Klindhh

To add my own feelings as a newbie about what would have really helped during the first five hours. This is going to come across rather negative as it only focuses on the things that were problems. The tutorial is really bad. Really Bad. The game is extremely unstable. It often crashes as I start it up but it is at least stable after this happens for me. However I have a friend who understands computers who has it freeze and/or crash whenever he tries to play it. So far he's had this result from three different computers. This is a huge hurdle to getting new players. The game is really obscure. I would have played this years ago if I'd known it existed. The only reason I found it at all was because of someones reference to it in a forum post that wasnt even about Wurm. This is after having spent hours during the last couple of years hunting for something similar. It was demorilisingly hard to find a starting point. I started off just wanting to try things out but there was a ring of deforestation around the protected trees of the starting zone so just trying to find a tree I could cut down took me many playing hours and multiple deaths. After spending a couple of days around the starting area because i felt tied to the newbie food vendors I decided to start out and find somewhere to settle that fit what I was looking for - open land with only one or two neighbours and space to expand. After a couple of days of stumbling around I was met on the road and given a place to live in an established village for a bit. At this time I was starting to feel like there would be no area that met my wishes and that my only option would be a tiny house squeezed inbetween long established deeds or a place within an already established village. I was within a day or so of giving up at this point as village life, although lovely, didnt supply the gameplay I wanted. Research on the forums led me to believe that there might be land up for grab to the south so I set off to find another place. This was an extremely frustrating trek as it put me back in sloping sands everytime I died forcing me to trek back to my dying position. This happened a LOT and if I had not known that this is exactly the sort of game I had wanted to play for years I would have quit multiple times over. I quickly got lost amongst the maze of roads as I was trying to follow what I thought was a highway, and getting blocked by deed walls. This was with the use of the community map. I am honestly still not sure where that highway actually is. I picked the area I have right now at least partly because the idea of making the same journey yet again was too depressing. Its also very hard to tell when an area is abandoned due to the beds and such that are lying around. To me these indicated that a place was already occupied. Things I would like for newbies following my experience are: More information on the servers when presenting me with a choice. For example I would have liked an indication of player population compared to ideal/capacity population and % of world covered by deeds/enclosures. Might also be nice to have an average skill level for the server but this might make it very hard for the older servers to get new people. A bag of travel rations that are not lost on dying that will keep me fed for 24 hours instead of the vendors or at the least scatter the vendors along the main highways leading out from the newbie town. There were a couple of items in the newbie kit that lasted about 5 minutes before I had lost them such as my backpack and a bowl. It would have been nice to have those as part of the newbie kit. I remember the bowl in particular being very hard to replace due to clay not being everywhere. The backpack was even harder to replace but more of a luxury. Some simple money making tasks at the beginning to teach me what I could do for coin without relying on other players. For example the traders could ask me to supply them with 10 corn or 5 chunks of iron ore and ask, at the time of giving the task, if I wanted advice on how to perform that task. First aid supplies. It is extremely hard to find cotton as a newbie. I died at least three times in the first day just because I was trying to forage what felt like mile after mile of spider infested woodland for cotton so that I could try to start healing up again. I actually had much better luck supplying myself with healing covers than bandaging. The ability during the first 24 hour period to respawn at the nearest settlement to facilitate any newbies travel away from the spawn area. Even if settlements have to opt into this it would have helped a lot. A limited time newbie town area where people can only have heavily restricted housing (ie a max 1 square shack with 1 square of enclosure for example) to enable people to find spots around the newbie spawn point to experiment in without first having to invest tens of hours getting lost within what was a mazelike nest of walls around the starting town. Ideally this should be part of the tutorial world before you leave as this would enable people to work out what they want and then try to find the server/town that provides it. Have a recruitment channel for these guys so they can ask for villages looking for them and then pick the server that has the town they liked most. Populate it the critters newbies can actually learn combat on without being immediately eaten. You would probably need to cap skill gain here and have it so the buildings go poof the minute people leave. The option to build your shack through some sort of task/quest system offering different levels of support to the player. Completely redo the tutorial. The movement section is overly complex and the route was very confusing. Personally I would have done the following. Point out that movement speeds depend on the terrain without going into details and then have an square area with some different land types all next to each other. Have it so the new character has to fight their way through a harmless foe (preferably a fur dropper) to a climb atop which they chop down a tree to get a single log, have them fall down that slope and then have them craft a component that will then let them repair a gate as an introduction to the crafting menu. Make them change to defensive combat stance and shield bash a second foe on going through this gate. Then explain and have them tend the bruise from the fall. Then have a compass navigation spot, possibly with the lantern light exercise you already have. Explanation boxes should never be more than a paragraph at a time. I particularly hated the digging section of the tutorial and feel this would be better tackled in the newbie settlement area described above by giving folks step by step popups on building that first shack. The mining section was ok but it badly needs to explain ways to find ore that do not involve an already existing mine. The tutorial also never mentioned that I could customise my characters appearance not did it mention banking at settlement tokens or the ability to sell items to the tokens for a bit of starting cash. Better starting merchants. The starting merchants in some of the servers arent very obvious. I had no idea these existed on my first character/server. They also never had any money for selling things to them during the first 2-3 days I spent in the sloping sands region. I was frustrated as a newcomer because it was extremely hard to trade things due to the lack of coins to make up the price differences. For example I wanted to some items for a bowstring but because the bowstrings value was not an exact multiple of the items I had to sell I couldnt buy it even though my items were worth more than the bowstring. You should either give newcomers a few iron coins for these small items or have special traders that always have a certain amount of coin available for the use of newcomers only.