RainRain

It's a little unrelated, but I do want to drive this point home. In the past, Wurm had a lot of its allure based off the mystery of its mechanics; Nobody understood how anything worked. People had to experiment, myths would propagate all the time about how things worked (soul depth affecting casting power, axes being completely incapable of parrying at all, barrels with salt reducing decay, bridles affecting horse turn angles). After WU, which I firmly believe was rolf's attempt to hail-mary the game in the desire that someone else more competent than him would pick up the code and do something with it, all of that mystery vanished. We have the code, and while alterations to it have been made, the pace of development updates alone shows that most of that code is just how it was in WU. There's no mystery anymore, and with how many players are experienced with modding the code, datamining for answers, and optimizing their gameplay, there's little reason to try and have that mystery unless you're introducing a whole new subsystem (i.e archeology) or revamping a subsystem entirely. Be clear, be honest, add a few numbers here and there (and if you don't have concrete numbers, add the rough estimations of what you hope to achieve.) We've played this game for ages and while the community isn't perfect at balance, if you give them numbers you'll hear ten different opinions and perspectives on why that number is good or bad- and from there, you can determine where to go to hit what you achieve. There's ALWAYS a ton of oversight when implementing changes, and players are quick at finding those - they could often be found before the change even comes out if you would just post numbers and effects. Embrace that and work closer with the community, because at this point attempting to keep the mystery of wurm will only hurt it more. I also think that as a dev team, you all should start working on figuring out what your greater 'vision' for the game is over the next several years, and communicating that vision with players. What do you hope or expect for a player coming into the game to be doing? A month into his gameplay? A year? What do you wish the gameplay pattern of pvp servers were? How should a pvp server be on its first week playing- a month, or year? When should kings start appearing, and how early do you want faith thresholds to be hit, and artifacts to be found? How should the nature of land conquest be seen, and should a pvp server be seen as an 'eternal' run, or should there be a perioding 'end' to a server? You can keep asking a thousand questions similar to this for every aspect of the game. It's what I think hasn't happened for a while. When Rolf was the main developer, he had these visions- he just didn't know how to achieve them. Epic was meant to reset periodically, Scenarios were meant to be large questline chains that could either be small (1 month) or long (a year+) with varying results of each, including the 'end' of a server as one of them. When Epic failed, he tried to imitate that vision with Challenge. So, what's the vision now? And if you don't know- then it's about time to figure it out!

You should note that there's players who play on both PvE and PvP equally on NFI as well, so it's not quite as clean cut as being a shortcut. Also, another thing to point out is that there are lots of players who didn't even grind the skill: they just went to Chaos and became a champion instead. There was never proper equality for this journal entry.

higher faith makes prayer checks have a lower difficulty which in turns means you get less skill. thus, priest mains need to depriest in order to efficiently grind prayer to 70. this is part of what's changing according to OP, though you wouldn't know this because some others prefer to mock you instead of explain apparently, as if any of this info is obvious. you could make it a pointless grind to 90 instead for a title

There is this strange conceited idea that because you worked hard for something, so too must others. Even when that amount of work is absurdly high and unneeded, people who endure hardships demand that others endure hardships to earn what they earned; I don't think this line of thought is in any way reasonable. When making changes, the only thing that should be considered is how that change impacts the future and how fun/fair it is as a change. There should be basically no consideration of those who have already hit that point, other than maybe concessions- for example, you could take everyone who's hit 70+ prayer the current way and give them some sort of title to compensate them, but that alone isn't a good reason to just not make the change. Anywho, I'm glad to see a VI without it being demanded for, and I'm glad to see stuff be worked on as well as announcing future updates on a super timely manner. I'll look forward to see what comes and hope this year marks a true and proper change to how wurm goes on btw @Retrogradewhat's the update on ?

