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Mishia

How can we get more people to play Wurm Online? [DEVS READ]

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The problem here is that I can't go up to one of my friends and say, "Hey man, I know of this great game called Wurm Online, we should play some time," for two reasons:


 


1. He/she would quit, guaranteed, and


 


2. It would be a lie.


 


This is the point where it is up to us, the players, to try our hardest to get Rolf to listen (even if it means burning through forum accounts like a token house bike account burns through cordage). We don't even know how long this game will be around. We notice the money issues, we see what is going on, regardless of whether or not it is an official statement or someone "spreading false rumors". We aren't saying these things because we want to hurt the game or the staff. We complain because we care. We want change. We know this game has potential, and we want it to reach that potential, but we know there are issues.


 


Listen to your players because often they know what they are talking about. They... WE... are not stupid, we do not have malicious intent. We want this game to be the best it can be. It obviously isn't anywhere close now. We want that to change. We are here to help.


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Perspective, this is important.


 


I am trying my hardest to get "into" wurm.


I go on freedom and attempt to speak about PVP and people turn shoulder. I go into epic to try to learn PVP and I get called a spy by every other person I meet. In order to attempt to get to Chaos I need a full expeditions worth of supplies. To get 20 FS, I literally have to sit and do nothing for DAYS.


 


 


How am I supposed to convince my friends from Eve Online, from Mortal Online, or any other hardcore sandbox, to come play Wurm with me?


 


- The graphics are bad


  +A small setback, only matters to a small percent


  +It runs Java which automatically adds resource bloat to low quality gamers, the prime audience for bad graphics


 


- The grind


  +As I said above, it literally takes a week to be at a tutorial level of combat readiness.


 


-The price


 +Deed, Premium, upkeep. It takes a lot to get past that.


 


Wurm is a gem, it is a beautiful and fantastic region of sandbox gaming that is literally one of kind. We have so much good, but a large wall of tedium before you can even glimpse the game beyond the cliff unlike Eve where you can at least see the appeal before you get there, or Mortal where the cliff is the toxic community and vast depth.


 


Honestly, I have never met someone in Wurm who has not paid for a deed at least once, and if you play more than a month you have premium most likely. I do not see why money would not be put aside for things like engine upgrades and contingency unless the financial infrastructure is nonexistent.


 


And on a side note, Wurm's old school combat is the only reason I am really interested in wurm combat, but some better (read: Smoother) player animation would attract the vast and free marketing that is youtube.


 


Just some personal opinions.


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In todays games graphics matter and they will matter more and more and more.  To say its only a small % of gamers who like nice graphics is completely false..with that said here's just an average game....to compare too. ;)


 


fem02.jpg


 


vs


 


 


TERA-Goes-Free-To-Play-1.jpg


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Free cookies. And bacon. Bacon cookies.


 


Honestly, it's the learning curve. I love the fact there are no missions or quests in the game but some people need them to break the crest of the learning curve of a game. The tutorial now is nowhere what it was when I first did it. I actually made something in mine instead of reading signs. There was a mission. You followed it. You learned things. Now they come out of the portal with a "Well Read" or "Educated?" title because they read signs.


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In todays games graphics matter and they will matter more and more and more.  To say its only a small % of gamers who like nice graphics is completely false..with that said here's just an average game....to compare too.

 

<snip>

 

I will say this for Wurm, at least it has female characters who actually look something like real women, rather than Barbie dolls with really bad fashion sense.

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I will say this for Wurm, at least it has female characters who actually look something like real women, rather than Barbie dolls with really bad fashion sense.

 

And armor that has more than 2 bottle caps held on with some wire.

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fixing the most prevalent bug and optimization issues that haven't been fixed since all the models were implemented so you dont crash with 30 people in local, and then put it on steam


 


ez


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In todays games graphics matter and they will matter more and more and more.  To say its only a small % of gamers who like nice graphics is completely false..with that said here's just an average game....to compare too. ;)

fem02.jpg

 

vs

 

 

TERA-Goes-Free-To-Play-1.jpg

 

 

Graphics definately dont matter.

I preferred wurm on the previous graphics that were on 2006 or something.

 

I also like runescape much more with the old school version - old graphics, the classic seems so fun too

Edited by silakka
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Half-naked pixel girls don`t attract me at all, that doesn`t make any game more interesting, take your girl on date in RL.


 


When I started playing games we had mostly only text ones, well ADOM was so great game even without all these naked manga-like looking babies.


