Adnurak

I've been thinking more on this post, about what it means to learn from your mistakes, and the difference between constructive, productive failure and reckless failure. Learning from one's mistakes is perfectly well and good, it's a natural part of advancing a project that you'll step in it a few times along the way as you feel out the boundaries of what works and what does not work. What's not normal or productive is making crucial, easy to avoid mistakes at every single turn, through a lack of understanding of the product, through a lack of due care and diligence, and through a reluctance to communicate with or seek the guidance of the people around you who have a level of familiarity with the product that far surpasses your own. So far, this is exactly what Krister has managed to do in his involvement with Wurm. One or two careless missteps of this kind can be excused in the name of politeness and good faith, but this is by now a well-established pattern of ignorance and unforced error. These sorts of mistakes are not attributable to the unique difficulties of this role, rather they are easily attributed to his own lack of care and disinterest in the wisdom that others have to offer him. My honest assessment at this point is that Krister is either woefully unsuited to the task of understanding Wurm as a product, or thinks that he can bluff his way through needing to understand it and replace anyone who presents themselves as an obstacle to his "bull in a china shop" approach. tl;dr: Acknowledging your mistakes is nothing more than a rude handwave if you turn around and simply repeat the same mistakes.

It's very clear at this point that whatever is going on behind the scenes, this is not just a series of isolated coincidences. The team shrinking in this manner is a far bigger problem than you can gauge just by adding up all the people it's lost. This is an existential threat and Krister is shuffling the chairs on the Titanic as if either he doesn't get what's happening (extremely doubtful,) or expects everyone else not to recognise it if he just acts cool about it. Seems very much like if this pattern continues Wurm will be a one man project, maybe chatGPT can redesign the new player experience though eh? All of this is self-contradictory waffle. "My job is to secure the well-being of our team" by whittling it down to nothing? I suppose if there are zero people on the team then none of them will have anything to worry about. Am I supposed to believe that every single one of these departures is because of something other than the one common factor at the centre of all of this? How many times has Krister appealed for people to reach out to him in private, only for posts to show up in various threads here with words to the effect of "I've been trying to reach you for weeks, since you haven't responded I'm unfortunately saying this here instead."? He's trying to create the impression that there's more going on in private discussions than there really is. Krister Elmgren tells lies like a fish swims, it's just like breathing air to him. Appalling behaviour.

It was an inappropriate decision in the first place and was done purely to rush it out the door to please investors who would not spot these mistakes as easily as players did. Weighing investors' money against players' money in this way is a good way to eventually eliminate both of these sources of revenue. Edit: I really want to emphasise that this backlash did not arise from some simple error in communication, the idea of the site being an evolving thing and the "placeholder images" was communicated, it was just rejected as an excuse for the poor state the site launched in. There is absolutely no reason that the site had to go out in this state (the state it remains in as of time of this post) except to rush it out for a 1st of July deadline, it either should have been postponed or work should have begun earlier.

Multiple people have posted about having sent emails and forum PMs to Krister that have, for some time, gone unanswered. If your anonymous friend has only the incomplete information set that you're passing to her, then she's deprived of information that she would need to make any relevant commentary on the situation, and on that basis I don't see what good it does sharing your mystery friend's opinions here.

I think what a lot of people were looking for was an apology for not involving staff or anyone else with a background in Wurm's history in the drafting of this "new branding", I notice the only posts addressed here from the outpouring of negative feedback in the new branding thread, are posts that were talking about Wurm's graphics, and none of the posts criticising the new branding itself, or the way the website was put together. All the most substantive criticism was ignored, in favour of replies to what were essentially off-topic posts about remaking Wurm in Unreal engine. I hope the other thread was not locked so all of that could be ignored, it certainly dragged on a bit, it was getting a bit repetitive, and probably should have been locked, but only so that what was there could be addressed instead of being buried under more anger. Again, I respect the fact that that thread was locked, and I do not intend to restart what was going on there in this thread instead, but there was a great deal of important, specific feedback from knowledgeable and well-spoken people in there and it has been sidestepped with a lot of boilerplate "Yes, I agree, I want to look into this more." language. With that said, I wish to make sure that these few posts are not forgotten and request that they get some special attention. Much of the criticism was quite harsh and unforgiving (including my own), but these posts had by far the most constructive, insightful, and useful feedback and they should not be ignored.

