Sindusk

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Posts posted by Sindusk

  3. Posted

    20 hours ago, Nordlys said:

    Ok, to wrap up this whole wall of text, we are now fast-forwarding to mid-late november, 2023. The tertiary report from GCG came out november 24, 2023, and we continue to see the CEO comfortly talks about the bright near future of Wurm Online. There is even mention about launching projects to optimize graphics and major updates regarding quality of life, and even game design to make the game more user-friendly for new players. This is said to be launched in the last quarter of the year. We are now almost in desember, and the CEO publicly tells that the last month of the year will include more updates than the whole year combined - after my understanding. That didnt fall through, i think we can agree on that. Although there were some nice updates to come with the holiday event, i dont think the promised changes was delivered, its quite clear.

     

    My comment to the VI at that time just under here. The whole statement from GCG is quoted there, along with a link to the press release.

     

     

    Nothing that is said can be taken seriously. Remember when VR was planned? As another example, since 2022 is well behind us let's take a look at what they stated that year:

     

    March 25, 2022 - Source

    Quote

    Wurm Online
    Wurm's community is a dedicated and very passionate group that we have great respect for. We are constantly working to satisfy the community with upgrades and new features that are requested.

    Through this community we also get important feedback about what to expect from the further development of the Wurm IP and we are happy that we have shared these great expectations for Wurm's future.

    Our other brands within the group each have a separate plan that we work according to. Since the synergies between the brands look different, we will evaluate which brands and products will be further developed, alternatively consolidated under our two business areas, which we communicated earlier is our main focus for our work process.

    Together with the Game Chest team and our subsidiaries, I look forward to further communicating our ambitions that we worked on during the previous year and which will now be launched during the year.

     

    Well, we're in 2024 now and I still have no idea what any of this means.

     

    Best to just ignore any messaging that's given because chances are it holds no weight. It's all designed to just keep players optimistic while the numbers show stagnation or decline. I found it very interesting when the stock price got so low that it started using a negative number for the bottom of the chart instead of 0. I put a red line where 0 is to help paint the picture properly.

     

    Yj8VSTb.png

     

    Source: Market Watch

     

    There's a low chance that Wurm will shut down abruptly. It serves no one to be alarmist about that. There is, however, a reasonable chance that the game will change hands again. Their current plans will not result in significant growth or getting players to return, and thus will continue the current stagnation or mild decline.

  5. Posted

    People tend to focus on the little things when it comes to PvP. At a glance, these seem like minor nuisances that add up to prevent players from approaching it. Losing their gear, losing their affinities, being outnumbered, and so on. Some of the suggestions target these issues, which I consider symptoms of a fundamentally flawed system. Sure, they might solve the problem at hand, but they don’t bring PvP in a direction that would become sustainable. It would see a short growth then sputter out as it always does. So instead, let’s take a step back, and talk about PvP from an extremely macro-perspective, then dial down into some of the problems that cause players to hesitate to participate.

     

    For starters, let’s talk about the kingdom dynamics. I think many people have the idea that the PvP landscape evolves and that kingdoms attack deeds or towers to take space and then expand their kingdom. Is that truly what happens? Extremely rarely. More often than not, a skirmish will take place because they want to skirmish. That’s honestly it. Not because they’re defending their village, not because there’s some threat to a tower, or anything of the sort. It’s generally some amount of people sitting outside a deed posturing in a way that says “let’s fight” and the other side (the ones on deed) need to opt into the skirmish.

     

    So what causes this dynamic? Can it be adjusted to make it more of a tug of war?

     

    It’s caused by lack of incentive and extremely dated siege mechanics, combined with a massive defenders advantage which makes assault of a deed highly unrewarding for the attackers, even on overwhelming success. Players will log out with their most valuable gear on alts instead of storing them on deed. Players will sit behind walls and repair damage as it’s done faster than it can be inflicted in most cases. There’s basically no way to enter a village with reasonable safety unless you have extremely overwhelming numbers.

     

    Assuming it worked as expected, and you could assault a deed and remove it from the map - what do you gain from it? There’s not much incentive to expand your borders beyond the 2% threshold to achieve kingdom title requirements. You don’t gain anything through rapid expansion.

     

    So raiding is off the table, there’s really just no benefit. So what about map objectives? This was attempted with a few changes, such as HotA. In the past, when it was in an isolated location on the map, the larger kingdom generally dominated it and there was rarely a contest. In the newer battle camp HotA system, that was resolved but replaced with an issue where it’s only claimed by a kingdom if it’s in a favorable location for them. It was successful when it first launched on Defiance, as players were interested in claiming the loot. But now that the loot is less valuable due to the maturity of the server, it’s no longer desirable enough to warrant taking a (potentially) losing fight to try and claim it. It’s become a handshake where it’s conceded to the kingdom that it spawns closest to.

