Gardening Nerf?

[Davih 1,340]

Do you guys realize that before this update basically nobody except me and a few other players used trellies to mass harvest in the whole game, and now, you're just also convincing me to stop?

Been still a noob on most skills, i've seen the trellis rework, liked the idea and therefore raised my gardening from 20 to 80 in a few months, HOPING that, being it a recently developing skill, more stuff would have been added and it would have become more useful in the future.

Instead just find out that most my work has basically been wasted because you decided to change your mind about trellies and made them become like bushes. I could have just decided to skill Forestry when it was giving insane amount of skills (and you were aware of the issue, and took a lot of time to fix it anyway, at the point that i was thinking it was working as intended)

To be honest, i would have preferred to have QL of yeald depending from trellis QL than this thing. (maybe not 1:1 , somewhere between 1:1 and the 3x you used for some reasons in skill like baking, maybe something like 1.5x? because imping to 99ql is unrealistic)

I would have imped all my 400 trellies to 66ql without a flinch instead of having this ridiculous bush-behaviour, at least i could have done it once and forget about it, and yeah, this is how much i hate chores.

You want to ruin trellis regardless, ok, but at least come up with something to make up for it, gardening was already a really bad skill and now it became incredibly worse.

 

Edited May 24, 2017 by Davih

[Reylaark 1,100]

5 hours ago, Cecci said:

This cooking update is just proving to be a waste of time for us players.

And if things are to be skillbased or ql based, whatever, just do so it is same all over the board.

 

Don't tell me this is better for newbies.

This adds massive amounts of chores on the newbies as well as on the older and/or skilled players.

The whole cooking update is just chores.

 

We're not slaves,we are paying costumers.

 

Just would like to respectfully disagree with this before it is decided we should be removing aspects from cooking to bring it back to the rote mechanic it was before the update.

I can't imagine I'm the only one that actually likes the cooking update. 

 

If someone suddenly doesn't have time for 400 trellises... well, guess it's going to be fewer trellises.

 

Sad part is, if people could just chill out and enjoy the game rather than always trying to max out every last drop out of any mechanic released, they wouldn't need to be nerfed.

The unfortunate truth is we're forcing the devs to not think about what would be fun, but instead to think about how players can bastardize and abuse any mechanic they put out.  That's on the players that do it.  If the rest of us suffer for it, blame the players that do it, not the devs that are then stuck having to waste time trying to bring things back into line.

Not to mention having what must be the disheartening experience of having all your players suddenly ignore everything positive you've done and say they hate your "chore" game and are going to quit over this change you made that was barely 1% of the work you've put in.

[Davih 1,340]

So they introduced trellis working in a certain way.

I decided to make a grape farm, and i made 400 trellis (which are actually 250 grape and 150 other)

And i abused a mechanic?..

So anyone making a huge field of corn is abusing the farming mechanics?

Come on, they still had to be harvested. and the fact that almost nobody did it, is pretty much self-explainatory of how it wasn't such a great thing to do overall. It took a big time investment in both grinding the skill and making the trellis (i still fail creation with 80 skill and 80ql shafts)

If that is abusing a mechanic, then everything you do in wurm is.

[Retrograde 12,013]

2 hours ago, Odynn said:

You should know better than anyone that some things need to be discused with the players, why some changes might be needed and how to allow a smoother transition than full harvest for 80+QL to you got ###### at young, wait for X time to have them very old. Something people actually complains about in that very same thread (or the need to increase the treillis farm).

This was not a transition, you did not need 80+ql for full yield, you could get a full yield at ANY quality above 10, which was obviously not ideal, and easily min/maxed by spamming hundreds of trellises for massive yields.

 

There is no need to increase the trellis farm, they still can have 4x as many harvestables per tile as the bush, they can be harvested the same as any bush farm and are still far more effective in small spaces, they just aren't as easily taken to extremes

[Davih 1,340]

Also, it's pretty unrespectful for you to tell me how i should be supposed to play this game.

I don't want to "chill out" and play it the way you are playing it, i like to play it my way, and putting the blame for this on me is pretty ridiculous, i never even sold a single grape coming out of a trellis, just saying.

