Vorticella

I do mostly enjoy the new fishing system, and I don't miss the old one. I think it's more fun, and I love how many other skills are involved when you assemble the various gear and supplies. That said, there are a few things that would improve the current system and give people more reasons to interact with it. A fish journal to complete similar to the almanac, for example, or displaying special fish on a wall plaque. I suspect Tich wanted to add a way to put fish on display, because examining a freshly caught fish gives information about who caught it and when. Why would you need that for an item just to go into bulk storage? This makes me think the fishing system was not quite done when Tich passed and sadly nobody has stepped up to finish it for her. The biggest QoL issue for me is honestly just that it's too tedious to keep a supply of all the different types of bait and floats. These should be bulk items, at the very least! I wish the tackle box would stop decay on all items in it, so you can take the time to put together a complete fishing kit as a big one time effort, and then it's ready so you can just activate your rod, add bait and float, and just start fishing without spending 30 mins getting set up every time. The bait and float items get used up and the gear takes damage on use, so you still have to top things up as you use them, but you wouldn't have to go through that tedious setup stage every single time. Storing the box in an LMC is not the answer, because I either forget to bring the tackle box out, decide to fish when I'm too far away to reasonably go back for it, or forget to put it back after and everything rots away while it's in my inventory. Every item in the tackle box is specific to fishing, so it's not like you could take advantage of this to store items for some other purpose. There's no reason it has to be this tedious; it feels like fighting with the game instead of playing it.

-1 to more skins, but huge +1 to using this idea to improve the actual game and increase player numbers and retention (and therefore income)

Ahh okay, that makes sense

WurmNode maps are populated when volunteers add things to the map based on what they see in game. If something is missing from the map it's just because nobody has added it, it doesn't have anything to do with when the deed was founded.

I feel like we're watching the devs make new content and throw it in the garbage every month. These decor items would add so much to the game if they were implemented as high level crafting options. They could be inspiring and motivating players to keep training their skills so they can make them too and bring their deeds and the game world to life. Such a shameful waste doing it this way

Why can't you add an action to settlement tokens that lets you travel between starter town and your own deed, which works just like a priest summon/karma home? That seems (to an outsider) like the most straightforward and accessible solution. That kind of teleport mechanic is in the game already, and everyone with a deed would have access automatically.

Good idea! This would let you check or restock your merchant with an alt if your main is far from home. Very convenient if you travel a lot or have deeds on multiple servers.

Still eagerly waiting for the karma teleport home + mount that was announced a while ago!

Couldn’t it work the same as the village teleport or being summoned by a priest, or the karma home?

Why is there a fixation on this being a pvp thing? It's only a "pvp skill" because it doesn't currently have any use on pve... so what's the problem with adding one?

@jaytooIn case this comment got lost in the discussion about fees, I'm very curious to know if you'd be willing to consider this. If the teleport was attached to the deed token it would be even more convenient and accessible than mailboxes since everyone with a deed automatically has one.

As a strictly PvE player I would only see this as a reason to learn a skill that is currently completely useless to us. It's just a new activity. The reason I don't set foot in PvP is because it's too stressful and I don't enjoy anything about it, not because there isn't enough PvP in it I really don't see lockpicking as a "PvP skill", it's just a skill that is currently only useful for PvP. Giving it a use in PvE won't change anything about the way I feel about PvP or make me want to engage in it or even think more about it, at all.

This is a great idea, and would be even better if they extended it to have the locked chests occasionally scattered randomly around the world for explorers to stumble upon. "Gatekeeping" special items or experiences behind skills is generally how games work. It keeps players motivated and engaged. This idea adds a reason to use a largely ignored skill, and would add a bit more depth to the game too. Instead of just finding a camp, killing mobs and collecting loot, now there's an extra layer of interaction added. It could be even more fun if the locks involved some sort of puzzle to open them instead of just rng and a long timer but this is still Wurm, so we should manage our expectations lol. Finding a random special item or event is always exciting, and it makes it even more exciting when you have to do a little extra to actually obtain the loot. That feeling of suspense and wondering what's inside the box lasts a little bit longer. And even if you don't care to train the skill, it's like finding a random bit of extra silver since these will certainly be easy to sell to others. I can't see any reason this wouldn't be a great addition to the game. Also, I disagree that it needs any alternative ways to open them because unlike WoW anyone in Wurm can train lockpicking. It's just a personal choice if you bother to do it or not.

I think it would be better if the teleport action is attached to a physical location like the deed token or a portal structure on your deed, because that would be restricted enough without adding more nuisance timers. Cooldowns or combat timers would be particularly frustrating for something like this, eg. if you want to quickly check on an auction before logging out but you just came in contact with a spider, now you have to stand and wait for five minutes before you can go.. then we'd definitely see more auction house alts. An instant teleport at the deed token (or a portal) without any cooldowns can be just as convenient as having access to the auction house at the mailbox, but with all the benefits of having an actual auction house in the game world rather than just a UI thing. If it uses the deed token then it's actually even more accessible than a mailbox.

Since portals between starter towns are in development, what about adding a teleport from our deeds to the starter towns and back too? Some will automatically react negatively to this idea, but I really think it's worth considering. It could be a craftable structure or even just an action taken at the deed token. Only useable by citizens of the deed to go to that server's starter town and back again. This way the auction house can be an in-world thing that is easily accessible to anyone with a deed regardless of location. It would naturally add more activity to the starter towns, might help revive markets in those areas and increase the chance of new players seeing other people around when they first enter the server.

