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Etherdrifter

Thoughts On The Wurm Economy

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Ayes has a point.

Wurm Unlimited is just way more appealing than grindy, flawed Wurm Online.

WU has faster skilling, faster resource gathering, denser population(so servers don't seem so dead) and lower costs of playing.

 

By changing WO's economy either you piss off the vets and they will leave with all their silver or newbies will stop coming because of it's awful grind compared to WU.

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There is a % who leave cause they want a console version of WO where they can sit on there buts for a hour and accomplish what it takes in a mmo several hours or just instant spawn it in cause they are even lazier than that.

But this is not the only thing there are many thing's that cause ripple effect's. 

 

Me leaving WO to go to WU had nothing to do with the economy dropping and sales going down or cause I'm lazy and want a fast paced game play or that I'm a freeloader wanting developers to make me games for free. In 5 years of my WO exp I bought items twice from other players. Once some building mats when I felt lazy on my large project and once at the very beginning day one of my WO exp to buy a set of chain armor and 2 long swords to help me live longer. So in 5 years i contributed only about 10s to the economy. Every other RW dollar I spent was to the online store for silver for deed upkeep only and I paid for sub on the store. I don't like this RWMT system never did. Only thing I got from leaving is the type of server and system I wanted but it came with a additional perk. I now don't have to pay a monthly fee to play it. Heck I would of left if Rolf charged a monthly fee for WU when he released it. There are many who fall under this reason.

 

What you saw was a decrease mainly from people who didn't like this system either or who wanted a faster pace lazy man version. They all didn't mind paying for the monthly access to the game they where use to it. It was the RWMT they wasn't use to and didn't like having to pay to win or get ahead most of these people played as hermits grinding there skills alone to make there own stuff rather than buy it for RW cash. 

 

Now that WO lost these players cause before WU, WO was the only place to play Wurm period we have this huge economy slump. So why do we have it? Is it because the people still left playing are high skilled vets who no longer have to buy good's cause they can make high goods? Is it because people look at WO and WU and compare This version one time fee this version life time fee?

 

I think a good portion of the people who are complaining right now are those who can't sell there good's well this is what you get when it is a player driven economy. Lets look at this from a scifi perspective. Lets say some company comes out tomorrow with a food generator that can make food from thin air you just type in the food you want and pop it appears. Now what happens to the farmers selling there crops to stores, then the stores selling food on the shelf. well these guys just lost a large % of there buyers. There will still be some who continue to buy there stuff cause they don't believe the new food generator is healthy or safe but a large portion who see a wallet relief will buy it.

 

This example above is Wurm Unlimited an Wurm Online right now. There is the sellers left and a portion who think WU servers are not safe. RWMT system Real world effect. What you need to do is now have some type of system put in that causes sellers to have a reason to buy a lot more from other seller's to stable the market. Cause the only fix I'm hearing from the seller's right now is Rolf find a way to get people to play the online version so I have customer's who can't make what I can make. Seeing this is a player driven economy you'll need to fix it and stop asking Rolf to fix it for you he never broke it in the first place. WU is not him breaking it. It is him as a seller him self trying to make a buck.

Edited by Arkonick
spelling correction
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Hello. I saw this thread almost by accident.  I haven't played Wurm Online since the first round of Challenge, a year ago or so, and I had moved on to other games, but a few days ago someone left a comment on one of my Wurm essays on my blog where I addressed the economy, so I decided to see if there was anything new on that front. And sure enough, there is this thread.

 

Wurm Online has always been plagued by structural rot, which emanated from the top of the player hierarchy. I'm not even saying it came from Rolf. He enabled it with his game design, yes, but that structural rot was quick to turn against his own financial well-being.

 

Structural problem #1: Pegging the in-game currency to real money.

 

Because Wurm sells coins through the cash shop, any in-game coin faucet (i.e. other than the cash shop itself), whether it's through traders, foraging or any other means, is a lost revenue opportunity for Rolf.  I will get back to that later, but the existence of in-game faucets even though it is a lost revenue opportunity indicates such a measure was necessary. Why? I've seen other dying games -- without this real-money connection -- where the economy was dysfunctional, but it was because of the lack of players, who would take part in the economy as a matter of course: they would earn in-game currency while playing the game. (Kill ten rats, get reward and all that.) If nobody plays, nobody produces and nobody buys. Simple as that.