And if you want to see things from my perspective, i started playing this game a year ago.

I wanted to craft and sell things, except the game already had several people at 99-100 in basically every existing useful skill.

And asked big money for their services.

I basically dug out somewhere close to 200k dirt just to get my toolset and a chance to start being vaguely competitive into doing something. Made both my char and a priest from scratch, and after a year of work, they are still barely decent and not very competitive.

Then cooking rework happened, i've seen this trellis thing and tought "OMG, finally a skill that most players don't already have at 100 is going to be useful, i get to have a chance to be very good at least at something, and maybe they'll make it even more useful!"

Grinded gardening to 70ish in a few weeks and, step by step, i realized:

- Spices were basically useless to have at high QL and anyway the market was swarmed by people having 90 foraging/botanizing and selling them dirt cheap.
- Hops were basically useless because few people are making beer, they don't need hops for most kind of beers, and even if they do, 1 hops is needed for 64kg of beer, except a single recipe, and beer is bad anyway cause it doesn't age.

All was left to get something out of were grapes, so i made this big grape farm (not even huge, 250 trellis aren't much compared to the zones with thousands of grape bushes)

- Trellis got nerfed even before i could get a single silver out of my grape farm, gardening is back to be an useless skill, lol.

 

Quote

This was not a transition, you did not need 80+ql for full yield, you could get a full yield at ANY quality above 10, which was obviously not ideal, and easily min/maxed by spamming hundreds of trellises for massive yields.

So what? Poeple can farm 15+ crops of 100ql from a single tile without even raking them, and i've never seen a single player complaining about that, everything i've seen is 50% of players skilling their farming above everything else.

So, gardening started to have a chance of being an useful skill too, and you decided to shut it down because that was a bad thing?
You want to make it harder? put a QL requirement for trellis compared to yeald QL, don't just make them equal to bushes, we already have bushes, and that's another skill.

Or at least, once again, if you're going to destroy trellis mechanics, make it so that gardening doesn't get back to be a 100% useless skill again?

Edited May 24, 2017 by Davih

[zigozag 918]

2 hours ago, Retrograde said:

trellises  had a superior advantage to bushes in all aspects

 

Why shouldn't that be a thing? Treliis need to be built, imped, you also need to forage for seedlings first.

[Cecci 1,609]

I don't care if I get 4 per trellis, I want my trellises to be harvestable, in season, when I come back to my main deed

from the tedious work of digging dirt for the new Highways/bridges between Glasshollow and Linton.

I have 11 hop trellises. What I don't want is come back in harvest season to find that all my 11 trellises are shrivelled/young.

[Davih 1,340]

9 minutes ago, zigozag said:

 

Why shouldn't that be a thing? Treliis need to be built, imped, you also need to forage for seedlings first.

Also they can't really be left offdeed, even less left to swarm, reproduce and take over entire map zones on their own to just get back and gather later.
 

1 minute ago, Cecci said:

I don't care if I get 4 per trellis, I want my trellises to be harvestable, in season, when I come back to my main deed

from the tedious work of digging dirt for the new Highways/bridges between Glasshollow and Linton.

I have 11 hop trellises. What I don't want is come back in harvest season to find that all my 11 trellises are shrivelled/young.

Even forgot to mention, it's almost hops season and all my trellis are still "young" except a single one which is mature (over ~400).

This means i will also lose an entire year of harvesting, thanks to the last patch, lol.

[JakeRivers 2,921]

10 hours ago, Retrograde said:

Why do you need 100 times as many trellises? 

 

you're again confusing quality of life with "easier". Trellises were made harvestable with 1.3 when hops came in, and originally the intent was harvest amount to be quality based. We decided this would penalise low skill players more, as they'd need 80+ql trellises to get 4 harvests, so decided to go with age. 

 

Trellises still outweigh bushes in terms of space used, and also have the same age issues, complaining about hav ing to keep trellises in the correct age bracket would pose the exact same problems if you tried to do it with bushes.

