Lightonfoot

I can end all this arguing. It's simple. Just add random teleportation portals across the map that interlock with eachother. Players step into one and it ports them to a different portal. It's the same for each interlocking portal. An in-game map system will have a teleportation layer that shows all the portals and all the connections between them. Next add telepotration chambers for settlements. Using the chamber, players can teleport to any other settlement that's friendly to them or has a chamber open to public use. Build some non-player settlements so there'll always be a selection of chambers for public use. Once players are teleporting, they'll think roads were stupid. They won't care how hard they're to make. They'll be like "They're not required. I don't use them. So I don't care how hard they're to make." And thus the arguing is over. HOWEVER, if you even think about making the teleportation system more difficult to use or even removing it altogether, you're more likely to sell land on Mars than you're to not ignite a firestorm of argument. Here's the lesson: It's a LOT easier to add faster travel than ti's to slow it down or fundamentally change it. Get your travel system right the first time. Otherwise, plan your changes to coincide with faster travel schemes. So you want to add more bricks to how roads are made? Then add a faster road that needs more bricks. Do not under any circumstances slow down the previous road recipes, unless you like to make flame wars. Generally, players do not like things to be slowed down AFTER THE FACT. Just a warning.

I would instead make this an ability like Last Gasp. Maybe call it Sprint. The reason I wouldn't want to make it a skill is because players would want to grind it and running just to run is not a fun activity. You don't want to remove the danger in the world by making players able to outrun everything. The point in these survival games is to use your experience and wits to survive. If there's always an automatic escape option then there's no surviving. Surviving is about making the right choices and having good enough reflexes (for Wurm). If you can't make a bad choice then there's no point in playing because you're not actually making choices. The idea is to give us more things to think about, not to make things easier. This game can become TOO simple at times, especially if you've played for a while or live too safely. This game needs to figure out how it can be compelling for both veterans and new players without making life too boring or hard for either one. A note about my new player experiences: For running longer distances, I enjoyed to look at the world maps online and plot my course. I did this when I first started. I left the central area and went to a far off place on the map. I'd use the water often because traveling on the land often meant going on longer courses and bumping into dangerous creatures. But as I learned more I figured out short cuts by crossing the least dangerous land areas.

Come people. This person offers some interesting comments. Visual feedback IS something we like, right? The only flaw the OP has is that they admitted to not playing enough. Some posters won't admit to something like that. I agree that it would be cool if we could look and see if something can be foraged/botanized or not. That really pulls you into the world. Looking at a text window is not really something that pulls you in so much. On a similar level, if I'm going down a hill or running from a creature down a hill, I have to keep my sights on the slope of the hill so I don't fall. I also have to keep watch for other dangerous creatures. For that matter, slopes and fall damage, as conditions, demand that I am actually looking at the world around me. It has the affect of pulling me in. The IDEA of visual feedback is a good one. It saves space on our user interface and doesn't clog the chat window.

Some interesting stuff. One of the things I thikn would be cool would be true 3d mining. But not so much to mine, but just to create awesomely complex dungeons so that people trying to steal my things will get lost and regret their decision to enter it. Right now Wurm is a 2d representation of the underground areas. They're not 3d like Minecraft. As others have stated, it's the survival/sandbox aspect of Wurm that I really like.

