Sindusk

I agree that the combat system is poorly understood. However, I believe the reason is because it's an illusion of depth when in reality those adjustments to combat do almost nothing. Whether you aim for arm or legs doesn't matter much in PvE combat. It simply presents itself like it does. PvP is slightly different. More on topic, the combat system could definitely use an update. The problem becomes that basically nobody understands the combat system intimately enough to actually begin reworking it. Understanding the code that runs combat takes an extremely long time to comprehend. After comprehension, you would then need to identify the issues you're trying to solve and plan a course of change in order to improve it. With the other projects currently at work, I doubt anyone working on the game has time to tackle a combat overhaul.

I've changed the link on the OP to link to the GitHub repositories instead of the Google Drive folder. This should remove some confusion about mods not working because they are out of date (the Google Drive versions were incredibly old). Furthermore, I updated the download links for Armoury and StarterGear to their GitHub counterparts. That error indicates a problem with the properties file, specifically the path it's using to get to the DiscordRelay. If you can show your properties file (without your Discord bot token) it would help troubleshoot the issue. Ensure the first line of the properties files matches the one provided. If you're running the server on linux, I've also experienced issues with capitalization being incorrect. Ensure that the files and properties match with capitalization.

Why? All this does is add another weird mechanic obscured by the game itself and make it harder to understand. If I have a 20QL item it should be a 20QL item. Not a 20QL item that acts like a 43.6QL item. That's just... why? If the point is to make the starter gear lower QL so players can upgrade them more easily with lower skills, there's much better ways to do that. Scale the math up on their use cases so lower quality items function better. This is a really sloppy change. While the follower changes make sense overall, it might be worthwhile to consider adding 10% characteristic gains across the board to all characters. With the changes made, Vynora followers get punished while everyone else gets bonuses. Instead, if you add the 10% characteristics skill bonus to everyone, then add these changes on top of what already existed, everyone ends up happy. By doing this change, you've essentially closed a "window of opportunity" that was used in order to skill accounts to where they are. Players from this point forward are forever slower to gain characteristics than those who had the Vynora bonus before. Instead of punishing people who want to play your game now and rewarding those who have been playing since the start, you should focus on trying to make it more appealing to play now than it was before. This change is an example of making the game less rewarding to play at the current time, and furthers the gap between accounts who have been playing forever and those who are just getting into Wurm now.

Will the Steam version be using the premium model? Will players still be able to convert in-game silver into premium time?

How to Make Everyone Happy: A Guide Step 1: Use The Gallows to explain why players are banned. So many topics involve people discussing bans. Earlier this year, The Gallows sub-forum was created to provide transparency about moderation actions taken against player accounts. In the whole year, only four threads have been posted. Are these the only bans that occurred for the entire year? Even in the topics posted, the details are extremely sparse. No evidence is provided and nothing aside from "these people were banned and here's why." I was hoping for something a bit more thorough where a statement would be made. Take control of the narrative in these situations and provide your viewpoint and tangible evidence! This would be a good step towards satisfying the players who are upset with how these bans were handled, as well as reassure those who don't care that the game is being properly moderated. It's a win-win and it baffles me why you wouldn't use the position of authority to explain why actions were taken. Step 2: Stop dodging around tough questions and just answer them flat. Additionally, learn to actually admit fault when there is some. You'll never persuade someone that your viewpoint is correct if all you're doing is dodging each point after point. It's a miserable tactic that just leads to endless fighting (which is why this thread is 5 pages long). So enough with quoting someone and pointing out minor inaccuracies. Tackle the big picture! What's after Steam? What happened to the old projects that were mentioned in previous roadmaps? Are there going to be adjustments to systems that were released and were not fully successful? Make a nice, clear statement that tackles all of the big picture problems! It's also important to know when to take a knee. I'll start for you - the priest rework was a failure. It didn't meet the markers it set out for. It turned PvP into a spellflinging contest and needed significant adjustments to PvE balance, including some spells that were simply not useful. Sure, it can be argued that many of the goals for the priest rework was met. Casting combat spells is useful again. Healing exploitation was fixed, as well as significantly shaking up the healing-centric PvP meta that existed. There's significant improvements to QoL for enchanting and similar. But all of that good comes with the bad. For PvP, it felt like non-priests were useless. For PvE, healing in rifts was significantly nerfed and made doing rifts with few players significantly harder. Jewelry enchants were annoying to create for PvP purposes. If there's one regret I have from leaving the team, it's that I wasn't able to refine the priest system after significant feedback came through. Changes of that scale aren't going to come out perfect on the first try. It saddened me greatly that most of the work I did ended up being mostly abandoned, with just a few nerfs at the combat spells and some minor bug fixes thrown at it. However, time and time again after revisiting the forums every now and then, I'm reminded why I left. All of the reasons I outlined are still an issue. Jackal was essentially designed in secret and launched without public testing. The concerns I had for Jackal came true almost completely. People who wanted a hunting server didn't find Jackal satisfying, while new players had to jump through hoops to get there. Moderation actions are still being taken without properly informing the player why. For the most part, they're not even bad moderation actions. It's just the players not knowing why - that's the issue - and that remains the case today. The common theme here is communication. Improve the communication to the players. You'll have less questions to answer, and they'll have less anxiety about the future of the game.

