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Hi everyone!

Slightly late, the forums have been a little temperamental today, it's being looked into as well as looking at long term plans to improve stability and response, but on with the news!

 

This is the launch of the newly named weekly news, the Valrei International! Containing all the dev news and events to the moon and back!

 

It's been a nice long break over the Christmas/new year period, and we're settling back in preparing ourselves for another big year ahead, taking stock of our current projects as well as lining up possible future projects, so we'll recap some of the events at the end of the year, and also address the WU update situation.

 

Secret Santa
I'd like to give a shout out to the forums omgderp for coming up with their secret Santa project over Christmas, it was amazing to see so many Wurmians donate presents and we'd like to all say thank you for sharing the fun.

 

Shrimpalong
The shrimpalong ran over the Christmas period to new years, and I have to say, it was a massive amount of fun, from the sheer amount of death in the arena, to the games and just general community, Impalongs are huge amounts of work and I think shrimp and co managed to put on an awesome one, check out the screenshots from the event here!

Notorious Impalong avoider Slickshot has described it as one of the best impalongs he's not attended, and looks forward to not attending more in the future.

 

Cooking questions?

If you've got questions about features and mechanics of the new update, Pandalet is running a thread to answer the hot questions about it all, so ask away!

 

WU update


So as you all know the WU cooking update is quite late, this is due to a few reasons which I'll go over here.

 

As outlined by Keenan previously, our WO servers and WU servers differ in a number of ways, mostly by the fact we have complete control over our hardware and can modify it as necessary, we know what to expect when updating and what systems the update runs on. The issue with this is in WU it becomes quite a large unknown.

 

1.3 is the first major database update since WU's release, adding new tables,and relationships which can be tricky in the best of times. With the unknown nature of WU systems it becomes even tougher as we need to ensure that it works smoothly every time, regardless of the system. It's an issue that we didn't expect to see so large so there's an unexpected delay there as well as ensuring that for any future updates it goes smoothly as well.

 

There has also been quite a few bug fixes and restarts to address issues that have arisen as more people explore the new update, highlighting things missed in testing (or simply not testable to a realistic scale), so isolating and resolving these issues as well as a few tweaks here and there have been going in in preparation for the 1.3 release.

 

Pushing the 1.3 update out for WU is now our largest priority over this month, ensuring that the recipe system works for WU and that the issues we've encountered on WO servers do not occur on WU. We do apologise for the delays and can assure you that it will be out in a beta as soon as we are able to do so.

 

Community Content

This weeks community content is the doomed brigade, by malokai, apart from just the sheer amount of snowmen, I think the most impressive thing is how perfectly they're lined up!

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Got something you'd like to see in the news? Feel free to contact me about it!


We've got a fair few things in the works with the start of 2017, doubtless you have seen a few mentioned, we'll be looking at outlining the goals of each one as time progresses, slowly getting back into the swing of things to ensure that Wurm keeps getting bigger and better.

Until then though, keep on Wurming!

 

Retrograde & the Wurm team

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Sorry on the beary bad loss. ;) Looking forward to the new year. Had lots of fun at the Shrimpalong. I can't wait for the next one. :D

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6 hours ago, Retrograde said:

Hi everyone!

Slightly late, the forums have been a little temperamental today, it's being looked into as well as looking at long term plans to improve stability and response, but on with the news!

yes

5i1ykhe.png

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Will we see any balance updates for Epic soon as well?

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12 hours ago, Retrograde said:

So as you all know the WU cooking update is quite late, this is due to a few reasons which I'll go over here.

 

Here's the thing. Waiting to update WU until all the new cooking additions and other 1.3 updates are straightened out has meant that a lot of smaller patches that were done to WO before that have been postponed because you wanted to just put them off as addons into 1.3. I can think of a number of small beneficial additions to WO which are still not into WU.

 

This is noticeable to those of us who play both WO and WU. A poor decision because for months we in WU have not had these newer perks available to us there. Who knows how long it will be until the Dev's feel confident that everything up to and including 1.3 is ready to be introduced into WU. I think a better approach would be to separate the big 1.3 update whenever it is ready and in the meantime update WU with everything that has been done to upgrade WO before that time. In other words separate this into 2 updates for WU, one of which should be ready now as it has already been found to function properly in WO.

 

=Ayes=

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4 hours ago, Lundy said:

Will we see any balance updates for Epic soon as well?

 

ha! i don't think the DEV's even know Epic cluster exists anymore. the population shows no interest in the game, cause the devs show no interest in that cluster! :P

 

good luck getting changes for epic though. maybe a merge is best, then more players would return!