     

    This is a long way of basically saying that the gameplay loop of the PvP servers is generally unrewarding for being proactive. The optimal way to play is defensive, and wait until you have conditions where you’re absolutely sure you’re going to win.

     

    So what’s the solution? Without a significant discussion on what PvP should look like, it’s hard to tell. Do players want more of a slow burn style of gameplay where you build up incremental advantages the more land you take and more fights you win? Do players want rubberband mechanics where growing too large can create weaknesses in their defenses that other kingdoms can take advantage of? Do they want it driven by the market so it’s more expensive in silver to maintain and defend your kingdom?

     

    Once there’s a reason for players to fight each other without having to sit outside an enemy deed wall and wait for them to come out and fight, that’s when real progress has been made and players might see interesting gameplay emerge from the PvP servers that they want to be involved in. Everything else - the loss of affinities, gear, and skill - are symptomatic of the current meta of having nothing to fight for on PvP.

  8. Posted · Edited by Sindusk

    Well I can say with high confidence that the original proposal is exceedingly unlikely. Getting portals from Chaos to Defiance is basically off the table, unless they're willing to fully merge SFI into NFI (which from other threads, seems very unlikely within itself). There is a separation of economy from NFI and SFI (silvers) where significantly more silver is in circulation on SFI. Allowing players to portal to defiance would allow players to trade silvers with NFI accounts.

     

    This is only one of the headaches that occur with allowing SFI characters to portal to Defiance while trying to restrict a full-fledged merge. Unless another angle is suggested or a more fleshed out idea is proposed, I don't see this happening.

     

    Edit: Forgot that items don't transfer between Defiance and PvE servers and changed the post as a result.

  9. Posted

    On 8/31/2023 at 3:55 PM, Ausimus said:

    I believe I may have worded that a little poorly, the only increase in requirements for the improvement of the arrow bundle is the increase in log amount to improve for the log imping action, everything else is the same as a normal arrow. There is no actual improvement difficulty added. As for the casting, the difficulty increase is 50% harder.

     

    Just remove the casting difficulty increase altogether. It doesn't need to be there.

  10. Posted

    3 hours ago, Ausimus said:

    The improvement requirements scale proportionally with the number of arrows added. For instance, a bundle containing 41 arrows would require 41x the log amount for improvement. Also, performing spell casting on a bundle is substantially more difficult compared to a single arrow. The likelihood of high cast on a bundle is much lower than on an individual arrow. With the increased difficulty also comes the increased chance of failing to channel, and subsequently damaging or shattering the entire bundle. Therefore, if optimal spell casts are your goal, it remains more advantageous to individually cast spells on each arrow. 

    I was really worried that the feature was going to be useful. Thanks for setting my mind at ease.

  11. Posted

    5 hours ago, Blazecraze said:

    Perfect time for the 'brand new wurm online' to make these as base features the company itself offers on its website - the community demands it exists, why not demand that the company itself provides?

     

    Might take time it was mentioned previously they were looking to host leaderboards etc so they already have some of the features planned. 

     

    Agree with this. It should be part of the game itself. It's been done before in Unlimited using an opt-in approach and could be done again in Online very easily.

     

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  12. Posted

    3 hours ago, MrCak said:

    WU has less players than WO, so it is not the audience to be read.

     

    WU is not the sequel to WO if anything it is like darkscape or any of the other runescape forks all of which were discontinued and the experience rolled back into rs3 in hopes they can direct those fragmented player bases back into their profitable product. Old School was the result of a huge failure to read the audience with the pvp removal not some grand marketing scheme. Fragmenting your player base has proven to be bad at nearly every scale. They never recovered to pre-pvp removal numbers, to this day.

     

     

    Unlimited was a failure for a reason, whether you agree or disagree the development was halted for a reason and that should be a large indicator of it's market viability. 

    Your conclusion is correct, Wurm Unlimited was no longer profitable and the development stopped on it as a result. However your speculation of why is incorrect. There was 2 major factors that I'm aware of for dropping support for Wurm Unlimited:

    • Humble Bundle promotion which included a Wurm Unlimited key. Consumers purchased a massive amount of these bundles for the other games inside of it, and resold the Wurm Unlimited keys on reseller websites, tanking the price of getting a copy to about $2. The price is similar today, and the money from those sales do not go back to CodeClub (or GCG, at present). With the revenue from the game no longer going to the developer, sale income decreased and focus was better spent on Wurm Online where the revenue was actually coming from.
    • Resources for a codebase split. Maintaining two separate code branches and having separate issues, bug reports, and development timelines/launches for both of them was more effort than the small team for Wurm could handle. This is why the Epic cluster is mostly abandoned at this point, since it falls under the same category.

