Sindusk

Miscellaneous Eternal Orbs can no longer be used on arrows. Effective power of combat enchants on the Arena are now capped to 200 during combat. This change applies to Flaming Aura, Frostbrand, Nimbleness, Life Transfer, Aura of Shared Pain, and Web Armour. The actual enchants will not change for items on Arena, nor will they be affected when transferring. Instead, the calculations during combat will use the lowest value between 200 and your enchant.

Reading back, I understand that a lot of this looks like it was framed specifically against you and your kills on the players on Arena yesterday. I apologize that it looks that way, and will try to clarify my viewpoint here. There are many, many enchants above the ones you own on the server. Here is the current highest player-made enchant (that isn't Bloodthirst) on the server: [13:52:44] Circle of Cunning has been cast on it, so it will increase skill gained with it when used. [732.6] My philosophy is to encourage players to "break" the mechanics I implement. When titans were first released, there was a total of four slayings of the titans using "cheese" tactics or downright exploits. One of them was so significant that it was used in Wurm Online to slay a unique. In each instance where players abused mechanics to slay the titan, I allowed the slaying to occur and let the players keep the rewards. I encourage people to think outside the box and overcome obstacles. I also encourage players investing time and resources to make something truly unique and magnificent. You've done precisely that with your staff, and it's a marvel to behold. However, I find it extremely difficult to argue that having enchants which give players up to 8x skill gain is healthy for the server. The crystals were never designed to be utilized in the way they were. I understand that you contacted a GM and reported the issue to check if it was okay when you first discovered it. Unfortunately, there was a fault in communication and I was never informed at the time. Obviously, this is an issue, and I'll be working to remedy that problem with the other staff members of the server in the future. The truth is, had I been informed of this issue, I would have patched it immediately (as I intend to now, hopefully by tomorrow). I want players to have the moments you did. Fighting one on one with a black hatchling and coming out victorious through sheer power of will and ingenuity. Figuring out how to link mechanics together to their advantage and discovering a new way to advance their goals in the game. In the future, I intend to develop features and content which further those ideals. While I wish there was a way to make an exception for those who truly invested their time and effort into the items they own, the simple fact is that it truly was not intended to allow crystals to get this out of control. In my search through the database to find other instances of high enchants, your staff stands out as one of the most powerful items. Very few weapons can meet the level of investment your staff has, and I can personally relate with your viewpoint where it appears other players are attacking the mechanics on the basis of what you spent so much time on. It's an impressive piece of work, but it will also remain so. Even through a decay down to 200 enchant power, your weapon would remain in the top 5 highest enchanted items. It's my responsibility to keep the game enjoyable for everyone and ensure the health of the server. The enchants which are currently available and being replicated are not healthy for the server. It's unfortunate that it turned out this way and needs to be addressed in such a crude manner, but it's a necessary evil that would fester and become worse if left unaddressed. I'll be doing my best to provide some form of compensation for those who have their items negatively affected by the changes. I enjoyed reading the stories you've shared, and hope to see more in the future.

You're right. Straight up. The last time I looked at the database for spell effects on items was months ago, and at the time I recall only seeing a handful of items (less than 10) total with casts above 200. This was several months after the server had launched with the crystals in play, and it was fine. This is no longer the case, and there are now hundreds or possibly thousands of items with casts ranging up to 900. To explain why I thought it would never get out of control: crystals have a difficulty increase as more enchants are used on an item. This creates an artificial cap on the amount of enchants an item can have. In your example, there is a total of 1360 total enchant power across the enchants you've highlighted. This would create a 136 difficulty increase when infusing the crystal, on top of the base difficulty which is usually around the 20-40 range. For reference, it would be like trying to improve a QL 150 item. The chances of failure are extremely high. Players are bypassing this mechanic and creating superpowered weapons through clever usage of game mechanics, enchanting items which can be split while retaining their enchants (arrow packs). They then can experiment with crystals on the individual arrows and copy any success to another arrow pack using an eternal orb. If one arrow critically fails, which is highly likely, then it's no big deal as there are dozens of other copies of the exact same enchant already in play. This is a problem, and I intend to solve it. The risk/reward factor should have artificially limited the enchants to the ~200-300 power range using crystals and excessive amounts of money to create these items. I don't particularly find this a problem if enough time is invested, but that time and money investment is being bypassed through the mechanics that currently exist. I'll be working on a way to resolve this without simply deleting these items, as it's not the fault of the players who were ingenious enough to figure out how to bend the mechanics to their favor. This is my fault for neither having the foresight to link these mechanics together for this type of abuse, nor paying a close eye on the server for the past several months. I apologize for letting it get this out of control and assure you that further updates will aim to resolve these problems.