At this point you should just consider posting a weekly rage thread. Share your name and yell at the game!

Pretty much. It's staggering how new content keeps getting pushed out instead of fixing underlying problems with existing systems. You can look at the road maps and compare what happened to what was planned. What happened to the meditation rework? What's the status of the new UI? I remember something about a new cash shop... I think? There's so much content already in the game. The next step is to refine it. Imagine how a new player interacts with the game when they first enter combat, knowing nothing about how it works. Combat could be so significantly improved with it's clarity - without fundamentally breaking the existing mechanics. Meditation has been a black mark for years and remains so, despite numerous great suggestion threads for how to improve it. I agree with the move to Steam (might be hasty) but what comes after? Are we really going to designate time to getting another round of Jackal, or are we going to see improvements to the fundamental systems that affects all of the players instead of the ones who are currently participating on Jackal?

Steam doesn't allow RMT and that includes EVE Online. This also includes CS:GO because all money is handled through the steam wallet. I contacted Steam a while ago specifically about this issue if Wurm were to come to steam: Steam Support Response The whole policy revolves around cash flow going into Steam and not coming out. For example, if people could sell their games in their library to other people, then Steam would lose out on a sale from the store. If you buy a skin on CS:GO, you get Steam Wallet money from the other person which cannot be extracted to real world money (unless you break terms, which does happen). You can use it to buy other games on their platform, but nowhere else - this keeps the money in the Steam ecosystem. In the case of Wurm, you can add a method to buy silver in-game, then allow people to use that silver to purchase items from other player. Cash flow goes through steam -> game/player, and cannot be reversed. This would include allowing players to purchase silver directly from other players using real money. All that aside, we can bring it back to EVE Online. Basically the policy is that they don't allow RMT. You can buy PLEX and sell it for player ISK in game. You can also use ISK to buy in-game PLEX, but it's not allowed to turn that PLEX into real world money. It's against terms to do RMT in EVE, and they can ban you for it. However, the difference is if they will ban you for it. Their enforcement of RMT rules is lax and they only do as much as they need to. I imagine that the same will apply to the Steam release of Wurm. They will have to outline that it would be against the rules to do real world trading. They wouldn't allow players to post WTS and WTB threads here on the forums. However, they probably will not enforce it with a heavy hand even when the rule is in place. So what's the best case scenario? The existing servers get connected to Steam and the terms change to support that. Forum WTB/WTS threads all get archived and a new forum is presented with new rules that align to only trading for in-game currency. The only time that the rules are enforced is if someone breaking them causes problems (such as fraud).

You would need to add terms that prohibited players from making transactions with money outside of the steam wallet. You would also need to moderate those transactions. You can read more about that from this post.