Agreed, the existing logo is nice, not just "good enough" but nice, I like it. I don't think Wurm needed rebranding at all, there's a strong argument that the website was technically outdated and anaemic, but in terms of its visual identity, it was perfectly solid. Wurm did not need a visual "fresh start." People may criticise Wurm for its (at times) low fidelity graphics and wish that the game could be remade in some other engine, I don't think any of that is realistic, nor is it a high priority compared to for example what @Archaed said earlier in the thread about more repeatable content. Wurm does not need a new haircut and a nice suit to bring in and retain more players, it needs a carefully considered new content plan, more new systems that play off the strengths of what is already interesting about Wurm, like the treasure hunt system did. Frankly, I get the impression from this "rebranding" that GCG was not motivated out of a desire to refresh or improve Wurm's look and appeal, but rather just to mark their territory, to put their own stamp on it so as to act like it belongs to them in more than simply a legal sense.

What he's saying is that it would be unwise of Krister to jump straight into responding on the fly to the pages and pages of criticism here, and he's right. I think I've been about as critical as anyone here, and I do think the ball was majorly dropped in how this was implemented; there should have been a public preview published on the forums or feedback taken from staff and devs privately before this went out live, but it's been done the way it was done and it does no good for us to wave our fists and generate more and more pages just getting upset at not getting a response yet. Everything that can be said has been said more or less. I'm not confident that we'll see the sort of response that I would like to see, but it's still only fair to allow time for the response to come.

half the small Ws on the banners at the head and foot of the website are backwards

Asserting that it's normal to do any of this doesn't change that it isn't good to do this. Putting that aside, none of this even is normal, it's not good practice to take down a website in order to edit the live version of the site, then bring it back up with "placeholder images", the idea behind placeholder text and images is that they DON'T get pushed to the public version. Every part of this stinks of unorthodoxy and incompetence. "Top level business people" do not accidentally leave a disclaimer saying that the real document should be prepared by a lawyer in the final version of their ToS that they copy/pasted from a template.

Fair enough, I just think it's very important that all of this is put out in the open and people shouldn't hold back their real thoughts. I don't mean to mischaracterise your position.

Pointing out patterns of bad behaviour and asserting that those patterns could continue and create problems for Wurm is not in any way conjuring those problems into existence. GCG getting involved with Wurm and then two important staff members suddenly leaving the team didn't happen because people made "negative" posts on the forum. Not voicing valid criticism because it sounds "pessimistic" or might hurt someone's feelings is no way for adults to behave, this is not a serious point of view. I think everyone here has a great deal of respect and appreciation for the time and energy that Wurm staff and devs have put into the game, our criticism is not remotely directed at those people. To recognise the hard work that has gone into Wurm is also to recognise that Wurm's continued existence is not just a fact of life, it's for that reason that I share my concerns here.

I think it speaks volumes how important it was to push ahead and get this website downgrade pushed out live in time for whatever investor meeting or deadline was imminent, so important that it could be filled with factual errors of the sort that any player of the game would notice and question, but any sort of response to the outpouring of negative feedback has been quite unfairly relegated to staff who had no control over any of this. Yep. Also of note: their other products and services consist of monthly subscription "mystery game crate" services and an index of HTML5 shovelware games. I checked their top listed game, a cheap minecraft knockoff named "Minicraft", which failed to load for me, and had a total of 26 user ratings (the 27th from me checking to see if you needed to register an account or do anything more than click one button to rate the game, and you did not. 26 total ratings for their site's "top game".) GCG's entire range of products appears to me like an arrangement of smoke and mirrors to keep syphoning investor cash, there's absolutely no way a site like gameitnow.com is turning a profit, this is the profile of a cannibal investment firm. If Wurm is as important to GCG as their other products, then we know what to expect more of going forward.

This looks like it was made in microsoft excel

A rustic, handcrafted feel. Made with love.

I'm not sure what your point is, the tool seems to correctly identify portions of the text which are GPT-generated. When the only input is an arrangement of words, it's extremely unlikely to throw a 100% match result given a long enough piece of text, it would give too many false positives if it worked that way. I'm not convinced the tool is useless and it's not the only piece of evidence to suggest that GPT is being used by GCG for marketing material or communication with the community.