 

Wurm is different, even with these in-game money faucets. Let's imagine if they were turned off. Wurm could have a maximum number of players on every server, and it still wouldn't change the reality that the only money circulating in the game would have been bought at some point with real money. There might be several people willing to buy player-made goods, yes, but it doesn't change anything if the sellers won't accept any payment other than coins, which those potential buyers could only have obtained in two ways: (1) by buying them through the cash shop, or (2) by obtaining them from other players.

 

What happens to be the case in Wurm is that the people who have the most money also happen to be the ones trying to sell goods, and the people who might want to buy either have no money or higher priorities for that money, such as deed upkeep. And then those players start getting ideas: "Well, if other people sell goods, why don't I? Instead of buying stuff from a player merchant, why don't I buy my own merchant and sell stuff too?"

 

Anecdote: Back in the day, I was playing on Celebration when it had just been launched. At one point, a new trading hub was announced. It was planned to have more merchant stalls than there were people playing on the server. Everybody sells. Who buys?

 

Structural problem #2: Rolf subsidizing a skill-based elite using money from newcomers.

 

I am referring, especially, to that sorry episode with private traders, which he more or less ended in time for the release of Xanadu, but which ensured, for years before then, that his top players might never have to pay another dime on the game if they played it enough to make and sell enough garbage to traders to make all the money they needed for their own deed upkeep and their own premium time. And since price was based on quality, and quality on skill, then the higher the skill, the more money, until you'd siphoned off all that you could. Then you presumably bought another trader with the proceeds, until you reached an equilibrium between how much time you had and how much money you needed. Then bye bye cash shop, I'll never buy from you again.

 

Back in the day (2012), the proof of that was how established players all paid silver coins to buy the 20 days of premium time offered to new premium members (as part of the new subscriber package), which was more expensive than just buy a month's premium in Euros through the store. Wurm's upper crust has rarely been known for its generosity, so if they did that, there was because there was a financial advantage to it. And if they never bought their silver coins in the first place and obtained them through their own trader, then yes, the advantage was clear.

 

I remember Rolf saying at the time that traders, even those bought by players, should be accessible to all. Naturally, the Wurm elites continued to keep their traders locked inside 3x3 locked houses to make sure nobody else traded with them. And when Rolf told his player core that traders weren't supposed to be the "fountains of income" that they were and that he was considering turning off the tap considerably, his own precious elite players graciously told him off and threatened to quit playing.

 

Structural problem #3: Those subsidized elites then went out of their way to exploit and/or antagonize new players.

 

Never forget that indentured servitude used to be a thing in this game. Rolf designed Wurm knowing full well that his economy would rest on the divide between people who had money and people who had time. And that's how you get to the state of affairs where for most newbies, taking part in the economy -- i.e. having coins -- translates more or less into: "grind me 500 bricks, peon", because they don't have the skills to produce anything else of value. All they have is time, to make objects where quality is not even a requirement. That's why skilled elites outsource menial tasks like 500 bricks: they need them, but they have a more profitable use for their time.

 

At the same time, you saw those same elites complaining every time Rolf made any attempt at changing the game in a way that would run contrary to their interests, as with the traders above. Likewise, they wanted to keep Wurm as hopelessly grindy as possible, because that's how they enjoyed the game, they said. Then the first thing they did was to turn around and outsource the production of those 500 bricks to some poor newbie soul too naive or desperate to say no.

 

I've met some good people in Wurm, but also a number of elitists of the worst order. The worst I've encountered was someone who had contacted me to provide her with 500 bricks or something like that, but who then got offended because I had failed to sufficiently thank her for providing me with a glorious opportunity to waste my time. I was premium at the time. I had my own deed. I did not really need the money. I did that to make myself useful. And that was how I was rewarded. Well, then. My deed was fairly close to spawn on Celebration, so I got a fair number of newbies, and even invited a few to join the village. A few of them were also offered by other established players to provide bricks or clay in bulk, and I always tried to dissuade them from accepting. Not because I was afraid they'd join another village -- I did not really care -- but because what good is it to have disposable income in this game if obtaining it is enough of a grind to disgust you off playing it altogether? (Whatever their reasons, they still stopped playing after a while, but I suspect it had more to do with Wurm's lack of an endgame.)

 

You ask about the economy, but the real question you should ask yourselves is why the game by and large failed to retain new players, leaving Rolf with a core of players motivated entirely by self-interest. Players who should have been told "no" a long time ago.

 

Structural problem #4: And since Rolf legalized people cashing out of the game, the incentive was there to make money at it.

