Lightonfoot

To the poster above me... did you know my IQ - as officially recorded - is 95!!!?? 95. I'm no genius. I think the reason I am a minority in almost all forums I go to and in walks of life is because I grew up reading Choose Your Own Adventure. There were some VERY weird ones. I think it screwed me up for life. The other thing that screwed me up was Mona Lisa. See, everywhere I go, I see Mona Lisa. Her eyes moved. The first time I saw a picture of her, the eyes moved with me and ever since she's always been with me.

Excellent thread. It highlights the symmetry in nature. The two halves of the brain. DNA only really has to know about one side. if it can reproduce it then it can make the other side with just one. There was a study where they concluded that beauty in a person's face across the globe is symmetry. Ugly faces, by comparison, lack symmetry. This is interesting to me. But I still think that symmetry ain't everything. I mean, you can take a woman and if she looks like a man, it don't matter if her face is symmetrical!

My suggestion is apply a penalty to using this ability such that it gives great advantage to large projects. Players that're doing small projects would be discouraged from using this because of the penalty. This would preserve the nitty gritty of the old method and add a method to speed up large projects.

Sad. This to me ... possibly ... is another example that Wurm is getting old. Every game gets old and dies. But like I said in my previous post.. online games survive because new online games are created. Old games fall apart with time and they get stuck in a certain character and cannot break out of it. In many ways games age like people do and die for the same reasons.

ALL GAMES in the history of gaming that're online get easier wiht time. EVery single one. And they all eventually die. Wurm is just doing what alll other games do. It doesn't matter whether the game is small-time or big-time. They all get easier with time until they die. I've never seen an online game that gets more hardcore with time. I've never seen an online game get more complex with time. They all streamline and get easier and easier. Sinlge-player are the only ones that either stay the same or allow you to modify them. The only thing that saves online games are new online games. SO if this new mechanic makes digging simpler and removes details then this is not shocking at all. It's just Wurm being like everybody else and not surprising me by breaking from the herd. Speeding up digging is ok to me, but I do think digging as it was was good for small projects. It's just that Wurm hasn't found a good way to handle big projects without replacing the whole thing with a script. If it were me, I'd limit this new option to large projects somehow. So that only players intending on doing something big would use it. The others would shy away from it because of some incurred penalty. Since most or all players will do small projects, this would preserve the current mechanics. And it would allow players who're doing large projects to get it done timely. But it appears that my approach to this is probably in the minority. I'm always in the minority.

One thing I"ve noticed is since you no longer need to climb up to level/flatten, climbing might raise slower overall. How are people increasing climbing skill if they're not going to use it doing different varied things? I think possibly increasing climbing skill gain might be necessary to offset the decreased amount that players will climb while digging with this new option. Just like how I'm on Chaos and it has a lot of steep slopes compared to other maps. So I get a lot of opportunities to increase climbing. So when I need it, it's more likely to be high enough. Playrs on other servers rarely climb so when they bump into a steep slope they're surprised and have low skill.

As long as digging still requires you to plan and think ahead and be smart. I think that digging was good as it was for small projects. I made a house in the side of a hill and actually enjoyed learning how to dig corners and how to flatten manually. I thought it was awesome that there was spillover. I liked to figure how the best paths for things. Everything in Wurm is like an engineering project and I've always enjoyed that. But it seems with every month that passes by the game becomes less of an engineering-type sandbox and more of a see-who-can-build-the-biggest-city. If they could have figured out a way to change digging for people who're making cities so that it's not quite as intensive, I'd prefer that. I know there're no machines in Wurm, but maybe something could have been figured out that would also preserve the digging mechanics so players still had to understand them? As I understand it, an automatic method was added so that players no longer need to understand how it works underneath. They just click a button and a script or piece of code takes over. This will mean less details to learn; imho, bad. Sit back and think to yourself. As a newbie I LOVED it that I could fall and get hurt. I liked using climbing and having to pay attention to where I was and to how steep things were. But imagine that suddenly overnight we no longer receive damage from falling on steep slopes. For me, that would really be the last straw. When you tear out all the rules and dangers from the game, you remove the things that make it engaging. It loses its edge. There must be a feeling of danger and complexity for it to feel engaging. Without those things, nothing feels worth doing to me. I'm sure others feel different, but for me, I need danger and complexity to want to do things in a sandbox game. Technically, I'm still a newbie. I first played in July 2012. Been paying off/on. Love Wurm. But don't mistake why I love Wurm. I love Wurm because of its details. I love to think. Please don't make the game more bland. Since I haven't tested the new digging code, I'll reserve judgement for later. It could be that I'm overblowing it because others have. Bottom line, if digging still requires you to be smart then I'm ok with it.

I started the game as a newbie with lots of fall damage. You assume every newbie is the same. Adversity as a newbie can make the game more compelling. What's not good is when you feel you have no way to learn or get better or to overcome. I never felt that way. But I'm a stubborn guy and love a challenge. Maybe not everybody else can stomach the game like I can. I even built a house on my own with trolls and crocs. There're many players out there that don't want the game handed to them.

