JontomXire

If the server is down, how come the game client login page says there are people logged into servers? Haven't played for years, thought I'd give it a go and find the servers are down. An hour or so later try again and all is well. Just finishing the tutorial and bang! servers are down again. Trying to persuade a friend to play with me, but not easy to even play let alone persuade someone else to when servers are so crap. Loving the new graphics though!

Fixed. Thanks.

I was asked to add this to help all newbies on kingdom chat over the weekend. I plan to add it to the skills section of the Wiki too - unless one of you beats me to it. Currently there is a bug (and the fact it's been in the game for years doesn't mean it's intended functionality) whereby if a skill is not in your tree it counts as being skill level 0. This gives you a very low probability (6% to 9%) of success at making something using that skill. Once you have failed (and wasted materials), the skill is added to your skill tree at the minimum skill level of 1 and you will typically get a 30-40% success probability of using it. A big improvement. To workaround this bug without wasting materials, the best solution is to try crafting something using the skill, but instantly stop the crafting activity. This will add the skill to the skill tree so you now have skill level 1, but you don't lose any materials. Before you all start flaming me for pointing out the obvious, it's only obvious if you already know it. This post is intended for people new to the game. Secondly, while many materials are so common that a little wastage is no big deal, that's not true of them all for all people. I cannot get enough steel together to even begin to level plate smithing for example. Lastly I suggest we sticky this thread for future new players, and maybe extend it with other "well known" work arounds and bug avoidance tips. I'm happy to accept any useful suggested edits to make this post more concise/neat/informative.

Thanks, Wulfgar. Good post! My logic was ok, but the information I was acting on was incorrect. I appreciate the clarification. I was going off what I read somewhere (probably in the Wiki) which made it seem that success was solely related to the QL of the handle.

So all his text about how the tutorial is irritating to existing players...? If it wasn't relevant to his argument/conclusion, why post it? I guess that was why I got confused. Thanks for the clarification.

Shalbriri, you confuse me. To summarise your post: Paragraph 1: The tutorial is good for new players. Paragraph 2: The tutorial is irritating to existing players, it's not for them. Paragraph 3: The tutorial is not there for existing players but for new players and is good for new players. From that I would have thought your conclusion would be that existing players should not be forced to do the tutorial, that they should be allowed to skip it - yet your actual conclusion was against the skip option. Your arguments do not seem to support your conclusion. What did I miss?

The lottery thing was a slight exaggeration. That should be obvious. The chances the game was quoting for me to attach a handle to my blade with a 8QL handle was about 12%, so I very much doubt that the chance with a 1QL handle would be 40% somehow. It would probably be better, if not exactly quicker to level up woodcutting than to just keep retrying. Let's say the chance of attaching the handle with my skill level is 10% and the chance of my making a handle successfully is 50%, then on average I would need 20 attempts to make a handle. If the chance of making the blade is 50% then I also need 20 attempts to make a blade. That leaves me with 10 handles and 10 blades of which one pair will make the tool I want. I need 50 creation attempts in order to make the tool. In actual fact I did make 10 handles and 10 blades and still kept failing. I suspect that in practise more like 100 or more creation attempts would be needed. By contrast, if I level up woodcutting, how many actions would I need to do to produce a log of sufficient QL to make a handle of sufficient QL that I have a 50% chance of attaching handle and blade. Probably a lot more than 100, but probably not that much more and at the end I can regularly make handles that give me 50% success which saves a lot of time over the long run. Then maybe you ought to read a little closer. All you're hearing from me is how I don't want to waste my time levelling all the skills in the game when a bit of teamwork means I can concentrate on a few skills while others concentrate on others and we all get better results quicker. Or maybe being a hermit is not for me.

If they are so obvious and so truthful, why can't you present them, with supporting evidence, etc. in such a way that I accept them as truths? All my co-workers, who have good logical faculties, can. Maybe it's because you are unable to distinguish between subjective and objective (facts and opinions) or unable to recognise the flaws in the arguments being made. Someone may know something that is true. It may be obvious to them from their knowledge and experience that it is true, but blindly stating that it is true is not a logical argument, and if it isn't well supported by logical arguments founded on good evidence then if a listener doesn't accept their "obvious truth" then that is their fault and not that of the listener. You say "talking about things you know nothing of". Well then teach me so I do know something about it - although usually people who say that are both exaggerating and being aggressive in order to be able to dismiss everything someone says, not just the bits where they actually are mistaken. Secondly, if you pay attention you will notice that I very rarely state "you are wrong" or "such and such is not true". Instead I ask questions that may imply that something is wrong, or state contradictory opinions (usually with supporting evidence). This is not me saying you are wrong. This is me trying to understand the gap between our understandings as well as attempting to close it by providing additional information you may lack or show you my frame of mind - the way I am thinking. By doing this someone may something they missed that makes them believe my view, or it may be they realise and state something I missed which changes my mind. It doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong - what matters is coming to an agreement. In my experience this technique works very well with people who are able to analyse and understand and have open minds to learn and adjust their thinking. It works very poorly with people who either have fixed incorrect beliefs, completely contrasting subjective beliefs, or who are unable or unwilling to explain their point of view sufficiently well to close the gap. Over the last 20 years or longer I have found that this works most of the time when discussing something objective or subjective with a strong degree of commonality between the people involved. Anyway, we're off topic here. The general opinion seems to be : *) That teamwork is recommended for Freedom, and more or less essential for Epic. *) That many villages are happy or even eager to take in new players and support them by giving them decent tools, etc. *) That some people prefer to live as hermits, but probably far fewer than the 90% quoted actually do.

