Locath

I like how people might think that a petition on a 3rd party website has any weight here. Also:

At work we do some basic testing of our own code but nothing is pushed out to live environment without users signing off on the change and testing they did. This means that if we implement something users don't want, it will never go live, that's their incentive. They have a say in what functionality is implemented and how it behaves. From GUI to background functionality to data flows. In gaming industry however (Not only Wurm), it doesn't work like that. By doing testing players are asked to report bugs or other unintended results. This creates a few issues: 1. Users don't really know what is the expected result. Other than this last change which was actually documented by Keenan, it's more of "pop in and see if you can find any bugs", without knowing what is meant to happen by design and what is a bug. 2. Users often are tempted not to report bugs which give them an advantage, in hope they can use them when the changes make it to live. 3. Users don't feel their testing result has any bearing on the new or updated functionality. It is what it is, see if you can find something wrong with it but keep your feedback to yourself. Only when it makes to live and there is an uproar in the forums about it, it might be considered to be changed. 4. Some of the testing requires a lot of effort, Wurm being a full time job as is, breeding or brewing for weeks on test at the same time does not spark joy. So here we are, between a rock and a hard place. Devs can't fully test their own code. If they could think of every possible scenario, they would account for it in code. Users don't want to do the testing or don't want to report all of the issues for a number of reasons. Incentives for players to do testing? Would having a civilized discussion with devs about tweaks, balancing and just simply bad ideas be enough? Knowing that if i feed back that it would be more user friendly to have option X swapped with option Y in the menu, it will be done and testers will be asked to check and comment on it again, make the testing feel worthwhile? Perhaps.

[16:34:29] The tomatoes is now groomed.

This. People who can commit to min-maxing their grind 16h/day would still have the same advantage over people who don't have the time to play as long. Person who can play 2h/day would get effective gains of playing 4h/day Person who can play 16h/day would get effective gains of 32h of gameplay (on multiple characters because fatigue). This is not a catch-up mechanic to help anyone "casual" and leave "nolifers" in the dark, "nolifers" as you call them, play on multiple characters and fatigue doesn't bother us most of the time. I don't have a better idea to even the playing field out but boosting the gains is not a solution to the issue you presented. I'm not saying i wouldn't be happy with x2 gains, i would like that but my reasoning behind it is different. I don't care how high other player skills are or how many bricks my neighbours have hoarded. If i can get my skills 2x faster, i'm happy with that. Everyone else gets the same though so people who are ahead of me, get further ahead then. It would change absolutely nothing in the "help the casuals catch up" department.

Why not use the same mods players are using when hunting uniques? disable rendering of trees Add scanner/ESP and you can see them from miles away and get all kinds of notifications. Even easier when flying as a GM toon.

This would be nice. Dress an alt in a bunch of different sets of suits, suicide as many times as needed and have a more interesting use for puppeteering skill this way 🙂

@EkcinIs there any pattern there? Any particular ingredient which comes up each time the affinity is not correct? There were some new ingredients added to cooking for the new beverages, maybe something changed there? I can't test or play a whole lot at the moment and won't be for the next few weeks but if it's a particular ingredient, i can easily disable or update its offset from work

What? Communicating with users? What is this, competent and professional staff? Someone wake me up! I realize that it probably wasn't Keenan alone who did all the work and as much as i love the upcoming changes, i appreciate a simple post telling us what will happen more than new artwork. Thanks Keenan! More new models please?

Aren't guard tower designs different between kingdoms and not by deities? I thought it doesn't matter which god you follow? https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/File:GuardTowers.jpg

Correct, colloquially people call the same thig a settlement, deed, village, town and so on but "settlement token and the deed token are the same thing" is a false statement. If you hover your mouse or examine either, they are not the same thing. Similarly, people in many games call a build a DPS build while most if not all builds are DPS (Damage Per Second) which means very little since a healer can deal some damage per second as well, better description is DD (Damage Dealer). It's about calling things what they are called in game, by game mechanics, rather than confusing people as evidenced by the example above. This extends to Wurmpedia because who cares about correct terminology or confused new players, right? Thanks for coming to my TED talk 🙂

I think you are still confused. Settlement is the village/town/what have you Deed is the paper you have in your inventory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deed

Another thing to consider, pay the mayor back the upkeep they invested so if and when they return, they aren't a stranger on a deed they paid for. Multiple ways to approach this but this is an important part of the suggestion to think about. If my deed is 100s per month in upkeep and i can't play, tough. If my deed costs 100s per month and i have put in next 30 years worth of upkeep but after a period of inactivity someone else can disband it and cash out... not quite as fun.

Not a bad idea at all. We had a similar situation in EQ2 with my wife. I was a guild master of a guild of over 360 characters but we stopped playing. Guild members had no way to contact us outside of the game so they made a petition to SoE who in turn sent me an e-mail to say that if i don't log on within next 2 weeks, the GM position will go up for voting amongst guild members. I have replied that i can't play the game for "reasons" so just go ahead and run the vote poll now which they did and everyone was happy. If i didn't reply, 2 weeks later it would happen anyway. Guild progress and guild house which everyone worked for wasn't lost. This is a good thing to do because people could lose a lot of time and effort simply because a deed mayor/guild master loses interest in game or got hit by a small boy on a big bike or they lost internet access and so on. I approve this suggestion.

I'm not saying the suggestion is ever going to be implemented but on its premise, it's not a bad one at all.

