Shiraek

I'm not a fan. What's the difference between buying a character with 90 weapon smithing and Rolf selling "weapon smithing skill to 90" potions for 100 euros? At least in the second example it would actually benefit the game as it would fund more development etc. At best, I don't think it adds anything to the game. Not for the people who buy an account and miss out on the actual game, and not for the people who have to compete with ancient bought-out accounts in PVP or PVE trading.

I don't see how it will make things "easier" really or result in more goods being available. All I do now is mine until I've got enough of the quality I want, or make extra bricks until I've got enough high quality ones etc. All it would do for me is remove some pointless grind. I say pointless because generally these actions are so far below my skill level that they aren't worth doing for the skill increase alone, and when I'm after good quality materials I often leave the sub par material to rot, having BSBs full of it already. Don't see how it would impact the market either. Maybe a slight increase in the availability of medium/highish quality stuff as people who would otherwise be bored stiff actually make the thing they set out to make - but so what? The market for items <90ql is pretty slim to none these days anyway.

o/ goodbye and good luck wherever you go!

I had a thought many years ago about medieval game skills and randomness, and how the rules rarely matched up with real life. In real life, when you get very, very good at something, your performance also becomes very, very reliable. I mean take anything... driving, flying an aircraft, ice skating, riding a bicycle, putting your key in the lock on your front door at 4am in the dark drunk enough to try it next door first... all of these things once you get good at them, how often do you roll a 1ql action? (Maybe excluding the last example) Not so in these games, wurm included. Yet, I think it would be both realistic and positive for gameplay if, for example, when mining a 74 ql vein with a 70ql pick and 76 mining skill, we mostly got 74ql iron. Instead of 20% or whatever it is. Same with making bricks. Making bricks is already mind numbingly dull, but when you want even just 10 at or near your max quality? Ohh lordy. What do we get out of the high degree of randomness that persists at high skill levels, other than more grind/tedium/frustration? Thoughts?

Interesting to me (had a look through the policies at the voteforpolicies site) how in the UK the far right agenda doesn't seem to have taken over as much as it has here in Australia, although in our case our far right government was elected on policies that weren't far right, and then tried to implement far right stuff, breaking most of their election promises in the process. (hasn't gone down well). In the UK all the parties seem to at least in part recognise the need for public health and education, and action on climate change. Not so here. So I guess one thing worth remembering is that policies can change when you get elected and it's pretty normal for politicians to say they'll do one thing and then get into power and do the complete opposite. Or at least it is here.

Vanguard was my favourite for a long while but Sony absolutely killed it, figuratively and then literally. Before they cancelled it I remember robots and lasers. Not making this up. It was the last PVE MMO I could convince my friends to play with me in, and will always hold a special place in my heart for that reason and because it was so crazily ambitious (and actually hit some of its goals). And until I found Wurm, nothing else had Vanguard's immense open spaces and freedom of play. After Vanguard's hideous failure, I don't think we'll see anything like it again for a long time either. Just the phrase "huge, seamless world" will have investors sprinting for the hills for a good decade or so I imagine. Loved EQ1 but... Sony Sony'd it. Right before I quit they were re-making zones that used to be open, scary forests etc into them parks with restrictive paths through them. Just absolutely nonsense. EQ2 I lasted for about 15 minutes. I tried it after VG and as a result its tiny zones just seemed way too theme park for suspension of disbelief and gave up. Eve Online was nothing short of awesome at first, but it's very very very PVP focused and you really can't do much PVE-wise beyond a certain point. Once I got a Carrier, my options were kill other players or quit. I quit. But that was after 3 years on and off of playing and enjoying it. Star Trek Online... loved it, played to max level in a few weeks and I think I might've only loved it cos it was... well... Star Trek. Definitely worth a romp but I don't see how it could keep your attention for months at a time. If you like PVP World of Tanks online was fun for a while (I did about 1200 battles if I recall) but it's very much designed as a money funnel and they abandoned realism pretty fast to maximise the money funnel. Still, as a PVP game it makes a lot of sense as you aren't destroying things that people took months building. WoT is great for playing with friends as you can platoon up with up to 3 of you and run as a team. And that's it for MMOs I've played. Single player stuff never lasts as long (if I get 40 hours out of a single player game it's a big win these days), and I must confess I would love to play a new MMO myself soon. Just... none of the current offerings really look good to me. I really don't like PVP in games where you get very established and then find yourself facing off with day one newbies, or destroying stuff that people took weeks or even months building. How could that be fun? For single player stuff, dwarf fortress is probably the best of them all at the moment as it's got wonderfully original gameplay, a fair bit of re-playability and a game can take many hours. But it badly, badly needs a new interface and some graphics. There are some very promising indie games in early access: Kerbal Space Program, Prison Architect and Subnautica are three I definitely recommend. KSP has many hours of play, the other two held my attention for a few hours each but all three are still being developed and new features added frequently, so probably worth getting now. These three are all wonderfully original ideas so very refreshing to play.