You make very good points. It can be highly demoralizing to see the type of items players have on the servers, considering how much easier they are to obtain with the mechanics introduced. To explain the thought process behind the crystals, they no doubt create a power creep. As more crystals enter the economy, player stats increase, and more are used to create more powerful weapons - there becomes a dynamic where the players end up outscaling the toughest creatures the game has to offer. In most cases, this would be a red flag, and would call for nerfs on the items or buffs to the creatures to make them more challenging. However, my philosophy follows another track. Nerfing the items just makes the players who worked hard to obtain them feel bad. Buffing the creatures makes it more difficult for newer players to deal with existing creatures, further increasing the problem to begin with. Instead, my philosophy dictates that power creep is fine, so long as there is consistent challenge to accompany that creep. This aligns with how most MMORPG's handle increasing item power. As a new expansion is released which enables higher level caps or stronger items, new content with new challenges are released to accompany that increase in power. Sadly, because I haven't been actively developing Revenant, the new content side hasn't had a chance to catch up, leaving players in an overpowered state for everything the game currently has available. To remedy this, the next goal is to introduce a hunting map that will contain new creatures and challenges that players can engage with. The timeline on this is undefined, as I'm currently awaiting the next Wurm Unlimited update before beginning further development on the server. There is a significant number of changes to the code base from the last several months of Wurm Online development that will break a very large portion of my mods. Any development I do on my mods now has a high likelyhood of being invalid with the new changes. In conclusion, I hear what you're saying and agree. There's definitely things that need to be done to improve the server's health overall, and I fully intend to develop Revenant further. When the next Wurm Unlimited update becomes available, you'll see those developments begin.

I was really hoping to just leave this behind me, but this post is just so insulting to me that I feel it's necessary to respond. Evidence is through internal communications. That's protected by NDA. I don't want to air dirty laundry, I just want to leave. If you really want to get into it, then go ahead and start with how I "threw team members under the bus." After you state your side, I'll be willing to state mine with all supporting evidence. You have my permission to share the full conversation we had on December 13th in IRC, if you really want to. However, that does nobody any good. This is by far the most insulting thing in the post. There are literally months of internal communications of Retrograde and other staff actively preventing the suggestions in this thread. Again, it's all protected by NDA, and I'm not looking to really get into it. Wurm isn't going anywhere, but the people that care about it are.

People are giving me far too much credit for my work on the priest rework. As is stated above, the development team is not a single person. While I did a large portion of the overhaul, it would be false to claim I did everything. Much of the changes were a joint effort between the developers and came at the conclusion of discussions with the whole team. I was prepared to come to our next discussion with this as a topic. It would've come with a recommendation to collapse the resistances of Shard of Ice, Fireheart, and Rotting Gut into a single shared resistance. This prevents the spell spam while keeping their potency (which is well received) intact.

