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Ordinii

Low Mob Count

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The proper solution is to be more efficient with existent resources. Mass spamming mobs all over the place is wasteful. It also causes problems for many players. Wurm's problem currently is mobs are either too spread out or too hard/time consuming to hunt them.  Mass spamming them just creates new problems.


 


The problem, as I see it, is that spamming mobs all over the place only please one type of player. In contrast, giving those same players the means to seek out densely populated mob pockets while leaving the majority of the land mob-less should please far more players.


 


Make it so lairs spawn mobs more frequently. These mobs would stay within a radius of their home lair. Lairs would still decay, destroy, and randomly spawn around the map. Finally, players could track down lair locations. Hunting would involve tracking down a lair or two and cleaning out areas. At some point a lair will destroy and respawn elsewhere which means hunters always have to be on the hunt for new hunting grounds.


 


If we were to couple this with deed created mob zones of difficulty we could get a really nice system where lairs only popup where they are wanted. Basicly deeds radiate out a customizable influence. The farther away a tile is from a deed the more difficult the mob influence is. Also, a deed could choose a custom influence of max difficulty.

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@Joedobo,  I agree.  I posted a relatively simple model for mob spawns at Epic launch that would allow for herding of mob spawns.  They would naturally move away from populated areas or could be herded toward populated areas with effort.

 

 

Here's the original post from a few years back.  http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/52711-migrating-creature-spawns/ (since archived) and the original text.

 

--------------------------------------------

This suggestion is primarily for Epic and possibly Wild as a way to have both regional and destructible spawns and turn lairs into more of a resource to be controlled rather than a fringe benefit for getting an area early.   I'd rather not rehash the Wild vs Freedom spawn debate.

The basic idea is to have regions comprised of lairs that can be destroyed and incorporate a fairly simple flocking algorithm.
 

  • Make a region be 512x512 (1/64th of a 4096x4096 map) tiles, Size is arbitrary, it could be smaller or bigger.
  • Pick a tile somewhere on the map, that's the home of a region.  
  • Uniformly place 6 lairs within that region such that the home tile is the effective geographic center of the 6 lairs, simplest method would be to  randomly place 5 within 256 tiles of the home and place the 6th to make the math work).  Doesn't have to be 6, but it can't be 1 or 2.
  • Pick the animal conditions for that lair from one of the 12 animal conditions.  
  • Don't let mobs roam outside their region but they can be kited.

So a troll region would have 6 troll spawns in it distributed around a single tile.  Because of the random lair placement within a region some may be very densely populated toward the center, some less so.  
 

  • Any time a lair is destroyed move the center of the region from it's original location to a point directly away from where the lair was destroyed.  For example, if the lair was 80 tiles SW of the center, move the regions home tile  NE by 80 tiles and create a new lair such that the home tile is still the geographic center; randomly pick the new lair type from the animal conditions.
  • If the new lair placement is in a water tile and all adjacent tiles are water don't place the lair,  that will result in the total lairs for that region being decreased by 1.
  • If the lair to be placed was the last lair then the region is destroyed
  • If the regions is destroyed create a new region randomly on the map somewhere, or maybe not so randomly.

This would cause regions to slowly migrate away from where lairs were destroyed.   It preserves the animal type random spawns, provides regional spawns but now they can be fought over and herded.  If you come late to the party you can invade another kingdom and kill of spawns to herd the spawn toward your area.   An entire region can be eradicated by driving it into the ocean or a large lake.

There could be multiple regions within the map for a given animal type, ie 4 or 5 troll regions.  The region sizes could be smaller, bigger or the size could vary by animal type, there could be more or fewer lairs within a region, the migration rate could be more or less pronounced by increasing or decreasing the offset when calculating the new geographic center.

Fewer, stronger lairs in a region would make that animal resistant to migration but would move in a jerky fashion,  more weaker lairs would make them migrate more smoothly.

Edited by belthize

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I feel the current system wastes a lot of resources trying to simulate stuff that nobody sees. Take for example Xanadu with 600 players logged in at the same time. How much of the server could these players reach within for example 5 minutes of movement? 5%? Meanwhile nobody sees the mobs located in the other 95% of the map, so why simulate them if nobody can see them? Isn't that a huge waste of resources right there?