 

You bring in the possibility of real-life financial gain, and you make everything worse. It not only encouraged the elite players to exploit the hell out of anyone coming their way, but it also deprived Rolf of revenue. Come on, Wurm sells coins through the cash shop; for a private exchange to happen, it has to be done at a lower rate than what the cash shop offers. Any such private exchange takes revenue away from the cash shop, therefore away from the game, until the game collapses because nobody uses the cash shop anymore.

 

If your complaints about the Wurm economy all hinge around making real money off it, I don't care. You've always been leeches on this game's potential. I've seen your ilk at work before, talking about Wurm in terms of investors and workers, and never using words like game, players, fun. Wurm is supposed to be a game. I like it as a game. If it's a second job, I want nothing to do with it; and for that matter, if it's all about the money you can make, any other second job is better.

 

Don't get me wrong: I usually love to play the economy in online games. But I hated that very notion in Wurm itself, not only because the currency was pegged to real money, but because Rolf himself legalized and even encouraged the idea that players could make real-life money out of this game. Which led to the kind of core player base we have come to expect from Wurm.

 

And then, there's Unlimited.

 

I haven't bought Unlimited yet, because I'm waiting for my friends to express an interest in playing Wurm. Then I'll get my $30 copy and never have to worry about the usual Wurm Online elitists anymore, or newbies cutting every tree they can find, or the endless grind just so I can get to the levels where my skills match my building imagination.  Playing Wurm Online is fun, but not alone. The last time I logged into Celebration, there were maybe 25 people on the server, none in the local chat (and as I said, I was fairly close to spawn). I'd rather play with 6 people I know and like hanging out with, than with two dozen strangers who never bother to act as if this game were still alive because they're too busy grinding to make money or complaining about how their grinding in fact makes no money.

 

Of course Unlimited imperils the survival of Wurm Online. I like to think that it's intentional. I like to think that Unlimited is Rolf's (belated, sadly) realization that the player core of Wurm Online ruined his game, effort after effort, that it was too late to redeem it, but that there were several people out there who liked Wurm in some other way than what the elite of the game had made it like, and who would pay for the chance to play Wurm their way, without the grind, and the snobbery of players who spent too much time taking pride in a bunch of pixels.

 

Still, if you want to ask me how to fix the Wurm economy:

 

1) Introduce some form of in-game currency distinct from cash-shop currency (which could continue being used for deeds and such), with perhaps a method to convert in-game currency to cash-shop currency. I'm thinking of an exchange bank à la Puzzle Pirates.

2) If #1 is impossible, barter should be encouraged. I suspect it would be a lot more satisfying than the current system where everyone wants coins nobody wants to spend. But most important of all...

3) End private coin-for-cash transactions between players, likewise the selling of accounts and any other item in Wurm for real money. These exchanges were, I thought, unethical to begin with, and since they translate into a loss of income for Code Club while offering nothing of benefit to the game, they don't even have a financial reason to exist.

 

I'm sure this proposal will be extremely popular among the remaining players of this game.

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Good post, Vetarnic.

Would remove buying premium for silver. Probably that's main reason why newbies even try to grind for coin in first place.

 

 

Rolf... All you had to do was to listen to Notch a bit, maybe then you wouldn't end up with grindfest full of elitists.

Edited by Volfgarix
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Not going to Quote all that post Vetarnic but you see it the same way I do. But sad part is not many people like me still watch the old WO forum section they have either moved to WU and only look in the WU topics or have moved on for good. This means your post and many of mine will get ripped on by the elitist who are trying to protect there income in game.

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Yup, just dawned on me, alot of fresh alts in here purposely  trolling people to string them along. Go back to WU, your not killing WO, because if WO falls, WU gets 0 in the future, jus saying :-P Also notch is a sell out who got lucky, its nothing to do with hes a great mind, just just made a game and got lucky that people liked it.  Minecraft is a instant gratification game. One that was popular, but now sits in the dust as all games do. You can only  do so much in MC before your bored, there is no goals, NO economy,  no real community that sticks together. i will gladly stick with rolf, even though hes a moron sometimes, he  still owns WO and sometimes sends us nice things down the pipe. Ill give my  money to rolf before notch.

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The traders were the wrong way to go about adding a faucet to circulate money into the economy.  They were loads of money to start, and so if you didn't have money to invest initially then you were never going to take advantage of it, while the people who could got super rich off it!