Not even going to voice an opinion on what this means for the game because it doesn't matter. However, reading through the thread, an explanation of what this is could've been presented much better than it is here. The original post should've been written by Retrograde and had a PR statement about what this means moving forwards to settle the anxiety of the change. Instead, it fell to players like @Malenato give a better insight into the potential futures of where this could lead in the future. Regardless, everyone should form their own opinion as to what this means. To do so, you need an accurate picture of the events that unfold, so I'll try my best to organize the full picture and CodeClub can correct me wherever I'm wrong. Switching Shares Referencing the press release that @zethrealposted here: Rolf sold his shares in CodeClub (representing "82.9 percent of the Code Club shares") for a "total of SEK 3,370,000" ($346,250 USD at current exchange rates). It goes on to say "of which SEK 1,000,000 (~$100,000 USD) was paid in cash on entry today, SEK 500,000 (~$50,000 USD) on October 31, 2019." The final piece is "SEK 1,870,000 (~$187,000 USD) through newly issued shares in Game Chest." To break it down: CodeClub is still a company. It's now a subsidiary of Game Chest Group, since they hold the majority of shares in the company. Rolf sold these shares for roughly $100,000 USD paid in July, then another roughly $50,000 USD that will be paid on October 31, 2019. This is paid in cash (or wire transfer maybe, specifics unknown). The remaining ~$187,000 USD value was granted through new Game Chest Group shares that Rolf now holds. Rolf is now a shareholder of Game Chest Group, not CodeClub. CodeClub, now being a subsidiary of Game Chest Group, means that Rolf actually still has a vested interest in Wurm and CodeClub. Half the payout was in shares, so it's still in Rolf's best interest to see success in CodeClub and Wurm. If Wurm improves and gains additional revenue, the new share values will increase in value and Rolf essentially makes money. If Wurm does not recover and eventually needs to be shut down, CodeClub share value will be close to nothing. Game Chest Group will remain more stable since they have multiple investments. So that's everything that actually transpired. Rolf's initial statement in this thread ("The reason I did this is basically risk management. With subscriber numbers and revenues going down I was happy that another company with more muscles was ready to step in and take over business.") matches the reasoning behind the last 2 lines, so you can use that as the justification for why this occurred. Now, that's the Rolf perspective of this whole ordeal. So what does this mean for the game? New Upper Management It's too early to know what the new majority shareholders will do with the game, but from the bits and pieces laid out, there's no reason to be completely alarmed. They're clearly willing to invest into the game directly. If that's the case, then they see an opportunity to get a return on investment. How they plan to do this is unknown. However, there's some possible scenarios: They trust the existing development team to do make good decisions and bring life back into the game. They're willing to fund whatever is necessary in order to make that work. If this approach succeeds, the game will have significant improvements in a rapid timeframe, players will return/new players will begin playing, and profits will increase. If this approach fails, the company may see this is a poor investment and will take an action to try and turn it around. They may attempt to milk the rest of the remaining resources they can out of the company before shutting down. This would be the end of the game entirely. If this occurs, the best case scenario for the community would be that they attempt to sell off the assets of the game to another company after shutting down. They may attempt to restructure the staff of the game in an attempt to make radical turn-around. They want to instate a new way of doing things and make radical changes. This would often involve laying off existing staff and instating new developers or completely restructuring the team. Existing signs point to this not being their approach. Rolf and the development team would not be able to prevent this anymore. If Game Chest Group makes the decision to remove existing staff they would be able to do so. Previously staff were accountable up to Rolf. With Game Chest now being the parent company of Code Club, staff are now accountable up to Game Chest Group. Rolf no longer has final say in the positions that staff members have. If Game Chest decides that someone should be removed from GM or development team, they have all the power to do so. As it stands, there is no "face" of Game Chest Group appearing. Most of the discussion seems to be internal, with Game Chest Group not providing a representative for their interests to the players. Rolf has stated they are hands off, so it shouldn't be expected that a Game Chest Group representative will be participating in the forums or providing any feedback or insight from their perspective. For all intents and purposes, Rolf may as well be the representative of Game Chest Group since he is now a shareholder. The only thing we have to work off are the two statements from the CEO and chairman: If you want to spin conspiracy theories I guess you could take "launching Wurm on additional fronts" as a potential plan for console release. However, we can only wait and see what happens. I'd provide an opinion but I'd rather just leave this as an informative post instead of an opinion piece.