 

Trellises were not designed to be an easy min/max alternative, which is what seems to have upset people here. Those who use them as decorations and occasional harvests will see little to no change.

 

Well you just turned my hops area into wasted space, plus the grapes I started adding, roughly 1000 trellis's that I am not going to be spending hours on end 'tending'. The worst part is they are all ageing at the same rate and I don't think I will get much of anything on the next harvest that is coming up soon. You realize how much effort it was to make that many? At this point it looks like the best option for me is to pick them up and drop them on the lava pit and save the frame rate on the deed.

[Reylaark 1,100]

@Davih

 

Apologies, wasn't saying you were abusing the mechanic by having 400 trellises.  It's a behavior that comes up aside from trellises.  I just think we shouldn't be too quick to jump all over the devs, tell them their chore game sucks and we're gonna quit... though you probably haven't done that either, plenty of people are.

 

400 trellises sure is a lot, though.  Not just to build, but to maintain.  If you can do it, great, go for it.  If it turns out it's too much, I mean, it that really that surprising?

If I understand correctly, you'd be using 100 tiles for the 400 trellises, correct?  4 trellises per tile?  So without trellises, that would be 100 grape bushes at 1 per tile.  You've quadrupled your output.

Another way to use trellises might be to cut your land needs down to just a quarter of what you would have needed with bushes.

You could use just 25 tiles, 4 trellises per tile, and have the same 100 plant output as if you were using 100 grape bushes.

 

Your maintenance time should then also be cut down, since you don't have to travel the 100 tiles.  It's more condensed.  Not as much as if no maintenance was necessary at all, true.

 

I can understand your frustration at raising a skill all the way to 80 just to see your reason for doing so change.  I'd be frustrated too, but unfortunately that's kind of the nature of the beast in a constantly developed online game, isn't it?

 

On the admittedly very dim bright side, your work is surely not for naught.  One of the things I've always really liked about Wurm is raising one skill raises a bunch of other things at the same time.  It's rarely isolated.  I don't know what gardening affects in particular, I can look into it, but I'd be surprised if it didn't benefit other aspects of your toon in the process.

 

Good luck, hang in there, and sorry for any offense.

 

[JakeRivers 2,921]

1 hour ago, Reylaark said:

Sad part is, if people could just chill out and enjoy the game rather than always trying to max out every last drop out of any mechanic released, they wouldn't need to be nerfed.

 

Don't tell others how to play the game, it really is none of your business if I want 1000 trellis's or 1.

 

This was a mechanic that worked fine and was changed on a whim later on without any input from the player base.

 

 

[Keenan 5,539]

Official developer response: Any player who takes a flawed mechanic to extremes is being abusive. Unlike other games, we don't normally punish people for doing this. We simply fix the flaw.

 

Carry on, though this is a fruitless debate.

 

Edit

Now if there are remaining flaws or bugs, they will be corrected. I would focus energy on reporting those if found.

[JakeRivers 2,921]

39 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

This was not a transition, you did not need 80+ql for full yield, you could get a full yield at ANY quality above 10, which was obviously not ideal, and easily min/maxed by spamming hundreds of trellises for massive yields.

 

There is no need to increase the trellis farm, they still can have 4x as many harvestables per tile as the bush, they can be harvested the same as any bush farm and are still far more effective in small spaces, they just aren't as easily taken to extremes

 

Why do you even care about extreme's? I mean I made 700 trellis before I found out that it takes one hops to make a barrel of beer, I mean okay so I didn't need 700 of these to make beer, but I had something I liked and looked forwards to harvest time.

 

If you worry so much about how many hops I get per tile how is this any different than someone who plants a ear of corn and gets 20+ corn after a few days time? Are you going to nerf farming next and make it so max yield will be a few?

 

You have been coming up with some great additions and improvements to the game, why are we back to these knee jerk reactions without asking how the player base feels? I don't expect you all asking us about every single change but when you decide my hops trellis farm is over powered for whatever hair brain reason you have you better bloody well ask me how I feel about it.

 

I am gonna rain on your parade.