    The idea that Wurm Unlimited does not read the audience is quite absurd. Most of the major updates to Wurm Online since Unlimited released were inspired or even based on mods.

    Some of the modders in this game are way ahead of the curve, and it would be a good pickup for Wurm Online to have them assist with development. Unfortunately, they've burned bridges or vice-versa with quite a few of them. Bdew is banned for having spoken out against them abandoning Wurm Unlimited. Other modders have negative opinions of the management of the game and would prefer to stick to their WU projects or have moved on.

     

    Should Unlimited get development again? Not in the same way it was, no. There could be an angle for a DLC or expansion release cycle to be used since it doesn't have an excess of keys floating around, but that would require numbers that aren't available to determine viability. However, to assume that Wurm Unlimited was just a pure failure where nothing can be learned or gained is a shallow take. It's far more nuanced than that.

     

    4 hours ago, MrCak said:

    Trust me as someone who writes mods, rewrites mods, collaborated with other modders on large projects, and someone who went to school for game design. It is tempting to look at the speed modders work or the ways mods push the envelope sometimes but there is a lack of code stability that is only shown through the entropy of repeated updates and refactoring. 

     

    That being said the cost in having art made for a game like wurm is not as steep as they make it out to be, the lack of a full dedicated PAID dev team and lack of updates is a complete management failure and result corporate greed not a fundamental structural issue with WO nor WU.

    This, however, is mostly on the money. Single modders work at a brisk pace because they lack QA, instead using the private server as a public QA. Anyone expecting Wurm Online to keep pace with Wurm Unlimited modders is holding unrealistic expectations. Of this, you are absolutely correct.

     

    The price for assets is also lower than people make it out to be, and that can be proven by a quick look at the Unity Asset Store. In terms of development team, they'll just argue that they have a full staff of developers right now and that they don't need anyone else. As a result, we'll be watching the snail pace continue with low-impact updates unless something substantial changes.

  13. Posted

    2 hours ago, Fogshark said:

     

    As an aside, does SD do anything else besides help rune attachment?  What was it's purpose before runes were ever brought to the game, and does it still have its original purpose(s)?

     

    I have a strong suspicion, based on having high SD.  But not officially proven.

     

    All characteristics affect the power of the skill rolls for every skill underneath them. The amount they do so depends on skill level distance to 100 and the difference between the skill and the characteristic. This can range from a mild bonus of a couple points difference at lower levels to completely inconsequential to a skill at 100. Some skills will also be entirely unaffected by it because there are other sources which cap the bonus (such as channeling).

     

    In short: Yes, it does more than just help with rune attachment.

  15. Posted

    Anyone who thinks that all bans in Wurm Online are "fully deserved" is heavily coping. Having run a Wurm Unlimited server, I know how painful it can be to try and trace an event back through logs or even search an area after something has happened. GM's in Wurm Online run into the same problem, where the tools available to gain information of an event that previously happened are poor at best and non-existent at worst. There was a time when over 10 players were blanket-banned for an exploit. Some of them were not even online during the time it happened. The appeal system worked in that instance and the bans corrected (mostly). In other instances, there is hard evidence of players exploiting through walls stealing hundreds of silver (euros at the time) items, yet they remain active to this day. Should they be banned for events that happened years ago? Even Rolf said no when I sent him the evidence several years back. If we're not retroactively banning people for offenses from years past, why are we keeping other players banned several years in the future? Permabans for all offenses are a relic of the past. The gaming space has moved on from this, and Wurm Online has not.

  16. Posted

    17 minutes ago, Atndy said:

    They need to rehire Sindusk as lead developer. He's got our back.

     

    I'm not employed right now, but even if they offered, I would not accept under the current conditions. They really need to re-think what they're doing. The problems I left for 5 years ago are similar to the ones causing issues today in spite of completely different management and circumstances. If they could communicate like rational human beings, I don't think the staff would be leaving the way they are now.

  17. Posted

    37 minutes ago, Derp said:

    Are staff subject to some sort of NDA as employees about what specifically has caused this split? I can only imagine you all were aware about some major change in direction ahead which you don't agree with. Which doesn't bode well

     

    Well since the official statement is a nothing sandwich, and there is in fact NDA's in place, I'll just throw a target on my back and give some generalizations from what I know. They are not happy about:

    • Communication policies
    • Changes in staff
    • Actions taken by other staff members related to the 2 points above

    I wont be getting into details to protect sources.