It's on the right track but not fully accurate. All of this is correct. The range of power is exactly -100 to 100. Otherwise, this is all correct. Mostly correct. There's a 1% chance to shatter an item. It is modified by shatter resistance (rune for example) so having 10% shatter resistance rune brings the chance down to 0.9% chance to shatter on every cast. This is an outdated statement in a way since metallic liquid does in fact guarantee the item will not shatter. Additional Information: What this is also misinterpreting is 101 and higher casts. All casts of 101 and higher are done on items that have a lower power enchant on the item. For each 20 power you improve the cast on an item, you gain an additional power. For example, if you're casting Circle of Cunning and land a 20 power cast, it will have a power of 20 on the resulting enchant. If you then cast a 60 power Circle of Cunning, you get a "bonus" 2 power from the improvement process, resulting in a Circle of Cunning 62. 104 casts previously were the result of casting a ~100 on an item with ~0-19 power already on it. In theory a 104.99 could be cast, but it would always be rounded down to 104 in display since it always removes the decimal points. However, as of the addition of the priest journal reward, cast power can go to 105 naturally. With that in place, you can now obtain an item with a power slightly over 110 (and it will display as 110) by casting a 105 power cast on an item which already has a 1-4 power cast on it.

Great write up and I completely agree, there is definitely more that needs to be touched up in regards to the priest rework. I don't think anyone expected the priest rework to come out as a golden egg. It was a significant rework that drastically changed the meta on both PvE and PvP. Those metas are now mostly stabilized and I think it would be wise to revisit the current state of affairs and make some minor adjustments (many of which you suggest). The change was not made specifically for PvP. It was also done to prevent a single player from tanking all the damage of any creature in the game by having a healing alt. Through the previous system someone was able to take damage indefinitely so long as someone was casting healing spells on them. With the new system, it's now soft capped so that they're only able to tank a total of 3x their total health per 20 minutes. In return for the change, most of the healing spells were buffed to frontload healing under the assumption that the healing debuff was not active. All healing spells (if I recall correctly) do more initial healing than the iteration before the rework. I get why it's viewed as a nerf, and in a way it was. I personally consider it a change. It was buffed under some circumstances, and nerfed in others. However, had the previous iteration continued to go on, you'd end up in a situation where no challenging content could ever be brought to the game. Any creature added to the game (assuming it's incapable of one-shotting a player) would be rendered easy by indefinite tanking via Fo healing. I'm also on the same page in regards to not being able to think of a better solution. I still don't know what better method exists to prevent the issue of immortal players in PvE. We found a single solution that hit the mark for solving problems on both sides. Players on PvE could no longer be immortal through healing alts and PvP players could no longer use Light of Fo as a get out of jail free card.

I don't know the answer. The servers I run always disabled champions so I never tested. If I were to guess (knowing the code of Wurm), I imagine it will decrease your faith down to 100.

It's probably better to rephrase the question to be "what is the draw of Wurm" instead. When you open up a question like this, you can probably check the box for absolutely everything being available in other games. Most of the concepts that exist in gaming are not unique, even among the most successful games. Minecraft alone would probably check the box for about half of what's listed. You can obviously argue something along the lines of "Minecraft is not an MMO" which would simply lead into an argument about the definition of an MMO. My answer to the question of "what is the draw of Wurm" is choice of goal. In most games, you're tasked with some goal you're aiming towards completing. Some of them are very direct, like how EVE has a singular goal of obtaining ISK. Some are more indirect, like World of Warcraft and obtaining better gear. These aren't the only goals available in the game, but they're the "directed" ones so to speak, where the game is designed around allowing players to progress towards those goals. In Wurm Online, there isn't any real goal set for the player at all, and nothing guiding the player towards doing anything in particular. There's very little enticing someone to build a village, train a skill, or slay a certain creature. You are placed into the world and left to your own devices. You figure out how the game works and set your own goals. It's a shame that the very thing which was so interesting about Wurm is slowly being drained away. The old personal goals and new journal run in direct opposition to the idea of giving the player free choice. There is an arbitrary set of tasks laid out that players are encouraged to perform. This starts dictating the way players behave instead of allowing them to form their gameplay goals naturally. I'm curious how many new guard towers have been built specifically to satisfy the journal goal which requires it, instead of for the purpose of actually having a guard tower.

