and defensive and tried my QL 69 shield and my QL 2 shield. zero skill gain. Large shield skill still at 1.000000. I even tried that autofight feature in case, no difference. Though now I think the problem isnt so much skill gain, its that in the last few months I never once recall seeing my guy actually block or fail a block. It is like whatever mechanic in the game checks to see if your guy blocks isnt active on my char since neither fails nor successful ones seem to show up. Anyway going to keep messing around a bit more and contact the GM in a week if nothing works but any other suggestions welcome at this point! thanks.
  5. Thanks for this info. I will mess around with shield bashing grinding some and see if that helps. Sounds like from MetalDragons post that shield skill increase overall may be a little messed up though.
  6. I have been playing for a number of months now, 3 I think and while I havent been actively hunting all the time, I have been doing it actively and raised my normal fighting close to 30, all of it with one handed weapons. After using my newbie birch shield for a few fights and getting it up to 2.5 skill I ditched it for a small metal shield and then later was gifted a QL 69 large metal shield which I have been using for about 3 months. No matter how many fights I get in, or how closely I make sure I am facing my enemy, my large shield skill will not budge over 1.0, even after literally a hundred fights probably, mainly since it never seems to block. BTW my small metal shield never blocked either and that skill is still at 1.0. Am I doing something wrong? Ive made sure my shield is equipped in the left arm shield slot. Thoughts? Thanks.
  7. The threat of losing everything on Epic is overblown unless you settle on Elevation or Affliction. If you settle on Desertion or Serenity most everyone on those servers is the same kingdom as you. While they can technically steal from you, destroy your stuff etc, there are big negatives to inter-kingdom ganking. These people will become kill on sight to other peoples' deeds and guards and I have heard, but cant confirm, that if they do this enough they get moved to Affliction. Basically people on these servers are on your own "team" and will rarely turn on you. It is the other "teams" you need to worry about. And if you have a good defense setup with multiple walls etc, this helps immensely. That is not to say you cant be assaulted by other kingdoms if they sail over. But others on the servers usually respond quickly if you mention you are being raided and I would say 80% of the pvp takes place near the water since that is most accessible by raiders. Build high in the mountains if you want to be safer. Having been on Freedom I would highly suggest to go on Epic. The skill gain + curve is really nice and it is fun knowing that your walls, locks. traps, etc mean something. Plus more to aim for after you have completed crafting with pvp, epic missions, etc.
  8. If you are trying to settle in a spot next to some rare mineral, etc, then look for high quality iron. I think you need your prospecting to be 20+ though to determine this.
  9. There is a much easier way to fend off mobs early on that I am surprised no one mentioned: tame a bison. They are great tanks and can even solo many creatures if needed. You just need a rope to lead them around and are very easy to tame at low levels, all you need is grass. Just make sure to re-tame it to increase your bond every day or after each fight.
  10. His question is understandable if you have played other MMOs. In those games harvesting and crafting are relatively instant or very quick. Actually Wurm isnt much different in that regards, it's just that the grind occurs at a different point which highlights the perceived timing difference. It may take you an instant to craft a powerful weapon in a game like WoW, but it may have taken weeks to farm mobs to get the required rare component needed for that weapon. In Wurm it still takes a long time to make a powerful weapon, but that grind occurs more linearly. The same with housing. In some MMOs you can usually buy a house and place it instantly once you have enough gold or whatever currency they use. But again it may have taken you weeks to farm for enough gold to do that... Versus in Wurm you can build right away, but then it just takes some time. etc...
  11. If you examine them it should tell you what you need to improve it with, like a lump of iron, a hammer etc.. Note you can't upgrade your starting items though.
  12. Exactly. Given the defensive resistance you see on this thread to simply making the deeding/housing processes better to understand, there seems to an emotional issue at work with certain established player who feel any attempt to clarify concepts for new players somehow equals taking something away from them. I have posted my suggestion in the suggestion thread about this so they can go there now to defend their desire to see new players fail.
