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LorenaMontana

The state of Epic

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As most of u know i have been a very active player for years on the epic cluster like many others here. 

 

I still login now and then to see how its going on over there coz i cannot see the player numbers on the forums anymore.

 

Its shocking how low the population is nowadays, its horribly low and there is no sign of it getting better it seems.

 

Is there any plans in the works? Or is it just gonna bleed out? 

 

It really saddens me to see that the cluster i have been on for years is like completely empty.

 

Anyone has ideas? Thoughts? Discussions?

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On 5/10/2017 at 1:58 PM, Budda said:

As for the other ongoing projects, there is the meditation rework based on the discussion on the suggestions board, which was originally planned to launch with the UI changes but given the delays in that we're moving towards an interim UI for it. Also ongoing is a rework of Valrei and missions, with some of the urgent changes already implemented. This project is at the end of the discovery phase, with a proposal prepared for internal review prior to public feedback in the future. As well as the above, we are also looking at all of the gods and their spells with proper balance between the gods, and some interesting creature AI changes. Some public discussion and feedback regarding ideas for the gods balancing will be on the forums sometime in the next month or so, so watch out for that.

 

The creature changes I am particularly excited about, as I have spent some of my spare time in the last few months working on prototype creature changes that I have tested with some players in WU - focusing around changes that make the creature put up an interesting and difficult fight (that scales well to the number of people attempting to kill it), without having to rely on extremely high damage or armour. The first creatures due for upgrades will be some of the Valrei creatures on Epic servers and depending on how they perform once live, their new smarts will slowly spread to other creatures like uniques and rift mobs.

 

Following after the Valrei changes will be continued changes to the Epic cluster which will aim to bring back some unique features to the cluster and make it a more appealing option to some players, as well as some ideas to make it easier for new players to jump into the action. These changes are still in the planning phase at the moment, but you can expect to hear more about it after the Valrei update goes live.

 

Valrei rework has progressed and I'll chase up some public stuff with that from budda some time over the next week, might not be time to show it all yet but I'll see if we can provide some insight.

 

First of the combat reworks came with the uttacha, with others being looked at, these will be expanded upon as time goes on too.

 

As you can see from this the main priorities are:

  • Fix broken systems
  • Balance systems
  • Add content unique to epic

We also have a few more epic centric plans not listed there, but they'll be waiting for the major reworks to come out before beginning those and I'll share them all when we move with them. 

 

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With all the separate systems, features and completely split skills... honestly Epic feels like a completely separate game, and when I want to play another game I'll go play Cities Skylines or DOOM or something.

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47 minutes ago, Darmalus said:

With all the separate systems, features and completely split skills... honestly Epic feels like a completely separate game, and when I want to play another game I'll go play Cities Skylines or DOOM or something.

 

What are you even on about lol.

 

It's Wurm with double the skillgain of freedom and a curve making it faster paced to get into the only thing in epic you dont get on freedom is valrei craters (sadly)

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Valrei and combat reworks aren't  going to save epic. You're kidding yourself if you think that.

Edited by Rudie
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Just now, Rudie said:

Valrei and combat reworks aren't  goimg to save epic. You're kidding yourself if you think that.

Won't save or revive it will keep going down

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Epic died years ago.  It is now just E P I C - Everyone Please Identify Crap.  In other words, it is now just a test cluster for the devs.  Let's just be honest about it.

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I think any plans for Epic are probably flogging a dead cluster at this point, the playerbase is generally in the 10-20 range evey single day, and that's the entire cluster, I recently spent a number of hours as the only player on Serenity, ([17:23:22] No other players are online on Serenity (458 totally in Wurm).).

 

The population has passed the point of no return at present, and any efforts to raise the population will indeed have an effect, for a while, but bfore long it'll once more descend to the levels we see now, the new affliction server revived numbers for a time, but those fell off again, the new elevation maps did the same, for a while, yet her we are again.

 

The blame has been placed at many doors, problems with pvp balance, path of insanity, and so on, but adding more content and rebalancing pvp will only delay the inevitable, Epic has stagnated, the home servers are generally deserted most of the time, with one or two players at most on each of them, and a handful on Elevation.

 

Serenity is a ghost town, the few deeds that are left are pretty much deserted apart from maybe a couple of logons per day, it's overrun with uniques and valrei mobs, new players stand almost no chance outside the starter town, the few who have visited of late have logged off never to be seen again, some last more than a week, most last little more than an hour or two, it's pretty accurate to say that Epic died a while ago, it's on life support now, and I honestly don't see any improvement to the quality of the game that will improve the quality of life of new players, because they're almost always cut off from the start, unable to see anyone in local, and frankly unless there's anyone close to the starter towns I can only imagine they assume no one at all is on, I certainly would if I saw local empty, no chat at all and nothing but abandoned and decaying buildings almost everywhere, as far as the client can render.