You know Weylin, I agree with almost every point in this thread you make. The single thing I want you to remember is that I AGREE with you! Gaw, you basically have spoken for me in my absence. I could use you as my spokesperson. In fact, I've made several recent posts on this exact subject matter. There was another thread... BUT I want to clue you on to something. Something I do to break the grind is to use MANY skills in as short a time as can be both beneficial and practical. Because skills in Wurm do not supply enough gameplay on their own, i have to mix them up to keep myself interested in the game. When they can no longer be mixed up, I have anticipated that this would undermine the game. There're two things that I can think of that stand between players and true enjoyment: 1) Specialization 2) Sabotaging the short-term rewards in skills Points 1) and 2) are both interrelated. Specialization happens when a player uses only a couple skills over long lengths of time. They're encouraged to grind them up to high(er) levels. Now, this can happen as result of a couple of factors. Those are: 1) Buying tools/items from other players 2) Joining a community and focusing mostly only on what you're good at compared to others Sabotaging the short-term rewards in skills happens when: 1) Buying or being given freely tools/items from other players and using them rather than making them The reason I say that both these things are interrelated is that when a crafting skill has its short-term rewards sabotaged by you receiving superior items than you can make with it in any reasonable time scale then you're encouraged not to use the skill at all and instead use a different one. This (likely) increases specialization. This is because the short-term rewards are meant to be a positive reinforcement so that you continue to improve your skill. But if somebody sabotages this by giving you said item(s) then you must instead grind the skill to very high levels before receiving anything you can use. For long periods of time you will not receive a reward. The startling thing is to realize that players in communities tend to specialize. Players do this to make their time spent be more worthwhile in the short-term. They each want to help the community so they figure out what the community needs most and what they can most easily and most productively produce. This motivates them to specialize. So if their highest skill is mining and they have the highest mining skill in the community then they're pushed to mine almost exclusively. This pattern can potentially continue indefinitely. And the sad thing is, it can sabotage the game and make it MORE grindy since they're specializing. This is absolutely at odds with the nature of MMO's. They're MEANT to form communities. But if communities work against the game then the game is hampering itself. AS a new player and as a person that doesn't take hand outs or buy things with silver, I was encouraged to learn all the skills equally when I started. This kept the game from being too grindy. I would find myself having plenty of diverse things to do in the foreseeable future. My goals were small and achievable. I was never bored. Just wanted to bring this up. Not sure if you've ever thought about it. But HOW to address this? A few ideas I've had in the past to discourage specializing is to limit the amount that you can train any single skill at 1x experience gain on a day to day basis. For example, if you use carpentry for 1 hour then the experience modifier drops to 0.8x rather than 1x. This encourages a player to move to another skill. HOWEVER, this would not prevent players from sabotaging the short-term rewards by either buying said item(s) or receiving them freely from other players. It would not prevent players from specializing in a community, but it might reduce it, depending on how much the experience modifier is reduced with prolonged use of a specific skill. An alternative idea is to instead increase the gameplay complexity of skills so that players don't have to mix skills up to feel engaged. However, this is unlikely to happen. It would require a massive content update. Furthermore, it would literally force players to specialize, since learning multiple skills would be so demanding. Each skill would be like an entire mini-game or game all by itself. And because players would find it so hard to train multiple skills, they'd feel forced into communities and might not like that. Some players prefer to be alone. Granted, players might be able to play alone, but the game would move along so slowly that their goals would have to be very small. Another idea is to allow more players to do more things in such a way that a lower skill player can fill the role of a higher skill player. So, for example, if there's a person with 80 mining skill in a community and a person with 40 mining skill, something would have to be implemented in hte game that would allow the person with 40 mining skill to contribute almost as much or as much as the person with 80 mining skill. This would reduce or stop specializing. One way possible way to do this is for 15 minutes per day per skill give players an extreme boost to their capabilities that allows them to do what higher skill players can do. This example would reduce specializing. Some players might feel threatened by my suggestion that a lower skilled player should be able to do what a higher skilled player can do. However, let me warn you that if NOTHING is done about this then Wurm will suffer. So whether you like it or not, your own feelings of superiority can hurt the game by forcing people into specialization. Remember that this is about an engaging game, NOT about your ego! An engaging game is ultimately better for everybody. An engaging game is about people doing lots of different things and feeling involved in the process. Maybe the game would be better if everybody could make high quality times but the people who've played longer could make them faster. But not so much faster that new players can't contribute things. It all boils down to the differences in capability between high skill and low skill. If the differences are too great then players will not diversify. There has to be a way that a player of any given skill can contribute meaningfully WHILE diversifying. Perhaps the game should just get rid of quality altogether. Make it so that a player of any skiil level can create exactly the same item. In fact, make it so that there's NO innate differences between players. A 2-year veteran would make planks at he same speed and quality as a new player. The only difference would be that the 2-year veteran would have more knowledge about how to do things. Once hte new players knows, they can reproduce the work. Yet another idea is to make it so that low-skill items do not increase the skill of high-skill players when they make them. Also make it so that the low-skill items PEAK in quality at specific skill amounts. This way if you're a 90 carpenter and some planks need to be made, it'd actually be smarter to have a low-skill carpenter to make them since they would still gain skill AND they'd be able to produce an item with equal quality as you can make. Hypothetically, the planks peak at 35 and you can gain skill all the way up to 55 from them. Since the low-skill carpenter has 40 carpentry, they're a better candidate to make them. HOWEVER, if the high-skill carpenter wanted to make them then they could. They'd still be max quality. But the high skill carpenter might not have the huge advantage they have now. The key is to make sure that players of all skill levels have something they can make that's useful to a community. If this is done right then diversifying can be beneficial since high-skill players are not always better choices for certain things. Bottom line, diversifying has to be rewarded, NOT specializing. There're probably a variety of ways to incite players to diversify their skill set. I can't anticipate all the ways the developers will do this. I can only guess. I've just offered a couple potential routes down this road. But one thing I know is that Wurm WILL do this if the grind turns out to be unliked by the developers for whatever reason.

