Ols

I would love to see a more intense PvE experience and Epic would be a good cluster to implement it on. I think in this instance Epic ought to have "home server rules" with reputations and outlaw status, enabling people to engage in stealing/lockpicking out of sight of guards, not be tripped up by stupid "protected areas" and preventing people from fencing off vast areas of land.

Resetting it would defeat the point of adding it to SFI, but yes they could just add the home servers to the SFI cluster. Something would still need to be done about people's different skillsets per cluster.

I don't see the point of "fixing" it. The fundamental problem of Epic is that it exists. Defiance has a lot of the QoL rules Elevation has, but has refined them into a more enjoyable experience. Defiance also has the Valrei experience. Epic has provided people with a lot of fun over the years but now its time to say goodbye to it. Totally agree. If the issue is people not wanting to lose their legacy, leave the home servers around as a small PvE cluster and let people portal to and from it from all the other clusters, using the same Freedom skillset. I'd rather have my little PvE skilling base there than NFI. After that, no further cluster specific work is required. Someone will simply patch in another balance breaking horse change a couple of years later and the cycle will repeat, lol.

I don't think a day is enough for us to get around trebbing down all the ugly deeds and bridges people spam across the Freedom servers, can the time window be made longer?

Travel being slow is a really important part of the game and makes the world feel large. It would spoil the game for a lot of people if it was faster, in my view. There are already wagoneers, teleports and the ability to chart course, all of which have done a bit to spoil the feeling of Wurm being a large expanse of islands that you can explore for days on end. Because that would render unicorns obsolete. Maybe the issue is that unicorns are too difficult to obtain and breed?

A character that becomes a priest on Defiance and portals back to NFI will not be a priest there. Faith, favour, alignment and the God you worship are not shared between Defiance and NFI. The relationship between Defiance and NFI is very different to Chaos and SFI. I agree that every starter town on every Freedom server should have a religious advisor for this purpose. Alternatively, include the ability to become a priest at a holy site as part of the Holy Sites patch in February.

Chaos is long past its sell by date and has a much lower pop than Defiance. Chaos is never going to recover to significant numbers because its a few extremely strong deeds and a sea of ruins and messed up land. If its such a great map then it should be wiped back to how it looked on launch and the Defiance ruleset imposed, as you said. Being able to physically transfer items from Chaos to SFI was also a terrible mistake and has ruined the dynamic of the server, allowing people to craft in completely safety and take their loot out of reach of their enemies. Its not a problem that can be fixed without wiping the map, which is why we got Defiance and why people enjoy it on Defiance more.

Repurposing the Epic cluster: I don't see the reasoning for wiping Defiance but I agree that Epic needs to close and it needs to close NOW. Tbh I think you'd be better off turning the 3 home servers into full PvE so that people don't lose their work there. Consider doing one final Epic skill transfer (from Epic to SFI) and then removing the separate skill progression there. I'd really like the idea of having one of the Epic home servers for my PvE base and being able to portal there from Defiance, especially if Affliction retains the special distinction of being naturally covered in Mycelium. I think the population would pick up on each if everyone is reassured that they are and will remain PvE only, with the new starter experience being better if they were able to see Freedom chats from there. Alternatively, you could keep the 3 home servers as the PvP kingdoms but still have the server be PvE, with physical travel on and off the server blocked but portalling allowed from any other cluster. That would leave them available for Defiance players to portal to and from for training/relaxing, whilst also allowing people from Freedom to visit for a slightly different experience. Closing Elevation and Chaos: I think Elevation and Chaos should be cut and the servers actually shut down. Release both as WU maps if people are interested. Chaos has always had a fairly steady baseline pop but I feel like its continued existence has always dragged down the potential of newer PvP servers. Allowing full skill transfer from Chaos to Defiance would imo eliminate the main issue with the server being closed. Elevation 3 was something of a failure to launch and I don't think anyone will really miss it when its gone. Chaos is by far the oldest server in the game and is so covered in ruins as to be a vastly different experience from a fresh PvP map. I tend to feel like PvP maps covered in ruins get stale and remove part of the fun of selecting and building up a new site. I think this was implicit in recent calls to reset chunks/remove ruins in certain places on Defiance. If an erosion system is ever added, trying it on PvP servers for areas that are not deeded and haven't been deeded for a period of time would be interesting. A possible future PvP server: I don't think we actually need to go down to 1 PvP server, but the offering should be radically different for each and you should be able to quickly portal between the two. Assuming Defiance will remain unchanged, I think the obvious complementary step would be to release a 1000x1000 map (or at least no larger than 2000x2000) map to serve as more of a PvP arena, physically connected to NFI and/or SFI, based around open-field PvP and objectives in the field, providing both functional and cosmetic items that are new to the Wurm economy. Its clear that a proportion of PvP players like the idea of regular map resets and I feel like it'd be better to set aside a specific map to work on this model, potentially with PvP breaks in between, so that people don't invest large amounts of time building up a deed that will just get wiped in a year. It'd also be a welcome opportunity to experiment with other PvP models like not having defined kingdoms and instead putting people in relatively generic "teams" which can use all 4 priests, don't have access to artifacts and don't have the great altars. New player experience on PvP: There should imo be more of an incentive for people who mostly play PvE to try their luck on a small PvP server without a strong commitment. It's hard for PvE players to get known in the PvP community and get settled on a PvP server, and offering ways to actually experience combat in a more "instant action" mode may help. It's a shame to see PvE players hopping over, not being allowed to join the existing alliances and quitting, or arriving and making a PvE deed that eventually gets raided and quitting. Any solution should try to take into account the needs of new players who absolutely should have the chance to PvP but also shouldn't be funneled there as soon as they create their account and get a wildly unrepresentative experience of what Wurm is like.