 

also need better PR with mmo sites and maybe even gamecon publicity to get this game going again.

 

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I hope people finish finding all the 500+ recipes in the game before they release it to WU, it might be I am a cynic but I am pretty sure as soon as it is released people will be data mining the recipes out of the WU code base and selling them on WO. 

 

 

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57 minutes ago, Saicotic said:

I hope people finish finding all the 500+ recipes in the game before they release it to WU, it might be I am a cynic but I am pretty sure as soon as it is released people will be data mining the recipes out of the WU code base and selling them on WO. 

 

Don't even get me started on this, but 

 

1) Devs are busy at work stripping the majority of recipes out of WU, they will get about 17% of the recipes mostly basic boring generic stuff like butter and fish stew,  "just to keep your surprise a surprisel!"   

2) in order for WU players to get any of these more advanced recipes (beyond the 80 or so generic ones to start), WO people will have to tell WU people the recipes so they can mod them back in using special JSON templates and adding one recipe at a time.,

3) People who struggled just to get a family server running at all, will be SOO pleased to find out they now have to mod their own servers with JSON templates just to make full use of the update.

4) EVEN IF recipes were first public through WU (but remember, they have to be given them from WO people), no one would "sell" them, they would just give the information out for free 

5) Retrograde already told WO players than once the update gets to WU, they can freely share them on the forums here anyway. So recipe sales should dry up once WO players can freely share them on the forums between themselves.

6) Too bad if Rolf told WU players they would get the same updates as WO, that's now been changed by devs to "well, we now decided you get SOME of the same updates lol"  

 

 

 

Also-- thank you retrograde for the update!! It is rather overdue but much appreciated!

 

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That is great news imo and it will allow much more customization of the recipes on WU servers. (json templates are not that hard)

This will also create more work for the WU servers but I do not really see a problem with that, there are some seriously dedicated people out there. Just look at some of the servers and mods that were released.

 

Not sure why anyone would expect a cookie from anything related to wurm at this point with no work involved. 

 

 

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Sorry I don't read news very quickly.

 

Just want to say I was so proud of how great everyone was about secret santa, I couldn't of done it alone.

And thank you for the mention, I'm very warm and fuzzy right now. :*

 

 

Edited by Omgderp
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11 hours ago, Ayes said:

 

Here's the thing. Waiting to update WU until all the new cooking additions and other 1.3 updates are straightened out has meant that a lot of smaller patches that were done to WO before that have been postponed because you wanted to just put them off as addons into 1.3. I can think of a number of small beneficial additions to WO which are still not into WU.

 

This is noticeable to those of us who play both WO and WU. A poor decision because for months we in WU have not had these newer perks available to us there. Who knows how long it will be until the Dev's feel confident that everything up to and including 1.3 is ready to be introduced into WU. I think a better approach would be to separate the big 1.3 update whenever it is ready and in the meantime update WU with everything that has been done to upgrade WO before that time. In other words separate this into 2 updates for WU, one of which should be ready now as it has already been found to function properly in WO.

 

=Ayes=

 

I  think that the developers need to start updating incrementally as I have suggested previously. updating big updates, discourages people from playing and new players from buying this game. which is why I pulled the pin for a while because there just wasn't enough updates being done for the game.

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We do update incrementally, it just so happens that the 1.3 update introduces a lot of new items and overhauls a large amount of existing mechanics, it's the culmination of a years worth of development time, so it's supposed to be big.

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That's a lot of snowmen. My only question is... where did they find all those hats?

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Valrei Weekly would have been better, its an international newsletter in terms of wurm 'nations' but Weekly is shorter and nicer

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On 1/13/2017 at 11:07 PM, Retrograde said:

WU update...

Make it like a mod that people have to check either to use or turn off on their server. Easy right. idk. 

 

 

Great to see the news XD

 

 

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Not a huge fan of incremental patches (since every patch seems to introduce bugs) but given the LONG DELAY on 1.3 patch, I think a lot of people could be more patient if we had a 1.29.99 patch that ONLY ADDED the new crop items:

 


Cabbage 
Carrot 
Lettuce 
Pea pod 
Tomato 
Cucumber 
Sugarbeet
Oranges
hazelnnuts
Pinenets
Hops
Cocoa bean 
Cumin
Ginger
Nutmeg
Paprika
Turmeric
Mint
Fennel Plant
and also herb planters.  

