Keenan

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Everything posted by Keenan

  1. Halloween 2021

    They'll be obviously different as 'spooky' fragments.
  2. Halloween 2021

    Hello! Previously, Halloween drops were somewhat rare with the exception of trolls and goblins. This was mostly due to inadvertently making the aggressive creature pool small and the CR-based chance making some creatures have incredibly low chances for dropping loot. In order to make Halloween more fun for folks of all skill levels, the following changes have been made: A flat chance to drop has been implemented instead of CR-based. Combat drops have had their chance to drop increased. Like before, there are three loot pools with varied chances: Trolls (7%) Goblins (7%) All other aggressive creatures (5%) All loot pools use an increasing chance. Your chances improve the more you miss the roll. New items have been added to the other aggressive creature pool. The aggressive creature pool was expanded to be all aggressive creatures except hell horses and summoned creatures. To expand the accessibility of the Halloween event, items have been added to archaeology, including a special archaeology-only item. Not all items have been added to archaeology as to not dilute the pool. This works as an 8% chance to return a spooky fragment on a successful investigation action. We’ve also made drops both from combat and archaeology a premium-only feature due to the increase in drop rates. This is primarily to prevent easy farming of these items with non-premium alt accounts. I hope you have a fun and safe Halloween! Happy Wurming!
  3. I'll work with Demona to get an update on this out tomorrow post-patch. It's changed, for example it's a straight chance now - not CR-based. I found that to be punishing for folks who couldn't take tougher creatures. The intention for this event is to be fun for everyone, not just those with high skill, therefore drop rates in both the combat and the spooky archaeology finds have been set accordingly.
  4. Hello all. I want to give a bit of notice on some changes happening in the next update. I wish I had more notice to give, but I feel it’s important to communicate these changes regardless. Firstly, the “twins” trait had a bug where it was able to be given to a male creature. This makes the trait on that particular creature useless as we do not have access to the father’s traits when the offspring is born. The intention was to force any offspring with this trait to be female, but a bug prevented this from happening. We have fixed that bug, and to correct the current uselessness of the trait, we will be updating any male creature with this trait to be female. The second change has to do with fountains and specifically decorative fountains. Some feedback we had was how confusing it is to have decorative fountains that show flowing water but cannot be used for drinking. With this change, decorative fountains will become wall fountains with a new model pictured below. Fountains will now show flowing water if they contain water, so to keep the same aesthetic, you can replace the wall fountains with the original fountain and put a little water in it to keep it flowing. Fountains will now also show the water animation when on a water source tile even if empty. We do not like to force changes like this upon players, but this was mostly unavoidable. The one I’m most keenly aware of is the change to decorative fountains, but I do hope that you all find the new model pleasing and can find a place for it in your designs. Thank you and happy Wurming! -- Keenan
  5. So I don't want to leave folks hanging on this. I tried hard to find a way to make this happen for the 28th, but it's actually a much bigger change than I anticipated. We'll have to discuss internally for a good solution given that we're at a pretty hard limit right now in terms of what we can do to extend just the last ripe stage.
  6. What's hilarious is I was just talking about my trip to Epic years ago where I had about 3 silver on me and died in the middle of nowhere. I gave up and went back to Freedom and left the coins behind. I doubt they're the same ones as this was so many years ago, before I was a developer, but the irony is real.
  7. They are simply not part of the server transfer code, and I'm loathe to go at that code right now without some more intestinal fortitude. I have some plans for server crossings, but it's going to be a rather huge effort to touch on and I want to get things going more smoothly for future updates before I divert my attention to that.
  8. So this is "Working As Intended"® Pet bowls do have the priority in the order. That doesn't mean it can't be changed. Do post a suggestion and we'll review it once folks have had a chance to chime in. My only worry is that changing it one way for your use case may break it in another way for another use case right now. Edit: I do like the priority idea for enchanted tiles, though. (Missed that at first)
  9. Aha, there's actually a Math.max(1, ...) function going on here, which means the rune suffers from the same bottoming out as everything else. I'm working on some changes to this for our update on the 28th.