 

Frankly it's dire, and a little depressing, as a player who was there on day one, and saw how vibrant and lively the server was in it's heyday, to the dead corpse that's slowly decomposing before my eyes....

 

A merge is not happening, that much has been made abundantly clear, and repeated often enough to simply not even mention it anymore, it's not happening. 

 

I'll wait for the changes, see how long the revival lasts, the creature changes I've seen so far are interesting, but the sheer numbers of Valrei creatures all over Serenity make it less fun than it could be, we're not all uber fighters, regardless of the perception that extra skillgain and the effective skill curve make life easier on Epic, it actually doesn't, apart from the early stages, after a while you're actually fighting with effective skill in order to make real skill gains, it's not a rush to 99 in everything, some of it is painfully slow. especially when you're a non-grinder slowcoach like me, who prefers doing stuff rather than sitting in a cave somewher making golves for weeks on end to get 90 tailoring...

 

So yes, a fix would be nice, but I'm losing the will to log on again, even as I spend more time on Epic than my 'day job' on Freedom, but all I'm doing most days is lacklustre damage control...

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In order to make changes that bring in new players to Epic the foundations that will keep them there need to be in.

 

We don't expect these changes to bring in swarms of players, but the changes we make towards that will need these foundations to keep them.

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7 hours ago, Darmalus said:

With all the separate systems, features and completely split skills... honestly Epic feels like a completely separate game, and when I want to play another game I'll go play Cities Skylines or DOOM or something.

I feel the same way, as a business it doesn't seem logical to keep a dead game afloat.

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5 minutes ago, Niki said:

I feel the same way, as a business it doesn't seem logical to keep a dead game afloat.

Without being a negative nelly I have to agree with this from a business logic point of view.  It seems like there is a stubborn locked in mindset to make it go when everything else is pointing towards it can't and won't go.  Kinda like staying in a relationship you long know is over and believing it'll be fine.  Where players go show what they are and are not interested in.  Sorta like depsite the push for pvp to be better and have it as a major component of the game because it was part of Rolf's vision, the players have shown instead to favor the pve aspect and that has taken off and grown more exponentially where pvp servers epic or freedom have languished.  This is where you sit back and say you know...I really wanted to to have crab cakes on the menue of my food truck cause i always dreamed it that way to find people prefer fish tacos with pico de gallo, guac, and habeneros.  Also, success in water skying and snow skying is learning to adapt to the changes and bend and flow with the rhytmn of change instead of fighting it.

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Moreover when elevation map was revamped because the hota area was borked, there was internal and external debate about if this will work and save epic.  The consensus I read and held as same belief is that it would do nothing, only temporarily infuse the server in that those that were staying to playing prior to map reset will be the only ones left play after a few months of a reset.    Those that weren't playing will come to look at the new cookie jar, take a bite then leave. which is exactly what happened.

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i've given up putting much effort into these kinds of threads, succumbed to the fact that the rest of my epic days are to be littered with memories of how fun the cluster used to be in the past. 

 

Most of us could talk for hours about changes that would benefit the cluster, unfortunately I don't think cc has the capability of putting out enough of those changes/fixes in a timely manner. Nothing against current staff, but its been a problem for so long, and it is what it is. A lot of great changes have happened in the past year or so, but most people agree its just nowhere even near enough, not remotely close to it. And you can see that most of the players are just worn out as well. These threads used to spark a great deal of conversation between a few dozen people with huge essays, now they barely get the generic "sorry that isn't enough" comments anymore lol. 

 

One of the most disappointing things to see still to this day, is that the groundwork for the game still barely even allows, let alone encourages pvp. You get more than 10 people in local and all of the sudden everyone starts lagging out, disconnecting, reconnecting, needing to relog every 5 minutes, etc. And then you have a game in which the entirety of its player base and staff know (or should know by now) that the game is highly unstable in regards to performance, and we still have a 30 year old client launcher that exits once you launch the game instead of a persistent launcher that would allow people to quickly reconnect and get back into the game without having to say "oh god guys, I just went through my 13th pre-loaded client this fight, if I crash again I'm probably going to die because I have to wait for the client to launch again".

 

rip

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Pretty pointless work on Epic.

 

We have WU, WO freedom(ill include chaos here, although that is also somewhat different than regular PvE players), WO epic. All are simply stealing players from each other.. That is what WU taught us, yet devs didn't learn a lesson. Instead of developing and focusing on ONE game, they STILL are actively trying to split up rather small (and smaller by every day) playerbase even more. Basically players have solved the "dead Epic" problem by themselves. Most have moved to chaos, others to PvE servers. This is what should be encouraged by the devs, not trying to guide them back to epic and recreating the problem again.