When I first came to this game in July, the thing that really stood out to me were the details in the game. Different tiles slowed you down and the steeper the slope the more damage you took. That was just the beginning. I loved it! Items have weight and volume and so on. The forests seemed a lot like forests because they were thick. The GUI was very accessible and minimal. Adventuring was dangerous. It was very VERY immersive! Lots of examples. But I don't like to see weight removed from the fall damage calculation. That to me is removing a detail and I really do not like it. Personally, I'd like to see climbing tools and other things. *sigh* I am proponent of realism in games. Sort of like realism in art history as opposed to impressionism. I believe that reality already has a good working model of things, so why re-invent the wheel? I use reality as a guide. The one thing reality has is lots of details. And these details lead to a very complex and engaging experience that many games fail to capture. They simply have too few details and they keep removing them as they age and get old. This is because most game companies think that by simplifying their game they'll catch more players in their nets. Not every gamer is a fan of streamlining They're a minority, but we do exist! My suggestion to Rolf is re-add weight into the fall damage calculations but reduce the damage so it's not too high. Keep the details but reduce the severity. Add climbing tools too for steep slopes. Be careful with changes too because they can chase people away and/or create bad impressions.

Too many people hate traveling of any kind. I love the idea, but it's inter-connected with a bunch of other things (climbing restrictions, stamina/cart/weight/movement speed/etc restrictions, etc). (is why I play on chaos... it has a nice big map with lots of steep places and cliffs) Just add a ^@$@#$% portable infinite-use teleporter to any point in the world for free for anybody geez. Too few people have thick skin or desire. They want everything to be convenient and simple. I just don't understand that mentality. It's antithetical. Those things make me die of boredom and watch the grass grow. To me restrictions and complexity (and/or diversity) add to the game and make it interesting. It feels like a world too. This is where single player games are superior. They don't have to have a common denominator since you can mod them and change their settings independently of the developers and others that play it. But still I don't understand why it can't all work together. Why can't we have a complex world and people of all different shapes and sizes and skill in that world without having the game collapse in on itself. I guess maybe I expect too much. Obviously, even though MMO's have common denominators, the denominators themselves are different from one game to another. Wurm is probably as extreme as it can be without having to fall back on a smaller population. For others, there're many MMO's that make you run the same speed no matter what the slope. You don't get hurt when you fall from a high place. And you can move any weight and/or you can teleport without any restrictions. There's no need to even build roads. Different MMO's have different outlooks on this dependent on their audience.

Just make it easier for higher skilled players to avoid fighting, but don't make it brain dead. I like that being on a higher slope or not turning your back can improve the chances that they don't attack. That's Wurm. Wurm is about being aware of your environment and making the right choices to improve your odds. If you take away the bite and the danger then this game loses a big chunk of its presence. I'd hate that. Would be a game killer. Most online games are too tame. Too friendly. Too simple. Ruins the feeling for me. But I'm a minority. So what I say rarely matters. Wurm Online is one of the few games I can play and feel like the danger is somewhat preserved. It's one of the few games where awareness is important. For example, cliffs in this game matter. What tile you run on matters. The choices you make matter. You can't just blindly run through while watching TV, eating a sandwich, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, etc. However, this also limits the popularity of the game and I see the need for a "pause" button. We all have lives and I know that a game can't expect too much from its players without causing frustrations. If there was a viable "pause" button that wasn't exploitable and didn't dumb the game down then I'd be all for it. I think it's possible and (in all sincerity) a good idea. Danger and presence pull you into the world. Makes you feel like you're there. Unfortunately, when you get bitten or suffer a fall or accident, it can hurt. But goddammit, the tame stuff falls far short of evoking the same feelings I've had in this game. They don't even come close. They're all game and no .... magic. It's hard to explain. I expect Wurm to increasingly have rails (tracks) and safeguards. It's the way most games evolve in their lifetime. Thing is, it's also the thing that always chases me away. I guess it's the way of the world. Luckily, there's always a new day. A new game. A reimagining. And there's always jaded people like me that once in a while cough up the money (and time) to make a game and stick it out for a while with the rest of their kin. If you want to hate on me, freely do so. I'm a veteran of these online flame wars. I would have it no other way. I've learned that if you get into an intense argument it's best to just walk away and not come back. But sometimes you get stuck inbetween and there's not an easy exit. Best to just reduce the casualties then.