Unfortunately, this thread is going to eventually disappear. So depressing. You know, I've seen all this b4. I'm 35 years old and have played a lot of online games. I really do not know where to start. It's a complicated issue. Plus, players have goals in mind when playing games that're different. What's automation? First thing that pops into my mind is how so many modern online games have in-game maps and mini-radars and how non-player characters have quest icons above them. Players have become so reliant on these tools. If you think about it, in-game maps and radars (and even quest icons) are just a form of automation. These modern tools are doing the memorizing and looking around FOR YOU, so you don't have to. The in-game map looks at the terrain and the nearby buildings and even looks at their specific names. The radar looks at the creatures and the non-player characters. Quest icons and speech trees replaced the older interfaces used in MUDs where you had to speak to a non-player character by entering sentences and there was no guide telling you what to ask! The reason I say all this is because I recall in-game maps being added to a game and I found myself using the in-game map so much that I became disgusted and just shut it off. I couldn't remember the places I was going without having the map window up because I never was putting in the time anymore to actually look around and learn the places. That was when I realized that this "feature" is not really a good one. I existed FINE without the map before it was added and after it was added I grew sick of it. I know some people LOVE these features, but I don't. Because so many players like these automation features, it transforms games. It makes them so they're tailored to these kinds of players. This basically means I'll enjoy it less. I usually just swallow my irritation. Automation has some practical uses. Lets be honest, real life happens. Sometimes you have to go to the bathroom. Sometimes you remember "Uh!!! I have to take the garbage out!" Sometimes you want to cook a quick meal. Sometimes you need to go afk for an hour real quick. And so on. For these reasons, I support some amount of automation to allow people to also have real lives. HOwever, there comes a time when the game is either defined by its automation or by its interactivity. A game has to decide what it's going to be. It can't be everything. The thing about mmo's is they can't -greatly- please everyone. I NEVER play sports games, for example. I almost never play puzzle games, either. I mostly in my life have played RPGs and strategy games. I have played one or two FPS games since I do like twitch gameplay - it reminds me so much of the nintendo I played as a kid. I just am not interested in other games. Yet, even within these sub-genres I have my own specific needs that're unique to me. And, more broadly, I share some preferences with a smaller section of players existing within these sub-genres. So even an RPG has to water down a bit to be able to appeal to everyone. For example, I love strategy and if the RPG has some strategy elements it will have to water them down so that everyone can have some enjoyment from it. I won't enjoy it as much as I enjoy a pure strategy game, but it might be better than a puzzle element that the game adds. And I also prefer interactivity and feedback within the game, but some players do not like it as much as I do. So the game will have to water it down somewhat in order for the game to appeal to the largest number of players. I'd like to see more twitch gameplay where we have to run and jump and avoid obstacles in short spans of time with danger lurking. So many online RPGs that I've played do not have enough twitch gameplay. What I really mean by this is something like what the Nintendo had. You had to jump and move around or you would die. This required good hand-eye coordination. This is probably the major reason that most online RPGs greatly water it down. In Wurm, the closest thing to this is running down a hill from a huge spider, trying not to get fall damage and not to attract other creatures that will attack and possibly hit you in the leg (and thus slow you down so they can eat you). At the end of the day, it just makes me feel real sad. The reason I say this is because in order for me to find the "perfect" game, I have to look for that 1 in a million. Since it's so unlikely, I'll be left playing watered down versions. Even Wurm is a watered down version of my ideal game. I want MORE detail, MORE feedback, MORE strategy, MORE twitch gameplay and so on. But the fact is, I'm just asking for too much. In this way, single player games are better because you can mod them. I can take any moddable single player game and make it EXACTLY what I want. No online game I've played is perfect. But Wurm Online is the closest. The second best game I've played was probably Ultima Online. It did so many things right compared to other online RPGs. It had in-game houses that you could see in a seamless world. It was skill-based. It had boats that you could even treasure hunt with. You could fish. The game early on even had a beta ecosystem model - which was later removed because it was seen as a liability. You could cut trees. You could furnish your house and even put merchants in it. You could mark/recall using a teleport spells. So many things! But I'd have to give a /nod to EverQuest and WoW for their deep lore and unique items and their factions and quests and dungeons. They spurred a generation of online RPGs that shares much in common. And I'd also have to /nod to the many MUDs out there that're the true ancestors of these graphically rich online RPGs. Every online game I've fallen in love with eventually hurts me. That's where this comes in: [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soDZBW-1P04 You may not be old enough yet to be hurt, but you'll get it later on.