 


So another option is to make mob spawning more instanced, without it looking that way to the player. What I mean there is that you should only spawn mobs within the vicinity of a player (like within 5 minutes of a player, to account for travel), after all if a 1 square km area has no logged in players in it, then there's no point in having mobs there. Once mobs have been spawned then they should be despawned if no player has been near them for, for example, an hour. Lairs and deeds could still be used to determine what spawns where just as how it works now. Tamed and branded mobs should be exempt from this and never despawn, same for mobs on deed. So if you put a tamed mob on deed and it goes untamed then it's still on a deed, so it won't despawn. Possibly also don't make them despawn if they are completely fenced in (assuming it is feasible to check for this).


In the case that spawning mobs requires quite a bit of resources then maybe it would be an option to create them all in advance, but storing them somewhere off the server? Then when you need to spawn some mobs you can just move them onto the server. When you need to despawn one you move it back to storage. Only if a mob dies do you need to generate a new one (and when a new creature is born through breeding).


 


This might solve the lack of mobs issue as you no longer need to simulate mobs which nobody sees anyway, and would make the server look and feel more alive as more mobs can be near each player. This solution also scales a lot better with server size, as it's the online player count which influences how many mobs need to exist, not the size of the server. The spawning of mobs could take into account brand new players (less than 24 hours old) and spawn less mobs around them. If the amount of mobs in an area also depends on the amount of lairs, then players have some control over the safety of an area as they could attempt to remove lairs of the more dangerous creatures. If some servers need to be more dangerous than others then the density of spawned mobs could be increased on those servers.


 


Uniques should obviously be exempt from this, possibly exempt champion mobs too, in which case champion mobs could take up a similar functionality to lairs in this system, increasing the amount of their kind spawned in their area when a player is nearby.


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Regional spawning is a bad idea for freedom. The reason why is linked to what I'll call customer perceived land value.  On freedom its beneficial for Wurm's revenue to make as much of the land as possible etiher be or at the very least seem desirable for customers. Regional spawns make certain areas more valuable then others, create great differences in customer perceived land value and finally potentially limit Wurm's revenue. On freedom, desirable land is a potential deed, and a potential deed will likely lead to at least one premium. The more undesirable land is the less potential deed spots there are (Note, the players who like to slam so called "lazy" deed making people aren't doing Wurm any favors).

 

I wish I remember who first posted about the idea of deeds radiating out diminishing zones of influence. I've talked about multiple times but I didn't come up with it first. The concept fits freedom really well. This idea dynamically adapts the lands to fit each paying customer's wish. As time goes by deeds come and go and likewise zones of influence change with them.

 

If you want easy mobs you set your difficulty to supper low. Gradually over time your deed influence will push away hard mobs and attract peaceful.

If you want hard mobs you set your deed difficulty so and over time you'll attract hard mobs and push away peaceful creatures. Setting influence to hard is like the deed is pretending its far away from other deeds. You could also say that influence starts out at more difficulty level.

A deed could choose any level in between peaceful and greenish trolls/uniques. This system favors no one and gives every player the means to turn their area into what they desire.

Finally, if you like to hunt you learn what areas are either deeds with high difficulty or areas that are far away from any deed ( far away from deeds always means harder mobs).

 

 

The advantage of better spawns might be something fun for PvP to compete over. On PvE it just devalues land when some dood says...200 euro "I win, my spawns!".  I do know that fighting over spawns or even "herding" them will tend to favor a minority. That minory will likely be the elites, power gamers, and those with deep pockets.

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It would perhaps be more efficient to have critters not travel above a certain height. If 80% of the critter pop is up on inaccessible spots on the mountains, they're just sitting there wasting server resources.


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The predator/prey AI is the main culprit I suspect. Before Xanadu, I could barely find any aggro mobs to kill even when I covered the entire Southern continent of Celebration twice a day. I saw plenty of bison and unicorns though. It seems the unicorns are running around very fast, and getting attacked by any aggro mob. Because unicorns have a pretty high CR, and hit hard and fast, almost any aggro mob will die to them, or at the very least become mortally wounded and bleed to death. As for Bison, those things have a ton of health, and I've seen them kill Venerable Hardened Scorpions without sustaining any major damage they couldn't heal in a few mins. I'd wager there are still plenty of bison and unicorns around?