I decided to resign from the Wurm Online development team. This was not due to any specific event, but instead a much longer sequence of events and general disagreement with deep-rooted policies in place for the Wurm Online team. I joined the team to make progressive changes for the game, and fix long standing issues with existing systems. The priest rework was a major accomplishment in that regard, overhauling a major system of the game into a much healthier state. However, I truly feel that the most significant issues with the game cannot be fixed through code. The common theme between everything that caused my resignation can be traced to one aspect: Communication. The first part would be development communication to the players. Certain features and development goals are kept secret with poor reason. Major changes can be implemented with players reading about them during the patch notes while the server is down. Without going into detail, Tower Chaining was one such feature that was nearly mishandled in this regard. This type of secrecy in the development leads to anxiety for players. What is the future fate of Epic? Should players continue playing there? If they place a new deed on Elevation, is there a possibility of the map being reset shortly after? How much heads up will be given? All these questions stem from the fact that there is no official statement for plans on the future of Epic. Everything is being done behind closed doors and leads the community to speculate. The players don’t know if there’s a plan for Epic at all. Making sure that content is complete before announcing it is one thing. Leaving the community in a state of anxiety without giving them something to look forward to is a whole different beast. There doesn’t need to be a set date, there doesn’t need to be a specific timeline. If something gets delayed, there was a reason. State the reason and trust the community to support it. Everyone in this community just wants the game to get better, but get kept at arm’s length due to fear of having them bark up a storm when something doesn’t get done. If you communicate clearly, and speak to your players like you’re having a conversation with a human instead of calming an angry consumer, you’ll see a much better response. The second part is an extension of the first, which is constraints imposed on staff when it comes to communicating with players. It was very recent that I received a discord PM regarding someone wondering who they should contact in order to report someone. I asked in the general staff channel if there was anyone around who could help this player. It got resolved, but not without it being made clear that type of communication to players is frowned upon. The expectation, being a developer and not someone who handles moderation, was to not respond to the inquiry at all. This is just a recent example, but this dates all the way back to when I first started. My communications with players seemed to have gone under incredible scrutiny. I remember instances where I was urged not to join specific chat channels or discord servers. I remember getting an absolutely insane amount of flak for appearing on stream without proper notification ahead of time. I remember reporting an issue and being told I shouldn’t even be bringing it up because it’s not part of being a developer. I remember having an exploit reported directly to me, bringing it up in the development chat, and then being chastised for having handled the bug report directly instead of redirecting them to the forums. These events all added up seemed to have painted me as hostile in the team. Like I was somehow breaking the natural order of things or overruling someone else’s duty. If someone comes to me with an issue, I shouldn’t have to judge whether I should attempt to resolve it or not. I shouldn’t be expected to ignore the message entirely and give the player no direction. Players have no interest in jumping through hoops to get something done “correctly” - it should just get done. These artificial restrictions, whatever purpose they serve, do nothing but harm the players in the long run and make players reporting issues excessively difficult. The final part is communication about GM actions to the general public, and even the players who are subject to the actions. This has nothing to do with GM rulings themselves. Instead, my primary point of complaint here is the communication to the players and general public when rulings are made. The lack of communication allows the players on the other end of the ruling to spin the narrative to paint corruption and bias into the decisions, even if they are not present. This dates all the way back to when Propheteer was banned and there was only the single statement made about it. From the GM team, there was no general statement as to why one of the most prominent players in the game was banned. Instead, it was handled behind closed doors and Propheteer was able to release his own statements to the player base, spinning the narrative to suit his perspective. If a clear, informative statement was made saying “Propheteer has been banned for this reason and this is the evidence we have against him” the whole situation would have gone much smoother. This translates to all decisions. When a PvP ban or raid ban is announced, it’s just announced then lifted some time later. Updates on the progress and expected timeframe would help settle the minds of players. Updates similar to “The bug has been found and fixed, and will be patched in the next update. When the update is live, we will ensure the bug has been fixed and lift the ban.” You can even provide non-committal ballparks for when that is. “We expect the update to go live later this week.” If it doesn’t happen, again, like stated before: You have a reason, just state your reason and trust the community to back it. Finally, this should extend to investigation process. Both sides should be heard during a dispute. Too many times have I heard of a player being punished without anyone listening to their perspective of events. Truth can’t be known until both sides are heard, and you can figure out the actual events that happened. For some reason, the players being accused are considered hostile and are never contacted to hear their side of events. GM’s should serve as mediators between players, not executioners of justice for those who do something suspicious. With all of that said, these aren’t the only reasons. Certain events that I’m not at liberty to discuss were also part of my decision. I truly respect the current development team and feel they have the best interests of the game in mind. However, improving the communication and winning your community back to supporting your efforts should be of paramount importance. I wish the best of luck to the future of the game, and hope players enjoy the content I’ve worked on. It’s been a great experience and it pains me to leave, but I feel that the work I do was being consistently tainted by policies and decisions outside my control.

Sold - can close.

As a personal opinion, I feel limiting prayers to one per day, but granting faith equivalent to 5x what it currently offers (including up to 5 faith in a single pray), would be the ideal solution. This removes the need for players to feel chained to an altar for almost 2 hours praying every 20 minutes in order to be efficient. Instead, you'd pray once and be set for the day.

