Locath

Until it rains and all your work is destroyed. Pay real money for the land but it might be under water in few days and there is nothing you can do about it. The animals you paid for and cared for will be wiped. Groves, beautiful plazas you created and decorated with all sorts of flora will be destroyed. You have spent last 13 years making your village perfect. You have spent thousands of euros in upkeep of that place. Too bad it rained. Start over. Persistent world and the mark you left on it are gone. Tuff.

Was there a vein removed with erupt/freeze in that spot? I had one of those re-collapse multiple times and eventually gave up since the issue was reported years ago.

Well, yes but you get to do that on every deed you own. Ain't that cool?

Add road tax so that highways get cleaned as well. If a quota isn't reached, highways on the server don't get cleaned.

This idea was discussed few times. It would surely bring revenue to the company but it might be challenging technically. Some players play on their own, local servers. Those buy the DLC, spin up the server and it works for them. No issues here. If the owner of one of the big, public servers purchases the DLC, do they distribute it to their players for free? Or are all players forced to buy it in order to play on a server which has donkeys while their client doesn't know what a donkey is? For games like Space Engineers, if i buy the DLC, other people connecting to my server can see the items they didn't purchase but can't construct them on their own. The client, with or without that DLC does have the models, just the ability to craft them is locked for those who didn't purchase the pack. In Wurm it's not that simple. If the server owner buys for example resource nodes, they either have to make it available to all clients for free (graphics.jar updated for all clients for free) and only one sale happens but 300 people use that system on the server or every client has to purchase the DLC in order to play on that server. Reverse scenario is the client paying for the DLC but server owner not having it purchased. In this case the client bought something they can't use on the server they play on. It would be great source of income for CCAB/GC but the entire core of how all this is handled would need to be reworked. As lovely as some of the existing mods are, not everyone is comfortable fiddling with files and mods so it would have to be handled between vanilla server and client.

Togglable on-deed seasons (visual only) which would let everyone pick their settlement's favourite look and show it off to others might be nice. It would lead to neighbouring villages in different seasons break the immersion of people passing by so perhaps settlement token altitude could determine which of the 4 seasons are available for the village?

I might be a bit oversensitive to the subject because i have seen and heard what was being said to my kid by other people online. For most part it was trolls trying to make him feel bad, sometimes people don't realize there is a child in a game which target audience are teenagers and talked about subjects which i'm completely comfortable with and have discussed with people but every time i knew who's listening. This doesn't change the fact that club penguin, being targeted at 7 year olds, had to implement non-text communication methods because it attracts so many creeps. It doesn't change the fact that a single instance of such scenario has financially ruined Omegle and shut them down. One of most likely many more surfacing, due to the publicity. It doesn't bring back all the kids bullied online in to all kinds of tragedies, parents being blamed for not paying attention and so on. If i run a business and can avoid a risk, at the attractive cost of doing nothing to implement that risk, i would gladly spend zero euros not to create a potential issue which might blow up in my face. Even if the chance of that happening is super low, implementing it means i agree to the consequences. Even if that change brings absolutely nothing new to the game and was previously proven to be problematic at best.

Last quote from me, i'm not concerned about my or my kid's safety at the moment. We live in a remote area and rarely see any chat in local (unmoderated) and he's at the age where he doesn't bother replying to people or doesn't bother reading but voice chat he would engage with (in my specific case, i would turn it off for him but not all kids play supervised). This suggestion doesn't affect me as much as it _might_ affect the company running our servers and i do not want to see it collapse with a bang.

Please read though my previous responses, that's already answered. I don't have the energy to copy-paste them again, especially since it's too much to read a 2 page (large font) document above.

This isn't a complicated document. I highlighted some of the parts which in the scenario we are discussing mean CCAB/GC: Player doesn't sign the ToS of Vivox as you sad. Player signs off on Wurm's ToS. All responsibility lays on you if you want to use their service in your product.

