RainRain

Sure, but as i mentioned, a bandaid can suit this fine for now. Asking the dev team to rework several skills to make them feel better to have an affinity for is a much bigger request than asking for certain skills to be blocked off from affinities for now, especially the outright literally zero use ones like parent characteristics or pvp only skills on the pve server. Especially since the dev team probably shouldnt be overburdened with work at the current pace if updates.

s-surely the combat overhaul is more encompassing than just special moves and making the already-important targeting mechanic more important?

make a sourcery spell that can be achieved easily that can improve node qualities; a karma sink for pve and a solution for ore qualities or just go the lame way and make it a mag/lib spell l ma o

Myeah. Realistically the solution is to fix said useless skills and make them less dumb, but a bandaid to just say you can’t get affinities for them is fine too.

honestly the only thing that excites me from this combat update is the idea of autofight being less dumb. Now i can just get a huge axe, turn on autofight and turn pvp into an even more brainless experience than it already is.

Uh, honestly none of those 3 things sound like labour. You can hit 70 fs in a day with 50q (lower, even. I hit 50 with 30q gear and that was just because i was too lazy to keep hunting) gear, breeding is intensive on defiance because you can breed animals every hour on the hour (including females who give birth in as little as 30 minutes lol), but when it takes literal real life weeks for animals to give birth it’s not that bad. Finding deeds sounds more like a hobby than labour.

It shouldn’t be a choice at all to be able to pay to skip weeks of grinding a skill to raise said skill, at least not significantly (rare bonuses for example, are fine due to how they work and how small they are). If you want to skip the labour, you can just directly buy the product (higher quality ore in this case), not the ability to produce it yourself.

This literally makes it better for lategame, not worse. It makes it so you can’t achieve ore 20 points of quality above your skill, which is frankly ridiculously busted, particularly combined with rarity and runes. Hitting 50 mining is a matter of a few days. 70 is a week. Being able to mine 70q ore at 50 skill is *crazy*, as would being able to mine 80q at 70, or 90q at 80. Imbues are expensive because of how good they are, but that doesn’t justify their power. They marginalize people who have actually grinded skills to 70/80/90 etc in order to mine ore of that quality. Now, they will REWARD people for going for higher skill, and will stop said skills from being devalued due to the existence of imbues, while still helping lower skills at least bump up the quality they can go for slightly. The 10% gather quality rune should’ve been gutted alongside this imo. Note: I still agree with Platyna that the details of the change should be publicized first before changing. Easy to screw up the math, here.

Optimism makes my heart sad. Here’s hoping you aren’t disappointed, but at this point i’ve learned that keeping my expectations low and being pleasantly surprised is a better choice.

I would but everyone i’ve ignored has just been a spammer so im not sure if much value would be gained there

Making gods equal and moving them to more central points on the nap would be cool. Is changing the map off the board (heh) too? I think the current shape means its hard to provide balanced starts. There was a post linked a few pages ago that tried to math out the probability of magranon winning fights, and his lowest win chance was 60% vs Libila. Also idea: can the title that gived 10% favor regen speed be changed to instead give a 90% karma discount on guiding your god or something similar? Valrei board being more in control of players feels better, but i’ve not had as much experience as others with it so who knows if thats even a good idea.

Disagree with removing graves. As an alternative, reduce the timer to 15-30 seconds or have it so that you randomly pull an item from a corpse every second of the loot action rather than all at once at the end. The loot action could also incur a huge cr penalty while active In-combat looting is bad and lame, but so is not being able to loot quickly at all (i.e near enemy deed). I’d also suggest adding graves for horses or at least tamed animals. 100% agree with removing res-stones and the res stone passive for magranon. Also, I thibk you guys should look into how valrei spells cna be brought back so they can be included in scenarios again. I propose: 1. Obviously, examine each spell and determine which one is good or which needs changes (buffs or nerfs) 2. Don’t allow people to know multiple spells. Once you read a book, thats your spell. If you read another book/get another spell, you lose knowledge of the last spell you had. 3. Remove the DR adjustment from each book. The idea of learning magic changing you a little was cool, but was a failed implementation. Enki has made some really cool items in the past as part of his minigames. It would be cool if named, “minor artifacts” could be dropped from valrei missions. What this can be is up to you all, but starting with the type of stuff Enki has made for his Enkounters is a neat idea (i.e a shovel that can rebirth monsters). Such artifacts would not be improve able, but would otherwise be a normal item with a special name. Since the value if rare/supreme/fantastic armor and weapons add to the game is fairly low, i’d love to see armor pieces or weapons of various metal types and raritirs be dropped by missions. Nothing is busted about a certain player getting a fantastic huge axe, since rarity barely does anything. But it’d definitely be cool (assuming that as you say, scenarios are longer term) If this game had real lore you could also base signatures on the weapons off that or something lol

