Sindusk
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Posts posted by Sindusk
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Since it's relevant to the conversation, here's some data. According to the Steam Hardware Survey, 2% of Steam users have a VR headset.
According to Artillry VR Global Revenue Forecast, VR revenue declined from 2019 to 2020, but is expected to make a recovery and grow again. The total value is currently ~$4B USD.
Meanwhile, according to Newzoo Insights (via ScaleTech), the mobile gaming market is currently estimated at around ~$100B USD and growing in market share year over year.
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On 7/28/2021 at 10:00 PM, Sindusk said:They gave up on this roadmap and are working on Wurm VR now.
Even I thought I was joking...
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Watched this today, and felt the following quote was extremely applicable to Wurm Online right now.
SpoilerAt 2:34:10, the following quote from Chris Wilson, CEO of Grinding Gear Games:
QuoteI think that this dialogue is really important, because it's so easy for us to just; A. assume that we're right; and B. get on with making the game and claim we're busy and not just kind of pretend the players are complaining because the players always complain and not really address the issues. But we've realized that we need to actually have an open dialogue in front of the community with thousands of people watching and solicit feedback and make sure that we're pushing the game in the right direction, and be held accountable for that. We'll have the equivalent of this talk in 3 months when 3.16 comes out and if there's things here that I've promised that there's been no movement on, we'll have a discussion about why. Some of them good reasons, some of them bad reasons, but hopefully a lot of this stuff will be getting better league by league so that more people have stuff they really enjoy in the game.
For context, the most recent update for Path of Exile upset a lot of players. Instead of ignoring the concerns of players and working on the next update in silence, they've set up community events (like being on podcasts and guests on streams) where they can explain their thought process and have an open dialogue with their community.Wurm Online's development team could learn a valuable lesson from this. Contact a content creator in the community and set up a time to get a developer to join them on stream and discuss what's going on with the game. Chris Wilson was reading comments directly from their internal issue tracker to ensure that players were aware that they were addressing their concerns, with a very clear cost to future marketing. Wurm Online is currently in a similar state where this type of thing would be the best move to settle community concerns.
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1 hour ago, Ricowan said:I'm curious about exactly how many employees CodeClub (or whatever they're called now) actually has. From my experience in the U.S. software industry (which may not reflect reality everywhere) a contractor is NOT an employee, nor is a volunteer.
Probably around 5, judging from this investor relations report.
QuoteThe Group currently consists of over 10 competent and highly committed employees who work actively to improve and further develop the company's services and platforms.
The group has a few other projects, so I would assume about half of their employees work on Wurm Online. Can't know for sure though.
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29 minutes ago, Mclavin said:When I got into wurm I knew the dev team back then was mostly volunteer, as time went on some paid staff came aboard to help with the work/push direction of updates but I think still most was volunteer, so i don't know why it's a suprise that sometimes things go quiet, personally think all the updates/scope of them have been pretty big, would love to get a few things fixed, hate the new taming system, but the doom and gloom? Seems really miss placed atm.
Comparing the games industry today to 5-10 years ago, it's radically different. Everyone is far more connected through the prevalence of Twitter, Discord, and Facebook. These platforms were far less popular - or did not exist - when Wurm first started. Communication is an expectation in today's gaming industry. This was not the case back then.
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10 hours ago, Archaed said:Care to share with the rest of the class? Or is this just more throwing out random assumptions based on nothing?
Posting it would be borderline doxxing. So no, I wont be posting it here.
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There are very strong indicators (beyond the lack of patches) that all development for Wurm Online has halted. Completely.
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1 minute ago, Finnn said:What's odd about that graphic is that old cluster remains with same numbers online on avrg.. while we all(?) know that we really lost 20-30-40% population who just left sfi to play on nfi.. maybe the end of rmt and last sold characters somewhat cover the loss of actual people and that appears to hold same login numbers on sfi(as new owners use them to do different kind of chores, etc)?
Market is pretty dead and gets worse on sfi.. simple services seem extinct lately.
Here's a new graph which is SFI only. NFI dominates the Y axis in the original, so having one dedicated to SFI helps show the variance over time.
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3 minutes ago, Oblivionnreaver said:public dragon slaying on both those dates
That was my first thought, but I don't see any old cluster slayings on 7/18 via Niarja. Is Niarja no longer accurately tracking public slayings?
Edit: Nevermind, I'm blind.
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Wonder what happened on 7/18 and 7/31 on the old cluster that caused it to spike so high.