i don't understand what the point of bringing up that topic over and over again is; yes, any game that gets a new surge in players will lose that surge and often quickly (although the study used a ton of singleplayer game examples which feels rather misleading to compare to a kind-of-sort-of MMO like wurm because the former is MEANT to be consumed and forgotten, whereas mmo's typically aren't)- that's perfectly well understood, but wurm is doing a fairly poor job of conserving that lead when compared to other games in modern days that receive new updates; you can look at the steam analytics charts for practically any ongoing game (https://steamcharts.com/ it's literally the same sort of ###### all over the study you posted minus more comparable to wurm because of the focused multiplayer aspect- that said i'll refrain from picking a game because comparing to wurm is hard specifically because it's a niche title; the closest comparison we have is likely life is feudal which experiences extremely similar drops in playercount until it ultimately snuffed out- though wurm is more resilient due to it's cheaper hosting nature and predatory community-reliant staffing tactics) consumable content alone isn't necessarily a wrong approach; infact it's a perfectly fine approach for many games so long as developers can maintain a steady stream of development- which it's very clear to anyone who's kept up with this game's dev patterns that they aren't; but an additional problem that wurm is constantly hitting is based on it's own structure for one, we have a large community split across several servers; while some servers you can travel across freely, for most of a person's gameplay they're going to be on their chosen server. in effect, this splits a population up into even smaller sizes which wouldn't be a bad thing were this game not so incredibly dependent on having a strong community in order to be enjoyable - minus solo players who are probably better off just playing WU instead anyhow. this creates a sort of deadly feedback loop where once players start to drop off, because an already small population is split across many servers (doubly so for SFI), the servers become much more barren and the existing players start to feel isolated/bored of being alone/whatever you want to call it. It's bad for pve but it's a gamekiller for pvp where you RELY on people being there on the other side whenever you're available yourself in order to actually participate in the servers intent- pvp. Now add in the fact that pvp is split across five damned servers in 3 different clusters and you have a recipe for death. thankfully rifts can be travelled to in time and the economy works across servers, but the cluster split also works against the game as well (not to imply a merge is desired or even a good idea at all, but they shot themselves in the foot going for this tactic) also, saying wurm should add "process" based content without actually giving any idea of what that content should look like doesn't really help anyone at all. i'd rather have consumable content than no content at all the cooking update's ambition and intentions are definitely the sort of thing that should be coming out on a regular basis for this game; i struggle to admire it as much as you because the system boils down to being something fairly simple, and the mechanical benefit of it has been reduced to spamming a single type of food to get a small boost in experience- a lot of love went into something with a fairly small reward, and i honestly feel like most of that work went into filling the cookbook with a ton of different recipes rather than the core system itself anyhow. definitely don't see the level of detail/thoughtfulness going into it, but it was still better than the old cooking system for sure, although it frankly failed in improving on it any (you can still ignore 99% of foods and just cook meals and nothing else at all and be max ccfp/nutrition, which a large complaint was that other foods are useless in comparison to meals, which for plenty of foods is still the case. you also don't need to do silly pizza schenanigans unless you like staring at 12+ hour affinities either) also i wouldn't be optimistic about the combat update, that needed to have been out 3 months ago if they wanted to inspire any hope and their dead silence about it is only adding to the flames, not to mention that it seems to just be culminating into mostly a UI update with tweaks to special moves, which... isn't a combat update. Not in the way that anyone who cares about it views it anyhow.

here's some numbers then: https://gamechestgroup.com/investor-relations/press-release/20573 GCG in total amounted to 1.5m SEK profit or around 180k usd during just quarter 3 aka the steam launch; while this is a result of all of their platforms, most of their stuff doesn't actually bring in much money and a grand majority of that is wurm; they reported 6k subs which climbed up to 8k around october (and has already plummeted down to 6k again) server migrations and the server costs of this game aren't; that high- infact the game is almost optimized to be as cheap as humanly possible. most of the money clearly hasn't been reinvested into the game

or how about before we look at bringing in new players (that will be bled out immediately afterwards) we look at structural changes within the staff team like, i don't know, maybe actually hiring a full-time developer to code on the game instead of taking mostly volunteer work and part time paid work? or properly coordinating updates, announcing monthly focuses and intentions instead of hiding behind vague promises and "it'll be better"'s, though i suppose those just mostly serve as a scapegoat for when the dev team can't follow up on something (such as valrei missions supposed to have been changed for defiance to encourage pvp rather than having the allotment we currently have, or imbuements taking 6 months to implement a change that's literally just changing a formula for a few) also yes i'm a pretty toxic person thank you for acknowledging it

maybe consider that not everyone is trying to put out a peer reviewed essay when stating their opinion on a game and are not intending to invite a debate that includes academic papers that neither you or anyone else has actually read in depth criticism can still be constructive without being absolute, and relative evidence (comparing population sizes of the game to it's old population) is still valid though neither really matters since then we start talking about what makes the game "dead" and some boomers will anchor down and tell themselves that servers with 100 players online concurrently isn't dead (and then, you consider that only one server on SFI even regularly breaches 100 and that most are 1/3 or even 1/4th of that) matter is this game isn't "dying"- it has been dead for months now. it was "dying" in september. Wurm experiences a much more abnormal loss of playercount from advertising and population surges than other games do; part of this is because of its niche, but really most of it is because of piss poor management and development

any population growth gained by advertising will be lost in months if this dev cycle continues

isn't "high deed density" and "all the good land is taken" part of the reason you put the warning about not joining harmony

There is, literally, already a meta. There will always be a meta in games like this.

this but unironically sorry but supporting a server with a population in its teens is a futile effort

3 months in the making now, surely these videos have to be pretty impressive in quality to have not even released one yet? Especially since they're not even meant to cover advanced topics. Polk released several over the course of a couple weeks on topics as advanced as pvp. Or has the plan changed?

the problem here is that "dying" to you doesn't mean what it means for others: if you're satisfied with 200 total accounts, many of which could be alts, being online across the what, 8 different servers in SFI (and i'll ignore epic here too) then i don't think "dead" means anything to you beyond "game shuts down" if the game hits pits like this, the game is dead. If it maintains this way, the game has no hope for improvement. The only people playing with it are the people satisfied with the status quo- the only fine thing about that is the fact that so little money is actually required to keep this game running that it can potentially keep running with just that many people basically until the end of time lmao. Steam wasn't a gamble. It was a play to raise money and impress investors. I'm waiting to see what they do with that money, now. I question how much 'dev time' actually was needed to create the steam servers. The most complicated aspect of it seems to have been managing the database, but the devs that existing have very different jobs tackling different areas of the code- and again, we have no full time contracted devs. It's the same excuse as always- for one reason or another (and maybe a good one, maybe not) the devs can't seem to actually commit much time to make many changes.