  19. Posted · Edited by Sindusk

    15 hours ago, joedobo said:

    Wow, I always thought that if someone was willing to drop a couple mill they could easily buy Wurm. I'm guessing you can't go into the Swedish penny stock system and buy out 51% of shares to effectively take control of the GCG?

     

    GCG isn't just Wurm. They have other holdings, which makes their market cap higher than what Wurm is worth. GCG originally acquired CodeClub/Wurm Online for 3.37M SEK (or ~$337K USD). As of right now, the market cap of GCG is 23.31M SEK, or $2.3 million USD. Assuming you could just buy stock in a company without having to consider if enough shares are available to purchase (not how it works), Wurm isn't even worth $1.15 million USD. It wasn't after the Steam launch, and it absolutely isn't now. The price to buy 51% was even higher during the Steam launch period since the stock was worth more.

     

    In a way, you're right that if someone was willing to drop a couple million, they might actually be able to buy Wurm right now. Problem starts with nobody actually wanting to do that because it would be a bad investment. Problem extends when, even if they did, the company holding it doesn't want to sell.

  20. Posted

    7 hours ago, Tukodama said:

    We have to be patient with Wurm leadership.  If you want to have a real say, become an investor, buy enough stock and advocate for real change.  If you are not a real investor, management doesn't have to tell you anything.  There has been a major shakeup in the dev and management teams and until everyone is up to speed and on the same page of the direction and future of Wurm, I wouldn't be releasing much info.  I would prefer silence instead of a bunch of empty promises.  The team needs to get their ducks in row and create an achievable guide to future updates and overall game improvements.    

    This is completely outrageous. To imply that people who are real investors would buy stock in the company in the hopes that change would occur? Yeah, no, that's not how it works man. A while ago I had an investor who was interested in buying Wurm (~2021). I contacted them to buy CodeClub/Wurm Online and this is the short version of how it went:

     

    Me: Hi I'm interested in making an offer for CodeClub and Wurm Online.

    Response: I'll forward this E-Mail.

    Me: Great.

    Nothing for a week.

    Me: Are you still interested in getting an offer for CodeClub/Wurm Online?

    No response for another week.

    Me: Does this mean you're not interested?

    No response, and I made no further attempts.
     

    There was a world there where the investor would've been willing to make a partnership arrangement or something like that, because I had convinced them that the game could be a long-term passive income source for them. This is proven by the current longevity of the game, and while it might have ups and downs, there is a very low chance that it will sink. Just for clarity, this was not conditional upon me being in charge or anything, it was an actual investor seeking to find a long-term passive income source.

     

    You think that someone is going to just pump a ton of money to buy up shares and pray that they're listened to? I couldn't even get a reasonable response to an E-Mail. People with money make plans - they don't just gamble blindly (well... most of them). They make sure the people they're giving money to are solid, and that there's a good chance for return on investment. GCG had a prime opportunity to sell high in 2021 with the Steam Launch, and I was actually able to convince a legit investor with millions to spare that it grow further. Now when I try to pitch the same idea, they just say hell no. GCG/CodeClub have squandered their Steam launch so hard that nobody I've talked to will even consider attempting to buy Wurm at any value. They would have to sell at an unreasonably low price to offload the game in it's current state. I imagine it's a bad idea for them to do that, too, considering it's stable right now. Their best move is to just hold on and minmax the product by investing the minimum required to keep up appearances that it's still supported to have people continue playing. As much as I'd like to see the game make a comeback through a bold update and proper direction, it's probably best for them to just sit back and let it simmer.

  21. Posted

    2 hours ago, BoulderDash said:

    some of the stuff on wurm unlimited private servers is great and quite interesting like pets for example or even making many different items out of clay like clay fruit and logs for extra decoration.

     

    both of those things above come from a server that budda created.  budda who is a dev here again, i think.  can devs from wurm unlimited not bring those things over to wurm online?   or do they have to recreate it all again themselves so that it does not rip off any users who might of created the mods for wurm unlimited?

     

    can't the wurm staff get permission from the users who created the mods for wurm unlimited to be able to use it on wurm online and maybe give them some payment for the exchange of content?  

     

    with some code fixes wurm online could have alot of new content which wurm unlimited already has on different servers....

     

    why limit the production of the official product?  you want it to shine beyond all else, correct? if so, do all that you can to do that!

    This drives me crazy as well. So many great things have come from Wurm Unlimited. There was a system being developed that worked like automation. You would attach a horse to a contraption and it would move around in a circle generating power, and the contraption would cut rock shards in the inventory into bricks. This was all done using the existing assets and a prototype was made overnight by the modder.