It's not how fast you gain skills that's important, it's WHAT YOU'RE DOING. If you're standing in place waiting for a skill timer and doing NOTHING EXCEPT STARING AT THE SCREEN then what're you doing? Nothing! Skills could grow agonizingly slow and the game could still work IF we were actually doing things and not doing too many of the same things. Doing too many of the same things is exactly like doing nothing. See, it's not any single thing that kills it. It's the WHOLE formula. If skill gain is too slow then a player is left to do the same thing over and over... If skill gain is too fast then a player is not using the content in the game and thus doing nothing... Let me explain this more precisely... Lets say that you're hunting in a forest. And lets say that skill gain is slowed down so much that players have to play 10 times longer than they previously needed. This means that a new player in the 1-20 FS range will have to fight the same types of creatures and this restricts them to certain areas where there're low level creatures. They'll have to do this ten times longer than before. So they'll end up killing the same types of creatures in the same area over and over and over. It might work at first, but sooner or later nothing will be new anymore. In a contrasting scenario, everything is the same except that the player gains skill 10 times faster. This means that they'll kill low level creatures and explore low level areas so fast that they don't even get the chance to enjoy it. They move on because there's much less need to stay in those areas. They don't get to see the areas or learn about their history or learn about the creatures or anything. That's the game right there and they just skipped it. We gain fighting skill because it's a challenge we place on ourselves. We have to figure out how to fight well in different environments and how to survive our wounds and work well with other players to maximize our effectiveness. When we get 20 FS and 40 FS and 60 FS, each achievement is a sign that we've steadily moved up the ladder and we MADE IT. Scoring systems are used because they're a measuring device and from them we derive a certain amount of pride in ourselves. If you remove the scoring system and everyone gets maximum skill on day 1 and even maximum gear then you remove the sense of accomplishment that a standard scoring system gives and replace it with a cardboard cutout that doesn't allow us to appreciate what we've done. Now, scoring systems can be implemented badly. They can make it so it's not fun to earn your points. if fighting ever becomes too much of the SAME THING then the game is not succeeding at its goal to keep us interested. Doing the same thing over and over is mostly drudgery - it's only a minor accomplishment at best for the most long lived - and is not fun by itself. We want a challenge that's worth fighting for. And achieving things without lifting a finger or without a respectable level of danger and tactics and presence is equally bad and not worth it either unless you're not naturally competitive. Anybody can press a button, but not everybody can make good choices. And that's why we value smart choices and tactics and awareness of things because they're a sign of accomplishment. Scoring systems have to keep all this in mind when they're implemented or they can break the game and make it so it's not worth fighting for. Content can be the environment you fight in or play in, like the trees and the weather and the non-players you talk to and the stories you read, but content is also in the diversity of skills and the mechanics and the strategies you employ and the details in items and in things you build. Content is the thing that makes the points worth earning and engages us. It's like football, as opposed to the score you get playing football. It's the meat and potatoes. It's the flesh and bone of the world and the game-play. Ideally, content is so diverse we rarely do the same thing twice. Content and rate of progression and scoring systems combine with each to make something unique. There's no guarantee that whatever they make works as a game. It's hard to judge what exactly is broken, I think. Just like how it's hard to understand the human mind; complex as it's. Judging what's wrong can be subjective based on your audience. There're many shows on TV that I hate and a few others I love. I'll never understand why people watch the ones I hate. I can't be trusted to fairly judge those shows because I simply have different desires and interests. Similarly, I don't much like football or tennis or soccer or other sports. If it were my choice, I'd probably start changing the rules and style to make those sports more interesting to me, but I'd ruin it for the people who currently love them. So when we all come to the table to judge a game and figure out how to fix it, we have to be careful. My opinion is Wurm Online has a LOT going for it. I'll say right here straight from the man himself (??), this is the most immersive game I have ever played. The feeling of danger when I entered this world was as real as it had ever been in any game in my life if not more. I was IN THAT WORLD. I could almost touch it. I will always remember that moment when I left that small player village and came up the hill at night and was in the clearcut area and looked up at the stars and could hear the breeze and thought "I am up in the hills and.... this feels almost real." I realized in that special moment that Wurm Online wasn't just a game, it had come across the valley and was becoming a world. Wurm Online is stuck on me. Nothing out there that I know of eclipses it. But there's some drudgery and holes in the game. It has to be changed smartly, not with a sledgehammer, but with a comb and a slide rule. The idea is not how fast a number goes up or down, it's whether that number and how it changes coincides and compliments the content in the game and the scoring system that caps it on top like the cherry on whipped cream on a sundae. This requires brains to figure out and is very delicate.