I especially agree with the bolded statement pararaph, but with some conditions - as you will understand if you read more. As for your other points it's hit and miss and I'll address that. I agree that time is not difficulty. Rather, difficulty is the ability to successfully juggle many different conditions in a span of time and these conditions from one moment to the next are never exactly the same. Players who learn to both juggle the best and to respond dynamically to changing conditions will be the best players. This is how I define difficulty. Time (consumption of), on the other hand, is rather just a side effect of the fact that people require X time to absorb information to understand it. For example, I require X time to learn how to drive a car successfully. If this time is too short then I cannot successfully learn. If this time is too long then I will grow bored because I am doing the same activity too frequently. As you should know, humans require some repetition to learn because we miss things, but too much is not considered enjoyable. So it's sometimes unclear what the offending repetition is. Now on to another point. You stated that making things quicker and adding more automation isn't making the game easier because the game wasn't hard to begin with. But can you understand that speeding things up or adding automation is NOT solving the problem of the game being too easy in its original state? To solve the problem of the game being too easy (or too repetitive; boredom), it needs to add more content to engage the player. You correctly observe that as the game adds more content, the time consumed by specific activities should be lessened to reduce the grind. BUT what you miss is this is only true if the game was already grindy and lacking in content. IF a game already has enough content for players, adding more is purposeless and by reducing the time needed to perform activities as a default you actually sabotage the ability of players to absorb information and enjoy the content. I think we can both agree that players should get more with extra effort. I also think we agree that effort should be more about juggling comlpex activities and not about who can grind for the longest period of time. I agree with others in this thread that assert thigns we do in this game should require time investment. If there was no time investment, especially in Wurm's case, either the map would have to be much greater in size or there'd have to be a large increase in decay to offset the vaster number of player constructions. As a new player since July 2012, I have LOVED this game. I haven't played every month and this is only my second time that I am premium (2 months each), but I can unequivocally say it has been very rewarding. I started out foraging and botanizing on Serenity. The feeling of immersion was the most intense I've ever experienced in any game. I simply cannot express how wonderful it was! The interface was simple (not imposing or cluttered). The environment was dangerous. There were no blinking lights or radars or in-game maps. I was absolutely embedded in the envrionment. The best moment of all I'd have to say was when I crested a hill and came into a clearcut where somebody had cut a lot of trees. I could see stacks of logs on the edges. It was night and I was watching for animals. I looked up at the stars. I could hear the wind. That was the moment when I told myself that there was something very special about Wurm. For a long time I knew there was something special, but it was really that moment when it crystallized. That memory will remain burnt into my mind, always remembered. I felt like I stood in a world. The wind wasn't just a line of text that only existed in the imagination. The wind was real! The world around me could change. And because what I saw around me could in fact be lost it I reached out and held onto it and hold it close even now. Here is my last post in this thread (it's really my single offering to this thread): http://forum.wurmonl..._40#entry767138

It used to destroy items when you failed. So the greater the skill requirement, the greater the chance to completely lose the item. So you'd have to start all over again. This led to players only improving to a safe threshold.