Really wish I had a reference to learn about all the history of Wurm, similar to this which was recently released for RuneScape:

It affects all frost wounds you inflict. This applies to salve of frost weaponry, frostbrand, shard of ice, hypothermia, ice pillar, and any other source of frost damage that I might be missing. As a simple rule of thumb: if you deal damage and it's type matches the ring enchant, it gets the damage bonus.

Another one is when your boat can't move. You hop into your boat and try to sail away, but it just doesn't move! There should be a message when you examine it telling you the water is too shallow for the boat. Even after playing for years, this one still gets me.

Hey everyone, sorry for the confusion. We should've added additional information to the change log regarding how player god priest restrictions work. Priest restrictions are based entirely on the template god. For example, Nahjo's template god is Fo. This means any priest restrictions that apply to Fo would also apply to Nahjo. In this case, Fo cannot apply support beams, and therefore neither can Nahjo. Because Magranon is able to apply support beams, this infers that Smeagain also can apply support beams (since Smeagain is a demigod of Magranon). I do see how strange it appears with Nahjo being able to reinforce with a spell, but not with a beam. However, this isn't a bug and instead just a side effect of re-rolling the spell lists. We're open to suggestions for changing this, and would ask that you make a new thread in the suggestions forum mentioning it. Again, sorry for the confusion and hopefully this helps clarify similar situations in the future.

No doubt! Dailies in other MMO's are very frequently underwhelming and I personally have been trained to dread them. With Wurm, it's even harder as the gameplay loop for each player differs substantially. Giving a player a goal to slay a creature when they have no interest in combat is a terrible idea, for example! So, since we're here, let's give it our best shot. If daily or weekly missions were added, what would you want them to look like? How would you make it appeal to the player it's given to? What type of objectives would suffice for both a casual player who logs in a few hours a week while also working for those who spend more than 24 hours per day grinding?

Bingo. Vynora had an absolutely absurd amount of favor stored up that was basically all burned today through consecutive casts. Because of the new Rite system, rites can now stack on top of eachother. A Ritual of the Sun and Rite of Spring can both be active at the same time, and players can obtain bonuses for each one assuming they're the proper deity. In this case, it was three instances of Rite of Spring stacked on top of each other. This leads to players being able to "claim" their bonus and get all three rewards at the same time. You will see the line "You feel enlightened!" three times when you pray on Xanadu. Now Vynora has been drained of all her favor, and another cast wont be able to occur until her pool replenishes. The sad truth of today's events is that it only hurts everyone. If done correctly and more spaced out, players would've been able to claim the full 5 hour sleep bonus several more times over the next week or two from different casts. Since the casts were instead overlapped, it tries to claim the 5 hours multiple times, but is capped on the first, wasting 10 hours of sleep bonus. Luckily, everyone is able to at least claim the full 3x mind logic ticks that the ritual provides, and the bonus to boat speed will last until the rite expires (though it doesn't apply multiple times over, so that boat speed is also going to waste). In the end, it's just an anomaly that will sort itself out shortly. We're also going to be implementing a fix for server restarts resetting the bonuses that can be obtained from rituals. The existing rites are going to perish after the next server restart, which is the purpose for the existing Rite ban. Any further rituals cast could end up being cut short due to a hotfix being deployed... which ironically is meant to fix the very issue that it would be causing. I know a lot of people are currently thinking that "oh it turned out how they didn't want it to and they're going to nerf it!" - That's not the case. We're actually keeping the player's best interest in mind by banning further casts so that a hotfix doesn't interrupt claiming the reward. As of right now, no changes are planned to the gains or favor cost of rites, and claiming the mind logic reward on Xanadu is valid and not considered exploiting. With that said, bear in mind that we'll be monitoring how often the rites are cast in the near future. If it's faster than we want, we'll likely be raising the favor cost a bit to compensate. For now, enjoy the change and claim some stats.

What type of effect would you like to see Rite of Death have? This was a question asked during the priest testing but no suggestions were proposed.

You're correct on every front. The choice is whether you want to take the situational approach or the generic upgrade. While cold is better against some targets, it's also worse against others (see studded). The demise have no restrictions aside from what target your hitting, and will always be beneficial against those targets.