Yes! And not just for new players. Last night I was trying to experiment with some ingredients to unlock recipes, and was disappointed to find it still broken. I really enjoy that activity, hope it will be fixed soon!

That's good to hear, thanks for clarifying

Not everyone chooses to grind strength that way but everyone needs to do it to raise woodcutting. You can gain strength from plenty of other actions. If you want to raise woodcutting to a decent level you have to go cut down a lot of trees even if you don't want to, and at higher levels you often have to travel far away searching for suitable areas in order to do it without causing friction among local residents. I can't think of any other skill that causes conflict like this one does. Kindling only takes you so far, and it's not fun to make thousands of kindling that you'll barely use whereas planks are always good to have on hand. I really think you guys are overestimating the importance of planks for raising carpentry skill. I found it very easy to raise carpentry through normal gameplay without ever focusing on it as a grind. It was my first decent skill on both my main characters and was quickly very far above other skills, because it naturally gets used so much when starting out. Building a house, fences, making and imping furniture and vehicles. SO many actions use carpentry. Woodcutting has always felt like a slow, forced grind. I think it's perfectly reasonable to move plank creation over to woodcutting to balance it better and reduce the impact of training it. Or, just add it so planks give a bit of both skills.

The problem with how it is, as I originally said, is the insane number of trees people have to cut down just to gain skill. With mining you can stand on one tile and hit a vein thousands of times. That doesn't change the landscape or affect other players in any way, and it's a nice chill activity to do while watching a movie. With woodcutting you have to keep finding increasingly large areas of land to clear if you don't want to wait for regrowth, and plenty of people are very bothered when they log in to find a forest near them in ruins because someone passed through to looking to get a skill tick. Digging could definitely use a better skillgain system too, that's a great point

They also need woodcutting skill pretty soon when they want to imp their wooden items, eg. their mallet, and the logs they cut aren't high enough quality. There are tons of ways to raise carpentry skill but woodcutting only comes from cutting large numbers of trees or making kindling which isn't very effective after very early stages.

It's just providing an opportunity for additional woodcutting skill from the same tile. Nothing is required. You can always just leave them if for some reason you like the way they look and don't care about the extra skill.. personally I think they look awful, especially large fields of them, even if it's just for a few days. There are other carpentry creation items priests can make to grind carpentry without imping (eg. shafts) that wouldn't need to be affected by this.

Players grinding woodcutting have to cut down insane numbers of trees to reach high skill levels. This often creates friction between players, and it feels wasteful to go out and clear huge areas, producing hundreds of thousands of logs just for tiny skill gains. I suggest giving woodcutting skill for making planks and chopping up tree stumps. This way a player can get much more skill per tree and have less of a negative impact on the area where they are training. This would also make it more feasible for someone to maintain their own tree farms for grinding since it requires less land, and it would add some variety to the skill gaining actions, making it a little less tedious to train. Carpentry can easily be raised by improving items, so I don't think it would be a significant loss to the carpentry skill to have planks give woodcutting instead.

The starting island is a great idea, looking forward to seeing how that will be implemented. I think you can encourage people to move on simply by limiting the resources available there, eg. the most difficult mob is a wolf, the only ore veins are iron, only trees are pine and birch, etc. Most people will crave more pretty fast, but if some players want to stay there and live as perpetual newbies, then new players will log in to find an active community rather than a ghost town, so it's not necessarily a bad thing Portals sound great. One of the biggest reasons I skip events has always been long travel times. I just don't have time for it anymore and it's not fun, especially on return trips. Exploring and traveling are very different and I'm so happy to finally see some fast travel options coming in. I would love to see portals we can craft on our own deeds to quickly jump over to the starter town and back. Items (and even a mount imo) should transfer on portals within the same server. Starter towns would really come to life with frequent visitors and thriving markets, making a much better first impression for newbies and bringing back a sense of community to the game. As a more timid player I'm very much in favour of the auction house concept. If we have on-deed portals to starter towns that include item transfers, the auction house could be a physical structure and NPC at the starter town instead of working via the mailbox. Much more immersive and brings people together. One thing I wasn't very excited about was this: I'm hoping I misunderstand this part and you mean adding more craftable items into the game as regular content, but it sounds like we're going to start seeing craftable items in the silver shop. Please, please limit the silver shop cosmetics to weapons and armour/clothing that the character equips. Decorative items, furniture, new vehicle models etc. should be added directly into the game as normal new content. By drawing this line the silver shop items will feel like bonus extras without competing with the regular gameplay of building and crafting items to customize and decorate our deeds. Items other than special player cosmetics should be added as new content to the game, which is something we expect to see when we already pay for monthly premium subscriptions. Limit access to special decorative items by gameplay, not silver. Put them behind high skills so we're motivated to stay in the game. Player retention is important for your profits too.

This would be amazing, only if the placed items could also be somehow designated as decorations so they don't just decay away over time. Otherwise we'll end up with even more barren, empty spaces.

This! I agree with OP that the Christmas event was more fun because it involved some actual gameplay, but I still wish the seasonal items were given as recipes. I can't stand how almost everything new is a limited collector's item now. Most skin tokens just sit in my bags cause I'm too reluctant to use them, since they're basically irreplaceable. So I don't even get new items from these events, just some more yellow dots in my inventory.