Yes, I would. People will exploit mechanics and cheese the content just like they do with everything else. I remember thinking the exact same thing when I implemented titans. I bet that nobody would be able to kill one within a month of the server. Low and behold, players drowned them, sacrificed them, used pets to tank them indefinitely, etc. No matter how hard you make it, players will be determined enough to cheese it and take it out in a way you haven't thought of yet. So yes, I'd like to bet that these strongholds will be defeated within the first few weeks of the server. Specifically within 3 weeks of when the server launches. What's did you have in mind for the terms of the bet?

I think this hits the right marks but has some serious design flaws which will show themselves later down the line. From my perspective, it looks like it's trying to hit the following marks: Create a new space where players can find uncharted lands. Ensure that there's no gap between highly skilled accounts and new accounts. Provide a challenge to players who have experienced the tougher content of the game so far. The way this is pitched hits all of those marks. By themselves, each one is positive. Together, though, they conflict heavily. Creating A New Space Creating a new environment for players to play in is great. Having it with separated skills is fine. Ensuring they can go back to their normal gameplay on the "main" servers easily is fantastic. However, this design is inhibited by the following requirement: This forces a prerequisite on anyone who wants to participate in the new environment. Not only do they need to be strong enough to participate in the rift (or leech off one, which some players are not keen on doing), but rifts themselves are volatile and only occur at specific time periods. They can also be difficult to travel to, whether you're a new or old player, because transport to a rift can be a challenge. Furthermore, while there's nothing mentioning it, I'm skeptical about "competition" over obtaining the lodestones. Will everyone get one, or will there be a limited amount that players who participated at the rift will be fighting over? Will these lodestones be consumed on use? Will they be so common that everyone will have one? If so, why even have this as a requirement? Adding the requirement to enter the new space to a rift needs more discussion. This arbitrarily limits player interaction to a certain subset of people who fulfill a prerequisite instead of allowing those who actually want to participate to do so freely. The Gap Between Accounts vs New & Challenging Content There are players who have played for a long time. Years and years, and they have accounts that show that dedication. Some people view them negatively, others view it as a mark of pride and envy. In the end, these accounts exist and many hours were spent making them into what they are. When you have one of these accounts, all the challenges in the game as they exist are trivial. Killing a troll is no problem. You eat champions for breakfast and craft 90 quality items of whatever you want. The next step is to pose some new challenge to this account. It's coming in this next update; Frontier... but there's a catch. You can't use the skills and items you obtained. Not only is this going to be off-putting to players who have put serious amounts of time into their accounts, but I'm also confused why new creatures are only being displayed for unskilled characters and reset every 6 months. Players with high skills generally enjoy taking on something new and challenging, seeing how it matches up against the account they invested so much time into. Instead, the newest challenge is being added to a land that can only be accessed by accounts with no skills, and will never obtain the "super account" status. In conclusion, it seems like the design was mixed between a hunting server and a new land that fresh players can explore without feeling gated by lack of skills. The problem is these two concepts don't mix very well. You either design the server as a fresh land for new players, or you design it to challenge your existing ones. You tried to design the server for everyone, and instead ended up with a server designed for no one.