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Epic is dead and no matter what you do will it rise again. 

 

Stupid decisions and the lack of updates through the years for the PVP part of the game did this, same thing will happen to chaos eventually. There will be an update here and there to keep the hopes up for the few that still wants to pvp but in reality they are just burping out the same nonsense thats been said by devs for years now...it is in the works, we will do this and that yet nothing happens and then you see some nice update like cooking or some new flowers or whatever. Great fun for the people that plays on freedom but kinda meh for the rest. 

 

That and the fact that devs rarely listen to the players at all when it comes to changes that actually could have a good impact on the game, i seen so many suggestions in threads much like this one and still nobody seems to read in on what the customers/players say.

 

I myself wont pay anymore prems for this game just to get dissapointed once again. Remove epic and chaos and get a new map and a merge and have 1 pvp server/cluster is something that might keep people interested and something that would make it easier for devs aswell to focus on. But this wont happen cause it seems its better to have 20 ppl on chaos and 10 on epic instead of actually trying to get them together and have more people getting interested in trying pvp.

 

 

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The lack of updates was to be expected though as there are only so many devs. Epic, Chaos, Freedom and WU are likely too many different environments for all of them to get frequent enough updates. WU can also offer most of what made Epic stand out from Chaos to begin with (certainly on the skill gain side). On the other hand I can see why they keep Epic running, it's a pretty good test bed for new features as it probably does still have more players than the test server, but doesn't have enough players that a massive screwup would be harmful. Just imagine certain mobs becoming way too powerful and slaughtering anybody who gets close. It would cause a bloodbath with a ton of complaints anywhere else, while on Epic it might affect a few players at most.

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wow Ecrir with that attitude no wonder epic is dying and most believe nothing can revive it. We are NOT guinea pigs and being treated as such jsut makes me more and more sure I never want to come back to epic.

Oh and the lackl of updates and being used as test server is exactly why most of us voted with our feet ;p

Edited by Rhianna

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10 hours ago, Zenity said:

I think any plans for Epic are probably flogging a dead cluster at this point, the playerbase is generally in the 10-20 range evey single day, and that's the entire cluster, I recently spent a number of hours as the only player on Serenity, ([17:23:22] No other players are online on Serenity (458 totally in Wurm).).

 

The population has passed the point of no return at present, and any efforts to raise the population will indeed have an effect, for a while, but bfore long it'll once more descend to the levels we see now, the new affliction server revived numbers for a time, but those fell off again, the new elevation maps did the same, for a while, yet her we are again.

 

The blame has been placed at many doors, problems with pvp balance, path of insanity, and so on, but adding more content and rebalancing pvp will only delay the inevitable, Epic has stagnated, the home servers are generally deserted most of the time, with one or two players at most on each of them, and a handful on Elevation. ...

 

I'll have to agree with Zenity here. Epic has passed the point of no return. No amount of work put into the current Epic cluster will change that.

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I've never played on Epic, so I really have no idea what I'm talking about, but how about making it free-to-play? (In other words, remove the skill caps on non-premium accounts.)

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It is normal for MMO populations to expand and contract.  When Wurm expanded to Wurm Unlimited, the WO population contracted and that contraction killed any hope of Epic's return.  There are now too many maps and too many choices for the smaller playerbase that is Wurm Online.  Consolidation of PVP in WO is the only logical solution to a viable pvp community.

Edited by Eyesgood
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26 minutes ago, Worksock said:

never forget

 

 

 

 

Spoiler

lol. don't want to turn this into yet another locked merge thread, but i'd love to see what % of epic players actually want a proper transfer (with skills and characteristics properly reverse engineered to the best precision possible to meet freedom equivalents)

 

surely its close to 100% by now right

edit: i'm not suggesting a merge here, nobody quote me implying such a thing, I'm just candidly interested in what percent want one from a numbers perspective

 

Edited by platinumteef
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4 hours ago, Ecrir said:

The lack of updates was to be expected though as there are only so many devs. Epic, Chaos, Freedom and WU are likely too many different environments for all of them to get frequent enough updates. WU can also offer most of what made Epic stand out from Chaos to begin with (certainly on the skill gain side). On the other hand I can see why they keep Epic running, it's a pretty good test bed for new features as it probably does still have more players than the test server, but doesn't have enough players that a massive screwup would be harmful. Just imagine certain mobs becoming way too powerful and slaughtering anybody who gets close. It would cause a bloodbath with a ton of complaints anywhere else, while on Epic it might affect a few players at most.

 

WU was a collosal failure though, rampant cheating discourages any form of pvp, and pve servers are boring as hell after 10 minutes. Not to mention one day the server you sunk loads of hours into can be gone..

it was a doomed idea from the start.

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rather see the new updates go into chaos where the player base isn't dead and freedom can come try them :)

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