  13. How to make Wurm attractive to players? Make it so you are not punished with extreme frustration and lost time if you happen to be new. Some examples: Starting compass - I have yet to see a good argument why we can't have these stay on people when they die, especially if you are just starting out. For a newer player its the difference of spending hours trying to find your corpse versus 30 minutes since you at least know the general direction to search in. The starting compasses are so bad anyway they wouldn't exactly collapse the market for the higher QL player made ones if this change occurred. Better disclaimer when building an off-deed house - Currently if you build an off-deed house you get this warning: ""You are planning a structure outside any known village. This is very risky, and the structure may very well be pillaged and looted by other players." For a new player who is just learning the game this disclaimer does not even begin to convey how much lost time and effort you are possible setting yourself up for. First off it makes you think that if you are not on a pvp server then you have no looting and pillaging to worry about... But mainly this disclaimer does not at all convey that you can basically be griefed by a player who deeds close to you, then expands their perimeter over you. New players can put hours into their first house. To have them lose it all due to a technical oddity they weren't even aware of on how deeding works seems unnecessary. At minimum you could convey the risks of off-deed housing a little better. So instead of trying to mess with deeding fundamentals which is fraught with difficulty, I suggest instead expanding this disclaimer slightly to convey the risks clearer. Here is what I suggest as a new disclaimer: "You are planning a structure outside any known village. This is very risky, and the structure may very well be pillaged and looted by other players, or the land it is on could be annexed by a settlement making it very difficult for you to maintain your structure. Please be aware the risks of building off-deed [link to a wiki page about this]." Another even better approach would be a simple one page screen like with deeding that elaborates on this more and has you confirm by hitting ok. I have already made a wiki page which conveys some of this through the "House Planning Guide" but would gladly create a page more specifically suited toward this if requested. Thanks for reading.
  14. The solution is indeed simple and you are conflating things. The solution is to be up-front and honest. This requires no major coding changes, no fundamental redesign of how land deeding works, and a trivial amount of work. The original poster complaining about this, while whiny I admit, had a point. He was not complaining the land deeding process should be changed (read his post), he was upset that he wasn't aware that this could even happen in the first place. Here is the current text you get placing a house outside a deed: "You are planning a structure outside any known village. This is very risky, and the structure may very well be pillaged and looted by other players." Ok... Well first off this text makes you think that if you are not on a pvp server, then you don't really have any looting or pillaging to worry about. Also I am curious how many new players actually understand this above text to mean, "oh and by the way you can also have your house griefed by players who utilize an odd inconsistency in the deeding process that prevents them from deeding their perimeter over you to begin with, which makes sense, but then allows them to do so a short while later after placing their deed, thus allowing them to basically evict you from your house with no warning due to drastically increased decay." Do you all think this concept is made clear by the current text which is displayed when you place a house outside a deed? If the devs need help writing this one-sentence concept into some tighter language they should feel free to PM and I would gladly help. And to the other posters, and the one I'm replaying to, saying its his responsibility to read stuff and that any player who has played for more than a couple days should know this. Where was he suppose to read or learn this from?? Please show me a reasonably accessible link anywhere on the wiki (not some sub paragraphed buried in another topic) which spells out very clear for new players this simple concept that your un-deeded house can basically be griefed and taken away from you without warning. You will not find it except on the house planning guide which I wrote and just updated yesterday to include this concept. Having played many indie games they seem to have a unique community. OIder players who have been loyal subscribers and who feel that any attempt to make the new player experience more intuitive or user friendly somehow invalidates the pain they went through learning the game. So while making the new player experience better may hurt the feelings of the older players, it is better for the overall game. Yet it seems too often devs in this situation cave. I recently played a fun little indie game called Star Sonata 2. I loved it but it got the point where the devs have basically given up trying to attract new players. And most changes are now aimed at trying to desperately cling to the few paying older subscribers they still have. My incentive in all this is to make Wurm a better game and get it a larger player base without totally screwing up the balance of existing players. Better up-front information achieves this with wonderful results and does not take away anything from existing players. Yet it still baffles me the people that aggressively resist this type of improvement.
  15. Overall this is kind of a ######'ish response. As a new player there is no way to know what you don't know, and your response is: "well you should've known." I responded to this players issues in another post : http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/82915-frustrating/page-2 and I have updated the house planning guide in the wiki I wrote to address this also. Basically Wurm has taken the position that new players who haven't sat and read the wiki 100% should be fully punished to the maximum extent possible through extreme frustration amounting to hours of wasted time. I like Wurm which is why I play it and pay to subscribe to it, but I am not blind to how unfriendly the game is to new players. It is the main reason this game will never be that successful. Given how many years it has been around I can only surmise either that 1) the devs are lazy regarding this, or 2) they have a made a conscious decision to not care and purposely make the frustration a "litmus test" for new players. If the latter is the case then I would suggest they at least be honest with their position about this so new players like the one above don't spend real money on this game before they are ready.