Because free alts are circumventing certain mechanics. Decay is there to prevent the servers from overloading from billions of items, yet what is the use when everyone can just make tons of free alts to store unlimited items with no decay? That means Rolf just has to make decay higher and punish players who don't abuse free alts like that. You mean that items in inventory don't decay? I didn't know that. Wouldn't a simple fix be just to make them decay even when they are in your inventory if you log off more than X days? You mean running 10 clients simultaneously? There are ways to prevent that too. 1) Linking all characters and alts to a single account and only allowing one client to use that account at a time is a good start. Especially if each account is required to use a unique email address. It also then means that if someone pays for premium they get it for all characters on that account. I am not aware if this is how it already works or not. 2) Having the client report a unique identifier to the server is also good, but bypassable with a hacked client. 3) Having the client detect if there is another client already running is also good, but bypassable with a hacked client. 4) Having the server detect clients on duplicate IP addresses and analyse behaviour to try and determine if it is two people in the same house or one person with two or more clients is difficult to do but feasible. Incidentally, using a client written in something a bit more low level than Java, specifically a pre-compiled language, makes it a lot harder to reverse engineer the client and hack it, and adding encryption to the network traffic helps prevent people sniffing that to reverse engineer the client too. But we're getting a bit off topic here. To summarise, I don't think making the tutorial un-skippable will do very much at all to avoid alt abuse. There are very simple things you can do that will make it much much harder to abuse alts than that, and without inconveniencing people who aren't abusing alts or breaking the rules.

Just out of curiosity, what is this objection to alts that everyone has? If I was to create an alt I would definitely want to skip the tutorial (unless helping someone else through it). I don't see any reason not to create an alt (have a miner and a smith and a mason and so on). Is it just that people create alts and use them to "grief" people? How much grief could a new alt with low skill levels in everything actually cause?

High curiosity. High attention to detail. High ability to logically analyse and find inconsistencies. Low ability to just let things go. Makes me very good at my job, but a pain to debate against unless you're as pernickety about detail as I am.

Did you ever read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov? It postulates that while people as individuals are unique and act and behave in unique and different ways, in large numbers their behaviour succumbs quite easily to statistical analysis and, with an accurate enough statistical analysis, can be accurately predicted. I may not have done an in depth statistical analysis of a large sample, but I believe my observations are still in the right ballpark. That my conclusions are reasonable enough. And it's not just based on "one or two threads and a few comments by random people", but on my experience playing MMORPGs and MUDs for over a decade. Of course no-one likes being lumped into a group or treated as a stereotype. However feelings and emotions do not affect the truth. That's what I meant about it being a logical analysis not a personal attack. You don't like "being lumped into one giant group". That's not a logical argument and does not contribute to proving or disproving the theory. Years back when the theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around, Galileo was forced, on pain of torture/death/whatever to recant his theory by the church. The Church not liking Galileo's theory, and Galileo recanting, didn't change the truth. I'm not saying my theory is the truth, it's a theory which is relevant to the topic at hand. I'm not keen on being considered as a number, as an entity who's behaviour can be mathematically mapped and predicted. However as a philosopher and a scientist I'm not going to ignore or refute the possibility based on whether I like it or not! Looking at the amount of money that marketing people throw at market analysis (statistical analysis of people's views/likes and dislikes divided by market segment (male/female, age range, lifestyle, affluence, family status, etc. etc.)) I'd say they are finding that lumping people into several giant groups, as I did, is a very effective way of analysing what large groups of people do and don't want. So I stand by my theory. That the current tiny population of Wurm mostly consists of the type of "builder" MMORPG player, often named carebears, to whom good graphics and animation are unimportant and to whom the presence of other players is relatively unimportant, hence why there are so many hermits in this game (as cited in many posts by many players). Further that to attract more people the game needs to appeal to other types of MMORPG players and that those types of player desire, or require, much better graphics and animation.