It was a very messed up system, and what Wurm really needs is a way to make coins in game, that is more lucrative than the current system.  There has to be a way people can play for free, if they have the time to play.  Otherwise you're going to make the servers dead, and no one will play this game when they can play wurm unlimited.  Wurm Unlimited will gradually chip away at WO if it isn't addressed.

 

Not to mention city owners should be rewarded for all the money they spend!  It is really expensive.  When servers ended up getting wiped, as they eventually do when the populations die down... you didn't get jack back from the developers.  They didn't reward you based on how much you've spent, and that just seems really weird to me.  There should be tiers of membership, based on how much you spend to reward people for their spending!  Nothing game breaking, but rare clothing items, etc should be considered.

 

Buildings should have been made historical when they became such, and made unbreakable.  I was really saddened when I came back and some of the most epic, amazing buildings or locations were decayed and all that was left was empty flat land.

 

The real issue people mentioned is that there's nothing to do other than crafting!  So there's no threat, no risk, no nothing...  Once your skills are high enough, there is nothing that threatens you other than a dragon, which you do with a group of friends and they grab your stuff for you so it doesn't decay.  There's nothing consuming resources, and taking them out of circulation.  So basically, there's no resource sinks that are rewarding enough to justify you dropping a 1000 mats in it.

 

Even if there was a threat, there's no reason to go do it.  You have thousands of meat, and hide just from the guards killing things.   I think guard kills should instantly disappear!

 

This means that none of the rare items leave the game, or the not so rare.

 

Keep in mind that it doesn't have to be combat related to take items out of circulation.   Honestly it's probably best for Wurm in the long run to just admit that it's combat sucks, and entirely focus on crafting and animal taming.  Look at A Tale in the Desert...  what they did was made epic monumental buildings to suck resources out of the economy.  They also had festivals where you could make goods and such and contribute and then based on how much you contributed you would get a unique, rare reward.

 

I'll use an example of what I experienced one time when I came back to wurm.  A city had been abandoned, so I broke into the houses and looted them all.  What I ended up with was the plague.  This city had so much high end gear, so large quantities of pretty much everything you'd ever need that that's probably why the city quit and left the game!  There was nothing more for them to do, they had it all.  There was no reason for them to continue making 90ql gear, or continue farming 90ql mats.  They had thousands, and it took me days to haul it all to my city.  By the end of it, I didn't want to continue trying to raise my mining skills, or my blacksmith.  I was set for life!  I couldn't sell any of it, as the population was too low and everyone who still played was a lifer.   I think at the time there was 10-20 people on off hours, which was when I played.

 

All these reasons are why people love new servers.  They are fresh, new, and the game is really balanced at the start!  It's really fun starting out new again with everyone else.  But then you grow attached, and leave when you realize you have everything again, and it's boring.

Edited by sweatygopher
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On 2/7/2016 at 11:19 PM, Arkonick said:

What I recommend is Rolf Make a tornado in Wurm a category F5 and have it rip across servers laying waste to homes and there stock piles and any thing it touches it destroys. I believe this would loosen the economy with a over flooded market bringing back demand on good's. But this would only be a temp fix cause in a month or 2 the market be flooded again.

 

Not only would I quit instantly, but I'd spend my leisure time for a while making sure the whole gaming planet knew this happened, and I'd look for recompense for the bait-and-switch plied against me anywhere I could, like the BBB or Paypal. What the F_ gives you the right to suggest that all my hard work and enjoyment should be wiped out just so some people can play economy? I am minding my business, paying for my premiums and deeds and doing my thing, and you suggest this should all be wiped out to FORCE me to have to do it all over again and spend more money? Please say you were just making a trolling joke.

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4 minutes ago, LorraineJ said:

 

Not only would I quit instantly, but I'd spend my leisure time for a while making sure the whole gaming planet knew this happened, and I'd look for recompense for the bait-and-switch plied against me anywhere I could, like the BBB or Paypal. What the F_ gives you the right to suggest that all my hard work and enjoyment should be wiped out just so some people can play economy? I am minding my business, paying for my premiums and deeds and doing my thing, and you suggest this should all be wiped out to FORCE me to have to do it all over again and spend more money? Please say you were just making a trolling joke.

LorraineJ don't take that post literal I was being sarcastic with that post.

 

I've been following this thread since the start and talked in it at times when I felt I had something to add. By the time I said that I was done listening to 90% of this thread and idea's of people who have no clue to why the game economy is sour. Sad part is when the true reasons why it's dead are mentioned people protecting the change are all for saying them post are wrong and full of it specially when all those who left are not here to answer this thread anymore. Normally when people stop playing a game they don't follow forum post of that game there to busy following the post of the new game they play. So when the net warriors like me voice we are lone gunmen in a shot out. But that post was me being sarcastic really it was I wouldn't want that to happen either.