I made reference to this a couple posts ago, here: http://forum.wurmonl...es/#entry765594 I've thought about this for a while when playing Wurm Online. First played in July 2012. Here're the things I focus on and ask: 1) Are you getting useful rewards for using/training skill(s)? 2) Are you using more than one or two skills to break the tedium? As others have pointed out, one way to break the grind is to do several skills at once spread over time. Because I'm a new player and don't spend silver to get things, I often have to make it myself. This means I have a reason to learn multiple skills. I've found that it has kept me busy and doing different things. Now, if I'm an already established player that has bought tools/weapons/etc then I might find myself stuck doing the same routine. This is something I've tried to avoid. Yesterday, in fact, I was thinking about this issue of buying tools/etc instead of making them. If you buy things this allows you to focus exclusively on one or two activities. And if you can't make anything useful with the skills you're learning because you've already bought them then the only way to get anything is to grind. The issue is what do we get from using our skills and are we doing the same skill too much? If you get something then it greatly helps to reduce the bad feelings. If you're not getting anything because you already bought superior items then you've sabotaged the reward system. This can also happen if other players who specialize give you superior tools/etc. This can also ruin the rewards. This also, not paradoxically, can force you to specialize. Because you're specializing, you're only using one or two skills at best. In this way, communities can be detrimental. So what I think is going on is this: 1. Buying superior items (rather than making) removes reward from training crafting skills 2. Communities force you to specialize and this increases the tedium There's the other issue of how repetitive certain skills are. For example, fishing and mining are extremely repetitive. On the other hand, imping a tool involves you using several different tools (and skills) and repairing and refueling the campfire/forge/etc. You also have to continually mine new ore and cut down trees to be able to improve your items. But with fishing the only time you really need to do anything is when (if) the fishing pole breaks. Other than that, all you're doing is waiting for the cooldown timer to reset. With mining, it's just as bad. Fishing and mining and things like "...Continue Building." are on the extreme end of repetition. The multiple actions/reactions involved in improving tools/weapons/etc is more I think what we need to reproduce as a matter of habit in the rest of the skills to reduce repetition. But this means players must be more engaged. My conclusion... Which leads me to conclude that the fundamental processes of skills in Wurm are not complex enough once players are forced into specialization. This can happen because they're in a community or because they've bought everything rather than making it. This is especially damaging for skills like fishing and mining and very repetitive processes like "....Continue Building." Furthermore, by using the economy and buying superior items, players shortchange the reward mechanism and thus remove some of the short-term inclinations to use skills. Lastly, I think there's another issue to all this too. And I think the OP has missed it. It's the issue that queuing actions is popular BECAUSE players can walk away from the computer for a minute or two to do different things around the house. They can also browse the internet. In fact, when I fish I often will browse. This is actually not a terrible thing, depending on whether the player likes it or not. It allows you to walk away from the game while still playing it. It's a minor form of botting. I believe that some players would NOT want to see the game become too action/reaction oriented. So while I think that making the process of how skills function should be more like how improving tools/weapons/etc works, I also think some players won't agree. They don't want to have to sit at the computer and reaction and act every few moments. They want to be able to sit back and relax and chat and/or go afk. I did this yesterday while building. I simply queued a bunch of actions repeatedly while I was cooking something. This allowed me to do thigns in RL while also playing the game. Some people will prefer this. I can't do this when improving items because the timer is quick and I have be ready to click the right thing to react to changed circumstances. This also means moving the items in my inventory so that they're easy to click. I must also put some things in my toolbelt. Usually, I'll put the mallet and a pelt on it. Essentially, all of this requires me to be at my keyboard. I also have to refuel the forge/campfire. I simply cannot do this if I'm browsing or afk cooking something to eat.

I agree with you. Wurm will NOT be destroyed by this new digging feature. It might even gain players. But the game will not be the same game. It will be softer and more mainstream, but it'll never be as good as a true mainstream online game is. What's worse is that it will not be the game you want to play anymore. Players who support mainstreaming Wurm are the types of players who do NOT share your thoughts. But I'll come out and stick my head on the chopping block and give you my support. I have been through this in other online games. They desperately streamline themselves as they grow older. We're like allies on this issue. I feel like we're brothers somehow. *tear* In my other post on this page I mentioned why I think they do this, to some extent. But mudflation is not the only reason. There're others. i only mentioned a few in that post. Another reason is simply just greed and changing attitudes. Companies will see another game doing well and they're like "Hey, I played their game and like it. Very fun. But those gamers from that game just can't understand our game and leave in frustration. That's money lost. Well, the reason we're having this meeting today is because I'm convinced we need to be more like that other game. This will quite possibly increase our budget so we can do everything we wanted to. It will also allow us to catch up with the times and to not be the ugly duckling that everyone thinks we're. It's time for us to make a positive change." A good example of this (NOT THE ONLY ONE) is Anarchy Online. During that time, Anarchy Online implemented new ideas with Rubi-Ka and it was different from EverQuest. But at that time, EverQuest ruled the industry. So AO executives decided to model their next expansion, Shadowlands, on the concepts in EverQuest. So rather than having instances and fast travel and less downtime, they decided to remove vehicles and to have "zones" and to give it more of a fantasy feeling. They probably did this to grab EverQuest players, but I'm sure some of the developers at AO also played EverQuest. The reason I say this is they glorified EverQuest and all of its awesomeness, but they never openly admitted they wanted to grab EverQuest players. The irony is that AO had it right with Rubi-Ka, they just were too blind to see it. A few years later WoW would come out and have instancing and fast travel and less downtime. Love is blind. But to some amount, so are companies. They copy each other like they have no originality. Obviously, this can work to their advantage if money is what they're after. But the thing is, it's not foolproof. And for small-time minority gamers like myself, the mainstream just cannot offer me what I am looking for. I am just exhausted with seeing how companies copy each other and cannot stand on their own two feet and form their own niche. Btw, I'm not a veteran. First played this game in July 2012. I'm a two-time premium player now. Still consider myself a noob. And you know what? I LOVE THAT FEELING. I love the feeling of fighting to climb the ladder. So many online games now don't have the FIGHT the whole way up. It's just a mindless quest-hub grind to max. Too many games won't let us get our face slammed into the mud. They're overprotective and feed our feelings of vulnerability rather than toughening us up by exposing us to the elements. We've become spoiled and unable to handle adversity. This is the first online game in a long long time that I actually felt like paying for and have stuck with. This game trully is somethign special for me. I can't express how stragne it's to actaully want to play a online game. All you people who say it's too tough... well I started in July 2012 and I died many times. I had a lot of s*** thrown in my face. I didn't play 12 hours/day. AND IT WAS THE MOST GODDAMN FUN I'VE EVER HAD.