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Rolf delivers ;)

  • Shark and bison now yield better fight skill when killed

  • Increased creature spawn rates and max numbers

Mrtg server graphs now work again

Shark distribution should improve

Seals, Tortoise and Crabs may now spawn

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Sadly my troll club and I have not found any seals yet. :(

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Yes, Rolf delivers again on an easy mode to code aggro mob AI system that imposes them upon all players regardless of their desires to deal with them. As a few have mentioned within this thread, a much better system would be to restrict them to certain areas where those who wish to deal with them have the option to choose to do so.


 


This would seem to be the simplest solution to code wherein they stay within certain hunting type environments from which they could not wander outward. Of course this would do away with players encountering them in their local vicinity and having to face unwanted encounters that make the Wurm way of life "exciting" or "challenging". Unfortunately, as this seems to be one of the cornerstones upon which Wurm is founded, I see little hope of anything being done to restrict their pestering's of others who have little interest in swatting these mosquitoes, or the poor unfortunates incapable of doing so.


 


The more peaceful state experienced upon Xanadu was nice while it lasted. The only real negative effect I had seen from the lack of these pests was unavailability of furs to create beds. Of course this could be solved by providing them from some of the more peaceful creatures as well. Now where did I put that pest control tool. Ah, still within my hand. Forgot to remove it by habit.


 


By the way. Seals should certainly be a source of furs. Hopefully not overlooked.


 


=Ayes=


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Yes, Rolf delivers again on an easy mode to code aggro mob AI system that imposes them upon all players regardless of their desires to deal with them. As a few have mentioned within this thread, a much better system would be to restrict them to certain areas where those who wish to deal with them have the option to choose to do so.

 

This would seem to be the simplest solution to code wherein they stay within certain hunting type environments from which they could not wander outward. Of course this would do away with players encountering them in their local vicinity and having to face unwanted encounters that make the Wurm way of life "exciting" or "challenging". Unfortunately, as this seems to be one of the cornerstones upon which Wurm is founded, I see little hope of anything being done to restrict their pestering's of others who have little interest in swatting these mosquitoes, or the poor unfortunates incapable of doing so.

 

The more peaceful state experienced upon Xanadu was nice while it lasted. The only real negative effect I had seen from the lack of these pests was unavailability of furs to create beds. Of course this could be solved by providing them from some of the more peaceful creatures as well. Now where did I put that pest control tool. Ah, still within my hand. Forgot to remove it by habit.

 

By the way. Seals should certainly be a source of furs. Hopefully not overlooked.

 

=Ayes=

game has guard towers and templars to allow u to keep a more 'peaceful state'. could even hire mercs to come clear ur area. 

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Rolf delivers ;)

  • Shark and bison now yield better fight skill when killed

Increased creature spawn rates and max numbers

Mrtg server graphs now work again

Shark distribution should improve

Seals, Tortoise and Crabs may now spawn

 

 

Even I have to say that's not too shabby. 

Edited by Jeixi

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Well a lot has changed in the last 4 days - seems things have gotten better - the increased FS for sharks seems to have done the trick - on my way to Xanadu from Release today I saw a load of shark corpses floating about on the sea! :-)


 


And just to chime in on some of the posts in this thread - I don't think putting mobs in specific regions is a good idea - I think that the random mobs all over the place is as much an element of Wurm as the crafting - the nervous feeling of wandering down a road not knowing what you could bump into or venturing down a dark mine and you turn a corner and are suddenly nose to nose with a Lava Fiend is a big part of Wurm for me.


Edited by Ordinii
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PLEASE bring the mobs... but can you brig them without a ton of lag?  LAg sucks worse than just about everything else that could be wrong.


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I liked that peacefulness on Xanadu. I could keep building my little settlement without being attacked by giant spiders. Now monsters will spawn again around my base.


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I liked that peacefulness on Xanadu. I could keep building my little settlement without being attacked by giant spiders. Now monsters will spawn again around my base.

 

Build guard towers? Settle a deed with a spirit templar? Make friends who can kill spiders?

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im on indy, got a  troll mound  on my last tile of my prem, its spawning nothing, i noticed no increase in animals, instead ive noticed this month a big decrease and even after the boost, everyone has noticed nothing is spawning, there is no changes.


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Build guard towers?

Needs a lot of materials, building takes a lot of time time.

Settle a deed with a spirit templar?

Needs money. Making enough mortar takes a lot of time.

Make friends who can kill spiders?