Those 5 votes should have to come from accounts that also pass a skill check, not just any premium account. One of those skills should be fight skill so accounts who've recently crossed from PvE but are otherwise good are ineligible to back a candidate. With regards to the altars, I've long figured that the Altar of Three should be divided up into individual great altars. Then a kingdom could be near Fo's sanctuary but not Magranon's or Vynora's. This would coincide very well with the Holy Sites update expected in February and would reduce the perceived necessity to camp near the Whitelight.

The PMK zone is a completely wacky and arbitrary choice, but I don't object to default kingdoms having a sort of semi-protected area beyond the starter zone where PMKs cannot expand their own influence. That should be defined more as a radius from the starter area than as a square or straight line. If you want to keep base kingdoms viable then you need to look more seriously at how the rulers are chosen. Random selection by an NPC that anyone can approach makes them inferior to PMKs and screws over kingdoms when an inexperienced character or an alt gets it. The ruler of a default kingdom being able to freely pass on the crown or lose it in a martial challenge seems sensible to me - the NPC should only get involved if the previous ruler abdicated/quit without designating an heir.

Yeah, accounts here are good enough that it doesn't matter anymore. Just block item transfer and its good. PvP portals should let you choose between Defiance, NFI, SFI and Epic.

Yeah, it would actually be weird. I'm not sure if a potter would use a glove, though? Maybe there should be a pottery wheel that can be enchanted with the same effect, but you wouldn't hold it in inventory.

Allow us to put WoA/BotD/CoC on our hands!

If it was called a ledger, it would be interesting if you could take reports of the contents of bulk containers, liquid containers and a few other things and have them sum up on the sheet, with certain limitations. Then you could be carrying a book with a listing of your current stockpiles, ingame. I'm sure PvE players could think of other valuable uses for a type of paper that records numbers and performs sums rather than plain text.

Totally agree. Maybe call it a Ledger?

That's generally what the toolbelt is for and its a defence against macroing. Being able to simply spam your improve and repair binds on every item you're imping would significantly change the experience of the game and not in a good way, imo.

Oh yeah, this too. I absolutely hate that colour affects speed. Let us have a bit of diversity god damn it. They should state that Defiance is canonically on Jackal/Seris/Valrei and give us Wetas back. It'd be badass to be able to PvP on the backs of giant cockroaches. The good thing about Wetas is that they were decent even without breeding, and they could be balanced separately from horses without needing to have more special horse rules on Defiance.

I think rare traits should be impossible on Defiance and hell horses and unicorns should stop spawning completely. The whole point is that people shouldn't have to spend crazy amounts of time prepping horses to be competitive in PvP. Alternatively you could make it so that the appearance of a hell horse or a unicorn is a cosmetic mutation that bred horses can have with no speed impact or other utility.

It looks like you may have machine translated this from Russian. A lot of the text here doesn't make sense or is very difficult to read. I recommend you remove the pictures or format them as external links, and list out each of your suggestions under headings so that its clear what you're asking for. At the moment this reads like a load of disconnected thoughts about the game with no overall conclusion.

I think it says somewhere that your spirit guards are the ones repairing the deed. I suppose if you don't have spirit guards then it doesn't make as much sense.

Deeds already prevent structures from decaying. There is no need for further mechanics in this regard. Items that need to be safeguarded from decay on deed can be placed in a bsb, fsb, crate or a magical chest.

Frankly CA Help should be cross kingdom. There are lots of very experienced players who can't help because they're on a PvP server at the time. If you made it so that all kingdoms had the same CA Help channel then you would likely see more volunteers stepping in to answer difficult questions. People are mature enough not to use the channel for cross kingdom trash talk. HotS CA Help is almost always dead and I assume JK and MR channels are the same.

Whilst there might not be a pressing need to add ballista back, I do agree that "hammers" skill should be removed and the warhammer subskill should be moved under mauls. Generally speaking there ought to be a skill prune with strange duplicates cut, behemoth parent skills like "Nature" broken up, and unduly specific subskills like blade smithing and weapon head smithing removed. I'd even go as far as to rename characteristics to have single word names and delete the parents for each, such as: Strength (body strength) Stamina (body stamina) Agility (body control) Logic (mind logic) Reflexes (mind speed) Passion (soul strength) Clarity (soul depth) Tidying up what has always been a fairly convoluted set of skills takes priority over keeping meal calculations the same imo - and you could always just make it so that meals for a removed skill just give a generic bonus or no affinity bonus at all.

I think there should really just be a binary WL vs. BL setup with people free to set up competing alliances within that framework. Remove the penalties for WLers fighting people of the same kingdom provided that they are not from the same alliance. I'd be minded to say that alliances within the same alignment should allowed to declare war or make peace with one another at will, but BL alliances should always be hostile to WL ones. One island could function as a BL sanctuary where intra-kingdom PvP is penalised or prevented, and conversely one island could be the WL sanctuary on the same basis. I get that this would entail new code being added but I think it might better address issues of most/all default kingdoms being pushed back to starter and totally marginalised by PMKs. A new player with no village arriving on Defiance would then be neutral to an alliance of the same alignment rather than hostile.

I think that should be a thing regardless. I don't think its a long term solution though.