I'd like to make a part 2 to my previous post. Basically, instant-travel skips everything in-between its starting point and its ending point. THIS is a serious problem. It's not a part of the world. You see, when I made my last post I planned on adding to the end of the post an implementation of fast travel. I wrote several things, starting with gate networks and ending with the payment a player makes to use a portal. But then I came to combat and danger. Is there any danger in instant travel? No, not really. In fact, instant travel is the most boring and unbalanced form of travel I could ever conceive of. If I wanted to destroy a world, instant-travel is one of the first things that would come to mind. Cheats and hacks are other things. That's when I hit my road block and decided that the loss is too great to justify something that's too gratifying and not deep enough. Then I thought a strange thought, something like "We already have running/swimming and it has all of the details needed." Basically, why reinvent the wheel if the wheel has already been invented? Why waste time adding something that's going to need a whole new set of challenges? So I asked "What if we could utilize the running/swimming form of travel and preserve all of its details and dangers but do this while moving MUCH faster?" First of all, there should be a progression from the slowest running to the fastest running and each point between the slowest and the fastest should have its potential uses. We should be able to sometimes do things easier by moving slow than by moving fast. Put another way, it's a lot like how we can sometimes run somewhere faster than traveling there with a boat. I think in this case one example is moving slowly down a slope rather than fast. Not all slopes are equal so every point between the slowest runspeed and the fastest will have its sweet spot. Second of all, if we're moving 3x or 6x or 12x faster then there would be no threat from monsters because they couldn't catch us. So, from the start, monsters might have to react faster or move faster to still remain a threat to a potentially much faster playerbase and to also maintain the current form of gameplay. Basically, the danger aspect should be preserved even though players now can sprint 2x/3x/etc their normal speed. However, increasing monster response times or movement speed is not the only way to preserve danger and risk. Danger can also come from the increased runspeed itself, and it seems much simpler to me too. In many ways, this is the same thing as what we already have. As a player falls from increasingly steep slopes, they're supposed to fall faster and get hurt more. This is the same idea. A faster moving player will receive greater damage when they fall because of the increased momentum. So when a player is sprinting, increase the damage inflicted when a player stumbles on a steep slope or reaches 0 stamina or gets hit by a monster. In conclusion, these measures ensure that when players enable fast runspeed they're making a tactical choice that must be used responsibly. Another issue that coincides with overall increased runspeed is progressive runspeed increases that come with higher skills. As players gain runspeed ability, if the expectations for using runspeed increases aren't higher or monsters around them aren't getting stronger or faster or more aggressive then the game will just get easier and easier until there's no danger and this whole aspect of travel has been essentially destroyed. Danger is a BIG part of it and destroying it is something only the most foolish and presumptuous will do. Danger is a significant factor in the process of creating a travel route from point A to point B and I don't think it should ever be removed. So either the expectations get steeper for progressive runspeed increases or monsters somehow can attack players on a fair and equal basis at the slowest runspeed and the fastest. Balancing fast players and monsters versus slow players and monsters is not an easy task, especially if the fast players and slow players are living in the same areas of the map. It might work if fast players increasingly go into less populated places far away from low-skill player areas. This way you could make the monsters react much faster to them and move faster too without also making the game impossible for low-skill players. And as already mentioned, using increased runspeed effects correctly is an important part of the danger too. As players gain skills and run faster, the consequences for running on steep sleeps or getting hit while running fast should scale up. Ultimately, I think that spawning faster moving monsters outside of populated areas will be complimentary to increasing the expectations on the use of sprint or runspeed bonuses. And what about stealth? Does stealth tie into this? You know, this is just my point. There're so many factors that tie into combined land/sea travel. It doesn't make any sense to invent a whole new travel system when we've got a massive world of detail already in front of us. We're blind and foolish to suggest such a dumb idea. It's like being given all the kings food and since it's green peas and not cake you decline it. Where's the danger in instant travel? Where're all the little details like in land/sea travel? No where, that's where. Instant travel skips everything. Soon as you add anything to instant travel to give it detail and factors just as there're details and factors in land/sea travel, it's no longer instant and therefore it's just a glorified whole new system but with less detail and factors and a lot of additional work. I shouldn't have to tell anyone what would happen if this were to occur. You know what mudflation is? Again, we're touching on gratification. It's a consuming process. It destroys and leaves behind it a trail of decay and loss. If some players want a whole new system then why not just play a different game? If Wurm wants to be a land/sea type travel game then please leave it alone and let it be. There're other games for other forms of travel. I loved recall/mark when I played Ultima Online. In X3:AB/TC you can jump and use gates to travel through space. In EverQuest 2, I used Set Recall Point and Go Home. I also used the bells to travel locally and globally. I like Wurm the way it's. It's a very immersive game. You actually have to use the landscape and the sea correctly. It's a different experience. But whatever. 99% of mmo's go down the trail of destruction anyway. I can't stop it from happening. I prefaced my previous post here with the grim reality of business and profession and the always progressing nature of people. Love is blind. So is business. So are people. We don't really know what we want, we just keep moving forward hoping for a miracle that will take everything bad in our life and make it good. You know what? There'll always be bad. And no matter how much success you have, you'll die and lose it and be superseded by the next person in line. Ultimately, we're all vainly in pursuit of unreachable things. Things like heaven, immortality, legacy and righteousness, and so on. But no matter what we aim for, it eventually is lost and/or forgotten and/or cruelly corrupted to nightmare proportions. Since we're going to lose everything anyway, why not be content with being Wurm? Wurm is Wurm. We have .... 500-600 players? Who cares? I don't. I just know I like Wurm and don't see the need for sweeping changes. I started on July 20th, I think. So I'm still new. Maybe my mind will chnage. But if it does, so what? That's another day. Maybe I'm just a luddite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Just another guy holding onto the past and soon to be swept away by the hand of time.