No. No. No. It is the Wurm developers who sign off on Vivox's ToS and accept all responsibility in order to be able to use their system: https://docs.vivox.com/v5/general/unity/15_1_210000/en-us/Unity/privacy-overview.htm

Why did over 7 billion people drink liquids yesterday but only few million used Vivox? Those are completely incomparable. I'm not sure if adding voice chat, in the already toxic community we have here, would turn that 2k in to millions.

I thought we have established that those mean very little to those who plan to ignore them. Not to mention that most people don't bother reading any of them. I'm sure both parties involved in the Omegle accepted the ToS to be able to communicate via the service. Company was still fined and shut down because of one of most likely multiple similar cases which are yet to surface. It wouldn't matter who provided the underlying services, it was Omegle who paired the victim with the predator and they are the ones to blame. Not someone who wrote some code which sends data stream over the network (voice/video/whathaveyou).

I'm not sure how would that look in court but a parent most likely wouldn't know what Vivox even is. They would blame Wurm, craving for blood. The press coverage would most likely cover the game rather than engine used within it. Much like we wouldn't blame Unreal Engine in other places.

Yes, i agree this is the darkest scenario and it can happen anywhere but in text chat you (and CCAB/GC) have the chat logs as proof. People have been banned for chat in the past, there is nothing unclear about that. With voice you either have to constantly moderate it or keep the recordings to be able to prove anything (where the legal issues regarding storing biometric data kick in). If there are 2 options, either to be safe and not have to worry about all that or potentially expose yourself to multi million fines and a shutdown of the service, with all the bad press around it, i wouldn't risk my business.

It isn't up to me, correct. We are having a discussion about pros and cons. If it was an option, i'll refer you to my first reply in this post. Picture your 12 years old kid in voice chat in Wurm, talking to their even younger friend, meanwhile some creepy, sleezy teenager walks in to local and starts throwing sexual suggestions or death threats. Your son had the chat enabled for the purpose it was meant. To chat instead of typing. Your son has agreed to the ToS. Your son has not said anything that could caus a bad reaction, he was chatting to a friend about yesterday's fdinner. You, as a parent, heard that and now you are the one to deal with that. Or.. You haven't heard that and the kid is scarred for life, because of how bad thigs used to be back when we did have voice chat in Wurm. CCAB/GC now is dragged in to the middle of this, you are looking for legal assistance so that this doesn't happen to anyone's kid again. Yes, this can (and does) happen on multiple platforms. A child can easily click "i'm over 18 years old" check box. I don't think the company wants that responsibility as they didn't want it back then (and rightly so). This is the darkest scenario and something people don't want to even consider but that's why Omegle was shut down recently. I don't think they wanned to shut down a business, i'm sure they had all kinds of ToS including age restrictions and waving rights and whatever else but stuff happens out there which no one should be exposed to and the punishment rarely falls on some teenager in South Asia, it falls on the service provider.

No, this isn't what i said. I said that agreeing to ToS doesn't mean people won't ignore those terms (much like when driving) and in case of a voice chat anything being said is super hard to prove or defend against unless there are recordings of it which circles back to the legal issues.

We have rules and laws regarding driving on public roads. By getting your driver's license you agree to follow those rules. This doesn't stop others from T-boning you, even if you have been following the law to the letter all your life. What you are saying is "either agree to abuse or don't use the voice chat".

Full article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol Discussion found about that exact concern: So enable voice chat but block everyone to prevent abuse? I might be missing the point here. If my voice chat is enabled to chat to you in local but someone else strolls in and starts throwing racial slurs at us, the abuse has already happened. Sure, if i get shot on the street i'll seek legal help but i have already been shot at that point. See above. Open a chat over Vivox and run wireshark. After authentication and handshakes, data stream runs P2P and it shows the IP of the peer. https://edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2021-07/edpb_guidelines_202102_on_vva_v2.0_adopted_en.pdf

The very definition of abuse is the lack of consent. If i ask you to punch me, my consent is implied and it's not abuse. With Voice Chat enabled, i don't consent to people verbally abusing me but there is nothing stopping them from doing so. User's intention to enable it would usually be to have a nice chat but there is nothing stopping others in local to abuse them over the voice chat which isn't moderated. Vivox uses SIP which means you are exposing your IP to the peer. This can be used in multiple ways to make one's life miserable. From DDoS attacks to death threats. Separate issue is CCAB/GC getting in to all the legalities regarding biometric data (your voice) and maintaining a legal department dedicated to that (which services the likes of Discord do).