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2 minutes ago, Arkonick said:

So when the net warriors like me voice we are lone gunmen in a shot out. But that post was me being sarcastic really it was I wouldn't want that to happen either.

 

Well thank goodness, but I'm sure there are people who thought that idea was fantastic.

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Any fix to this "economic problem" that people insist we have is guaranteed to make someone upset.  Best way I can think of to bolster the economy is to release a new server.  But that'll anger everyone that is complainnig about the lack of population density, so I dunno.

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Skills being slow is a core design element. Gameplay was not meant to be "fastfood" style, and even from the beginning the creators, Rolf and Notch, knew that was a niche decision.

 

Granted there could be better ways of concealing the grind.

 

Not a huge fan of current timer lengths, especially for what a new player has to endure. Watching a timer is like boiling water.

 

 

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What doesn't make sense to me is that higher quality materials actually take LESS time to gather than poor quality materials.  Should be the other way around!!!  Why does it take my newbie 30 seconds to do something that takes a pro 7 seconds to get max ql mats?

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22 minutes ago, sweatygopher said:

What doesn't make sense to me is that higher quality materials actually take LESS time to gather than poor quality materials.  Should be the other way around!!!  Why does it take my newbie 30 seconds to do something that takes a pro 7 seconds to get max ql mats?

Well logically A skilled carpenter should be able to make a chair in less time than someone doing it for the first time. He has had time in learning his trade this is why it works that way. For it to be turned around it be like a skilled carp takes 3 hrs to build a chair when a novice takes 30 mins for same chair it don't make since.

 

! more example would be a logger. A unskilled logger don't know where and how to real chop the tree to get it to fall he will just swing at one spot frantic. A skilled logger would know where to chop on the tree when to move around the tree while chopping etc.. meaning he would drop the tree faster .

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You're right a grandmaster could make a normal, 30QL chair no time at all!  A Grand master, 90ql chair should take a huge amount of time!

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Good post, Vetarnic, and spot on.

 

I'll turn this into an experiment. I will keep paying Premium until my silver runs out to pay the deed. I will not buy silver and I will not forage hundreds of tiles just looking for rare coins. I'll just continue playing the way I enjoy it. Currently I am building a rowing boat and maybe I can sell it for some copper, but probably people will just laugh. I still have some >30QL gems, maybe those will stretch the uptime of my deed enough to finish the Cog so I can try to sell my sailboat and so on.

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7 hours ago, Vetarnic said:

You bring in the possibility of real-life financial gain, and you make everything worse. It not only encouraged the elite players to exploit the hell out of anyone coming their way, but it also deprived Rolf of revenue. Come on, Wurm sells coins through the cash shop; for a private exchange to happen, it has to be done at a lower rate than what the cash shop offers. Any such private exchange takes revenue away from the cash shop, therefore away from the game, until the game collapses because nobody uses the cash shop anymore.

No, it isn't that simple.. many players seem to think, that every silver, that changes hands between players, is automatically a lost sale for Rolf. No it isn't. Silver is like a token, which Code Club sells. The whole point of it is, that people use it for trading. Some trade for goods, some for labor and yes, some for real money. The most important of that all is, that it creates a need for silver. And only place to add more silver to the overall pool, is through Code Club's store and this is, where Code Club has monopoly..

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You know, economy could be improved a bit if game had a lot new players coming from time to time, but there is no way to keep them here.

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since a lot of people are also talking about WU/WO/Economy/Problems in this thread i figured id like to offer my experience from a person who has played almost exclusively PvP in Wurm from the get go and has been around since forever. (and i apologize for the late night ramble, but hopefully someone can make sense of my gibberish.)

 

a huge problem in this game is that there really isn't demand for anything. I don't think, even today, I have ever purchased anything from anyone out of me needing the item. If i need anything imped I can simply do it myself, or use a friends account to do so. If neither or available, I will ask a friend and end up getting it for free anyway. I then look at EVE, and I don't really see a similar situation as large of a scale as it is here on Wurm. Sure some people might have accounts there that have been around for years and have many characters that results in them doing everything, but the "grind" there is so long that it encourages efficiency in what you skill up, and people will end up specializing in something. In Wurm, the grind isn't long, it's simply boring, which makes it seem longer than it actually is because you are less efficient when you just sit there and stare at a timer bored out of your mind.