putting the burden on the community in a massive community based game is hilarious this is bad game design, not the worst thing ever and certainly something that can be fixed easily, but it's improperly designed when considering large populations of players (like many other mechanics)

except as has been stated millions if times, there was barely any mm purchased at that time. Not only that but for a majority of cases there is nearly zero difference between an 80q tool and 99q (and of the cases where jt does matter, it being a moonmetal doesn’t matter) Weapon quality gets applied to multiple curves meaning that there is hardly any difference between a 70q weapon and 99q weapon. Armor quality is the same. Tools don’t need to be moonmetal and are often better off not being them; the best use cases being like, anvils and such. Everything you’re crying about has little to no impact on the game on the wider scale, even IF hundreds of kg’s of moonmetal were bought and hoarded, which there wasn’t. The only impact it has is allowing the hoarders to benefit off the poor decisions of people who decide to buy moonmetals off others at high quality for some reason; which considering how much the rest of the game fals into that sort of economic practice, is hardly a problem. Now, what *is* dumb at all is that you can spend real life money to buy a rare resource in a game *at all*, despite it being hilariously cost inefficient, and that you can more consistently get it in high quality by spending money instead of by doing the ingame event thats supposed to reward people with it. Nerf moonmetals further from marks- have the quality be randomized between 1-75q but have it grant more than what it currently grants (1kg iirc), and make kt cost less marks. Make rifts reward more and more consistently get higher quality from rifts. This way you can have players focus on participating in the ingame event meant for this stuff to get high quality goods, and if they need more bulk for creation they can spend some marks for that instead of wasting valuable imping metal.

Not quite sure why you think SL is a good game to take after for financial decisions when linden labs has a notoriously awful system in place and the company struggled to stay afloat for years, and a majority of revenue doesn’t even come from land ownership though to be fair with the amount of money wurm rakes in theres zero reason for the game to be in the state it is now anyways lol, at least we can see the return on investment from SL

Can be said for a lot more than just hair selection honestly

theres a shocking display of a lack of how mechanics actually work in this game maybe bringing clarity to all of that would be a good idea so people can be silent. They already have access to WU code anyways so keeping silent is a practice in futility

Good changes! The only thing I might suggest is altering the rune slightly to have pieces of both, so that it’s also useful for skills that always harvest at skill level. I.e it picks whichever would raise the quality more: 5% of the difference between gathering level and 100 (so, a .5ql boost at 90q) OR 10% total bump capped at skill level. This way the former ability will apply to skills that already max things out, and the latter will apply for other uses. This 5% increase shouldn’t stack with imbues at all. But otherwise, good round of changes. Being able to grab product 30+ q above your level at 70 just simply shouldn’t have existed.

This seems pretty cute, yeah. Would love more sources of items that can give passice particles like this.

I mean, it’s still literally not worth the effort to forage instead of sinking the same amount of time you spent foraging to farm and garden. Cocoa beans, Nettles, Nutmeg and Sassafrass are the only unique items from foraging/botanizing. Nettles/Nutmeg/Sassa have almost no valie. They have unique affinity numbers for cooking food and can help you add a tiny bit extra to pizza durations- but considering you can already hit 16+ hours with a relatively simple pizza, and you can always asjust other ingredients to hit affinities, there aint much worth. Cocoa beans on the other hand are used to make rum (though you can spam a different ingredient to raise quantity, problem is that the beans dump the quality) and rum isn’t even worth bothering with as an alcohol except for aesthetics/fun Likwise, the ONLY recipe thay uses dairy food making also needs TWO cocoa beans per. Otherwise, you need to spam creation which has awful experience rates due to the 66% skillgain penalty on creation tasks. Even then, cooking chocolate milk doesn’t grant a whole lot- you’ll need hundreds of cocoa beans and cocoa beans fall into the most general category for foraging so even with 20 skill its a pain to grab lots of, though multiitems help it a bit you’re still looking at spending days doing nothing but foraging just to grind a useless skill (two actually lol). To note, dairy foodmaking has no real value above 33, as product quality for most dfm recipes use 3x skill, and even then the quality isn’t a gamebreaker when cooking with low quality dfm items. The desire is purely for the titles. So yeah, definitely disagreed. The only “value” these skills have come from extremely niche uses for their unique resources that have no real purpose being unique to begin with, and the sunken loss by people who, for some reason, decided to grind then despite them being slower and more attention requiring skills to grind than gardening or farming lol

pigs get the ease of grinding tsming cuz they eat anything but yeah itd be cool if you couod breed traits that let pigs sniff out shrooms and truffles

The only god is Libila. The rest are traitors.

alright but where are my plantable cocoa beans. Pvp can’t be saved unless i can grind to 50 dairy foodmaking efficiently