Speaking only for my self but if your store inconveniences me and makes me spend stupid amounts of time traveling across the server, you miss that sale. This applies not only to Wurm. This is why physical game stores are closing down, this is why more and more grocery stores offer delivery. We like the convenience of clicking few buttons and having things delivered to us rather than getting out in to the crowds, where people are. Why would i want to buy something that isn't a necessity and suffer at the same time? I'll simply not make that purchase and my wallet will be healthier for it. There is nothing stopping people from traveling and meeting up for whatever reason they might have. Forcing people to do that is just an annoyance to the point of missed sales.

Yup, we had it, people passing by insulting everyone, no way to moderate it or even know who said what. All kinds of sleezy stuff was being said in presence of potentially minors. Should this be added, i'm playing the 10 hours version of PFUDOR all the time. On a loop.

Hold your horses! We haven't established yet if it's perhaps a gas? Priorities!

Those do exist but if it's presented on the shop website, people will take it as a binding price. Then they go to pay via their own bank/paypal/whathaveyou and the price is different. I'm not sure about other countries but in EU the price shown on the price tag in shop is binding. Showing that the bank which provides the API exchanges the price of, for example, month of premium, as 20 Fiji Mussels but when the player pays from their bank account which exchanges at less favorable rate and takes 21 Fiji Mussels out of their account, people will feel robbed. If the rate in their bank is in their favor, the company is losing money since the player paid 19 Fiji Mussels which CCAB/GC had converted in to Euro and got €7.5 from that sale. The current solution has the customer and/or their payment processor do the conversion at the exact rate they will pay. I like the idea but i really don't think there is a solution which would be accurate and have everyone happy. The website below aggregates exchange rates and can be a rough guide (xe.com, one of the most popular): Meanwhile my bank will convert euro to dollars for me when i make a transaction at this rate: So if the store price was in dollars (which isn't local to CCAB/GC, just an example), they get $0.22 less than what the most popular exchange rate aggregator suggests (who might provide such API, didn't check) today. Tomorrow i might pay $0.50 more than market data suggests. People abusing the system and using VPN aside, such data will never be accurate unless the customer happens to have an account with the crowd who provided the exchange data.

It would be nice if it was this simple. Price of currency X can be different between 2 banks on the same street. Which one should the shop present? If an official shop shows the price in currency X, some people might see it as binding and kick up if they are charged more because they used their CC and the exchange was made by their bank at that specific bank's exchange rate at the time. PayPal might have different exchange rate. One that doesn't match their bank current rate or the price tag shown on the website. One way around this would be to reduce the number of possible payment methods to one and present the exchange rates from that payment service. Then the price shown would be accurate but many players wouldn't have means to buy anything. Another way would be to take a snapshot of today's exchange rates, present the prices at those rates and then never change them or change them periodically. This option leads to issues like people have with Steam though: In a perfect world, that would be a great and standard thing to do. Live price in local currency shown on the website. Game devs aren't bankers most of the time and they leave that to crowds and services who are. As per the suggestion, it wouldn't be super hard to set a price in a small number of the most popular currencies and stick to it but that would mean either inevitable profit loss or higher prices, depending on the day. If 1 month of premium today costs €7.99 and a decision is made to use today's exchange rates, it costs $8.55. 2 years ago it would have been 9.58$ so if that rate was set 2 years ago it means during that period everyone paying in dollars is overpaying compared to people who use Euro. That wouldn't go down well. So setting a static price in few currencies based on today's exchange rates is something a small company is unlikely to do. It's much, much easier to present the price in they currency of choice and leave the conversion to the buyer and their payment processor.