[JakeRivers 2,921]

5 minutes ago, Keenan said:

Official developer response: Any player who takes a flawed mechanic to extremes is being abusive. Unlike other games, we don't normally punish people for doing this. We simply fix the flaw.

 

Carry on, though this is a fruitless debate.

 

Edit

Now if there are remaining flaws or bugs, they will be corrected. I would focus energy on reporting those if found.

 

How the hell was the trellis a flawed mechanic?

[Davih 1,340]

3 minutes ago, Reylaark said:

400 trellises sure is a lot, though.  Not just to build, but to maintain.  If you can do it, great, go for it.  If it turns out it's too much, I mean, it that really that surprising?

Yes, that is very surprising, because when i built them, spending several RL days to make them, they didn't need any kind of maintainance, and that is why i liked and tought of investing a lot of time into making them
 

4 minutes ago, Reylaark said:

If I understand correctly, you'd be using 100 tiles for the 400 trellises, correct?  4 trellises per tile?  So without trellises, that would be 100 grape bushes at 1 per tile.  You've quadrupled your output.

Another way to use trellises might be to cut your land needs down to just a quarter of what you would have needed with bushes.

You could use just 25 tiles, 4 trellises per tile, and have the same 100 plant output as if you were using 100 grape bushes.

No, If i was to harvest grape from bushes, i would have just let the grape bushes swarm on their own in the areas outside my deed, cutting down any other growing plant(which is an easy job). So i would had to face the annoying "aging" thing to harvest them, but they would have used up 0 tiles of space of my deed, without changing my output by much, but just making them more annoying to harvest.
 

4 minutes ago, Reylaark said:

On the admittedly very dim bright side, your work is surely not for naught.  One of the things I've always really liked about Wurm is raising one skill raises a bunch of other things at the same time.  It's rarely isolated.  I don't know what gardening affects in particular, I can look into it, but I'd be surprised if it didn't benefit other aspects of your toon in the process.

If i remember correctly, gardening is one of the few skills, that, when imping trellies to skill it, didn't raise any other charateristics, but i'm not 100% sure about it, lol

[Cecci 1,609]

So the fact that they are way harder to make than a simlpy planted sprout does not count for anything?

Don't give me the you gain skill answer now, I'm not really a grinder.

[Davih 1,340]

22 minutes ago, Keenan said:

Official developer response: Any player who takes a flawed mechanic to extremes is being abusive. Unlike other games, we don't normally punish people for doing this. We simply fix the flaw.

 

Carry on, though this is a fruitless debate.

 

Edit

Now if there are remaining flaws or bugs, they will be corrected. I would focus energy on reporting those if found.

So, you made them work in that specific way, which was pretty straight-forward and obvious, to just just realize several months later that it was flawed?

It's not like it was a hidden bug or some glitch that made them work that way, like being stuck on "very old" or something like that.

That was just the way they were intended to work.

So, really, nobody could understand or even suspect that it was a "flawed mechanic" 

Thanks for not punishing us for just "playing the game the way it's supposed to work" ?

Farming still seems more productive than how gardening was, comparing actions to yield.

It would be like saying that i would abuse "coalmaking mechanics" by making hundreds of piles, or seriously any other possible example like this one, it just doesn't make any sense and i really don't feel guilty about having made hundreds of trellis, i just feel fooled by having them turned to be way less useful, like other players here do.
 

Edited May 24, 2017 by Davih

[Odynn 2,248]

57 minutes ago, Davih said:

Even forgot to mention, it's almost hops season and all my trellis are still "young" except a single one which is mature (over ~400).

 

1 hour ago, Retrograde said:

This was not a transition, you did not need 80+ql for full yield, you could get a full yield at ANY quality above 10, which was obviously not ideal, and easily min/maxed by spamming hundreds of trellises for massive yields.

 

See, that's what I mean and common, trellis farm are nowhere aesthetics, so yah, one tile can have 4 trellis but not everyone do... We used the given parameters and used it as we have seen fit, some went for large trellis farm, good for them, others just used a few for their own purpose, right now, we all feel screwed (to put it nicely).