You dont need 60ql handles to make stuff.... You can make tools even with a 1ql handle your creation chance will be lower but still you can make them Please stop making pointless threads if you dont know what you are talking about. As for the rest: its called friends A complete stranger wont give you good QL ore thats like going to someone on the street and ask them to give you $100 so that you can buy stuff that you need without working for the money... I do know what I'm going on about. I lost count of the number of blades got turned to scrap metal because the handle QL wasn't high enough - and it was much higher than 1 in every case. Sure it's possible to make tools with 1QL handles. It's also possible to win the lottery. But you won't find me buying lottery tickets and you won't find me wasting my time trying to make a tool with a 1QL handle. Mostly because it would be quicker to level woodcutting, level carpentry, make a 20QL handle, and use that to make a tool first attempt. As for friends, yes, great. I don't have any friends who play this game. I wanted to play with my wife, but she doesn't like the game. I think the posters who say they are happy to help a new player and hand out 50QL tools to do so have it right. Someone else said that some people hand out tools worth lots of real life money to new starters. Umm, if the tools are that easy to make and readily available that you would give them to a new recruit who you don't really know if you can trust them, are they really that valuable? To be specific, who would buy them? If they are worth that much, the only people with money to buy them would be people who could make them for themselves. I haven't seen any merchants selling them or offering to buy them.

Actually what you say gives me a specific idea. I know there are geographical limitations, but a village in a linear setting with a small orchard, a forge, a wood working shop etc. etc. would be great. As you walk past each building you get a pop-up dialogue in the same way as in the current tutorial suggesting you go in and telling you a little bit about each type of crafting or whatever, and if you go in there's several rooms with more tutorial dialogues in each and tools available that automatically respawn (and are removed from your inventory when you leave the building) with materials etc. to practise what you are learning. If you want to skip it, simply walk past all the buildings and ignore all the dialogue windows. It would be much like the current tutorial in its linearity, and each section would be in it's own area in the same way, except you have a choice to simply walk past if you're not interested. Also, and unlike the tutorial, you would be able to go back and redo a section if you wanted. So if when you hit the cookery section having skipped the pottery section, you realised you needed to learn to make clay bowls, you could go back to the pottery section, get some clay and make some bowls.

Wulfgar and Othob, I am fully aware that the views of a few do not necessarily represent the views of the many. I was however shocked at the general response to many of my posts and threads elsewhere in this forum, both by the general attitude and by the near unanimity. To take one case in point, people were actively stating that they like the current crafting UI, which has to be one of the least user-friendly interfaces I have ever met requiring no fewer than 5 clicks to craft a single item. Among the various reasons given was that the interface is good because it drives people away. My posts weren't talking about dumbing down the game, just about making the interface less RSI friendly and easier to use. Plisscken, in other games people from a country tend to play together, either by starting as a group of RL friends, or by actively recruiting for only people from that country. Of course it's a lot harder when the total game population is barely a thousand, if that. I suspect if there were language specific chat channels (a better solution is to allow player created chat channels) that they might be fairly deserted. I know that on the occasions I have played, the server generally has fewer than 10 people on it. Even if there were hundreds of people on the server, it's unlikely that many of them would be non-English speakers. To be honest, I think having English only in game menus etc. is a bigger barrier to non-English speakers than the chat channels. Ago, it depends how well the animations are done. If they are very well done, they help immersion which means "non-geeks" (to use your metaphor) find it easier to get into the game, to become more "geeky". Moreover I think having good combat animation would be a big crowd puller. Many people who play MMOs do so because they want to be a hero - fight monsters etc. etc. Many people play to roleplay and just to be immersed in a fantasy world. The first lot are happy to do crafting and build settlements as a support function to that, and the second lot are happy to fight monsters etc. as part of being immersed in a fantasy world. For the first group, good combat animations are essential so they can feel heroic. For the second group, good animations generally are important so they can feel immersed, but customising their own appearance is essential so they can feel that they have their own identity. However the current population of Wurm seems to consist in most part of Carebears who just want to build stuff and for whom the animation is fine as it is. The sad thing is that while the wannabe heroes want an audience to admire them and their heroicness, and the role-players want people to role-play amongst, the carebears don't really need, or want, other people. Hence the comment I saw in this forum somewhere earlier that 90% of players are hermits. As the animation is as it is, most of the wannabe heroes and roleplayers don't bother going much past the tutorial and so almost all that is left is the carebears. And because they aren't too bothered about the animation and general polish...a classic vicious circle. I know I'm making quite big generalisations about carebears and I am aware it might upset some of you. This is a logical analysis not a personal attack, ok, guys (and girls). There are many of you who appreciate very strongly the other aspects of the game and I'm one of them. I love the complexity and realism, but I also know that it would all be more realistic with more players. I have seen many empty settlements in my travels, and none that were occupied except the one I was travelling to - and even that is usually empty when I log on. So personally I would prefer if everyone was in one server rather than 8 or so, and I would personally prefer to see more people, even if some of them are going to be jerks who just want to take advantage of other people (that's realistic too) and even if some of them are going to be wannabe heroes or roleplayers or whatever other personality type they are. Because that's what the real world is like - full of different people with different views. And also because this game has enough realism (or would with more people) to be self-regulating. Anybody who spends all his time griefing in a PvP world will, in short order, be hunted down by a large group of heavily armed men on horses - that's realism. And if he's very annoying they might lock him up too (seeing as death isn't permanent), even if they have to build the jail around him rather than throw him in one. Sorry for the wall of text. I have opinions of which I am not ashamed, and too much time on my hands. I also love the potential of this game - it is exactly what I want barring a few small but unfairly important factors. So because I care - I post.