Edited by Mormo

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I think if a tutorial server was made, newbies would need to start with say 50 skill in digging, mining, carpentry, smithing and fighting stats on it, so they can experience wurm for a few days at its 'full' potential.


No use playing on a server where everything will be lost in a few days when you leave if all you did was spend hours grinding basic skills or failing 20x in a row at making a plank.


Edited by Outlaw
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There are not going to be more players than this. For several reasons.


 


Not everyone can bear this grind. Some of it makes a sort of sense, some is just TEDIUM. There's a lot of repetitious button pushing, and the same chores to do day in, day out. Two of the people I introduced to the game quit from that.


 


There is too much lag. One of the players I introduced to the game barely plays now because of that.


 


If you are a player who signed on for PvE, and then you are the victim of griefing, theft, or condoned harassment/bullying, you either quit or play less, and you CERTAINLY don't spread the game through word of mouth. 6-8 people I know have left the game because of this just in my one area. My own young nephew stopped playing from adults bullying him. He wasn't raised to mouth back at adults and didn't know how to deal with it. At this point I don't know anyone who spreads the game with word of mouth, the most important method for growth. (I don't associate with the bullies, they might but they tend to be selfish.)


 


The game is fairly expensive to play fully, and it's insulting to have things rot on deed, or disappear out of bins monthly after paying for the space/toon.


 


Very annoying bugs persist (animals clipping on buildings, templars screaming all day, permissions problems, etc.) and then things like mooring ropes are focused on. Officers of the game tell you straight to your face they don't care if you all quit. And there is biased treatment.


 


There are a lot of great things about the game, and it could be epic. That is not the wish of the principals of the game.

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make more intense wurm pvp videos on youtube

 

I doubt u get people to wurm that way. 

Wurm has more then just Intense PvP it is real life back in the days.

This game is for people who are dedicated to it. The reason wurm is small player based is that most of us are patient and relaxed in what we do.

 

Most games are about fast and quick etc etc.

Wurm is made to achieve things overtime it should stay that way i hope.

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Not that this is my opinion, but the best the combat is so far from what outsiders want these days. They actually want to strike things with a click and a cross hair. I honestly like the combat here, as its not my main focus anyway.

So changing the combat would get all those 'shallow' people in, but will that keep them here?

People can't handle wurm, they want instant gratification, we aren't about that here and when it comes down to it we probably won't be able to change the masses.

I happy as long as Rolf is making enough to keep wurm evolving.

Most companies don't have the balls to make a game like this but Rolf has us here and we keep it going, most games do an alpha, people try it and get to the point of 'it has potential'.

More people? I'm happy on my mountain, hardly seeing anyone, working away and relaxing.

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Fix the problems first as was said.  Then add missions that are actually fun to do. And also cause you to travel extensively, So we have a reason to go adventuring. What makes the game boring is staring at a forge all day, And the only reason you have to go anywhere is if you have a merchant setup that isn't local.  After a few hunting trips you can survive for months or years on the amount of meat you have, So you literally have no reason to hunt, Unless your grinding fs.or leather working, And it just bores you killing the same old things over and over. 


 


Create special creatures.plants. and ores that are unique to certain missions, And place them all over the world on different maps, So we have a reason to visit those places. Personally I wouldn't care what the quest reward was, Just as long as i get to have some fun.  Of course this means you have to allow animals to be cargo-ed to other servers, So were not going on foot.


 


Simple speak to Npc's all over the world that lead you thru a quest chain that explains the lore of wurm, If there is such a thing.


 


So many ways to make it fun, That just haven't been done. But we have sheep baaaaah, So exciting. Not.


 


Basically the key to retaining your player base is player immersion.  We have to feel like we've had an experience that was fun.  Instead you login and dread the amount of work you have to do that day. Or your crops and animals die, And half your stuff rots.


 


If you can get the game to that level, Players will for the most part be more forgiving of the bad animations, And lack of combat system.  And they stick around.


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fixing the most prevalent bug and optimization issues that haven't been fixed since all the models were implemented so you dont crash with 30 people in local, and then put it on steam

 

ez

 Quite honestly the most on point post.  Wurm won't be known for it's flashy graphics or it's in depth mechanics.  Most of us play it because it's freedom, freedom to make choices and decisions.  Everything is player built, maintained and occupied.  This is what will appeal to people when they get in wurm.  What needs to be done is optimizing java clients to possibly use some sort of culling that can allow users to mass in areas.  This would be a first step in allowing wurm to really have a platform for being allowed to grow.  