What you're missing is that starting players also get the benefits of the new digging feature(s). But I'll agree that players whom don't spend a lot of RL money for in-game money will have to diversify more to get it, possibly. But like I said in my last post, I don't think digging jobs will go extinct. What's happened is that the req for big(ger) terraforming projects has lowered. There'll still be jobs, but the jobs themselves will amount to big(ger) terraforming.

It won't make digging jobs go extinct. What I think it will do is lead to bigger jobs being undertaken, since players can do more now. Players on PvP servers will use it to extremes now to distance themselves from froobs and their (premium) enemies. All that's happened is the req for big(ger) terraforming projects lowered, but the players will do everything in their power to distance themselves from others to gain an advantage. As for your point about how crafting is not quite as demanding as it used to be, well, this is common in online games. Most online games start out tough. The rules are tight. But as time continues on, they lighten the rules considerably. There're probably a load of theories for why this happens. The most conventional one that you'll read on forums is that players like it that way. They don't like tight rules. Another possibility that's less well known is that older games pick the lower fruit by easing the gameplay penalties. This only really makes sense when you consider that companies do not like to invest in old(er) games. But I think the best one is that it's a symptom of mudflation. To compensate for those instances when the game adds new progression powers for veterans, the game has to speed up the progression curve from low-skill to high-skill year after year to keep it steady. (This is more subject to non-sandbox games that have lots of expansion releases and level increases.) If it did not do this then new players would never have a chance to catch up with the skill-level of veterans and would forever be slaves to them. But for sandbox games, there's still the element of high-skill players congesting the world and choking off new players from rising up. The game has to ensure that long-term players do not become too powerful in terms of what they own and control to prevent them from monopolizing things and making the game too restrictive for starting players.

I have to agree in terms of how Wurm handles skills and items. But honestly, the whole skill-up process in these kinds of games is incredibly linear. The degree of accomplishment should not be how much you grind a skill, but how many different conditions you're juggling in your mind successfuly. it should be in the reactions to things. It should be in your knowledge of things. It should be in the interrelations to other (unrelated) threats. Skills in games are mostly fake. They're not things you learn. They're just numbers that go up when you click certain things or do certain things. For the most part, this is the rule, not the exception. The reason why ti's this way? Well, hard to say. It could be lack of ability in the developers to program compelling things. It could be that players can't handle complex things because they don't have enough time. It could be that players don't want to have to learn at all. This may surprise you, but there're studies that show rats which are stressed experimentally will tend to favor repetitive behaviors over learning behaviors. When htey examined the brains of the rats that participated in hte experiments, they foudn that the parts of their brain for learning and goals had shrunk. Conversely, the area of hte brain for habitual behavior had grown. This was a response to the stress the experimenters introduced. Basically, it appears that when the rats felt incapable of stopping stress or are exposed to excessive amounts, they became locked into repetitive habits. I'm sure there're other reasons. This is seen in humans (at least somewhat). Studies show that the learning and memory areas of the human brain are damaged by long-term exposure to stress. But does this cause the dorsolateral striatum (habitual behavior) in the brain to grow like it did in the lab rats in the experiment, assuming everything else is equal? My guess is people IRL that favor habitual behavior will favor repetition/grinding in games. Constrastingly, if games required more learning and goal-directed behavior, these same players would no longer like it. I do not know if the learning/memory centers of the brain can be restored. However, I would like to add that some jobs IRL require repetition. Perhaps it's good that some people might favor repetition. Just googled this... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452203008467

I voted "I don't have an opinion." for digging. For the animal-breeding, I voted "I don't like them." The reason I voted "I don't like them" for the animal breeding is because this game is first and foremost a sandbox. If someone wants to capture high-level creatures to train up combat skills in a more convenient (homely) way then I don't see anything wrong with that, so long as the whole process is not too simple and brainless. It should just be another way to do things. Restricting things too much just makes hte game more bland and linear.

I support democracy. Let gamers have a say in the game they play. Doesn't mean I like a particular game. See this thread: http://forum.wurmonl...nimals-changes/ For digging, I clicked on "I have no opinion." I don't have an opinion yet since: 1) I haven't tried the new feature 2) I want to see how it plays out over several months; after the damage, if any, has been done If you examine the numbers, only 21 people can be said to be critical of the new digging feature, while 33 support it mostly happily. So 38% of the population would probably support some adjustments to the new feature. However, 61% of the population probably would not want any negative adjustments to the feature.