Not questioning that but there are some small studios who make console games and ports. I don't believe time will be invested in to such thing here but it would open a new, uncharted customer territory with pretty much zero competition i think.

So was Minecraft. I think the idea is to redevelop the engine? Not something that i see happening but on the other hand, a lot of new players could be reached this way. PS natively supports keyboards and mice too so controls aren't an issue.

You know this is about Epic, right? You know (?) Epic portals exist? You know you can pop in, make thousands of X item and sell them there and then and then *poof* back to your deed on Freedom with the monies?

So... credit card? If and when Epic has any population to talk about and there is more than 1 player per kingdom online at a time, such system would make me visit PvP for the first time just to craft and sell said items and go back home with the money.

None of which can't be sorted with a credit card, right?

What game is this? It sounds really bad. Richest kingdom can declare a war on everyone else and they default to bankruptcy after a while. We had similar scenarios like in the terrible game you are talking about, where one kingdom was so much more powerful than the others that they drove everyone else off the PvP server and then complained that there is no PvP happening. That ridiculous game you described is a gateway to exactly this but easier.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/ball-lightning

Played the closed and open betas and i like it but it remains to be seen if it will be something to stick to for longer. Skill level progress was so much faster than what i'm used to that it seemed like playing in creative mode (perhaps it was boosted for betas only?) Harvesting is cool, different types of resources are gathered in different ways so trees can be cut down but minerals are mined from nodes, food is gathered from farms, fishing can be done in any place but there are richer spots so different styles of gathering depending on what you do. I like that. One thing that stands out for me is "oh, i think i can jump on top of that ledge to get to that other one and i might be able to get to the top of that mountain, i bet devs didn't expect players to get there, lets see what happens..." and i get to the top of the mountain and there is a mineral node or two up there so clearly it was meant to be accessible albeit not very easily. Nice surprise. If they manage to get rid of the exploits from closed beta where people cheesed fortunes in money and so on, it might be quite entertaining to play around with. Consensual PvP is another nice thing. I don't PvP so i simply don't flag my self for PvP and i'm safe. Someone who likes PvP can do the opposite and take part in open world PvP and in those big battles which i was just a spectator in. PvP flag can be toggled in safe zones so we can mix the play styles as we wish. Housing lacks a bit but i'm sure more decorations will be added but it resembles EQ2 housing except the highest "voted" house in the instance is shown in the world which is a nice touch.

I get what Wipeout is saying and going by some of the logic people are trying to apply, me playing WO over RDP from work means that i'm not at my PC so i'm breaking the rules? I am looking at the Wurm session, i am chatting to my allies, i might preform some actions, depending quiet work is but i am NOT sitting in front of my PC.

Oh it's undeniable that many of the projects get abandoned for reasons unknown. It is sad and people do get frustrated but it's not 100% of EA titles that end up in the trash. Some of the unfinished and abandoned EA titles are well playable and will give us hundreds of hours of fun. My point was that EA is sometimes a necessary part of the development cycle and unless i try the game my self, i can't have an opinion about it. Going by reviews helps a bit but again, on example of Medieval Engineers, the game is clearly abandoned and unfinished but the part of functionality which interests me is well done, so for me, it is a complete product (it's not but i hope you know what i mean). Similarly with WO, if the development stopped right now and only the final bugs were fixed and an announcement was made to say "this is the final product", would i stop playing? No, WO already has enough to offer to keep me busy for a long time. I agree that the paid EA is abused by people who slap free assets and systems together in Unity, get few sales and forget about the whole thing. They simply don't care and that is rampant in gaming industry but if i didn't get Satisfactory in EA, i would have missed the entire journey it's going through. Factorio is the next one, it took years for it to leave EA but each next update made me play it again. Could it be done without EA? Sure, released games can be updated as well and companies which can afford that kind of development cycle, morally should do that. Build and release the game and then keep updating it. Except... If there was no EA, we would complain about games being released while "not ready", despite any releases being pushed out later. Because some of the great dev teams simply can't feed their families for 3 years from their savings alone, unfinished products would be going live. The EA tag lets people know to lower their expectations i guess. Any EA title gets a bit of slack from me when it comes to minor annoyances and bugs i can work around. It's the lack of control by the platform (e.g. Steam) that ruins it. If a game has 1 positive to a million negative reviews, it still won't be taken down by the platform because it might get that one more sale to someone who didn't check the reviews. It's not the premise of EA or our past experiences with EA titles that make the concept of early access wrong in any way i think. It's the lack of control and accountability for failed products or even scams.

Yes and no. For example Medieval Engineers was abandoned but despite being in perpetual Early Access, it does scratch that itch when it comes to building and a bit of mechanics+automation. It's unfinished, it's not very exciting but the one thing i got it for, which is building massive and complex structures, works well and i often go back to it. Mostly negative reviews deter future buyers but i had lots of fun with it. Would i be happier if they continued development? Yes. Do i regret buying it? No. On example of Stationeers, pretty much all of the systems were revamped and often rebuilt from scratch, game is still amazing and being updated often. Similarly with Empyrion, ARK, Colony Survival, Space Engineers, ECO and countless other. Some of the games many of us bought left EA in condition which doesn't warrant calling it a "release", some are in EA for years and are getting better and better, some got abandoned in EA. I don't agree with painting all developers with one brush based on the release cycle which most(all?) games go through.