Look, lets be frank, it's virtually certain that at some juncture in time Rolf or somebody else that owns this game will add portals to deeds. It's just a matter of time. $$$ is a tremendous persuasive device in commercial enterprises. There're uncountable numbers of casual players out there that would like to see instant-travel as well as many other features added to Wurm. What's not known is how long it will be before $$$ finally wins the tug of war. You see, as we speak, Rolf or whoever owns Wurm is slowly making $$$. As they make money, they will eye the future and they will wonder What's Next? Either they will jump ship and form a new project or they will, in all likelihood, shift gears and pull away from Wurm's past towards more promising grounds. In business this means moving towards the mainstream. It means adding many more players to your customer base and, of course, changing the game to suit them. From my standpoint, the bottom line is depth, not gratification. Gratification is pushing a button to win the game. It's not hard or engrossing. Anybody can push a button. And everybody would like to be the best, but if everyone is then it's not important anymore. You see, the crying shame is that depth isn't about winning. It's about immersing yourself in the moment. It's not indulgent. Indulgent is grabbing a whole cake and eating it right there just because it tastes good. Depth is about enjoying a plain ol' carrot while watching the birds and reading a book. Depth is more lasting. Gratification is a consuming process that destroys. Gratification makes us weak. It makes us dependent. It's an all too much exploitable illness of the soul. First of all, travel should not be something we have to do often. I mean, I'm on Chaos and I haven't even moved from where I built my place. I have most everything I need and I have a lot more things to build. Now, if I was a much older player and traded with other servers then I'd probably have a long history of using my team of horses and boats to get to far off places. That's when I'd start realizing the long travel distances and might start getting tired of it. What if I'm trying to trade with a player on the other side of the world? Or what if that player is on another server and that server is accessed on the other side of the world? Does the large cargo hold of a ship make up for it? If you look at it purely from the perspective of the amount of cargo moved then ships are vastly faster than anything else. Maybe 10 to 100 times faster. The problem is that some people who travel long distances aren't moving large numbers of goods. They might just be moving a new player to someplace else or moving themselves or maybe just a few items. We all know that games are progression. We also know that as you progress it destroys old ways of playing. For example, the switch from running to horses was a large jump in progression. You went from traveling on foot and having to escape from monsters and frightfully moving through a thick forest to galloping across the land on a horse with little fear of getting harmed. And ships are even bigger, IF they're faster. They're not always faster than traveling by land. But the real big jump is how much they can carry. No more do you have to hitch a couple horses or bison to a cart and travel by road. You can load up many more goods on a ship and just sail to your destination. In some cases, you can now sail straight to your destination and at a faster pace too. All during this progression, did anyone ask if the game went from being engrossing to being too simple? When it becomes too simple it becomes a destroyer. I shouldn't have to repeat what I say, but depth is greater than gratification. Basically, running should be just as engrossing as using a horse and a horse should be just as engrossing as using a ship. They each should have their own unique challenges. If each faster form of travel defeats previous challenges but doesn't add any new ones then it's destroying and not adding depth. The question I have to ask you is can instant-travel be as engaging and engrossing as traveling by land and sea? Heck, when I run I often will swim AND run. And while I'm doing that I have many things on my mind. I'm in genuine danger. In a previous post here I tried to convey the many factors that go into creating a travel route. All of those factors work to connect the world and to keep me interested. Without them, it all flies apart. So can instant-travel be a part of the world or will it be so separate and simple that it becomes a world destroyer? What we need is a way to travel fast yet still experience the danger and complication of running/swimming. We need all of the factors that're involved in creating a travel route to reflect themselves in all forms of travel. Whether I am moving fast or slow I should be wary of monsters and aware of geography and roads and terrain and seas and lakes and all of the little details that go into it. No form of travel should eliminate threat or eliminate these details. It should just be faster, but not safer or easier. Actually, with increased speed, it should slowly increase the difficulty, not decrease it. We should have more things to worry about as we move faster. But it shouldn't scale fast, either. What I'm thinking of is a kind of "sprint" ability that's 3x normal running speed. It's useable by new players but that kills you if you receive so much as a very light bruise or when your stamina runs out? So when going down a steep slope you'd shut it off. Or you shut it off when a monster is ahead and you have to cross its path. Or you shut it off before your stamina is 0. Monsters would have to be able to hit or react faster when a player is within range so that players with this speed boost can still be hit and still feel the danger. This is really just a faster version of normal running but with higher expectations placed on the player. Perhaps when players start out they can only cast it once every 48 hours. Once it's cast, it stays on you for maybe 3 hours as a toggle-able effect and isn't removed if you die. It can be toggled off/on during this period. The critical thing is to preserve the danger and detail of travel via land/sea. As players gain more skills and body characteristics the speed boosts will increase from 3x to a maximum of 5x. However, a few more expectations are placed on the player. For example, they will more easily receive very light bruises from falling on steep sleeps. They can choose to use the 3x version of the speed boost if they want to. Basically, as players speed up the game needs to keep the intensity high and not decrease it. Otherwise, the game just becomes increasingly easier and less dangerous and less engrossing and more and more destructive and bland. Now, I realize that was an overly long paragraph, but any real feature of that sort would require so much more thought and testing than that. Basically, I'm trying to translate the danger and feel and detail of running/swimming but to something that's much faster. And I'm trying to grapple with the knowledge that as players gain skills the danger decreases and thus parts of the game are destroyed. High skill players need danger and expectations placed on them too. The game shouldn't be a walk in the park with higher skills. It should be every bit as dangerous as it was in the beginning. The short version of the story is that high skill players will move faster, but it's not easier.

