Torgrim

The old look was terrible, I have hated all hedges since they were released because they look like they belong to Roblox. The new model is nice, I hope all hedges will get new looks like this (but different ofc). -1 to pruning them back to the old look, for the above reason. Anyway, I understand the OP, it is painful to remake all those hedges becuase of a simple change in graphics. I don't know exactly how that would be solved, some kind of option to choose another hedge type once maybe.

Nice. Any chance to have armor penalties in there?

+1

The graphics are 3D, of course. But the server representation of the world is 2D with a 3D dimension slapped on top for some purposes, more and more purposes, but not natviely built in from the ground and up.

Why not just buff walking speed on rock tiles to the same as paved road? No need for concrete then...

+1 but eyerobot, it's not really that simple because you still want to see it rain or snow when you look out the window. They would have to implement clipping in the weather effects, which I guess degrades performance and is a bit more work to implement.

How about ramps for wagons? Or will that be bridges that you have to build on the outside of your house?

You say unity has built in physics engine and walking under bridges and such is easy, but I don't think it would be when you add the fact that a Wurm server is like on gigantic zone that is streamed to the client in real time, the world is ever changing. You also need to do alot of the physics and collition detection server side since this is an mmo, not a single player game. Everything is a lot easier in a single player or even normal multi player game compared to an MMO. I think when Rolf talks about a new engine he means client engine, not replacement of the server engine. It would make it simpler to add more graphical effects on the client, but the server is still as hard to implement. And as you already mention, the terrain stuff in Unity is lacking. I tried it a bit too, but didn't see how it could be used tfor anything like Wurm...

And this server should have flight, electricity and exploding green mobs ...

Traders in more populated areas seem to get the most money. Not nearly as much as before Xanadu but more than those in low population areas.

"It will be interesting to see how well the new client performs." So, this means it is actually being worked on?

Advanced trash heap, hehe. How advanced can a heap get?

Most ppl have dynamic IPs. This doesn't work, sorry.

Now at least we have pretty ok graphics. I have tried to introduce the game to others before but they just laughed when they saw the graphics and didn't even want to try the game. Now, at least they don't laugh at how the game looks anymore, even though, compared to modern high budget games it still looks old.

Huh? Who says this is the true definition of Multiboxing. Looking at several gaming sites and wiki pedia gives another definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-boxing), Multiboxing is most commonly defined as playing more than one account at once, no cheating with macros or 3rd party helpers involved... The rule text is not really clear, but I think it pretty clear anyway to normal people if you are cheating or not. Playing more than one account at a time is perfectly ok, I think most people do that or they play one account and watch a movie at the same time. Most people don't even reflect upon the issue of cheating or not, normal people doesn't have to because if you use common sense and don't really try to you are not likely to ever come close to cheating.

Prolonging time between resets just makes you loose more in the reset, people will whine and before you know it you have a permanent world again... But I guess it could beinteresting if the rounds were of different length, between 2 and 8 weeks to make the experience a bit different from round to round. Tactics in a 2 week round will be very different from an 8 week round.

Tried it for a day, but it feels like a battleground type of game, but without nice fighting implementation. I understand if some people like it, for a while, but I think it will grow old fast. If you remove skilling up, building and decorating your deeds, trading and building roads from a game that is all about those things, what you have left is a very small game. It will appeal to people who like instant gratification, but those people seldom play a game for more than a month...

-1 for auction houses and bulk mails. The other stuff sure, but I would put in better fighting mechanics and 3D mines before most of that.

I think Wurm PvP can be pretty exiting and dramatic on Epic or Chaos, just because there is so much to loose. Of course it has two sides, loosing everything is not fun, but knowing that you can loose everything makes the PvP much more nerve wrecking, it also adds incentives to build for defense rather than looks. The strong point of PvP in Wurm is not really the battles themselves, it's cat an mouse games, spying, buidling etc. with the knowledge that the enemy is out there and they can attack at any time. The fighting in Wurm is pretty bad, from implementation point of view. It can still be exiting and fun, because of the above, but the figting in itself has been done many times better by other games. The game is laggy, it crashes, animations are very bland, numerous glitches etc. It just can't really handle fighting, not PvP and not PvE in a good way. This is why I think challenge, while maybe fun for a while will not succeed in the long run. Why? Because it focuses on the fighting, which is Wurm's worst feature. If you want a battle ground type of game I think there are other alternatives that are better. I also don't see how challenge will even out the playfield. It will still be the people spending 15hours a day for the first week grinding thier fighting skills that will have a huge advantage.

+1 to OP

So.. you spent time on challenge (that nobody had asked for) instead of working on bridges... meh.. please take the other servers online then at least, why does all servers have to wait for challenge to get up?

A final verdict on traders would be very welcome. What are their purpose in the future? I own a couple of traders, what should I do with them, disband now or wait because there might be a refund later that I miss out on if I disband?

I was fine with how traders worked before. I'm fine with having them removed. It doesn't matter. It's the dedicated players that will have all the cash either way. Rolf's economy has never been my concern, I think he can manage the finances of his company just fine by himself.

Ok, yes this is a good explanation. I think many of us older players already know and have known this since almost a year back. It was pretty obvious that Rolf was trying to take this "easy way out". I think it went ok too, I'm not happy about having a few traders that doesn't give any income, but I do like the new system. I would prefer traders were removed completly though. You can still abuse them on Xanadu with alts draining..