I had a thought after my last post, having read through Krister's previous posts here on the site, a little red flag went off in my head, there was something about the writing style that felt off to me. I ran his text through a GPT-checker tool. More food for thought.

I have a growing sense of dread that these guys genuinely have no idea what they're doing. GCG tried to bulldoze through changes to the trader system without investigating or attempting to understand any second-order consequences of the changes they wanted to make, because their number one priority was implementing a new storefront, i.e. streamlining the process of parting users from their money. GCG also tried to push for implementing VR for Wurm, a feature that would be used by a portion of the playerbase statistically indistinguishable from a rounding error, and which would bring in exactly zero new players, who would instead keep playing the great number of VR-focused titles available to them. I am in what is probably a tiny minority of people who are both subbed to Wurm Online and own a VR kit and I would like to state emphatically that combining these two things is a recipe for disaster, the idea is bordering on a joke. GCG now using bizarre "placeholder" art when copious art and screenshots exist that actually represent the game, replacing the old logo with a technically and aesthetically worse-looking downgrade, and making improper use of machine-generated text full of factual errors. All of these things were done without consulting any members of the community who we all know are both capable and enthusiastic in their endeavours to make this game better, indeed in their endeavours to make Wurm a living, breathing place. These events, and more, represent to me a pattern of behaviour that illustrates a lack of good judgement or discernment skills on the part of GCG. I would prefer to be wrong about this but it appears by all measures that GCG do not understand what Wurm is, do not understand the importance of legacy and history to this community, and I personally do not trust in their ability to carry the game forward. Rather, I suspect that this game is about to get strip mined by trend-chasing dunning-krugerite investment capital types who falsely have the impression that running a video game company is as simple as using """AI""" tools like a magic wand to do all their work for them, and preying on the goodwill of a community that built up over years around a game that they themselves had nothing to do with building. I urge the rest of you: Disabuse yourselves of the notion that this game is, or will continue to be, the same thing that you loved before it was acquired by GCG, or you risk being exploited.

There is definitely a need for a larger starter's guide for Wurm, the in-game tutorial as it is is not enough to give new players a proper direction when starting out after they cross through the portal. The proper way to demonstrate what's possible in Wurm and how to get yourself on the road to achieving that is ideally NOT by taking them through an excruciating step by step in-game tutorial though, a video companion guide would be perfect. Opting to only create this after new players arrive is a bafflingly shortsighted misunderstanding of a new player's needs. It's like deciding to make yourself a weapon after showing up to a dragon slaying.

I absolutely hate double clicking to activate, so I've had shift+q bound to activate and shift+e bound to combine for many years now. Would recommend putting these on a similar set of keys of your preference that you can hit quickly in one motion. My suggestion: Make embark - commander/ride keybindable pls. Would love to be able to expand and collapse stacks in the UI with a keybind too. Fewer clicks for everything, save my poor clicking finger.

I don't think this is healthy for the game. There are a lot of changes you could make to Wurm in the name of "quality of life" that essentially amount to watering down its unique appeal as a game. When I first started playing I remember learning that my friend had to go on a journey to find someone to convert him or make a dangerous pilgrimage to something called the "white light" in order to join a faith. As a new player I thought that was one of the coolest things I'd ever heard, and it's this and many of Wurm's other idiosyncrasies that hooked me and keep me playing today. Making NFI and SFI equal in this regard is a pointless appeal to symmetry that serves only to make the Wurm experience less about your interactions with other players.

Why? The people who do the work of finding and capturing the uniques (which is the actual hard part) dictate how the slaying goes down and how the loot is split. We don't need a top-down mandate for who gets to benefit from other people's efforts. No-one is going around telling blacksmiths to offer imps at X price, so why do we need to tell hunting groups how to manage their affairs? If I find an utmost silver vein do I have to share it with the rest of the server? This is a non-issue.

I have no problem with you. I have a problem with what you say in your posts, as I have outlined in my posts. I honestly don't know anything about you outside of this thread. This is not a personal issue to me, if you are experiencing anxiety as a result of arguments on a web forum I can only suggest you take a break from the computer.