Insta-travel destroys the world. How? By destroying travel routes. What are those? They're a set of points on a map that have been determined in accordance to various conditions and/or circumstances. These conditions and/or circumstances are intimately tied to the world that the person or player exists in. The objective of setting these points on the map is to create a fast and effective path from one point to another. Travel routes exist because of many factors. One of those factors is geography. Geography is made up of hills and valleys and cliffs and lakes and rivers and volcanoes and swamps and so on. There're many other types of geography, ofc. Obviously, not all forms of geography have the same impacts on travel, though. Thus, you need to create an optimal travel route. Another factor that's intertwined with travel routes are player built things like roads or boats or deformed terrain. It's faster to travel on a road than on grass, for example. It's faster to travel on a road that has been deformed so it's straighter (shortest distance between two points is a straight line). Travel routes also exist because there're roaming creatures or pvpers. If you stick to the shoreline you're safer because most creatures don't swim. If you travel by water then you can avoid most roaming creatures. If a particular creature is nasty and you know there's a lair in a certain region then you can avoid that region while creating your travel route. If you're on a PvP server then you might avoid certain areas where there're certain factions or groups of players. Travel routes can probably exist for other reasons. One of them might be regions where other players live on a consistent basis. For example, you may have a friend that you want to visit while on your way to someplace else. So you might alter your travel route to visit that friend. Anything in the world - whether it's spacial or time-based (like an event) - that can alter travel times is a factor when creating travel routes. For example, night-time is time-based and might influence your travel route. For example, maybe some creatures come out only at night? Or maybe you want to delay your departure time to be in the morning and not in the dusk, so that you can see clearly what's ahead of you. Insta-travle ignores all of those things. It's like a cheat. It takes all of the blood and sweat that's invested into the world to make it diverse and detailed and just flushes it down the toilet and laughs happily as the world drowns. By ignoring all of those things, it also means they're not needed. So they can be removed or neglected. This usually results in an overly simplistic backdrop that has no sense of place. If you jump off the amusement park ride, you discover that there's nothing there. The ride was just an illusion. It's like stepping past the curtain to unveil the wizard of oz pulling his levers and pushing buttons. With few things to bind the world together, it becomes very subjective. Of course, if there's nothing to really see in the world because you've already seen it all or because it's just stripped down or barren then nothing is really getting destroyed so you don't have to worry. People invest time in the world because of its impact. If there's no impact then the only real value of what we do is its creative or its subjective value. Imagine being rewarded the most powerful sword in a game but its impact on the game is 0. There're no connecting strands. It's just a pretty icon in your left hand and that's it. Its impact is the same as every other sword or weapon. Imagine one day you're looking at a full color image and it suddenly flickers and all you see is black after that. Imagine hills and valleys that you can travel across in equal time regardless of size. So you could climb a mole hill and Mt. Everest in equal time. Or imagine time itself being reduced to 0 so that nothing required time. So you could be anything you want anywhere anytime. Might be fun for some people, but not all. Insta-travel might work if it's very very expensive. After all, ships also destroy a bit of the world too since they're faster than walking, right? But you have to keep in mind that everytime a player progresses to the next stage up they destroy some of the gameplay they experienced in previous stages. Progression, by its nature, destroys past progressions. Games are progression. Ships are much more expensive than walking and that's why they require so much time to make. They're the next step up, but not -always- the next step up. There're many cases where it's quicker to walk somewhere than sail there. Insta-travel should be that much harder to get. It's the next stage after ships. Furthermore, ships should still be useful in many cases just as it's faster to run to some places than it's to sail to them. So all these players wanting cheap insta-travel should just give up the hope of ever getting it unless they plan to put more time into it than they would a large ship. This would be something only the best deeds could afford. However, insta-travel doesn't just go somewhere faster than ships, it completely and utterly destroys travel routes! So when creating this insta-travel system, it might be wise to link it to the actual world so that players have to create a insta-travel network that's impacted by the world around it. For example, maybe it's cheaper to build a teleporter at high elevation or near a volcano? Or maybe it's cheaper to build them near mountains so you can mine the ore to create them? Or maybe you need to link them in a complex network to reduce costs because they're impacted by land/sea ratios. Another words, a line between any two points will cross X land and X sea. Land/Sea is the ratio. This land/sea ratio can further be impacted by the presence of lairs, lattitude/longitude, mineral veins, player-built structures (kind of like a transformer or resistor), etc. These sorts of factors would make insta-travel a part of the world and less destructive.

I updated my list of suggested changes to how troll bashing works: 1) Limit troll bashing and non-player sieging to Chaos and Epic servers. 2) Reduce damage to walls from troll bashing (make it lower than it's now) 3) Increase spawn timer so when players kill them it has a noticeable and satisfactory impact 4) Allow for the strategy of building a moat to thwart trolls from bashing the perimeter of a fort 5) Improve guard response to bashing on walls from non-players (like trolls) 6) Make most troll bashers attack unused or decayed settlements/walls (usually not active places) 7) Make it so not all trolls will bash and... if players kill a bashing troll, less troll bashers are produced for a while 8) Make bashing trolls weaker than non-bashing trolls (so they're easier to kill) 9) Most troll bashing happens in spring/summer and if players destroy troll lairs before this time then it prevents most bashing. This requires troll lairs to spread at a rate that's not too rapid so it won't outpace the efforts of players. Troll Sieging Party(s): I think the idea of a sieging troll party would be cool. 2 or 3 trolls and a catapult would slowly move from their "Troll Fort" to your settlement. It would require maybe 24-48 RL hours or more to build the catapult and for them to move it to your position. And there should be warning sounds heard when they're building the catapult. Additionally, there might be troll horns that call out loudly - when they're marching - that you can hear from a great distance. Something like this should only be possible on certain areas of the map so it's more predictable. It should also be limited to spring or summer. And Troll lairs should spread slowly so that if players find them and destroy them before spring and summer then they can prevent a siege from ever happening. Ofc, all of this would only happen on Chaos or Epic servers. I'd prefer it on Chaos because Epic already has player-based raiding. Player-based raiding is more than hard enough. Stacking non-player sieging on top of player-based sieging would be kind of insane. Troll Traps: It could just be a chest that you setup nearby in the woods. When players examine it it would say it's trapped. Trolls are too dumb to understand this and would try to open it or bash it. The trap would be set off and poison them severely. Maybe some traps would cause the poison to be communicable to other trolls. So if the troll survives for a while then many trolls can be poisoned during its short lifetime. Or maybe an explosion sort of trap. Hunter Guilds: You create this building on your settlement and you can hire non-player hunters that roam around your deeded area and will kill whatever you tell them to, including trolls. An alternative to this is just allow players to instruct some templars or guards (at the guardhouses) to wander around the deeded area and attack certain creatures. This is a good idea really because not all creatures will behave the same or be treated equally by settlement owners. Dangerous troll country (a.k.a. Super Lairs): I think there should be some areas of the map that're specially dangerous. This might already be the case, actually, since troll lairs can randomly appear in some areas in larger numbers. For example, if two troll lairs are close to each other then there'll be more trolls in that region and present a bigger danger for players. The problem with this is that it's not predictable when it does happen and might cause strain on some players resources who weren't prepared for it. If super lairs or local areas with more than 1 troll lair nearby only happened in certain places then players who do not want that danger could build in a different region and would never have to concern themselves with it. Bottom line, there should be ways of causing most bashing trolls to stay away from active settlements/places. This would reduce the tedium for active players so they don't have to repair walls as much. And it would help to decay old places so that players can loot them or build in their place without having to destroy them themselves.