I'm aware, but busy with another one for now

So have archery towers work like deed guards on deed only. (for those saying they would ruin hunting if they shot at things offdeed) That said... if your definition of hunting is only going after stuff near your and your neighbour's deeds, you're missing out on the real fun I understand why folks want them to be purely cosmetic - they can't ruin anything that way, and as a result it's unlikely they'll ever be anything else so meh. But it would be nice, really nice, to have a new feature. Even if it was originally for PVP. And to me, cosmetic things aren't new features.

The "Bear Lake" deed on the eastern shore of Bear Lake has disbanded.

+1 for making the turrets work against hostile mobs at least. Why not? edit: maybe on-deed only though?

Been biting my tongue on this thread, it's hard not to wade in an argue, but I don't see a lot of point in getting too bogged down in it. However, I will say the following: If you're doing all your physics server side, moving to a new engine for your front end purely for better visuals is made less complex, not more If you're validating every single thing every player does every time instead of a random sample, you're wasting resources. Cheats won't get away with it forever with a random sample. You can kill off a lot of cheating (macroing) with game design that removes actions that are easy to repeat Bridge collision could be done with a series of box colliders, since no doubt they're made of components like our existing walls and floors. Ray casts through and collisions with box colliders are not complex to implement, even from scratch in C++ Queue "what would you know about client-server MMO development?" in 3...2...1...

That looks great! Something we do where you've got two different materials in an object is to split it into two meshes and apply two different shaders. You could have a metal one for the head, brace and pommel and a "woodlike" one for the haft and handle. I've no idea of course what you've done there so take this post with a bucket of salt as ever

You're welcome. Is this apology for the misunderstanding or the condescending lecture/rant below? I guess for completeness sake I'll explain myself without plugging my product... I founded a games studio two years ago, and after our successful release on Steam in late Feb, I have stopped thinking of myself as an IT professional dabbling in games and begun thinking of myself as a games developer, which I think is reasonable. I also think, given that our game is also and MMO and also has some very strong sandbox elements, that my perspective is highly relevant to Wurm as a whole. I don't have zero idea what you do career wise. You mentioned you were in development but were not a games developer bit further up in this thread. My response was to supply a games developer's perspective, because I was aware you didn't have it. Thanks for your perspective on professional software development. But again I'm afraid I must disagree - I never found it boring. Trying at times, as some of the same issues apply, but on the whole (and this is relevant) I found almost every customer to be far more professional and respectful when providing feedback than I see in much of the games industry in general and in these forums in particular. Although I would exclude for the most part my own games customers from that. I appear to have been blessed so far. I know what your OP was about and its intent - this was rather clear in your OP. And I think everyone who's ever been in business knows that without the customer you're kind of screwed. I am not sure what you're getting at there. My angle was to give you a new perspective (one you explained yourself that you did not have) that might shed some light on why your plea may not be successful and that there's more going on than devs simply ignoring feedback from customers. I don't see the relevance of the rest of your post. I wasn't talking about you or your experiences, whether you were a people person or not, or how you dealt with customers. If I was talking about you at all (and I wasn't for the most part - I felt we were both discussing, in general, other people's feedback), it was with respect to how you deal with your suppliers, not customers, and in this case code club.