 

that specialization seems to give people a job to do and it seems to be of such importance that it's a huge help in driving the game.

 

there is not more reward than risk/effort in Wurm PvP, and this is because of two reasons. the first one is very simple, it's just its outdated, imbalanced, buggy combat system. the second is the market. i think this issue was created simply because the direction of the game kept shifting from PvP to PvE to PvP to PvE and so on so forth rather than just making the direction of the game, well Wurm, where everything is tied together in some manner.

 

why is the risk higher than the reward? because the current meta is to use equipment that isn't easily obtainable in large numbers to further snowball its importance.

if you aren't aware of what the meta is, it's to simply use the best tier of dragon armor availible to you, so either drake/scale, with a large metal shield, and a glimmersteel weapon (if longsword/medium maul/large axe/huge axe/2h sword/2h maul) or an adamantine weapon (if shortsword/small maul/small axe. ) and i do understand that some people will be like why not just kill them and take it? it's very difficult as as tough as that gear makes them to kill, most fights are usually a few tiles from a door where damage reduction mechanics like SOTG can make the distance to the door easily reachable.

 

so you have people using dragon scale, and dragon hide that can't be made that often (so it stays rare, and even rarer in a community like freedom where a good portion of the hunts are public so the hide is even more split) and you have people using moonmetal weapons which just simply aren't obtainable to the larger crafting crowd. the people using this have no reliance on anyone else because imping the rare items (yes, grinding lw on drake, pas on scale, wsing on glimmer/addy) gives additional skillgain. these people (myself included) know 99.5% of the time they will not ever, not once, be in a situation where it is possible to lose said items if they don't want to be, and if they are, most of them certainly wont be using those items, they will be using the tier down... which brings me to another problem.

 

the tier down from dragon armor/moonmetal weapons is fullplate, and well, still moonmetal weapons as they are actually pretty common (to the PvP crowd almost exclusively, which is another problem.).

Now the problem with plate, and well any material lower than this really is simply due to its ease to create and its ease to obtain (and any material lower than this is utterly useless, because like i said, combat isn't really balanced). I need plate armor? Cool, if it's not provided for me i get to spend 30 hours grinding it and whoop-de-doo, i never have to ask anyone for help with it ever again. This effectively removes the need for skilled craftsman to fill the gap for the skilled warriors.

 

A lot of people make great suggestions to change this, and I think if it was changed in the correct way it could REALLY help the game.

 

The problem with a lot of the suggestions that go out trying to change this don't realize that due to the fact that everyone isn't specialized in anything, but is great at everything, PvPers will bring out their armor, their main weapon, their backup weapon and in some cases their two backup weapons, you got the required nolocate jewelry, you got the vesseled gems, the mandatory longbow and the mandatory shortbow, and you also got the 1-2 quivers of 50-70ql arrows and maybe a satchel full of 90ql lockpicks. Then you got the primary horse with its 90ql supreme horsegear, and the backup horse with its 90ql normal gear and a good old 70ql+ chain barding to top it all off.

 

These players will not want a suggestion that puts them into roles because it devalues the time they spent specializing into well everything, and for a long time I didn't either and the only way I could see something like this working would be small changes over time introducing mechanics like skill rust, and then making certain crafting skills harder to grind, and then certain combat skills harder to grind. Skill rust would, slowly but surely, help resolve the issue of exploited accounts/windows of oppourtunity and characters specialized into everything if done correctly. With skill rust, making some skills that are really easy, take longer, would further encourage specialization, including combat skills. You would end up with people focusing on what they enjoy in the game rather than just going for everything and I think that could create a demand big enough to power at least a small market until it's fleshed out by someone either much more intelligent or much more creative than I.

 

 

 

With all that being said, you still have a lot of problems that are causing the veterans to leave WO and go to WU (once again from a PvP perspective.)

 

1. There is a lack of consistency in the way things are handled by staff, and the rules regarding how things are handled seem to be changed either too little, or too often over something too little depending on what it is. The game is also a bit buggy and it puts people who PvP in a situation quite often where they need GM assistance fast, and 90% of the time they will never get it in a reasonable timeframe.

 

I've seen quite a number of individuals who have played for an extended period of time watch someone lose something to a bug, be it time invested in a skill via skill loss, or straight up money down the hole by suffocating in a cave wall and losing your items/champ life, or getting stuck in a fence/door and ganked and dropping your gear and those players being reimbursed, and then when it happens to them they aren't helped out in the slightest. When that happens, it quite frankly looks biased even if it was handled with the best of intentions simply because nobody has any idea of what to expect with the lack of consistency and the lack of access to prominent rule changes without reading every page of a 50 discussion where something was mentioned by some GM at 4:52 AM on page 43.