 

 


This would keep WUPlayers  busy and distracted  before we go back to waiting waiting waiting on the cooking update, which sounds like it has mega database issues due to the recipes adding potential thousands of new database items and WU never shipping with proper database design. Beehives would be nice also but i suspect that is pushing it. However, adding a few vegetables should be piece of cake so to speak.  It's true most of those new crops cannot actually be used for cooking till the real 1.3 patch, but wurmers love to packrat stuff and this eway they can cheerfully spend a good amount of time botanizing/foraging/planting/harvesting their little hearts out  to get ready. It might defuse some of the anger caused by stripping hundreds of recipes out of the WU version as well as the long wait for database bugs. 

 

As it is, the game's ratings/reviews on steam are dropping like a dead cat tossed into a rotting pond (went from 78% to 54% rating in the past month or two), sales are way down even after a big christmas sale price cut,  and that can't be good for anyone since for some odd reason people on WU are not likely to invest in a more expensive version of the game (WO) if the singleplayer version is poorly coded and maintained. 

 

At this point it is very near to dropping into the dreaded  MOSTLY NEGATIVE  rating tier which is probably a kiss of death for both the WU and WO versions of the game.

 

I dinna think Rolf would be pleased.


 

Edited by Brash_Endeavors
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2 hours ago, Brash_Endeavors said:

Not a huge fan of incremental patches (since every patch seems to introduce bugs) but given the LONG DELAY on 1.3 patch, I think a lot of people could be more patient if we had a 1.29.99 patch that ONLY ADDED the new crop items:

 


Cabbage 
Carrot 
Lettuce 
Pea pod 
Tomato 
Cucumber 
Sugarbeet
Oranges
hazelnnuts
Pinenets
Hops
Cocoa bean 
Cumin
Ginger
Nutmeg
Paprika
Turmeric
Mint
Fennel Plant
and also herb planters.  

 

 


This would keep WUPlayers  busy and distracted  before we go back to waiting waiting waiting on the cooking update, which sounds like it has mega database issues due to the recipes adding potential thousands of new database items and WU never shipping with proper database design. Beehives would be nice also but i suspect that is pushing it. However, adding a few vegetables should be piece of cake so to speak.  It's true most of those new crops cannot actually be used for cooking till the real 1.3 patch, but wurmers love to packrat stuff and this eway they can cheerfully spend a good amount of time botanizing/foraging/planting/harvesting their little hearts out  to get ready. It might defuse some of the anger caused by stripping hundreds of recipes out of the WU version as well as the long wait for database bugs. 

 

As it is, the game's ratings/reviews on steam are dropping like a dead cat tossed into a rotting pond (went from 78% to 54% rating in the past month or two), sales are way down even after a big christmas sale price cut,  and that can't be good for anyone since for some odd reason people on WU are not likely to invest in a more expensive version of the game (WO) if the singleplayer version is poorly coded and maintained. 

 

At this point it is very near to dropping into the dreaded  MOSTLY NEGATIVE  rating tier which is probably a kiss of death for both the WU and WO versions of the game.

 

I dinna think Rolf would be pleased.


 

 

No, it doesn't have "mega issues". It has problems that must be solved due the fact that I can't pop over to your house and patch your databases for you. The fact that we have to take into consideration the modding aspect. We can't just push it out, let people's servers crash and burn, and just say "Oh well! Shouldn't have modded."

 

You understand nothing of the update, nothing of what we're launching - despite many posts - and yet you continue to make the same misinformed points over and over again. 

 

You do have technical background. I've seen it demonstrated, so surely you understand  the technical difficulties this update brings for us? Not to mention if you've not been following along, we've had some issues crop up in Wurm Online that are related to 1.3. I'd much rather resolve these issues than push out bugs. I mean heck, your dramatic "(since every patch seems to introduce bugs)" would be proven true.

 

Feedback is one thing, but you've gone beyond feedback at this point.

I'm willing to answer questions, but you're bordering on using misinformation to cause FUD.

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As for any poor reviews, we've been paying attention. Part of what I've been working on with the 1.3 update for WU is to fix some of the glaring problems that the server launcher has had. It should be more stable, and the new classes and solutions I'm adding will make it easier as we move forward with what we'd like to focus on this year.

 

Personally, I'd like to make WU as easy to play (as in, start up and get into) as any other game off of Steam. We're not ignorant to the fact that it takes a bit more than common gaming knowledge to get up and running right now. I think you may find many of the reviews you mention actually name that fact as their reason - then top on things like the in-game user interface (which is also slated as a project for this year).

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