you can have both with 1 tbh; one that happens once a week or so and is more of a battle arena, and then the hota we have now assuming it ever gets fixed happening every few days + depot littered in between also obviously the temporary map shouldn't just be some flat plane- it should have randomized terrain to a certain extent

prediction: there will not be a response to these posts again, or if there is they will conveniently ignore most issues and respond to a very small aspect

One more post to say one small thing: One of the things that was said (by you, retro) last time there was a lot of complaining about the lack of communication was that you simply had nothing to communicate. I understand that perspective, but that's not an answer. You aren't just a mouthpiece for the developers to release information- if the community at large is getting antsy about things and you don't know how development progress is going, then it's your imperative to poke a developer to get a gist of where they are in whatever project they have assigned to them. I am specifically referring to the first time Defiance had huge issues with mob spawns (they do again btw, people just gave up on complaining because it takes months to fix). A bunch of us begged for information and got told that you just simply didn't have any information. Then, one of us directly went to a developer and got told it would be fixed in the next patch which was coming in a couple of days. This to me isn't you having a lack of information, it's you not going ahead and trying to get that information to answer complaints with. also, if theres any dev that i think should be modeled after, it's probably darklords. I know the guy works a taxing job and often can't deliver, but he absolutely goes out of his way to try and release the best experience, spends time talking to players about the issues they come across, and himself has experience with the system he's trying to fix. I just think the game demands more than he's able to address with the time he can spare.