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Maybe everyone is just breeding incorrectly. If traits are rarely being passed down from parents, doesn't it stand to reason that breeding horses with bad traits together will result in amazing ones?
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Most of the negative reviews are quite literally targeting developers and staff for poor conduct or inaction. Here's the top 10 "Most Helpful" reviews according to Steam:
Traslogan (Negative) - 526 Helpful
Nadroj (Negative) - 442 Helpful
Lord Bob Saget (Positive) - 359 Helpful
Jenshae (Negative) - 337 Helpful
Dilbert (Negative) - 336 Helpful
Malfor (Negative) - 314 Helpful
Armynator (Negative) - 292 Helpful
Nepocrates (Negative) - 219 Helpful
Jocktor (Negative) - 212 Helpful
Honorable Mentions:
EpicPhail (Negative) - 211 Helpful
Tiny Rick (Positive) - 168 Helpful
If I missed one highly voted in the list, it's because Steam doesn't actually allow you to sort by reviews rated most helpful. I had to manually scroll through several pages and find the ones with the highest votes.
Personally, I'd rather see the concerns mentioned in the reviews addressed rather than respond to the reviews themselves.
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They gave up on this roadmap and are working on Wurm VR now.
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Announcement? Communication? You're expecting too much.
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Ideas
in Town Square
2 hours ago, Blazecraze said:an old java based game that runs mainly off of server ticks and timers is hard to design brand new things for, especially when creating new mobs/monsters
A bit of a misconception there. It's actually incredibly easy to create a new monster and implement it into the game. You can see examples here for many of the creatures I made in Wurm Unlimited, many of which took less than an hour to code. I imagine the new donkey creature being implemented took more time to create a model for than to actually add into the game.
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14 hours ago, Archaed said:I agree with you completely in that breakdown, and you are correct, lack of updates is a sore issue in this community both from a player perspective, and a business perspective.
What I am calling out is the idea that this whole "service" is in some way altruistic and not self serving.
I don't want the game to go the path of so many others in the past. I don't want to see the community slowly fizzle out and Wurm Online end up abandoned. This game has been around for so long and I want to see it continue since it's been so enjoyable for me in the past 5 years since I started playing. Others have played for a decade or more.
There's so many lessons capable of being learned from other successful games out there with successful business models. I'd like to see Wurm Online adapt to the current gaming market, and others here are suggesting the same.
At the end of the day, a forum is for discussion about topics. A topic was presented, and people are discussing it. I don't agree with everything others have said, but I'm not so vain as to call them self-serving because of their interpretation of the data. If you'd like to disagree with their interpretation, I think you should use counterpoints to the data or logic against their statements. You shouldn't attack the person who's presenting their viewpoint.
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On 7/12/2021 at 8:06 PM, Archaed said:It would help if this thread wasn't some attempt at "look the games dying" and actually contained any reliable information other than "this many players were online at this random time"
For the record, none of this is reliable data, it's just all conjecture with a continued clutching at straws because three less players were logged in at a specific time.
They aren't random times, they're intervals. Measuring active players over time always uses some form of interval. Whether it be a minute, an hour, or when the number changes, there's an interval somewhere. Can you explain how this information, using 1 hour intervals, is not reliable?
On 7/12/2021 at 10:03 PM, Archaed said:It's interesting to see, but I'd like to point out the inferences being drawn are being drawn by him, highlighting minor reductions as proof of a downward slide, and ignoring even or upticks as "insubstantial"
Where do you see the upticks? I want to see those, but I can't find them in the data being collected. Month over month the active player count has declined. Combined with the investor relations press releases from GameChestGroup, it's evident that subscriber numbers continue to decrease.
So far, nothing I've stated in this post has been "conjecture" or "opinion" - everything stated above is simply fact. With that said, from here on I will begin adding some opinion.
The game continues to decline completely in spite of existing updates. Take a look at the Steam Charts, with tags for each significant update over the past year.
This information does not include non-steam players, but tracks at a roughly stable percentage of the data in this thread (about 1/3 of the total player count).
Compare this information to other games, and you'll see a very stark difference.
"But wait, No Man's Sky has a huge studio of many people working on the game! It's not a fair comparison!"
You don't need a huge team to have a successful update structure. Take a look at the game recently added to Steam "Legends of Idleon MMO" - a game developed by a single developer which includes a mobile version not present in the Steam Charts data. Here is an image taken directly from their dev blog post discussing the health and future of the game.