It might be worthwhile to actually articulate why it wont be changed or removed instead of just saying so. If you're adamant on keeping this in the game, explain why. Give us the hypothetical scenario where this is beneficial to keep the way it is. This is one of the very few goals in the game where the player doesn't actually have all the tools by which to accomplish it themselves. Goal to create some nails? I can use my pickaxe, find a vein, smelt the ore and craft the nails. Done. Goal to get to 70 prayer? It's going to be a long and boring road, but after being chained to an altar for long enough, it can be done. Goal to sacrifice a champion creature? It may take a while to find one, but there's plenty of them out there. I can kill it myself, bring it back to the altar, and get the rewards. Goal to hold 100 sermons? I can either make alts to hold the sermons to myself, or work with village mates and do a sermon rotation at the benefit of everyone involved. Now you look at the global spell goal. Lets say I make 10 alts just to pray and get the global spell charged. At a timer of 30 seconds and each prayer taking 30 seconds, this would require 3,000,000 (3 million) seconds of prayers to achieve spread across 10 alts (300,000 seconds each). That's 5,000 minutes praying total for each alt, roughly 83.3 hours or 3.5 days of consistent prayer. Again, this is me putting 10 alts and 3.5 days of pure time into getting this done. Let's say I spend a week doing this, 12 hours a day, on 10 alts online at all times. Then I go to sleep on the 6th or 7th day, and wake up the next morning to find that someone else had charged the rest of the spell and done the cast. The whole process gets reset to zero and everything I just did to get to my own goal is now gone. This is toxic and will simply turn players in the community against each other. I'll go ahead and just name Yellowfinger. How do people feel about him in general? Are you okay with encouraging that type of interaction? Rites were changed to the 24 hour window to avoid situations where stealing a cast would be frowned upon. However, as soon as that was done, this goal entered the fray and continued the trend of players frowning upon players casting global spells. Individual players have no control over this goal. If someone doesn't have an army of alts, they have even less control over this goal. I struggle to even call this a goal. As others have stated, it's a lottery. It's not a goal, it's a wash.

Sadly I am awful at setting up web pages. The person who assisted me with it last time is no longer available. After the site went down I was not able to renew the domain. For now, this is the only way to view the maps: http://192.95.31.54/revenant/ http://192.95.31.54/arena/

Nice guide! I think you did a better job explaining the depth of the elemental system than I ever could. You really thought this through, did the math, and outlined your findings well in this post. Great job.

It went something along the lines of "the reward is powerful enough to justify the incredibly tough requirements." In one respect, I agree that the reward for completing the journal tier is outrageously strong, and the requirements should be tough. I think most people here also agree with that sentiment. The problem arises when the actual completion isn't tough, but instead a combination of luck and reliance on others not to ###### you over. It creates a competitive and toxic dynamic between players who have the same goal. I would wholeheartedly agree with changing the goal from casting the spell directly to obtaining the reward from a rite X amount of times. For what it's worth, the argument that it would be too hard to change is inaccurate. It would be a few lines change to switch the goal over to some new requirement. The technical challenge comes from making sure existing players who completed the goal don't lose that journal tier when the requirement changes. This would require a database edit or something to flag a player who has one achievement to automatically obtain another.

That's not correct. The rites were standardized to 100,000 "deity favor" to cast. Furthermore, deity favor is now pooled into the template deity for each spell, even if you're praying or holding a sermon as a priest of a player god. Prayers grant 1 deity favor. No conditions. You don't need to gain faith, adjust your alignment, whatever. A successful pray grants a deity favor. Sermons are a bit more tricky. They grant 1 favor per person who affects the faith of the player holding the sermon. Think of each 0.02 faith gained as a prayer in this scenario. Furthermore, the rarity of the altar will add an additional deity favor per rarity level. +1 for rare, +2 for supreme, +3 for fantastic. In a situation where you hold a sermon for 6 subjects and obtain 0.12 favor, you would be adding 6 deity favor to the template deity. Before the priest rework, the deity pools worked a bit different. Each deity had their own pool and the rites were much more tricky to calculate the deity favor costs for, since it would modify based on how many players were on the server and similar. With that out of the way, I'm indifferent on the aspect of your suggestion overall. I believe some aspects are ideal - such as making it so only the 5 daily prayers count towards the deity favor - but have trouble grasping the full benefit of the system. From my understanding it's to allow players to actually cast the rite themselves instead of getting the bonuses from people who cast it when it's available. However, that entirely contradicts the point of the rites in the first place. They're meant to be a global bonus that occurs infrequently. This doesn't scale very well when each player can have that impact as an individual. I can see a lot of abuse cases by putting these casts on players instead of on the community at large.