Last time you said they were mostly part-time contracted, as in the game has no active, daily developers that work on the game consistently- nobody is paid fulltime. This much is obvious since different developers seem to focus on very specific things and corners of the game, and the game is updated at a glacial pace- something that wasn't true in the past back when the game had legitimate full-time workers, and constant new updates that usually brought in new content. A pace of one update per month of which the update might not even add new content and be mostly bugfixes is utterly unacceptable. I hate to sound entitled here but there is no way a game that needs so much work to be appealing to the broader audience like wurm is going to get any better from a pace like that- especially on the pvp side of things where critical changes are needed ASAP since the steam launch barely tweaked anything in the inherently flawed pvp setup. Since not everyone else has seen the thread, I want to bring this post to spotlight. Sindusk, an ex-dev of this game, singlehandedly revamped the entirety of the combat system in a pretty interesting and unique way, over the course of less than three weeks. Not everyone knows how combat works, but he completely re-did the flow of how things are calculated, removed CR as a stat (CR is literally the main stat in combat that determines so many things it's basically half of combat itself). A single dedicated developer can do this; and while I don't think it's fair to place the expectations on the dev team- the fact is that since the steam launch, this game has gotten no significant overhauls or upgrades despite several areas of the game desperately needing one, and the announcements for future ones have been vague and scarce of most details- which i can only assume is a result of a system that has not been fully explored, thought out, and much less even started. I don't blame the developers for this because I understand that almost all of you work a real job in addition to your wurm job (dark in particular, brave lad)- this is why my criticism has narrowed itself down from "the devs are bad" to "management is bad because there aren't any dedicated fulltime devs". It's also not easy deciding what to do either, but indecision and refusal to take the game with a solid grip and lead it forward has caused too many issues By this, i'm specifically referring to the hesitation on the dev's side to shut down old servers (and im not even talking about chaos here, but elevation in specific; though something needs to be done about chaos too). That's not to say you guys have been completely blame free of things (nor am i saying the community is either; i wouldn't want to mess with the bundle of idiots that is the pvp community either hahaha, like i said dark is a brave lad). I think as a devs (and you in specific, retro,) your biggest failings are communication. To clarify what I mean, i'll use the links/channeling/sacrifice stuff as example. Links were abruptly and suddenly nerfed after literally decades of them being the go-to method to train channeling. I want to stress that I don't disagree with then nerf; I think it was stupid that you could buy alts to make grinding faster. The problem here is that this method was essentially THE main way for all priests to grind; I refuse to believe the developers didn't know this unless none of them ever have grinded up channeling as a skill to 60/70+. It was the standard practice for SFI, for the entire Epic cluster, and it was the same in NFI. The mistake here was not releasing this change as part of launching the server, as now many people were left with useless alts they no longer needed, and players were punished for not even knowing what they were doing was wrong. However, during this fiasco there was mention of an exploit- and the entire community went crazy because they thought people were bug abusing to hit 90 channeling. Which wasn't the case, at all. The bug was there but few (if any) people were caught using it, and nobody had grinding to any particularly weird outlier of channeling by that time. But all this time, while the forums were raging and discord was active, nobody said a damned word to clarify the situation. Retro is specific literally would post in these threads to clarify OTHER issues, but never make a declaring statement until weeks after the issue had began to die down that there was no conclusive evidence anyone abused the bug to hit extremely high channeling. I can't fathom why this would happen; I had to ping him on discord just to pry the information out of him, and then myself try to clarify the issue to people who were screaming around. Then, the sacrifice change came around - I particularly like this one since I think the sacrifice change idea almost completely came from a suggestion I talked with Ost about on discord (which makes me wonder how often suggestion threads are even looked at compared to people on discord, but w/e). Ost made an attempt to have a good discussion about it all, which I very much appreciate- but I feel like the way this situation ended went poorly. There wasn't much 'discussion' with the devs as much as there was 'telling your concerns to the devs', after which the curtain was called and the devs said "Thanks for your complaints, we'll try to factor them into the change when we release it"- a big thing was that many people didn't want the change at all, and yet no reason for why they would proceed to go along with it was mentioned. This was the correct decision to make given how good the system turned out after the patch for it, but the flaw is mainly the complete lack of communication regarding decisionmaking. As a side complain; I hate how long it took for the changes to be implemented despite the fact that the changes were announced basically the same day the initial rework was released- why did it take so long to make such minor changes? Is it because the devs want to focus on monthly changes rather than spotty smaller ones? Is it because they stumbled into issues? Who knows- just explain!! Also because i'd love to @Madnath- how about that entire fatigue system eh? I could keep going on and on, because I frankly love this game and the amount of issues it has frustrates me to no end- especially those made by the staff because they could be fixed so easily- but i'm petered out. I'm still here months after basically quitting this game because I still deeply wish this game was better (and i think the same goes for everyone else out there who barely logs in but still talks to the community). I can't say 'hope', because at this point I don't have much hope, but damn do I want to be proven wrong. If I had to boil down my suggestions from this word wall, here's the takeway 1. Hire a fulltime, paid developer who manages the game and consistently works on churning out updates. These updates don't need to be massive, they can be QoL too (like come on how hard is this to implement? it'd make such a nice difference and take zero effort). As long as it reminds us that hey, yeah devs are working on this game and breathing life into it. 2. Re-manage your community skills. Organize things better, and try to give a sense of periodic deadlines; Alongside 1, you could change your dev patterns a bit. You could try and release a major patch once per month (major meaning tweaking subsystems, small additions and changes- perfect for 'reworking' old systems that direly need a rework such as combat, meditation and religion). with one or two small patches between (of which can be nothing but bugfixes if people truly want). You could organize a trello to publically track what you're looking at changing and provide insight into how things are going internally. 3. Develop a more solid vision for the game. One of the flaws I think with overall changes in this game is that there is no consistency in what this game should 'feel' like to play in the long run. There's no vision for how pvp should work (instead we just try new iterations constantly of old, broken down systems), and there's not much of a vision for PvE besides trying to establish a sense of community (which is good, but that won't bring in many new players). 3. FOCUS ON THE NEW PLAYER EXPERIENCE. Too much of this game's feedback comes from veterans who are used to broken down systems and bugs as part of their daily wurm gameplay. Create polls asking for feedback, encourage new players to sign up on the forums for small benefits and create more events to encourage new players to interact with both new and old servers, as well as pvp servers. All of the recent events have focused on SFI which feels extremely backwards. And then, AFTER all of all that- after you organize yourselves and focus on fixing the fundamental issues of this game, then begin to reach out, market, and advertise.