  10. The rune works, but it's hard to explain why, so here goes trying. Things that are not a light source do not use fuel. Instead, you're setting a temperature of the item to a value. Let's say 10,000. Each second the game ticks the temperature of the furnace, reducing it by a certain amount. There's a modifier that is applied to the number that is subtracted from temperature every second. The problem is that temperature is a whole number value, and this modifier is a floating point value. Once it's applied, the precision is removed and thus some of the bonus is removed. The net value here is that a forge indoors ticks down at the same rate as any rarity of forge, because it bottoms out at 1 point of temperature per second. Outdoors, a rare forge and a common forge will tick down differently with the common ticking down 2 temperature every second and the rare+ forge a 1. The rune works in a way because instead of trying to add another 10% modifier to this equation that's already bottomed out, it has a 10% chance to not tick down at all. I remember us having a hard time trying to communicate this in-game with the rune, because "reduce fuel usage rate by 10%" isn't the same as "have a 10% chance to not consume fuel", with the latter not true either given that forges don't technically use fuel to sustain heat. This basically means that rarity is "working as intended", only that the intent is much less of a bonus than what we would like. That said, I'll take a few moments to see if we can't get the bonus to be something more meaningful - like additional chances to not tick down temperature. That's about all we can really do with this unless we rewrite how they work, which is out of scope at this time. Edit: My tests were done with a 99QL forge, both common and rare. Inside and outside.
  11. Hello all! As per Samool’s post, I’ll be stepping up as the product manager for Wurm Online. Thank you for all the hard work you’ve done Samool. Working with you has been a pleasure, and I wish you all the best. I do hope you are able to bring your amazing skills back to us in the future. I’d like to start by saying that I am working on an updated road map, which may take a little more time before it’s ready, to ensure accuracy. What I can say right now is that we are shifting priorities a little: the Exploration update is still on the radar but will be pushed back to allow more time to finish and test it; in the meantime, we will be focusing on smaller suggestions, as well as some surprises for Halloween, all coming later this month. There is other content brewing as well, but I’ll leave that for teasing later! Map dumps will be coming around the New Year, as per our normal schedule, but they will include Northern Freedom Isles! Defiance will have a map dump that is delayed somewhat, with the actual delay still being determined; this is to protect fledgling villages that are still working on defenses. Finally, as a thank you for being patient with us, we will be running a 30% skill-gain and affinity bonus weekend at the end of this month. This will start with the update on the 28th of October and continue until midnight, server time, on the 4th of November (Thursday - Wednesday). Thank you all and happy Wurming! Edit: Due to some recommendations, we'll be doing a full week of bonus instead of just a weekend. This is to accommodate folks of varying play times.
  12. Yeah, let's leave the current PvP happenings out of this thread. I'm genuinely interested in where the feeling is on this. It's okay to fall on either side of this issue. We'll be using the points for and against to come to a decision. Currently, I'm personally torn. Releasing them means there's no going back in a way. We could always stop releasing them, but that isn't fair for the folks whose deeds will forever be located on the map dump. Not releasing them does preserve the fog of war, but the real question is: Does that element make PvP more fun for people? If I played on Defiance, I'd probably side with the idea of not releasing them. I do remember Chaos and having map software. I remember using priests to get approximate locations of deeds, and actually having to scout around. That was fun for me. I wasn't much of a fighter, but I did like to roam. Yet what's fun for me doesn't mean it's fun for everyone, and even then we still had map dumps of Chaos now and then. Granted, the old days they were very far and few between, but they still happened. Please keep on giving your feedback on this!
  13. This is an interesting point, though I'm curious how popular it is with folks on Defiance?
  14. Working on getting Got the other formats of maps up there as well (terrain, topographical).
  15. Mostly because the process isn't automated yet. That's a goal I have for the near/medium-range future. One of the main blockers for automation is that I want to get away from using Google Drive to host the maps.
  16. I'll have more news on map dumps soon.
  17. Hi all. We're looking at doing map dumps again, and this question keeps cropping up. In the past, I've varied the delay between the map data and release by about 30 days. I'm wondering what you, the PvP community, thinks though? The idea is to prevent fresh deeds from being outed and pummeled before they're defensible. So what delay would you all prefer?
  18. Just a heads up: "Test - Preview" is gone. There's "Test" and "Test - Legacy" (the old UI) I just rolled this change out a little bit ago.