 The next step is simple, just add the game to Steam as Proph has said.  Advertisement is expensive and any where you can find it cheaply is the place to go.  The Valve platform called Steam which is essentially an online store that allows people to promote their games cheaply.  LiF:YO is nothing compared to what Wurm can offer in depths of community and what I feel is an easier grind.  This game would blossom without a doubt if it was added to Steam.  

Edited by Samusen
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  This game would blossom without a doubt if it was added to Steam.  

 

Can you have your game on Steam if you allow adults to harass children? Or serially harass other players? How do the servers work on there?

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WURM is not for the masses by a long ways. This game caters to those of us who want to do things our own way whatever it takes. We all know that if you want to [do this] you will have to [do all these other things] and while you're at it here's another [long list of things you should consider]. Most modern gamers won't tolerate that for a week much less the years some have invested here.

I am happy to see some progress however glacial it may be. A bit more work on the internal workings toward efficiency along with the brass n polish would be nice though.

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 there is many problems that would need to the fixed first, for example adding some some kind of trigger that disables glsl shaders on the videocards that have problems with it,many new players try the game see that they have to do all kinds of changes just for the game to work properly and leave instead.


 


an my own experience having a deed that recruited new players,most of the people that started playing and liked wurm,suddenly started crashing so much they just quitted instead of going to open a topic on the forums to try to figure what the problem was


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Can you have your game on Steam if you allow adults to harass children?

 

I'd have to have more information--from both parties--to really determine what sort of, if any, kind of harassment your nephew suffered.

 

If you felt it was truly harassment, then did you contact a GM about it?

And about "talking back to adults".  If your nephew is too young to differentiate between "talking back" and "standing for his rights", then he should not be online unsupervised.  You would not leave him alone in a public area with strangers regularly, would you?

 

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I'd have to have more information--from both parties--to really determine what sort of, if any, kind of harassment your nephew suffered.

 

If you felt it was truly harassment, then did you contact a GM about it?

And about "talking back to adults".  If your nephew is too young to differentiate between "talking back" and "standing for his rights", then he should not be online unsupervised.  You would not leave him alone in a public area with strangers regularly, would you?

 

 

1 & 2, I'll send you a private PM.

 

3. Yeah. Like school. It breaks my heart, but he's like a gentle giant. He even has a black belt in karate, and plays football, but when people are rude or mean to him, he takes it to heart and doesn't mouth back. And he'd never mouth to an adult. I wish he would. He's old enough not to be supervised. But in this game, he should not have to be.

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Can you have your game on Steam if you allow adults to harass children? Or serially harass other players? How do the servers work on there?

This is the internet.  People are going to bicker and harass each other irregardless of every factor you can think of.  Steam does not host servers.  They merely provide a middleman service of which people can find and play a game of what ever genre they look for. 

 

WURM is not for the masses by a long ways. This game caters to those of us who want to do things our own way whatever it takes. We all know that if you want to [do this] you will have to [do all these other things] and while you're at it here's another [long list of things you should consider]. Most modern gamers won't tolerate that for a week much less the years some have invested here.

I am happy to see some progress however glacial it may be. A bit more work on the internal workings toward efficiency along with the brass n polish would be nice though.

The very definition of a sandbox genre allows as many users as the sandbox(Server) will hold.  Creating more servers to allow new players access is a great way of generating more and more content for Sandbox users to interact with.  Sandbox games are most definitely made for a certain genre of gamer base.  That doesn't mean people can change or find a game that they haven't known about to suit their needs.  Why does every player that comes to Wurm need to stay for a year?  They should be allowed to play off and on, there is nothing wrong with being a casual gamer.  

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I don't think that lack of advertisement is Wurm's problem. Wurm had massive influx in the past, and quite big press coverage. But it could not retain the players. What that problem is exactly, I couldn't tell - it's probably a pile of problems anyway.

One of them is the players who play Wurm currently. Just look up how many people in this thread said something along the lines of "I don't want more players in Wurm, because it lags the servers".

There's also a plethora of things that people think are wrong, but eh.. it's difficult to say what things are actually wrong. Often it's just things that people personally dislike, opinions, without proper background knowledge, and not objective assessments.

For example,

1.  Wurm is too expensive to play.  You pay for your toon.  You pay for your priest alt.  You pay to place deeds.  You pay to upkeep deeds.  You pay other players for items.  You pay, you pay, and you pay.

Wurm's subscription fee is still only half of what is considered the "industry standard", with optional extra fees. Rarely can you really buy land in other games. And even then, a deed that covers an area for 1s per month has quite a respectable size, and some of the price goes into upkeep. One month prem + 5s and you're good for over half a year, owning land. Nobody really needs a second or third account either, unless you want to go hardcore singleplayer in an MMO.