 

I've seen a lot of players that his has happened to outright drop the game, right there on the spot and sell up within days of it happening, i've seen others simply never log in again. I even remember an instance where a good 20-25 people lost their gear because the game client couldn't handle the load of 50 people being in local at a raid and 50 people crashing 10 times over the span of 20 seconds for two hours wasn't enough for the GM team to simply restart the server and call for a PvP ban. My kingdom in that situation literally lost all momentum from that one instance. Didn't even go to HOTA for the next like two months (it was also VERY visible on the server graph at the time because a good portion of those people simply stopped playing for a bit after that, and after playing with these people for as long as i have, enemies or not, i'm pretty sure a hiatus between three kingdoms like that certainly isn't caused by being burned out from the grind.)

 

2. There are a lot of great features in the game being added, sure some are buggy, but most of them are extremely cool once they work well, like bridges or minedoors for instance. The problem? They render the current combat system and the PvP mechanics around it even more inept.

 

I'll elaborate by giving two examples (and there are plenty more, like minedoors, lamps/statues, reinforcement beams, bridges)

 

The first being the level option. I love the level option, it makes it much easier to watch, lets say, season one of Daredevil while you raise a landbridge. However, before leveling you had something called flatraising and that style of terraforming is still used today, but for very obvious reasons not as much. Said reasons being less efficient than level in certain situations, and it simply taking more time. The time it took alone was enough to prevent people from making absurdly high dirtwalls (like 300 slope stacked on 300 slope), now that the time that flatraising once took is effectively removed by leveling, people make bigger dirtwalls, which stagnates the PvP even more and the politics surrounding it.

 

The second being multistory. I really enjoy my three story 4x5, but it becomes a problem when people make longhouses with the max number of stories a 99 carpenter/mason can build on that are built on top of a 600 slope dirtwall with nothing but the lower and upper floors finished. It makes catapulting extremely difficult, and guess what, it also stagnates PvP.

 

Nobody wants to raid due to how much time it takes (that time requirement has gone up very very significantly in recent months) so nobody does. Nobody raiding = not as many people losing their stuff = even less demand. I mean sure keep in mind larger kingdoms can do it, with enough people you can lessen the requirements on anything, but at the end of the day the game simply isn't large enough to have more than one faction that can do something like that reliably and consistently.

 

 

There are a few more reasons I could go into but I'm not quite sure if they are the result of bias or if they are actually the effect of another cause, once i'm sure of what it is, ill probably whine about it somewhere.

 

With all of that being said, WU gives people access. It gives them i guess, customization, however hard it may be and some people are determined to work with what they have to mitigate these problems.

 

You have some WU servers whose development teams and staff really worked hard on creating a thriving economy, and maybe in some cases they succeeded I don't know I don't play there.

You have some WU servers opened by people who had an inconsistent/bad experience with staff at one point or another and they really worked hard on creating a server that has great management. (I didn't play much WU, but it was pretty nice being on Rudie's server or Cubeman's server where i was able to get help almost instantly.)

 

To keep it short, you have people that see something wrong with the game, which has an incredibly small playerbase, and they use WU to take the game and shape it to what they want it to be, and in many cases it ends up better than what WO offers in at least one aspect. Most of the players tend to play inside a community under the greater WO community. For instance, the PvP crowd usually all know eachother pretty well and when you have such a small tight knit community, when someone does something that strikes home with a group of people, like offering a server that solves X problem, there is a good chance that a large group who were personally bothered by X problem (chance is even larger when the problem goes on for years ignored, and there are a lot of those) will shift to what was offered to them simply because its unlikely they would be bothered by X problem again, or anywhere near as much.

 

i don't think with the release of WU that WO will ever again gain more subs than it will lose unless some big changes are made, and i've been around this game for a long time (a good bit longer than my forum join date would have you believe) and Im reasonably certain that i have never once said that. It's a bit depressing looking at my friends i have played this game forever with and seeing less than i guess 1/16ths of them still playing, with nearly all of them quitting WO itself in such a short span like between the time WU released and now. (Some still play WU). Just feels like living in a 20 story apartment building that keeps getting another story added on top of it when the foundations are rotten and the first 10 floors are crumbling and the same person that built that apartment just built 20 new houses down the street.