They won't be available non-stop. At the very beginning of Wurm players had to deal with spiders without good skills and weapons. I don't know how they did it.

Edited by Volfgarix

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Now this is what I call fun!

 

 

imo, this has proven that we could easily add something to let people toggle off fighting. The only negative aspect here is people who enjoy being threatened by mobs don't have that opportunity.

 

Heck, I'd be willing to spend hours on my deed investing time into some object that could be used to give my combat free time off deed. Basically, store hours in an object via crafting which in turn could be used to get hours of combat free time out exploring. Just to be clear this would be optional. If you want to fight stuff you just don't spend the time making the repel item.

 

 

I do not like that idea.  It gives an economic advantage to people who are not willing to face monsters.

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I think a couple of people in this thread have really hit the nail on the head with the sharks.

Basically, Wurm servers have a set total mob count which (as far as I know) is based on total number of mobs, not the type of mobs. This often leads to a situation where certain kinds of mobs which people don't kill for whatever reason end up hogging the spawn count. In the past it used to be that critters used to end up massed on mountains/cliffs because they are extremely hard to reach places for hunters. Farming mobs like horses, cows, pigs, chickens etc. also takes up some of the spawn count.

 

Most recently I think the biggest spawn count hogs were bison, simply because it's not really worth spending the time it takes to kill them. They're pretty well armoured and don't give much reward for the extra time taken to kill them. But at least Bison are on land.

 

The real problem I think came with Sharks. Sharks seem to have similar problems to bison, except that sharks are much harder to reach by virtue of being in the sea. I don't have access to creature-by-type graphs over time, but I would suspect the shark population on all servers goes up over time rather than staying level or decreasing as I suspect more sharks spawn than are killed. If this is true, then the number of all other mobs will have to decrease to compensate for that under the total number of mobs.

As for Xanadu, that server currently has around 142,000 mobs on a (32km x 32km) 1024sq km landmass and falling. This makes 138 mobs per sq km on Xanadu.

A server like Deliverance currently has 22,000 mobs on a (8km x 8km) 64sq km landmass. This makes 343 mobs per sq km on Deliverance. On any given tile on Deli, you are 2.5x more likely to see a mob than on Xanadu.

A tiny server like Affliction (BL Home on Epic) seems infested with mobs, because it has 564 mobs per sq km (9000 mobs on a (4km x 4km) 16sq km server).

For Xanadu to "feel" like it has the same mob density as Deli, it would need a cap of about 351,000 mobs which would probably harm performance at this stage.

Obviously this doesnt take into account mass penned up mobs which distorts things but it proves why mobs seem so much rarer on some servers and so common on others.

 

The solution in my view would be so:

1a - If this system is not already in, change the system so that each type of mob has its own cap. This would prevent some creature types dominating the creature count because people don't bother killing them for good reason.

 

AND/OR

 

1b - Make mobs like bison and sharks more rewarding to kill.

2 - Raise the mob cap on Xanadu. At the moment it is persistently falling and I don't know why, and is much lower per sq km than other servers.

 

 

Or, if you are a hunter and want things that are not sharks to kill,  Go kill some sharks to make room.  Or offer a bounty for shark fins or something.  This does not require the world to be changed, it can be solved with player action.

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I feel the current system wastes a lot of resources trying to simulate stuff that nobody sees. Take for example Xanadu with 600 players logged in at the same time. How much of the server could these players reach within for example 5 minutes of movement? 5%? Meanwhile nobody sees the mobs located in the other 95% of the map, so why simulate them if nobody can see them? Isn't that a huge waste of resources right there?

 

So another option is to make mob spawning more instanced, without it looking that way to the player. What I mean there is that you should only spawn mobs within the vicinity of a player (like within 5 minutes of a player, to account for travel), after all if a 1 square km area has no logged in players in it, then there's no point in having mobs there. Once mobs have been spawned then they should be despawned if no player has been near them for, for example, an hour. Lairs and deeds could still be used to determine what spawns where just as how it works now. Tamed and branded mobs should be exempt from this and never despawn, same for mobs on deed. So if you put a tamed mob on deed and it goes untamed then it's still on a deed, so it won't despawn. Possibly also don't make them despawn if they are completely fenced in (assuming it is feasible to check for this).