  19. Let me start by saying this is my opinion and not a "Yes" or "No" to the idea. I want to be open and honest about this. First, the transfer back in 2017 was terrible. The math was good, but the implementation was horrible, and I'm still getting tickets passed to me to fix people who had issues with it. To this day, I have a docker container with the databases loaded from before the transfer to verify what people were supposed to have. We did a terrible job, and I'm not afraid to say that. (Edit: On further reflection, we didn't do a terrible job. We did what we could with what we had at the time, and there was no indication of anything going wrong based on the data we had. I'm being too hard on us here, but I'm also leaving that part in because transparency is good.) It was so awful because it was a one-time database modification based on a sample set of data that proved inaccurate and did not represent the whole set. And it was an extensive sampling, but the problem came from other bugs that caused incorrect data that we were relying on to complete the proper calculations. So, I do not personally want to go down that road again. Now that leaves us with an in-code solution. Here's the rub, though: It would have to be some conversion based on the epic curve during transfers, and transfers are delicate as is. We did something similar to this for Jackal, and it resulted in us having to do the first (and so far only (knocking on wood)) rollback in my tenure as a developer. That's nearly six years. We eventually got it mostly correct, but it wasn't perfect, and the code wouldn't translate well here because it went off of skill ticks. What we did was record your skill ticks, not the amount of skill you gained. We then applied those ticks at the Freedom skill rate, giving you skill on Freedom for your work on Jackal. The problem with this approach is that anyone who has skilled up on Epic since 2017 will be out of luck as we have no way of tracking those individual ticks. Now we need to write new code into server transfers to allow for skill transfer back to Freedom. Again, I'm not saying "No." Nor can I say "Yes" as that's not my call individually. But if we tried to do it, it would take a significant amount of time and still leave us with the central issue: Epic doesn't seem to attract people. Yes, people wouldn't be "wasting" time on Epic with skill transfers, but since the gains would have to be on par with Freedom gains, that also means there's still no incentive to play there. So we need to figure out that bit first, in my opinion, before we address skills at all. The TL;DR for those who hate my books is that skill transfer is very hard and still doesn't provide an incentive to play on Epic. In my opinion, we should focus on that incentive first, and then we can look into skill transfers. As for shutting down Epic, there's no reason to do this. If we were still on Hetzner, there would be a financial reason to consider it, but since we now load balance game servers across several hosts, the server costs aren't as much of an issue.
  20. This is a fair assessment, however I feel we need to approach the VI as a team going forward. Being a small team, there will be times during the year where development slows considerably as people take vacations. During these times, we'll likely share less about development and more about what the team is up to. Even if it's just saying "Hey! It's vacation time here, what are your plans?" or something of that nature. The point being that you won't be left wondering whether or not we're still here, as has been the case during the last few months. I also know that we're tight-lipped about what we're working on usually until it's ready for release. This is a learned behavior from things having been promised in the past, only to not be delivered in a reasonable time frame or sometimes changed completely. I think we need to get better at this, even if we disclose that whatever it is we're teasing is subject to change during development. It's something we're discussing internally and I hope the results of that discussion show in future editions of the VI.
  21. Hello! I’d like to address some of the concerns we’ve seen from you. Communication I’ve talked with Demona, who will be staying on board, and we’ve agreed that a Valrei International on at least a monthly basis is a must. Releasing one on this cadence will ensure active communication from the team every month. Animal Husbandry I won’t go into all the details here, but I will say that we have a patch we plan on releasing tomorrow that has some long-awaited fixes for breeding and animal husbandry. I’ve asked Demona to cover the details in a Valrei International, which should be going up later. As with anything, development is an ongoing process, and we will await more feedback from you before we decide on future tweaks to this system. Patches & Future Content While tomorrow’s patch will be a bug fix patch, we’re still actively working on a few significant projects and sourcing suggestions for quality of life improvements. We plan to make another post in a week or so regarding the previously detailed plans and where things currently stand. With all of that said, I’d like to thank you all for your patience and feedback. Happy Wurming! Edit: to stop suggestions getting lost in this thread, there is a separate epic channges suggestions thread running here:
  22. I'm locking this thread. There will be another post later today detailing the upcoming bug fix patch. I will not have much to say beyond that at this time, however. We understand that you want more out of us, and we're working on that internally. Thanks for your feedback.
  23. This is Keenan. Keenan doesn't understand this is a joke. Keenan likes the idea. Keenan implements it for next patch. Don't be Keenan.