 

A bit like bees when they were introduced and never moved to the domestic hives, our complaints have been listened to and transfer rate / 2nd queen was made easier, something that can and should be done this time as well.

 

30 minutes ago, Davih said:

It would be like saying that i would abuse "coalmaking mechanics" by making hundreds of piles

 

Don't worry, that one is a properly working feature, with 90+ skill and 95+ materials you will make a 40QL pile... working. as. intended.

[Morhedron 42]

57 minutes ago, Keenan said:

Official developer response: Any player who takes a flawed mechanic to extremes is being abusive. Unlike other games, we don't normally punish people for doing this. We simply fix the flaw.

 

Carry on, though this is a fruitless debate.

 

Edit

Now if there are remaining flaws or bugs, they will be corrected. I would focus energy on reporting those if found.

If this is a fruitless debate, like my trellis' for this harvest, I find myself again contemplating why I continue to sink funds into this game.

[Retrograde 12,013]

Sometimes development decisions are made based on balance and unintended mechanics.

 

The way trellises worked was considered unintended when taken to extremes, given those who have created 400-1000 trellises to take advantage of this system, we found the best solution to be making this change.

 

That is why this decision was made, those who use them in small amounts and those who user them for decoration will see little to no change

[Morhedron 42]

All the "little to no change"s add up to massive frustration.  To dismiss the concerns (and feelings) of any customer(s) in such an off-hand way is extremely irksome to say the least.  And certainly the yield is marginal compared to the nerfs to farming when it was "fixed" and again to farming when the cooking update came out.

[Davih 1,340]

15 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

Sometimes development decisions are made based on balance and unintended mechanics.

 

The way trellises worked was considered unintended when taken to extremes, given those who have created 400-1000 trellises to take advantage of this system, we found the best solution to be making this change.

 

That is why this decision was made, those who use them in small amounts and those who user them for decoration will see little to no change

I doubt anyone was aware of the fact that i had 400 trellies before i came here to state it, since i never even started to sell grapes.

I also doubt "balancing" gardening was ever an issue, i play on this game's market 12/7 and i never seen anyone selling huge bulks of grapes, nor ruining the grapes market or anything like that (even implying you care about the game market)
While a lot of players are selling insanely high amounts of crops or dirt casted by priests, and countless other things that are destroying several markets.

If the thing doesn't even involve the market, why would you care about balancing it at all? Are you bothered by the fact that somebody is stacking several thousands of hops that he will never even be able to use? Well, this doesn't even change that, so you should really find more uses for them.

I think this thing was done in a rush of "let's make this new almanac thingie useful for more things, let's involve trellies too" and only later decided this was a "rebalancing issue" after basically just me and another player who carelessly made 700hops trellis (LOL, rip) came out here to openly state it.

So, honestly, i'm utterly unconvinved by this explaination, and by the fact that "abusing trellies" (even though you can't really call that an abuse) was ever an issue, .

 

Edited May 24, 2017 by Davih

[Retrograde 12,013]

The difference here is between those who have hundreds of trellises vs those who only have a few.

 

Those who have hundreds now see a large maintenance task in order to keep maximum yield potential (pruning at overaged)

 

Those who have only a relative few, should still receive decent harvests, and if they wish to keep large amounts, any maintenance to do so is relatively low.

 

Again, this game will always grow and adapt just like the players, when we encounter unintended scenarios we address the bugs in the mechanics causing them, or adjust the mechanics to counteract such an obviously flawed system

 

This has happened several times since 1.3 as things come up, and will continue to do so as we introduce more things into the game. 

 

[Morhedron 42]

4 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

Again, this game will always grow and adapt just like the players, when we encounter unintended scenarios we address the bugs in the mechanics causing them, or adjust the mechanics to counteract such an obviously flawed system

 

This has happened several times since 1.3 as things come up, and will continue to do so as we introduce more things into the game. 

And again....  how much frustration shall I endure?  So this is just going to continue this way?  Regardless of customer input? 

[Cecci 1,609]

Why is 100 trellises a problem if 100 farm tiles aren't, raked or not raked?