Hrm. OP is true up to a point. Another perspective, from one who receives such feedback... not all feedback is priceless. Some of it, frankly, is closer to worthless. People playing MMOs often confuse what would be good for their character, with what would be good for their game, and many other things. Such as what would be good for them or their 'group', with what would be good for the playerbase as a whole. Many player supplied ideas are bad ideas. Sorry, fact of life. If everyone was a great game designer, there would be a lot of really great games out there. A lot more than there are. Even great ideas can be vastly more expensive to build than you might think, making them on balance, a bad idea (cost vs. benefit, opportunity cost) Players in general have a very poor idea of how much work goes into these things. Sometimes that huge thing you think will take weeks is a one-liner in a config file somewhere. Other times that "one simple thing" you're asking for is actually a new feature that none of our databases are structured for yet and requires much of the game to be rewritten. Very little feedback on this forum in particular is written constructively. If these were my forums, I might've stopped reading them by now, or stopped developing the game because it's just not rewarding. Put yourself in a developer's shoes and read the front page of Town Square's threads. There's a lot of unhelpful nastiness, sarcasm, contempt, cynicism etc shown. You're asking someone... to do work for you. If you were their boss, how would you do that? I would suggest you'd do it politely and respectfully, or you wouldn't be their boss for long... and you aren't their boss now! So why is it OK to use this kind of language to a game developer, even a CEO of a company who's started something out of nothing at their own cost and now employs a whole team? A lot of feedback has no clear action item you can take away from it. In other words, it might be a valid expression of feeling but there is very little use in reading it. Try reading every thread in this forum and come up with a set of action items from them... where you CAN come up with action to take, often one thread's action will contradict another and there's no clear path through it. Often in the same threads there are great arguments both for and against something. When I see that, I almost never take action unless I absolutely have to for the good of the game. I'm not saying "Games Developers are angelic creatures and you should kiss our behinds and approach us with reverence and awe". I'm saying we're human, and we react like any other human to feedback - even when we know user feedback IS often priceless (and it is). I'm saying bearing this in mind when framing and wording your feedback gives you a much better chance of getting the work you wanted done. I'm saying that after working 15 hours straight on that new feature, bashing our heads against insane limitations in our engines, operating systems and hardware for hour after hour and dealing with 100x the bugs you do, often bugs in other people's code we can't get fixed or fix ourselves and have no option but to live with and hide from you, when we log onto our forums or into our games and are confronted with negativity, it doesn't help anything. It certainly doesn't make the good feedback any easier to find or take on board. Even your OP here ends with "you can lead a horse to water...". Read that back to yourself. "You're stupid and/or stubborn, and I know better than you, doing my best to explain it as simply as possible." That's how I read it, and it wasn't directed at me. I'm also not saying Wurm has no problems. Wurm has big problems. Structural problems. Technology problems. Code club AB don't communicate with the playerbase well. The development team strike me as more than a little burned out actually. But how do they engage with this community and say that? And how will this community help them fall in love with the game again? I don't see how. Not this community. Not with this attitude. And where's your sense of perspective? I would bet a lot of people complaining bitterly of this or that have been playing for years. Many of you with thousands of hours racked up. You've probably got games in Steam with 40 hours played that you think are wonderful, while you run this one down. It's held your attention this long, there's no doubt a lot you love about it. So would it kill you to write from that perspective? As though when you're being critical you're picking apart a minor issue in a mostly good game, with a view to improving it? Or suggesting a possible new feature so you can go on enjoying a game you've loved for years? Instead of complaining about yet another huge flaw in an overall terrible game with the expectation that your complaint, yet again, will fall upon inexplicably deaf ears?