In the case that spawning mobs requires quite a bit of resources then maybe it would be an option to create them all in advance, but storing them somewhere off the server? Then when you need to spawn some mobs you can just move them onto the server. When you need to despawn one you move it back to storage. Only if a mob dies do you need to generate a new one (and when a new creature is born through breeding).

 

This might solve the lack of mobs issue as you no longer need to simulate mobs which nobody sees anyway, and would make the server look and feel more alive as more mobs can be near each player. This solution also scales a lot better with server size, as it's the online player count which influences how many mobs need to exist, not the size of the server. The spawning of mobs could take into account brand new players (less than 24 hours old) and spawn less mobs around them. If the amount of mobs in an area also depends on the amount of lairs, then players have some control over the safety of an area as they could attempt to remove lairs of the more dangerous creatures. If some servers need to be more dangerous than others then the density of spawned mobs could be increased on those servers.

 

Uniques should obviously be exempt from this, possibly exempt champion mobs too, in which case champion mobs could take up a similar functionality to lairs in this system, increasing the amount of their kind spawned in their area when a player is nearby.

 

I think this could lead to trouble as the server becomes more densely populated.

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Needs a lot of materials, building takes a lot of time time.

Needs money. Making enough mortar takes a lot of time.

They won't be available non-stop. At the very beginning of Wurm players had to deal with spiders without good skills and weapons. I don't know how they did it.

 

Running away is how you deal with spiders without good skills or weapons.  running away and dying a lot and dying a lot is ok because you don't have good stuff to lose yet.

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Running away is how you deal with spiders without good skills or weapons.  running away and dying a lot and dying a lot is ok because you don't have good stuff to lose yet.

But monster are faster now. Dying causes loss in skills.

Earlier you could at least outrun them if you was running on road, now you can't outrun them in any way.

Newbies can't run all the time, they must have possibility to level up, progress, but most of mobs they meet are spiders, hell hounds, bears and lions. Pigs, large rats and other weaker animals are quite rare.

 

Veterans doesn't care because they can kill spider in few hits. When trolls were buffed, they whined a quite lot, they didn't want to run away from trolls. They wanted to be heroes who are killing giant monsters! They haven't considered running away as viable method of dealing with them, because this would place them equal with newbies.

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Needs a lot of materials, building takes a lot of time time.

Needs money. Making enough mortar takes a lot of time.

They won't be available non-stop. At the very beginning of Wurm players had to deal with spiders without good skills and weapons. I don't know how they did it.

I am guessing you are a new player - just to clarify -

 

Guard Towers do require a fair amount of materials if your a new player but its a good way to skill up masonry and I made one with my newbie character in about 6 hours - which by Wurm standards is not a lot of time.

 

Yes if you drop a deed it will cost you money but the minimum deed is less than 2 Dollars a month (and that's with 1 Spirit Templar) - which equates to about 1 beer or a happy meal from MacDonalds - that's for a whole month and hours and hours of entertainment - how long does a beer/happy meal last?  Not sure why you are mentioning mortar here - you don't need mortar to set up a deed.

 

As BabylonHoruv has mentioned - running is the noobies tactic for dealing with mobs - until you get some armour and a half decent weapon - (which doesn't take that long to obtain)

But monster are faster now. Dying causes loss in skills.

Earlier you could at least outrun them if you was running on road, now you can't outrun them in any way.

Newbies can't run all the time, they must have possibility to level up, progress, but most of mobs they meet are spiders, hell hounds, bears and lions. Pigs, large rats and other weaker animals are quite rare.

 

Veterans doesn't care because they can kill spider in few hits. When trolls were buffed, they whined a quite lot, they didn't want to run away from trolls. They wanted to be heroes who are killing giant monsters! They haven't considered running away as viable method of dealing with them, because this would place them equal with newbies.

 

As far as I know mobs have not had a speed buff recently - when you say "Earlier" - when exactly are you talking about?

 

The loss in skills at the beginning is negligible as you can regain the skills in one or two actions!

 

And where did you get the notion that Veterans have this elitist attitude?  Apart from one or two bad apples (which in my opinion is a lot less than your average online game) most veteran players are willing to go out of their way to help new players.

 

Maybe Wurm just isn't the game for you - but if you stick with it, it is one of the most enjoyable games on the market at the moment!

Edited by Ordinii
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If you think mobs are bad now, you should have played in the early days.

I was wrecked by a pheasant.

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