He then goes on to analyze the data, describing how he interprets it as the game community growing.
Updates with games almost always coincide with an increase in players. Generally, it's players returning to engage with the new content. However, with upticks in player activity, new players are also more willing to try out the game. Wurm has a significant lack of this happening, and the result is players blaming the development team. Whether it's actually the fault of the development team is definitely an opinion, but one backed by significant amounts of data. Not just data from Wurm, but the gaming industry as a whole. When every other game has a pattern of growth that can easily be seen through the data, when Wurm is devoid of that same pattern, it's a red flag that something has gone wrong.
The current data tracks similarly to other games that have completely died out due to the game losing so many players that development could no longer be sustained. A few examples of games that I used to adore which have died out completely with a similar data trend.
Firefall
Bloodline Champions
Magicka: Wizard Wars
So, Archaed, I propose a challenge. Can you make the case that the game is stable? Not that the game is growing - that's an unreasonable ask. I want you to convince me that the game is stable and that it's not in decline. If I come back in 2 years, will there still be people playing Wurm Online for me to play with? Will the servers still be online?
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On 6/27/2021 at 6:44 AM, DemonaNightshade said:I'm not sure how many more times you guys would like me to say that it's being worked on, but it is. Having said that, if things were going completely as intended, they would not be being worked on. I personally am not the one working on it, so I cannot give details, and I am sorry that I cannot communicate in a way that you would like because of that. We are aware that there have been issues, and we hear you guys and what you are saying, I promise!
On 6/27/2021 at 8:37 AM, DemonaNightshade said:I am not frustrated with the players. Nor am I frustrated with the devs. They have been working on things, discussing things, and trying to set things straight and I do see that. I have mentioned in multiple places spanning multiple posts that I have been frustrated with the new breeding system producing less than desirable animals just as you all are, especially since most of my play time has involved collecting and breeding creatures and building my deed around my champion zoo and breeding pens. Not to mention having a decently successful animal market prior to this. But, I also fully expected to be at least a little bit bummed with that, knowing that my animal husbandry is only 50 and I'd need to grind it up more after all the times I've tried to avoid getting more skill in it.
On 6/27/2021 at 8:44 AM, DemonaNightshade said:I did not say I have exact details as to what is being worked on in exact terms. Please don't put words in my mouth. I've mentioned before that I know they are discussing things and working on things. I have put in suggestions for changes, as well, aimed at helping animal husbandry make more sense and be more reliable. I do not know if they will be used, or what things will be changed exactly, but I do know that they know this isn't working out for people and have been working on a solution.
On 6/27/2021 at 8:51 AM, DemonaNightshade said:Seeing discussions, brainstorms, and ideas being flipped back and forth does not equal having concrete details on what exactly is coming.
Have you considered trying to articulate some of the discussions that are being had on the development team? Maybe try and relay what the conversations are about, what issues are being brought up, and potential solutions for those issues? This opens up a line of communication with the players so you get initial responses on how certain changes could affect the system before too much work is put into it.
I don't know how to phrase this without being rude... but isn't that basically the point of a community manager? To be a conduit between the development team and the players?
If you're unable to relay anything that's being discussed, then CodeClub at large should reconsider what they're willing to share. Because right now, saying that "something is being done but I cannot tell you what" is doing so much damage to the reputation of the company and your position within the community. Players have invested lots of time into this game and keeping them in the dark about what the development team is intending to change is making them pessimistic and aggressive.
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9 hours ago, RainRain said:tbh even assuming bare minimum (70fs, absolutely no modifiers and just flat cr), 11cr vs 11cr only has a 5% hit chance increase with 90 nim, 11cr vs 100 cr has about a 2% increase. so the best case scenario is fighting something roughly equal to you or weaker than you for cr bonuses to mean a lot (flat ones), and the stronger you get/the stronger enemies get, the less impactful it is.
I didn't factor in modifiers because even those just make the situation worse for nim (as higher cr = each individual point matters less, less % hit-chance gain from nim in the end). interested in your explanation for why nim is better to know what i did wrong thoughThe math and logic here is faulty. Assuming the situation of 11 CR vs 11 CR, with 90 nimbleness you're going from 75% hit chance to 80.64% hit chance. This isn't a 5% damage increase. It's 80.64 / 75.0 = 7.5% damage increase. Not to mention that multipliers in combat such as flanking bonus and similar will increase the differential even more.
