BrokenSanity

First and foremost, as I and many others have already suggested - Increased skillgain on Defiance. This increase need to be high enough to persuade people to forgo their 25% increased skillgain from PoK, weekly Rites, and profitable PvE market. The percentage increase could scale with meditation level (not path). Secondly - Exclusive skins that can only be acquired on the PvP server. These could be gained through Valrei missions, HoTA rewards, or maybe as rewards for having high battle rank. These skins could be transferable to the Freedom servers to allow people to show off their pvp-gotten-gains. Whether these skins are tradable or account bound is up for discussion, I'm not sure what the best route would be.

Agreed. As I said earlier in the thread; to even begin to compete with all that, a skill gain increase to Defiance should be considered.

And then people will continue to skill solely on PvE due to the ease of gaining sleep bonus from (weekly) Rites, purchased sleep bonus and the 25% increased skill gain from PoK. These proposed changes look very positive, but the final nail in the coffin for PvP will always be the PoK level 11 ability. Reintroducing level 11 meditation to Defiance will not solve this issue as it is not a meta PvP path. People will always choose the PvP-meta path on Defiance, and again, use the PvE servers to grind. The solution to this is really a general increase to the skillgain on Defiance, perhaps linked to meditation level (not path). Without it, why would people put in the effort to hunt/roam for sleep bonus on Defiance, when they could gain 5 hours a week from a simple prayer from Rites, gain skill 25% faster from PoK, and purchase even more sleep bonus from the things they make? I say keep the plan to merge sleep bonus, so everyone can take advantage of the insane rate of Rites PvE can put out, but also make it worth people's time to use the sleep bonus on Defiance.

What? No? Don't do that, please. That's a terrible idea, if I suck a high ql gem to top up my favor bar, I don't want the entire gem being used up only to decay away.

I feel like priests taking armour off before casting is a strange "issue" to be focusing on. Especially as it's a gamble whenever a priest does this as there's a window where they are unarmoured + have a nerfed CR due to casting. To me having such a risk involved means it's fairly balanced. Do people really think PvP will be drastically improved by adding a timer for taking armour off, or other such "fix"? It all just seems like an added frustration to me, and definitely not something that would lead to more people PvPing.

Massive -1. Priests already can't improve, and in some cases can't terraform either. That's 80% of the game inaccessible to priests, and you want to make it so they can only watch pvp from a distance too? No thanks.

You really don't have to worry about incentivising PvE play. There's a lot of players who will never set foot on a PvP server, no matter what bonuses there are - more than enough to keep the PvE servers well populated. The changes being suggested in this thread are specifically to offer incentive for the people who grind on PvE and only jump on Defiance specifically to PvP.

One other aspect to consider after reading this comment from Samool on the other thread: If more methods of gaining sleep bonus are introduced to Defiance, this should still coincide with some form of increased skill gain on Defiance. Otherwise you'll end up with more or less the same problem as before; where people will hop over to Defiance to get their sleep bonus before returning to PvE to grind (due to the aforementioned increased skill gain from PoK 11, selling their goods, etc.).

Sindusk already linked my thread on this, but here it is again: In short, the main reasons people mainly play on the PvE servers are the increased skillgain, and the ability to sell the things you create for silver. The former is partly due to the latter, as you are able to use the silver you make on Freedom's active market to purchase even more sleep bonus, thus increasing skillgain. But as well as that, on PvE you have many more Rites; due to multiple servers and larger concentrations of vynora priests, you have Wisdom of Vynora (which is also bugged due to the fixed 10 hours of fatigue, it's also of course inaccessible to BL priests on Defiance), and soon there will be path of Knowledge level 11, granting a 25% bonus to skill gain, that you can not achieve on Defiance. My most recent suggestion to partly counter this was to passively increase skillgain on Defiance, but not have that increase linked to a specific meditation path. If it was linked to a specific meditation path, and the specific path was not the "PvP-meta path", then people would still choose to skill on freedom, and instead choose the PvP-meta path on Defiance. Instead I suggested linking the passive skill gain increase to overall meditation skill, but there are of course many other ways this could be done.

Bump. One huge benefit to PvE is the Path of Knowledge level 11 ability which grants 25% bonus skill gain. This is unattainable on the PvP servers, as there is a meditation level cap of 9. (I'm not sure how I left this out of the OP, updated it now) As I suggested before, a skill gain bonus on Defiance would help counteract this. Perhaps linked to meditation skill, but irrespective of meditation path?

This. There's so many people wanting to get into pvp, but are unable to due to the poor mob situation right now. I dread to think how many people have already stopped playing because of this (I know for a fact this is a non zero amount). What's more, even with whatever bugs were present in the previous mob spawning code, it was still fun to play for everyone. Isn't that the most important thing?