It does sound to me like they damage walls too much. So here're my thoughts based on what I've read here: 1) Limit troll bashing and non-player sieging to Chaos and Epic servers. 2) Reduce damage to walls from trolls 3) Increase spawn timer so when players kill them it has an appreciable impact 4) Allow for the strategy of building a moat to thwart trolls from bashing the perimeter of a fort 5) Improve guard response to bashing on walls from non-players 6) Overall, add more tactics that trolls will use and give players more diverse responses I think the idea of a sieging troll party would be cool. 2 or 3 trolls and a catapult would slowly move from their "Troll Fort" to your settlement. It would require maybe 24 hours or more to build the catapult and for them to move it to your position. And there should be warning sounds heard when they're building the catapult. Additionally, there might be troll horns that call out loudly - when they're marching - that you can hear from a great distance. Something like this should only be possible on certain areas of the map so it's more predictable. It should also be limited to maybe spring or summer. And Troll lairs should spread slowly so that if players find them and destroy them before spring and summer then they can prevent a siege from ever happening. Ofc, all of this would only happen on Chaos or Epic servers. I'd prefer it on Chaos because Epic already has player-based raiding. Player-based is hard enough as it's. Stacking non-player sieging on top of player-based sieging would be far too much to expect from Epic. Also could make it so that troll sieging parties only go after larger (defended) settlements. I also think that Trolls tasked with bashing walls that're killed should caution the troll lair to stop bashing for a while. So if you kill a specific troll that was bashing then that lair won't produce bashing trolls for a while. This is in addition to increasing the spawn timer. This also gives it a more personal feel. You're saying "Stop bashing my walls!" So... 7) Potentially add troll sieging parties (with limitation applied to it so it's not griefing too much) 8) Make it so not all trolls will bash and... if players kill a bashing troll, less troll bashers are produced for a while

You made the issue look like this: 1) They'll destroy your deed when you're offline! All the players will quit and Wurm Online dies! -or- 2) NO non-player sieging or player sieging. Everybody is happy! That's distorted. If you frame the issue that way then this game is missing out and oversimplifying itself. There can be danger in the game AND ease. It's not either/or. It's not a black/white picture.

Reduce troll spawn rate so when players kill the trolls the problem goes away for a fair amount of time. If the player(s) destroy the troll lair then that's even better. Point being that trolls bashing on walls is just adding something to hte game that's absent without it - sieging. Why build walls or have defenses or make moats or have catapults if nothing is going to attack?????? Something should attack, but it shouldn't be tedious either. It should be interesting and make you think somewhat, at least. Players are much worse than the trolls in Wurm. That's why players can't bash on freedom servers. But come on people, there should be some form of non-player seiging at least. Don't make the game too boring by removing these more non-linear things. Don't make it too predictable and comfortable. The danger is makes the world feel more "real", just like good graphics do. I think there can be an inbetween where the people who don't want sieging can live in the more populated areas and the players who think it's exciting can live in the more wild areas. This would make sense too since trolls shouldn't be too close to civilization. In fact, I think the game already spawns many of the higher QL animals away from populated places. If you build a moat around your buildings or fences, will that keep the trolls out?