I propose that only some of the champions should be bigger. The rest should have a different texture or a different model. I don't think all champions should look the same from one monster-type to another. They should be champions for different reasons.

Gorillas evolved too just like humans. Let me ask you: Which one is better? Humans are because they dominate the earth, right? Well, why not ask the gorillas and lets see what they have to say about it. One of the reasons I play Wurm is because things take time. If I could do everything with one click then I wouldn't play. Right now, Wurm is still a great game. But I've left games for lesser reasons than this. So your "evolution" doesn't always work. It has turned me off of other games before. I'm happy for you if it works for you. And I have to wonder with speeded up terraforming how it will change the terrain. If it's so much easier to flatten or raise now then I'd expect to see more flat and raised areas all across the server maps. For an individual this means less grind when terraforming, but for the server it probably means more terraformed land. And I was thinking the other day about slopes in one of the cities I'm in. There're uneven areas. Ironically, it adds variety. Now that flattening is easier, those uneven areas are more likely to be flattened in the future. If this feature adds more variety to slopes in cities then great. But if not then that sucks because I hate flat cities. I'll wait and see how it goes. I wonder how this will be used on the pvp servers?

What about the idea of only allowing this new flattening feature on deeds? This would: 1) Reduce terraform spamming in non-deeded areas (not as easy to bulldoze wild areas) 2) Simulate the idea of a (deeded) community working together to dig faster 3) Require players to invest in a deed to gain access to the faster digging

I agree with you. It needs to be an interactive experience. Not necessarily 1 to 1. I started in July 2012. I dug and flatted an area for my house. For fun, I even put a small dirt wall around it. I also dug out some area for a mine. I loved it. It was fun figuring how how the corners work and how to flatten. I was having genuine fun. So when guys come out and say digging is boring, I do not get it because I had fun. They must mean much MUCH bigger projects than I have done. And if that's true then maybe they're right. I just hate being pigeon-holed and forced to play this game the way THEY want it by having the way I do things being obsolete. Right now, apparently, digging manually is obsolete because it's so much easier to use automation. There's no interaction in automation, since it's expected to be automatic. Furthermore, if players are going to be digging so much faster, deeds and flat areas are going to spring up everywhere. Whatever natural beauty was there will be gone since it's now so easy to bulldoze things. There needs to be some limitations on the speed and size of things that players can do so that the world isn't overwhelmed with terraformed land and deeds and houses everywhere. One huge paved metropolis. So say the developers put a hard limit on how much you can terraform in a day. Is that really so much better than what we have now? Right now we can terraform all day to our heart's content. But it's slow. In the future, it'll probably be lightning fast, but there'll be a limit placed on how much or where we can terraform. So a player terraforms for 1 hour and then does something else because they reached their terraform limit for the day. It's evolution baby. I'll explain further... One idea to resolve fast terraforming is to dynamically decay non-deeded terraformed land so that it steadily becomes more natural and broken apart and wild. One way to do this is to just bring the terraformed land into alignment with its original height/etc over time. This may have to be done also in conjunction with a daily limit on terraforming activities. To control the number of deeds so the world isn't a huge paved metropolis without increasing the size of the map, you can increase the prices and/or the demands of maintaining them.

I like your post. If players can make this happen now, why're they not doing it? (but i personally like wood scraps and wish metal scraps were still in-game, but with better mechanics)

POssibly worthy of repeating. Please excuse my ignorance if it's foul smelling.

Assuming what you say is true and not a spin then this is a good example of what's going on. In fact, the other day I saw an enclosed fence about 4x4 with several creatures inside that were trapped. There was no house nearby. I didn't check the decay of the fence to see if it's old or not. Maybe I'll check that tonight. I like the idea of making captive animals dumb so that they're not using server processing resources. So they won't attack or feed or groom themselves or move. I'm sure Rolf could figure out other things to limit processing. And if you think about the real world, most captive animals lose their wild instincts and DO sit a lot. It's realistic! The other idea of course is just to remove benefits of having them enough that most players don't.

Great comments by everyone about all that. However, one way to reduce this is to "corral" your horses into smaller pens so they don't crowd up amongst one other. This of course requires more work, but is a way to compensate it. After all, you can't expect horses to not intermingle if given the option to. And that's the whole thing with disease. The reason viruses and diseases survive is because we're social creatures and tend towards intermingling. What you bring up here is more of an excuse to allow people to pen large numbers of animals and not have to put in the extra work. You want the whole cake but you don't want to pay the price for the cake. You're like the guy that says it's a good idea to put limitations on things, but you can't seem to agree with any of the limitations. There has to be concessions because the server cannot do infinite creature AI instances. The trick I think is how do you limit what players are doing without ruining the experience and chasing them away? Players, by and large, lack attention to detail. So you can't make things too complex. It has to be accessible somehow. What I think will happen is that the developers will choose not to make your job more complex, but will instead limit how many animals players can have some other way. Perhaps they'll make it so that captive animals do not move and do not attack or feed on their own (to reduce processing cycles). Or they could reduce the benefit of captive animals enough so that players will be discouraged from having large numbers of them. So only those who're making a zoo for roleplaying reasons will want large numbers of them. The rest of players will see no reason to do it.