Answered your points in purple above. In regards to ring, I don't really have a good answer for it. I'm inclined to say that it's the same as any other trade, but I'm not well versed enough to know with high confidence.

Good catch! That's unintentional. For organization purposes, would you be willing to make a new thread in the Server Bugs forum mentioning this issue? Lots of work to be done and keeping everything well organized will help the team fix issues like this one.

Examining the token should give a message stating if the deed is chained to kingdom influence.

This is really nice. My only nitpick would be to freeze the first column (view -> freeze -> 1 column). This will allow scrolling until the names match up with a deity to check their spell list exactly. Otherwise, really glad that players are compiling information and working together to figure out the quirks of the new update.

Would you happen to know if you had negative alignment before the update?

Hey everyone, thanks for the feedback. We're reading through the posts and have made a couple of changes in response to some of the concerns you have. You're absolutely right with this. We've made a change that allows guards to prevent bashing towers. Our goal is going to be to keep it at the 90 damage mark, as we feel it might make for some really memorable moments. If a kingdom is alerted at 30/60, then gets rallied together and out to the tower with 70 damage being inflicted, it's very easy for the opposing kingdom to back off and determine it's not worth it. By putting the marker at 90, we're attempting to put the attacking kingdom into a "commitment" to take the tower. Leaving a tower at 95-98 damage because the defenders came into local is going to be a really tough call. We want this to happen. It could end up with moments where a kingdom sacrifices part of their force to take down the tower. Of course, it's possible that this doesn't turn out this way, and we end up with the opposing kingdom simply taking the tower and leaving. If this becomes commonplace, we can always revisit the mechanic and make tweaks to when the alert goes out. It's very hard to get these mechanics right without doing live testing on them first. Just know that we're not putting our foot down and saying "this is how it is and always will be" - we're open to adjusting the numbers in the future to improve the system. It's hard to know whether to overtune or undertune this system for release. On one hand, if you make the alert too early, players will just simply avoid bashing towers as it's not worth it, expecting the opposing kingdom to outmatch them. On the other hand, if we place it too late, players are going to be attacking towers rapidly across the map because the system is in a place that's very good for that. We're going with the latter, as we'd prefer to make players aggressively use this system to start. If it gets too crazy, we'll dial it back. Furthermore, we also believe that this opens up the opportunity for smaller kingdoms to make a play on larger kingdoms without having to fight their full force. As a final point, we're not intent on making bricks used to repair the towers right now. We can look into it for a future update, but right now we're happy with simply preventing players from repairing towers while there are enemies in local. If you want to repair a tower, you'll need to push them off the objective and out of your local to re-establish control to repair. Opinions might vary on this, really. While individually none of these penalties seems very severe, when combined and put into practice, they may make a significant difference. Inflicting decay on a longhouse through cutting it's chain can be very punishing, and requires a ton of maintenance. It's easier to say "just repair the walls with brick every few days" than to actually do it. In time, we'll see how this plays out. It's important to note that the goal wasn't to cripple non-chained deeds, simply provide penalties that give incentive for enemies to raid it more easily. If players are able to use these mechanics to wipe deeds off the map rapidly, then the goals of the system have failed. If players are using these mechanics to strengthen their position before committing to a raid, the goals of the system have succeeded. Correct. This system is limited to Chaos and Elevation. It's also tied to a feature that can be toggled on and off, server-specific, at any time. If any unforseen circumstances occur on any server after the implementation of this feature, it can be disabled without a restart until a fix can be deployed. Yes, they will begin to be affected immediately. We're not launching with a grace period, but it can be implemented afterwards if necessary. Correct. The new tower chaining feature also requires that deeds be founded with the token within 50 tiles of a chained tower, instead of 50 tiles of kingdom influence. This means a chained tower is absolutely required and the token cannot be placed outside of existing tower influence. Any deeds that already exist outside of tower influence are grandfathered in to the system and wont be penalized, assuming there is a valid tower nearby within chaining distance (120 tiles).