gonna echo something from discord 1. turn hota into something like my suggestion the tl;dr: When hota starts, a temporary map (that changes each hota) is used. Very small map. Battlecamps spawn everywhere and only hostile mobs spawn (could use rift/jackal mobs too as well as valrei mobs). You can't deed here, you can't build here. Some horses will spawn around but it should be scarce. You can't bring any creature into this map, and you can access the hota through a portal at starter towns/portals that spawn all over the map. Otherwise it works the same as hota now: battlecamps spawn, you capture them and they spawn guards that attack enemies. First to capture 4 wins. After someone wins, the statue for the winners spawns in the starter village for them under ownership of the final person to capture a camp + all the loot in it. After 1 hour of someone winning, the server resets and boots all players off of it back to their respective starter villages (players can also leave via portals inside the world). Bam, that's hota. 2. remove all pvp/pve portals, and make it so the only ones that exist are the ones in starter villages. This way you don't need to do anything complex like linking servers via sailing, players still get the option whether to go to pvp/pve to grind, but pvp players cant infinite grind on pve and only pop over for pvp- plus as people will be travelling between their starter towns and villages it might open up pvp situations where enemies could go deep into territory and pull risky plays

the fact that weaponskill, shield skill and all the other skills transfers over renders the entire point of keeping fightskill seperate moot unfortunately. you can hit 70fs in just a handful of hunting trips i personally dislike that people on pvp can swap over to pve to grind, but since the only important skill that doesn't transfer is FS the system has already failed, as FS is hilariously the easiest to hit 70 with at least, for now- in a couple of months/years when the server is down to 10 people like chaos i suppose having 90+ fs will be important

good luck took em 2 months of people yelling at them to allow newbies to spawn in defiance before they did it

Yeah this never went away, nor did the random “teleport you off your horse and desync your horse’s location” bug

you must have a really old brain if you think grinding for 6-8h is a lot in the first 30 days of the steam launch i had 22 days of playtime and a majority if that was watching timers go down. 100% wouldve hit the fatigue wall several times if it wasn’t disabled for those 2 months only reason it was re-enabled was because doing thay is easier than putting in effort to fix a stupid spell (wisdom of vynora) (ps they disabled it without saying anything after a player pm’d a dev about it because they knew its a bad system and would piss off new players diving into a new cluster.)

what dedication

queue alts for crafting and fighting being even more prevalent

i dont understand why the reward for a year of premium is an item with such niche and miniscule use

not to disregard the rest of your post, though im probably only going to respond to this since it's the most concrete and probably easily answered/conversed point i can my thing is though, i interact with people like this all the time. there's always "insane" people on public chats, probably moreso on pvp servers than on pve servers hence why i don't see much of a big deal. I ignore them- that is, i use the /ignore function so that I can't see their posts anymore. I'm talking about two types of people here; both the sort that are literally actually crazy and talk by themselves for hours on end, spamming the global/kingdom chat with inane nonsense, and the 'subtle crapstirrers' who go out of their way to skirt the rules in an effort to make others angry and bring up drama. That's all. I ignored them, because I can identify the type of person they'll be. Because it's easier than trying to bring attention to it from all sides and try to get a moderator involved, and because it solves my issues in a neat, quick, and convenient manner. Sometimes later in the future they'll come up again for some reason and I might even unblock them and see if they're as bad as I thought, but most of the time- they're just gone, and I never have to think about them again. unfortunately reality is way less interesting. Snipe worked like that; only premium players could snipe, and if enough of the current population of premium players /snipe'd the same person in a short period of time, that person was muted for 24 hours. But the amount of people needed to /snipe someone was so high (because of the prevalence of alt accounts), that /snipe almost never actually functioned. It was developed by Rolf and the older dev teams and basically entirely forgotten about by years. Then, the newer devs realized it existed and went "woah woah that can be abused way too hard" and disabled it, despite the fact it was extremely hard to use properly, much less abuse.