Faith doesn't transfer when crossing servers, so it is possible to be a priest on PvP and a non priest on PvE, and vice versa.

Bump (it's not just melody though, as I'm sure others in this thread have pointed out)

In short, players are heavily rewarded for playing on PvE servers, whilst a lot of people feel there is little reason to play on Defiance unless there is an active PvP engagement occurring. This is super unhealthy for the PvP community, and if changes aren’t made, the population on Defiance will eventually die. Some of the reasons people frequently choose to play on Freedom rather than Defiance include: More frequent rites, and therefore more sleep bonus. There are a lot more rite casts on Freedom than on Defiance due to the higher population and more concentrated number of Vynora priests. Risk free crafting. Risk free hunting. Items you make can be sold for silver, whereas on Defiance people are more likely to provide items for free. Ease of crossing between Defiance and Freedom. Instead of the Chaos/Freedom isles relationship; where you must sail between servers (which is a risk in itself), portals currently allow you to cross at a moment’s notice in order to respond to PvP. The Path of Knowledge level 11 ability which grants 25% bonus skill gain. This is unattainable on Defiance. Essentially, playing on Freedom just makes a lot of sense for the individual, but if everyone does the same, this has a negative impact on the PvP community. Usually high difficulty is rewarded in Wurm, as it should be, which is why I suggest adding incentives to play on PvP rather than removing features from Freedom: Hunting should ALWAYS be good on PvP. Right now it is terrible, particularly in the south. Spawns should be crazy high. Starter zones could be spared so new players don’t get overwhelmed. Rites could have halved requirements on PvP, and scale with number of active priests in that religion. (Or a timed cooldown, half requirements on PvP might still mean more casts on Freedom). Looting battle camps could give 1 hr sleep bonus to all in local. Valrei missions: If the Defiance server rewards are as the same on Freedom it’d make no sense, as there’s no risk to completing Valrei missions on Freedom. On Defiance, these missions should be more frequent, they should encourage going into enemy lands, and they should give lots of sleep bonus and other rewards for all participants. (My suggestion is keep Valrei missions the same as they currently are on Freedom, but buff the rewards on PvP. Note that this DOES NOT mean adding moon metals or similar to the PvP Valrei rewards.) Exclusive skins that can only be acquired on the PvP server. These could be gained through Valrei missions, HoTA rewards, or maybe as rewards for having high battle rank. These skins could be transferable to the Freedom servers to allow people to show off their pvp-gotten-gains. Some sort of penalty to using a PvP portal, a timed CR nerf or similar. Increased skill gain? Nothing as drastic as Epic, but instead a 10% bonus to all skillgain. These are just some ideas thrown out there as examples, as there are plenty of other ways to increase incentive. Feel free to add more suggestions, like, comment, subscribe, etc. It should also be noted that this thread links up with this one here:

I don't have any screenshots to back it up, but it appears on Defiance there's extremely large gatherings of mobs along the north east coast. Specifically around the deserts there. Meanwhile in the south hunting is near impossible. It was a fun few days being able to hunt before the "fix".

It's already been said, but to reiterate: please don't make any changes like this, it sounds massively over complicated. And would this "pool" be a hidden pool? Would it be another faith-style bar? Either way, I don't like the sound of it.

Bump, I still think this would be a good move.

Why not just make it so pets have to be lead to be ridden?

Doesn't really seem necessary to me -1

Just to note I also reported this bug back in 2017, and it wasn't a new bug even then. It would be good to see it finally fixed.

Bump. Consider this: As most skills currently transfer between the PvE and PvP servers, having a shared sleep bonus pool would not affect game balance in the slightest. The only affects this change would have on this game are positive ones, namely giving people more freedom to choose where they can play. This in turn could perhaps reduce the excess of deeds on the PvE servers slightly, giving the more permanent PvE inhabitants more space to roam, plant deeds, etc.

I fundamentally disagree with Retro's response (quoted above) to when you previously brought up shared sleep bonus. You are being penalised if you choose to play on the server where you do not have sleep bonus. Therefore, in order to not be penalised, you're forced to play on a specific server. As I said, shared sleep bonus would give people more freedom to play where they wish.

The sleep bonus pool should be shared between all servers in the Northern Isles cluster; Defiance, Harmony, and Melody. For example, if you have 3 hours of sleep bonus on one server, you have 3 hours on all the servers. If you use up 20 minutes on one server, you lose 20 minutes on all the servers. Seeing as account/character skills mostly cross between servers, it makes sense for the sleep bonus to cross too. This would stop people feeling like they're forced to play on any specific server in order to use up their sleep bonus, and instead give them the freedom to grind wherever they please.

Bump, this is getting increasingly more important as people on the new servers are going down meditation paths where they can't utilise any of the early bonuses.

+1