Have a cost for automation. Whether it's for digging or for fishing or for mining or for cutting down a tree. Force players to pick between doing something manually and being able to use an in-game script/macro. If they choose the script, there's some incurred penalty. If they choose to do it manually, they'll have to do the thinking and clicking but they'll not have the penalty. The penalty could be as simple as the script not being smart. And that's not hard to do. Most scripts that try to replace a player do not perform nearly as smart, depending on how complex the activity is. For example, cutting a tree down is not very complex. However, if I chop a tree down and see that its quality is too low, I'll ignore it and move on to a new one. I may watch my stamina and not let it get too low - just in case I need to run in a hurry and my water/food is not max. That's about as complex as it gets. Even digging only gets confusing with things like runoff or moving dirt around. When you look at the numbers, they're not complicated. It's not difficult to figure out how to flatten manually. However, understandably, you do have to have a mind that's friendly towards numbers. To a script, these things are easy. Anyway, if the activity is easy to script, just increase stamina drain. Simple as that. Manual = most efficient. Automatic = most convenient. And you know if you boil away all of the arguing, what it comes down to is: How complex are the activities in Wurm? The more complex they're, the harder theyr'e to script and the more likely we're to do them manually. And also... how hostile is hte world? If there're lots of threats, a player will not want to be AFK. If everything is too automated I can foresee players being AFK a lot just because they can. If they're AFK and in a hostile place they'll get killed quickly. How long will it be before players protest that the world is too dangerous for them to go afk? Will they want automated combat so that when they're afk and a threat is presented their character will survive? In sum, I think automating everything just dumbs down the world. It limits what the world can do to trick us and make us think. When we become reliant on automation we become as smart as software. And we all know how stupid software can be. The fact that games can be macroed is a hint that they're dumbed down bland repetitive worlds.

This is precisely why I think this change should have been implemented more cautiously. Not only does it ignore shovel/digging skill, but it it's faster than the previous method, so makes it obsolete. This is just another example of mudflation and will have the same sort of effect that it has in other games. People will now accomplish digging tasks much faster. Things that used to require more time and thought will be trivialized. If I had implemented this, I would have added a penalty that would discourage small projects from using it. People doing bigger projects would use it to save time. But as I understand it, nothing was added to balance this new mechanic so it's complimentary. I say all this because I enjoyed digging, but I only did small projects. I liked the attention to details. How I had to figure out where to put dirt. Eventually I figured out how to flatten corners. How to do things effectively. Bigger and bigger and bigger. Bigger is better. That's the way you all appear to me. It's juvenile. It lacks wisdom. I see it in every online game I play. YOu all think the same way, like a flock of pigeons flying to their doom. Time and time again I'll see core mechanics removed in different online games I play that actually had depth. And I'll watch as crowds of screaming and cheering players flood around the developers and applaud them like blind fools. This game even has a line of text that's something like "You fail because there were too many wrong solutions to problems." That sentence is now popping up in my head. At first, I didn't really get it. But then I got it. See, a solution can work, or seem to, but that's only because of lack of perspective on broader circumstances. Now, if I'm wrong and this feature IS complimentary then I'm sorry for jumping hte gun. By complimentary I mean that it's not a complete replacement, but rather a specialized feature that adds to what's already there. And by adds I mean that it's not the best solution for every problem. Rather, it's one potential solution for specific circumstances. And mind you I do think that larger projects required something extra. It's just something that required too much time. It turned people off of building their dream deed. I just don't like how this is being implemented. On the other hand, I keep wondering about how the game world is going to react. When players can easily do whatever they dream of, that's not always good. Sometimes it's good that we cannot have everything we want. For example, I like how hte natural world in Wurm looks; the trees, mountains, cliffs, lakes, etc. But if players can do whatever they want, I foresee them changing all manners of things. This might mean less scenic views and more cities and thigns I don't like. But I guess I can always run away from populated areas to find less populated areas, but I doubt that will really work well. Either way, I think that some limits placed on what we can do are necessary evils. YOu know, it's stragne how this is all mirroring the real world. We're rampantly destroying the natural world on earth. But don't listen to me. Dismiss me. I'm just a rambling old neckbeard that has lost his mind. Next.