Rift creatures have more CR than players by a decent bit. Lets say you're fighting 11 CR vs 25 CR. With 90 nimbleness, you go from 51.7% hit chance to 58.9% hit chance. 58.9 / 51.7 = 1.139, or a 13.9% damage increase. This, being Nimbleness 90 (for sake of easy rounding to nearest whole CR), outperforms WoA 100 on a weapon. Combine that with additional modifiers via flanking bonus to close the gap between you and the target even more, and you'll notice that Nimbleness results in a significantly better damage output over WoA.
In short, WoA is good if the target is weak. Nimbleness is better if the target is strong. Any weapon that is meant to do rifts, uniques, or difficult creatures of any kind (trolls even) should be using Nimbleness over Wind of Ages.
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On 6/24/2021 at 7:38 PM, Toby said:Silver staff - Nimb or woa?
Which is better for rifts?
Most use Huge Axe, but isn't staff just as good for rifts?
Short answer: Nimbleness
Long answer: Wind of Ages is only better at a certain level of skill and gear, and also requires you to be fighting optimally (flanking bonus and more). If you'd like to figure out the specifics and do the math yourself, the resources you're looking for are Wurm Data (Weapons sheet) and Wurm Combat Explained. Between the two, you can run the numbers yourself using your own stats and situation.
If you're not looking to get into the details and optimize for the 1% increases, then just go Nimbleness. It will almost always outperform Wind of Ages against Rift creatures.
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I'm curious what next month's subscriber numbers will be reported as, when there's no update and all the 1-year deals from premium purchase on steam launch expire. I know of at least a half dozen people who bought the 1 year premium time when Wurm first launched on Steam, and none of them are currently playing.
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1 hour ago, Ekcin said:Not wanting to be impolite, but such would be terrible. The implementation alone would cause instabilities which might make a considerable part of the population (especially newer ones on NFI) quit.
Further on, it would require creating double bank accounts which would break the login and accounting database (and shop) in its current architecture. And before implementation, there would be virtually no way to live test it. All their merits acknowledged I have troubles to trust that the development team could seamlessly handle such a transition which requires more than changing horse colours or animal husbandry which have not even been a role model of gracious implementation. If only for that reason, no please.
Such a half assed change with far reaching consequences, only to keep the carpetbaggers' cash cows inside the pen seems disproportional to me.
It's not impolite, and you make good points. Do you feel that attempting any version of a half merge is out of the question? Or does a merge between the clusters need to be all or nothing? If it has to be all or nothing, why?
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Out of curiosity, I'd like to know what people think about a "half" merge, where you can transfer "max" skill between clusters. This would give the [3x] bonus to anything you grinded up to before without fully giving you all your skills on transfer.
For example, if you had 70 blacksmithing on NFI and transferred to SFI, you'd get the [3x] bonus up until you reached 70 blacksmithing on SFI again. If you then grinded it to 90 on SFI, you'd be able to go back to NFI where you had 70 and get the [3x] bonus up until 90.
Most arguments against the merge are from NFI players who do not want players who have abused windows of opportunity or grinded skills for years to come and decimate the newer economy of NFI. With a half merge, players would simply gain an accelerated "catch up" mechanic instead.
Most arguments for the merge simply want to see the playerbase unified. While this might not fully succeed in getting everyone on the same page, it's a step in the right direction and at least gives the option to transfer to the other server while retaining some of what they've accomplished so far.
For clarity, this is referring to only the skills transferring, not items. Maybe they should remain separate, maybe they should have some exceptions. I'm not sure that it's the optimal solution. However, merges don't have to be a binary solution where it's all or nothing. It might be time to consider a compromise that is acceptable to both sides of the argument.
Reaction to Staff Statements on Game Status
in Town Square
Posted
Feels like a lot of people are overthinking things. Speculation about what the parent company is doing, the motives behind the decisions of those running the game, and what the future holds. I feel like I was victim to that same mindset not long ago. At some point you just need to decide if the game is worth it for you or not.
Additionally, if people think that volunteers cannot maintain the game well, I would respectfully disagree. It's very much the people in charge who are gatekeeping progress on the game's development.
All it would take to turn the game around is someone at the top who actually gave a damn. Right now, there appears to be none. Not a single person fighting for the future of the game. Wurm will be living in the present and stay there indefinitely unless something changes. If you're satisfied with that, be happy and continue playing. If you're not satisfied, cancel your subscription until they decide to show that they care.