Another example,

[...]To get 20 FS, I literally have to sit and do nothing for DAYS[...]

That is absolutely not true. Sure, it's one way of getting to 20FS but certainly not the only way.

Another thing is running off into the wild without giving it a thought or two, which most likely gets a newbie character killed. But who do you really want to blame if you jump off a bridge and die? A lot of people are just too impatient to learn a new game, and then complain that the game sucks.

And if you can't accomplish something by yourself just yet, it's not for lack of willingness to help from other players. Of course you can't expect everybody to immediately drop what they're doing and rush somewhere for 3 hours. But my positive experiences far outweigh the negative ones, on both ends of the stick. Sometimes, one just has to ask.

Well, that would be my 2 coppers then.

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As a person running around on a newbie academy for two years and spending a lot of time helping people in the technical issues thread, I can think of a few things that really should be looked at from a technical standpoint to give the people who love a game like wurm the wish to stay, and not go through tons of hoops just to be able to play a game.


 


1. Somehow force wurm to run on 64 bit java if run on a 64 bit system.


32 bit java is the main cause of crashes and is also the default most people have at first. Even the java download site recommends 32 bit java since most browsers are still 32 bit (and will even say "we detect you run on a 32 bit browser") Even if you have both installed, the auto update feature will often make wurm suddenly switch to 32 bit again. Being able to force this, somehow integrating a 64 bit java install during pack updates or something of this variant would really cut down on a lot of crashes.


 


2. Make it possible for dual-GPU systems to detect wurm as a game and run it on their powerful graphics card.


Currently wurm is seen as a java application and hence the computer will choose to use the intel integrated graphics unless you change the options in the graphic card control panels. Intel integrated graphics cause a lot of trouble, ranging from simple lower performances to stretched character and animal models and/or deformed/mistextured/flickering tiles. Being able to let a default dual graphics card computer setup pick the high end graphics card will save a lot of problems and headaches, whether this can be somehow coded in or can be arranged through cooperation with nvidia/amd through the profiles they use to determine this.


 


3. The dreaded "memory leak / travel bug / fillinanyname".


This little creature has been given many names but it all comes down to the same and is the number 1 cause for newbies in my academy  to decide wurm is not worth it even though they have no further technical issues. Anyone playing for prolonged periods of time in heavily built or populated areas will know this. You log in all fine, slowly you experience more and more freezes until your system grinds to a halt and wurm becomes unresponsive. Traveling also can increase the rate this happens when nearing heavy areas.


 


Relogging to clear it up might "not be that big a deal" for the niche die hards, but it is a really big annoyance and hindrance to most and even more so in pvp (having to have a backup client open so you can quickly relog is just silly). You can "prevent(sort of not totally)" this or "delay" it (for example move to a desolate area) with all sorts of advanced methods like adding more memory to the heap, but this is not really working that well. We should not have to go through this expert technical aspect, should also not be forced to buy a lot of RAM so we can reserve a huge heap space, nor should people (especially new players) be forced to exile them self in a MMO game.


 


There are of course a lot of other issues that can be looked at, but in my experience, the first 2 make up for 90% of all issues posted in Technical Issues and the number 3 forces people to move away from wurm or the newbie academy, either out of sheer frustration or before they are fully immersed into the game and became part of the community and will therefore feel less inclined to stick around. I think most of you can agree that being part of a community and having nice conversations adds a great depth to your online game.


 


Viti


Edited by Viti
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  • How about keeping the existing ones for starters. I think it is important to mention that I am not pointing to any cases. 

How about updating WiKi? I do understand it is a very big job.

How about having less trolling in forum threads (in WTS should be a WTS thread, not a discussion about something even not relevant to it).

How about respecting GMs and doing what asked, instead of keep going (they should have been assigned to the title for a reason).

How about respecting each other? [03:44:28] <Liandal> looks like the prick who set up a small deed  and just abandoned it,and now i have to wait for the upkeep on his small deed to run out

How about sorting our problems first before even mentioning expanding?

(And I am not talking about lags or other in game issues like cart disappearing from the first/upper floor and appearing on the ground one)

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I think wurm should let its freak flag fly, and stuff, and seek out all the bizarre and interesting people who are actually interested in this kind of game.


 


Also, an active subreddit wouldn't hurt. And a "Too Weird for Steam" ad campaign. I'd be willing to illustrate it in Paint.


 


I'm not an opponent of forum drama, per se, but Wurm's can be highly verbose. New players are going to want to get up to speed quickly.


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