Maybe start dropping hints about what it might be? If there's one thing that gets this community going, it's over-analyzing vague clues.

What you quoted has a significant amount of information packed into very few sentences there. From the outset, I'll state that I do not have any privileged information regarding what this update is and nobody has filled me in. I'm just connecting the pieces. However, I can probably help guide you towards an answer of what to expect: From this, we know that this expansion builds on some system that already exists. This could be a skill, system, or perhaps a theme. For example, it could be an expansion to cooking, channeling, or fishing. It could also be an expansion of existing mechanics, such as runes or building. Finally, it could expand on lore such as valrei or rifts. Exploring new lands implies a new server, or at least some version of such. If the technology was developed to allow instancing players that would be a pretty big deal, and I'm doubtful it would be achieved in the short timeframe currently set. I'm going to go with a new server on that one. Working together implies that there will be content that is geared towards groups. This could imply the addition of new combat challenges with creatures stronger than the run-of-the mill troll. New uniques are on the table. With recent discussions, I wouldn't be surprised to see a unique rework come alongside an addition of some new uniques that exist in a new land. Avatars of deities might also come into play. Common enemy confirms that it will have a combat component. I don't think the word "enemy" would be used here if there was not combat involved. While this tends to skew the direction more towards a combat-oriented update, it doesn't throw non-combat expansions out the window. Combining the above three points, we can assume that there will be combat against new enemies. Huge hint there. Recent changes and the looking through recent change notes gives a very good idea of what's coming next. When it was posted, the recent changes would've been ones listed in these patch notes. Changes to spells and how they work on uniques reinforces the theory that new uniques or major creatures will come with the update. Changes to AI for epic creatures reinforces that these creatures may be available in the "new lands" (which will obviously be available to freedom). Finally, one of the big hints is the name. Frontier. The word is a codename, of course, but it will generally steer in the direction you're looking for. Frontier implies that you'll be on the front lines of something. Combined with the "common enemy" you can make an assumption that there is some form of invasion or battleground that will take place on these "new lands." Now, with all that spelled out, it doesn't take a huge leap to figure out the rest. There's actually a few popular suggestion threads that check most of the boxes. One was even written by a developer. Best guesses are it will be something along the lines of that thread, or some middle ground server between epic and freedom where the epic creatures are trying to break through and enter the freedom isles. With that rant aside and back on topic - advertisement doesn't just need to be the standard "click me and play" advertisement you see on sites. There's alternate ways to advertise a game which are likely more effective. A trailer video that comes alongside the update would be a huge boost, as trailers get shared on social media sites very easily. Keep it short (~2-4 minutes) and informative, then share it on social media platforms and see how far it spreads.

So in total honesty I did not believe this was the case when I originally read it. I always assumed that it was generally the company ToS/EULA that dictated those restrictions, mainly for the reasons of keeping game integrity. I also didn't believe this because Valve games themselves via CS:GO, TF2, and similar allow selling items for real money (caveat being it's through steam wallet, but still). This prompted me to contact Steam support directly and ask them directly whether or not a game which allows players to trade items for real money would be allowed. Unfortunately sometimes it's hard to convey the specific details of a situation... so it ended up being a back-and-forth over the past week trying to get into the finer details that there was no in-game method by which to support trading in-game items (ex. Diablo 3's real money auction house) and that it wasn't linked with the steam inventory nor would that be realistic (because then steam wallet could be used to purchase/sell items between players). It also had to be clarified that the servers where the items were held was on the company server, and not a private one (where the rules change: see Wurm Unlimited and players having cash shops as a prime example). In the end, I finally got some clarification. I admit I was wrong with my initial assumptions, and here's a couple of responses to my inquiries that you can use if the topic comes up again:

I believe they need to be be bigints. They're long values that record epoch time of the last event.