It's been a bit since I last posted here, as I've been working on some of the projects unrelated to the priest rework recently. However, I've spent some time and made some quick changes to address some of the current issues/bugs with the current build. As of right now, the priest rework is considered content-complete and no further mechanics changes are planned. Fixes for bugs and exploits are obviously still on the table. Purge no longer dispels karma spell effects. Befriend monster passive no longer works for rift monsters or legendary creatures. Infection wounds no longer tick every minute against legendary creatures. Scorn of Libila no longer heals neutral creatures that are naturally aggressive. This resolves an issue with it healing creatures that are rendered neutral due to the befriend monster & befriend creature passives. Containers can now be enchanted and mended. This applies to pottery items, barrels, and similar objects that could previously not be cast on. Wrath of Magranon no longer fails to damage fences on the east and southern tip of its area of effect. Ritual of the Sun now properly repairs all fences and structures within Magranon & demigod faith zones. That aside, let's dive into some responses for the recent comments. Wurm is very heavy on RNG as it stands. Every action you take is dictated by some form of RNG, swayed by the items and skills you use. In the end, it still comes down to a roll of the dice. The "critical success" you speak of is done through raw sample size. Players cast over and over on items in order to achieve the higher value enchants. If the proposed ability to move enchants from item to item were implemented, it bypasses that sample size restriction on a single item and instead allows that sample size to be spread across all items and all players in the entire game. Instead of having a 104 enchant on a supreme be amazing, you'd instead compare a 104 cast on a supreme and a 104 cast on a normal item and consider them equal... because the normal item cast can be transferred to the supreme. To re-iterate, I've already done this in Wurm Unlimited. It ended up with players obtaining super-items that were massively out of control. Granted, I compounded that failure by uncapping enchant power and letting players advance excessively... but still. Once players have the best items, they no longer have anything to strive for. Goals are what keep players interested in playing Wurm. The ability to move enchants makes goals easier to achieve. While that feels good for the player, it's unhealthy for the game. This is a clash of good game design versus player desire. Sadly most of the work that was supposed to be done with Fo ended up not working out as intended. There were spells planned to be reworked that we just couldn't manage to do in a valid way, because the ideas were too ambitious. This leaves Fo in an unfortunate state where we were planning to give him something extra in order to bring him up to par with the other deities, but ends up falling short. Right now, he'll be remaining in the state that he's in. At the end of the day, he's the only god who has the full kit of healing spells, combined with Oakshell, Genesis, Life Transfer, and Venom. Because he's also a template god, he gets the special CR bonus for being on his terrain, which can be pretty potent. Aside from that, there's really not much else to say. I'm sure players will use him, but he'll be the niche pick of the group. This is intentionally remaining. Diversity is a good thing, and it will keep kingdom templates relevant. Players who are JK template can have a Vynora and Fo champion, then require a demigod for their third champion. Vynora and Fo are the most non-combatant template gods, so this seems a good balance whereas BL will have a "strong" Libila champion and MR will have a "strong" Magranon champion. Again, this isn't set in stone, so if it doesn't work out as intended, it can always be adjusted in the future. Fish are considered meat, so this is already functioning. Not being stung by bees seems like a good idea, but it'd require a new passive - of which Fo already has a very large amount. Followers of Fo already have 3 unique passives at 20 faith. Overloading Fo with passives is probably not the best way to fix him. In regards to the pets, that would be extremely difficult to achieve with the current pet system. There would need to be a rework of how pet mechanics worked before that type of idea could be attempted. Yes. Libila does not obtain Strongwall on PvE, but will retain it for PvP servers. Other priests will have access to Disintegrate on PvE after the update. Most of the deities roll either Strongwall or Disintegrate on PvE. I can't recall off the top of my head what deities have specifically on PvE, as the screenshots for their lists were taken on Baphomet (a PvP test server). A new list would need to be made for the PvE spell lists to include which deities have Disintegrate or Strongwall. No. This mechanic follows the same rules that govern all actions in the game. Whether it's improving an item, farming a field, or mining iron, you're always rolling -100 to 100, with a slide based on many factors. Channeling is no exception, but the actual power of the actions are more pronounced since they're entirely visible to the player instead of being hidden under other gameplay layers.

The effect you see there was highly "forced" by using a GM account to apply the effect in that area repeatedly. I condensed about ~2-4 months worth of terrain erosion into that 15 second clip. Edit: a quick before/after when I was working on it. This was roughly a week of erosion being live on the server: Before After