Definitely not grindy like wurm. The only way you'd see it as grindy now, given all the different ways you can advance, is if you tried to advance as fast as possible and just ground out the most profitable thing to do at the time - be it a trade route or mining or what have you. Whereas if you just do what you feel like doing you'll enjoy it a lot more, and advance a bit slower (which isn't a bad thing). I've seen players put >100 hours into it in a week and advance really fast. I guarantee if you do that, you'll find your experience grindy. The steam version comes with 3 months full premium, which is $3 USD a month after that. This covers server costs. You can activate your steam premium at any time and don't need it until you're many hours into the game usually.

I had no option; when I started Independence was all there was, but there was no room anywhere on the coast for a deed, so when it opened I moved to Deli and I've been there ever since. However, Deliverance's playerbase is in long term decline, so I have a small note of concern about the future there.

First person view is in (scroll all the way in or hit 1), and lots of people use joysticks of various makes and models, some have a full HOTAS setup but they seem to need to remap some things. Your mileage may vary.

So anyway, we're now live on steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/345010/ Sales are going very well, we had a great weekend. Rolf should totally put Wurm on steam.

Actually what you're saying is entirely valid in real life but plain wrong in a simulation like Wurm, where rules can in fact be perfect as it exists in a "perfect" environment, i.e. a computing environment. For example, deed settings (excluding the occasional bug which is fixable and the frequent misinterpretation due to no manual and no tutorial) on freedom can be set perfectly to our requirements. You can't dig on my deed, the end. The same is inherently applicable to perimeter, whether the five "free" tiles or further.

All of the issues raised in this thread result directly from a mismatch between: What is enforced by the game What GMs enforce What the community finds acceptable behaviour Close the gap and the issues vanish. In this case, most people would see digging inside the 5 tiles of someone else's "free" perim without discussion to be unacceptable, but the game allows it, and the circumstances in which GMs will or can intervene in it are more limited than that. Personally, I maintain one large perim on Deli and I don't mind much when others dig in it (depending on what they're doing of course) but that's a completely separate issue, and that perimeter has a completely different purpose from the "5 tile buffer" which isn't a buffer at all because it allows so much (including blocking it off with fences.

All of the issues raised in this thread result directly from a mismatch between: What is enforced by the game What GMs enforce What the community finds acceptable behaviour Close the gap and the issues vanish. Hmm I should copy paste this to a bunch of other threads. In fact, maybe macro it...?

If you want to clear a large section of forest without going insane woodcutting it all, plant willows every 5 tiles. On the other hand, leaving trees for the newbies (both of them) is good...

Still looks pretty stock Unity to me with no sign of any gameplay, or original ideas, although admittedly that might be somewhere else as this seems to be a video about the graphics. Vanguard was the most heartbreaking thing ever... it had tons, and tons, and tons of potential, 3% of which was realised. I was very active in the Beta and was staggered they released it in the state it was in. I just wouldn't have and at that time I had no experience in the games industry and had very little release management experience. Not so anymore... Brad doesn't just need someone to run the business side and project manage, he needs brilliant implementation people (engine, UI, Game design) to get his mad visions working. He didn't have enough of that for VG. I would be very sceptical of this project until it shoes signs that those people are present and active. With no funding, it sounds doomed.

Animals starving to death with food on the ground in front of them would be a server bug, I recommend reporting it.

Quote from the floor somewhere in second life "The only things in here that are real, are our feelings, so play nice!" And for me that's what it comes down to. Yeah, those animals you broke in and stole weren't real. Bits and pixels. But their owner might have loved them, and THAT is. That's what makes it wrong, and that's why I could never do it, not even on a PVP server. What REALLY does my head in is when I'm coding AI with feelings. I mean those feelings are nothing more than electrical impulses somewhere... but so are yours!