 

tl;dr no need for specialization, games direction has shifted so many times that it has built pve wurm and pvp wurm rather than just wurm resulting in a divided playerbase and a divided economy, other problems, WU gave people a way out of WO while still being able to play, other problems are causing the game to bleed vets and that combined with new player retention make it seem like its bleeding so much more with an added assumption/educated guess at the end of my wall of text.

 

oh also if you don't read this ill end up listening to early 2000's pop mixes, just to be clear.

 

/endrant

 

 

Edited by Propheteer
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Don't think it either PVP vs PVE that caused the main problems, its the combine issues of Poor Combat, Poor monster AI, and other Subgames issues such as survival (IE Cooking) which Metagame is basically casting refresh/Saccing.

 

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There wont be many times when i will agree with Propheteer but i have on multiple occasions posted the same feelings in a more broken up way while replying to certain suggestion posts.

 

Its not just the pvp vs pve but the whole game in one. The biggest issue the lack of consistant rules or rule changes when full systems change but the rules dont. I was in the middle of writing up a large post which i stopped because ive honestly lost hope in the dev team (when i say dev team i mean everyone.. Gms Rolf devs) the inconsistency is pushing so many people away from WO and WU is looking a whole lot better in terms of just about everything!

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Honestly I think Rolf could pull out of this downing slope by making new server's that are not tied to other server's with some changes on these server's. 

These server's have to be paid online and ingame payment's for coin need to be removed. Including the RWMT server's the ingame pay needs to be removed.

 

Example's:

Monthly sub includes: 10 x 10 Deed = 21 x 21 square additional tiles will cost. 5 day grace period before it disbands allowing you to resub with out deed lose.

Server 1. 7x skillgain 7x actions 

Server 2. 5x skillgain 5x actions

Server 3. 3x skillgain 3x actions

Server 4. WO skillgain WO actions

(1)

a.)PVE

b.)RWMT

c.)PVP Arena's built that can't be altered by player's but players can hold event's in them just like a impalong. Only 9 total to a map positioned in the 4 corners NW, SW, NE, SE and north, south, east, west and center.

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

Monthly sub includes: 10 x 10 Deed = 21 x 21 square extra land cost addition fictional coin. If sub runs out your deed has a 5 day grace period before it disbands allowing you to resub with out deed lose.

Fictional coin system: uses are to pay for dead upkeep and purchase land, To buy item's from all trader's it is the main currency in game.

Server 5. 7x skillgain 7x actions 

Server 6. 5x skillgain 5x actions

Server 7. 3x skillgain 3x actions

Server 8. WO skillgain WO actions

(2)

a.)PVE,

b.)Has a fictional coin system system so players can choose to not have to deal with RWMT this gives them a choice. The fictional coin is earned buy dropping off humanoid type mob's and all items sold to vendors only produces fictional coin.

This system doesn't stop players from selling there crafted items for RWM but allows for both to ride side by side and a choice..

c.)PVP Arena's built that can't be altered by player's but players can hold event's in them just like a impalong. Only 9 total to a map positioned in the 4 corners NW, SW, NE, SE and north, south, east, west and center.

 

If this would have been done in the beginning WU wouldn't have needed to be born but a portion of the community was against this some time's it don't pay to fear change. Put I believe a change like this would encourage players to come back to the company. With deed being included in the monthly sub the sub could become 10 or 11 euro's a month.

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Nothing is left out in the real world economy.  Let another county's market take a dive.  your money is going to.  How big the dip will depend on how much your country is invested in that county.  But never think that any country stands alone.

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On 2/9/2016 at 0:07 PM, Volfgarix said:

Didn't read the whole topic yet, but I want to ask a question:

What would happen if we removed the possibility to buy premium with in-game silver?

1. it will cause some people to stop playing, creating deflationary pressures.

2. More silver will stay in the economy, creating inflationary pressures and stimulating aggregate demand.

3. The RWT price of silver will decrease, due to the lessening of demand for silver

       a. This should increase aggregate demand, as the 'cost' of parting with silver is less painful

       b. This could also reduce the supply of elite high ql items, as the benefit will be smaller while 'cost' stays constant.

 

2 and 3 will help the economy grow and give less skilled craftsman a chance to participate in the market.  It all depends on how many people would leave the game whether or not we would see a net benefit.

 

Perhaps Rolf could add a 'gift premium' option if he got rid of silver for premium.  would get the benefits of the silver staying in the economy from #2.

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