     

    You'll never see anything like that in Wurm Online, not because they're incapable of doing it, but because they don't want to risk upsetting anyone. If the move is not 100% safe, they wont even attempt it. Who is going to complain about a donkey being added? Who will rage that a canoe has been implemented? Who would be upset at a random site that gives buffs? The worst you can get is disappointment, not flames.

     

    Take a damn risk. Be bold and try something new. Save your own time: tell the players what you're considering to get feedback before you even start working on it. You aren't marketing your updates, so stop acting like you have to be silent until they launch. Fix your communication policies and repair your relationship with the community.

  22. Posted

    2 hours ago, Locath said:

    It does seem like a lot of time and effort goes in to adding a single thing. Compared to most other engines it seems that it takes disproportional amount of effort to add a single new item. Everything being added takes ages and is a big announcement.

    I really hope that this misconception goes away sometimes soon.

     

    You can see how easy it is to add a creature by viewing how it's done in mods for Wurm Unlimited. It is, quite literally, just a bunch of numbers and strings that you put together and Wurm will spit back a creature at you. Creating a creature as a mod takes maybe 30 minutes to just type in all the info for the creature and adjust the parameters of how it operates. Here's an example of an enlarged and transparent version of a hell horse:

    https://github.com/Sindusk/wyvernmods/blob/master/src/main/java/mod/sin/creatures/Charger.java

    This is a rideable, hitchable, larger version of a hell horse which took maybe 30 minutes to create. Here's a screenshot of someone riding one:

    unknown.png

     

    Excluding the visuals: Adding a new creature takes about 30 minutes. Adding a new spell during the priest rework took a few hours. When I finished refactoring it and streamlining the spell creation process, it only took a few minutes to add the spell then whatever time it took to implement the effect. Adding a new item takes minutes if you're using placeholder models and icons.

     

    Many of the suggestions made on the forums here would be outrageously simple to implement. Picking out some from the first page, adding a setting to disable the visual and audio cue for rares would just be a couple menu options added to the UI setting a flag, then checking that flag when a rare event occurs - few hours probably. Pre-generated ruins to loot is probably the most time consuming one, but by hooking it into the archaeology system which already is capable of generating "fake" deeds that have decayed, you might be able to pull off a prototype in a week or two. This QoL thread has some really low hanging fruit. For example, making mailboxes loadable is like 2 minutes. There's a couple bugs with it but enough mods have done it that they're pretty well known and the fixes are available. This feature was already done on many WU servers. Making black bears rideable would take 5-10 minutes. You add a vehicle behavior to them and a mount spot, test it until it looks right, and you're done. 

     

    So no, it's not because it's hard to do. It's because it's not being done. There could be many reasons for that; I would personally guess comes down to philosophy. One that I disagreed with heavily, tried to change, failed, and moved on.

  23. Posted

    Sometimes I find myself wondering what the community of Wurm would be like if there wasn't an immense amount of history. If everyone just forgot the past and saw the game in its current form without the attachment of nostalgia or the bonds they've built with other players. A timeline where nobody had strong opinions, grudges, or "precedents" of how things should be done. Would most players continue playing? Would people want to engage with this game right now if not for its history and the part they took in it? Does it fit in the current ecosphere of the gaming market?

     

    Does it even make sense to try and make the game more "mainstream?"

     

    I find myself viewing the development and progression of Wurm recently as taking the wrong direction. The attempts to "reach the main crowd" or "draw in new players" always seem to miss the mark. I believe this is because Wurm is not a game meant to be marketed to the masses. It's meant to be marketed to those who already play or have played in the past. By proxy, this will affect new player growth. I would like to see retention stats based on connection in Wurm. If a player in a deed begins playing again after a long hiatus, how many of their friends/deed mates return with them? Are individuals really coming back to the game of their own accord, or is it groups? Perhaps their group expanded while they were gone, and they now have several new players who will try the game. How many new players join a deed when a group returns to the game?

     

    I would bet that returning players affect new player growth more than any marketing done so far. This new branding doesn't speak to the community or the history, instead leaning towards new trends and styles. So yeah, this rebranding feels pretty off. It's a mass marketing attempt for a game where mass marketing wont hit the mark. Market to your current players, and let them market the game to new players. Wurm is a village, not a city.

  24. Posted

    32 minutes ago, Emoo said:

    @Kristerplease watch this video. 

    I have experience building brands and a wide array of small business and start-ups. You NEED to hear constructive feedback regarding this venture. Some of it is good but a lot of it is flawed!
     

     

    Haven't watched the full video yet, but so many good points are made within the first 15 minutes. Great video.