The difference between Wurm and Minecraft are details and style and goals. Minecraft does this: 1 wood (default) = 4 wooden plank 4 wooden plank (default) = 1 crafting table 2 wooden plank (crafting table) = 4 stick 3 wood + 2 stick (crafting table) = 1 wooden pickaxe 1 stick + 1 coal (any?) = 4 torch The process is fast. There're no statistics to look at. No text. And it's cute. Boxxy-style! By contrast, Wurm allows you to get sticks from multiple places with more steps in-between. Sticks in Wurm are the equivalent of a shaft. In Wurm, we can craft shafts from branches that we botanize. We can also craft them from trees or bushes we cutdown. But cutting down trees/etc isn't free like it's in Minecraft when you start out - keeping in mind that Minecraft has better tools for cutting trees too. We have to first botanize some branches. Then we have to rummage some rock tiles for a rock shard and an iron rock. Then we have to create a crude knife. Then we can create a shaft from some branches. Then we have to rummage another rock shard. Then we have to create a crude pickaxe head with a rock shard and a crude knife. Then we finally can create a crude pickaxe to cutdown trees with the crude pickaxe head and a shaft. But we can only cutdown trees up to mature since a iron or better axe is required to chop up a tree and older trees than mature have to be. And to make an iron axe we need an anvil and that's more work than is listed here. So you see, there're lots more steps in Wurm. There's a big difference between em. I would say that Wurm is a slower game for people who like it slow. It's also more detailed. It's more about how to do something than why. Minecraft, on the other hand, is faster and more focused on the creative aspects of building. Wurm is more technical and ultimately less accommodating. That will always make it niche. But that doesn't mean it can't fill some corner of this world and make some people happy. It just has to set practical goals. (And btw.... torches in Minecraft stay lit forever.) I think it's cool to light torches. This is my opinion. I like knowing that the world around me has to be kept in repair. It means more when a place looks good when you know that's because people take care of it. I don't have a deed and don't have to light torches. I'm sorry if I stepped on some toes with this post. I think lights should consume oil or tar or whatever. But I wouldn't be bothered if they lasted a month or two without needing to be refilled. I don't like the idea of lanterns/lights/etc that stay lit forever. And I am not trying to be offensive. A lot of things we do in Wurm can be classified as 'boring' by the mainstream. I mean, much of what we do is toil. Hours and hours of cooking and mining and moving stuff from one place to another. But we like those things for some reason. Somehow the results of our work make it all worth it. That's partly why we play. It's hard to explain. It just feels unique because so many games don't let you work. These things would be unthinkable in many conventional games. And there's so much learning too because of all the many details you can miss. I think the details and the social side of it are also very important. This game isn't going to win any awards and is likely to be known by only a few people in history. Is it fame we want or do we just want to play the game? Why let others define the type of game we want? I'm a relatively new player and played for the first time on July 20 2012. On the very first day of playing Wurm I was awestruck! It was the most immersive experience I'd ever had in any game in all my life and I'm in my 30's. Today I just got 2 months of premium. These're the best days in an MMO I believe I've ever had. I've loved every minute of it. It hit me the most one night when I was up on a mountain in a clearcut. There were piles of logs around me in this empty place with some grass and a few animal corpses. I could hear the wind and could see the stars. The trees on hte edge of the clearing swayed and had the color of twilight. I felt alone and vulnerable somewhat but at the same time filled with awe and feeling. I felt like I was IN the world. It had rules. I was just a visitor. A grateful one! I just came from EQ2 so the idea that the game would just treat me indifferently was so unthinkable. EQ2 holds your hand everywhere and is always there to prevent mishap. But Wurm... Wurm is a world. Warts and all. It doens't go out of its way to greet you. It just is. You're here and for how long is a mystery and a story yet to be told.

Making a map in-game would be more immersive, but the problem is that: 1) it would inevitably add automatic features (GPS/etc) - so we'd think less about our local environment 2) it's too fancy (it's not immersive to use photoshop in-character) 3) it's going to be based on hard server map dumps that're NOT immersive Bottom line, it's not immersive to have a satillite image of the server map. It'd be very immersive if we had to draw the map with a ink pen or something and didn't have 21st century technology to aid us. And then we had to copy the maps by hand (using scribing) to share them with other players. But it WOULD be overshadowed by map dumps outside the game. So even if you went through all this effort to allow players to draw the map, it'd be utterly pointless. I'd love it, but nobody would use it since they could just use a map dump outside hte game hat's much more accurate, prettier, easy to make, and easier to distribute. It would just be a waste of time to make an in-game map more immersive. At least the lame maps aren't in-game. They're already immersion breaking. The map dumps show EVERY tile and structure (in 3d). Think about that for a while. How is that immersive again? Yer trolling buddy. Sorry. This is another feature of Wurm that makes it unique. I want to keep it. I don't care if it doesn't please 10,000 people. It at least pleases some. It doesn't have to please everybody. Wurm isn't competing in that range anyway. It's still a small game and serving a niche audience. In time it'll probably become less niche, unfortunately.

Step 1 might be ok, but currently I can open a paint program and make my own markers on the map. The only downside is alt-tabbing, but it's so minor that I don't even notice. Eventually, everyone would ask for the ability to edit the in-game map so they could put markers on it. The problem with this is that it would be like putting a paint program inside Wurm. That's a lot of development time spent to save a couple seconds of alt-tabbing, really. Plus, the map dumps show you pretty much EVERYTHING, except label names. Where's the exploration in that? I think it may even show where all the rock tiles are. I know it at least shows where the clay/grass/water/etc tiles are. I'd rather see development time spent on other things. Honestly. I think you're trying to fix something that ain't broke. If you want to make the game easier then make better community maps that show -all- the roads and cities and alliances and so on. Most of the maps I've seen are not very accurate and miss things. And this wouldn't involve the actual Wurm developers doing anything. This would allow them to continue working on the rest of the game. Wurm can't appeal to everyone. I may sound hardheaded in saying that, but it's true. It has to know what it's and where it's going. It can't do everything and it has to know its audience. It has to stay committed. You may think change is good. But please don't force it on Wurm if Wurm don't want it. I don't know why it's suddenly old fashioned to not have an in-game map. I'm not a professor. I am just a player right now. From my perspective, it's a compromise (but modern solution) to have maps outside the game that're official map dumps. Anytyhing more than that is crossing a line and focusing too much on cosmetics and not enough on gameplay depth. What we need are HUGE maps that're so big it'd require 50 years to map them. Maybe I'm going too far left-field, but this would bring back the feeling of journeying to virgin land like a true explorer. Wurm, as it's, is mostly completely settled on. There're few areas if any not marked by someone. Sine there's no genuine exploration then players aren't getting that sense of reward that they found virgin land. This is why so many players wnat a map. And then there's hte issue that once a place is settled and there're deeds placed then players need to locate them with a map.