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Roccandil

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10 hours ago, Roccandil said:

However we define RNG, Wurm provides wildly different outcomes for doing the same thing, and in so doing, provides constant, if subtle, feedback to the player that they are wasting their time and money.

 

I don't understand where you're trying to go with this. Let's see if this example works. Let's use shooting at an archery target.

 

In Wurm if you shoot at an archery target 100 times you get different results. You'll get a mixture of successes and failures. Since you are doing "the exact same thing" (IE shooting shooting at a target) you think getting different results means this is random and is a waste of time.

 

In real lifeif you shoot at an archery target 100 times you get different results. You'll get a mixture of successes and failures. Since you are doing "the exact same thing" (IE shooting at a target) you think getting different results means this is not random and is not a waste of time.

 

Nailed it, right?

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15 hours ago, Roccandil said:

Chess is perhaps the quintessential example of a game -without- RNG, and it's neither boring nor predictable.

 

Chess is predictable enough that the best chess player in the world was beaten by a computer already 20 years ago. Meanwhile full-ring poker, which is based on predicting what your opponent will do given RNG and partial imformation, is still not possible for a computer to conquer and won't be in the foreseeable future.

 

This hasn't much to do with Wurm, except the fact that unpredictability also brings challenges. For example, if you bum out your meditation tick, you have to adapt, i.e. re-plan what you do the next 10 minutes or 1 hour. Or if you need a unicorn horn and the one you find does not give you one when you butcher, you have to rethink your hunting trip. This can actually be seen as a good thing. 

 

 

Edited by Cista

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12 hours ago, Hailene said:

 

I don't understand where you're trying to go with this. Let's see if this example works. Let's use shooting at an archery target.

 

In Wurm if you shoot at an archery target 100 times you get different results. You'll get a mixture of successes and failures. Since you are doing "the exact same thing" (IE shooting shooting at a target) you think getting different results means this is random and is a waste of time.

 

In real lifeif you shoot at an archery target 100 times you get different results. You'll get a mixture of successes and failures. Since you are doing "the exact same thing" (IE shooting at a target) you think getting different results means this is not random and is not a waste of time.

 

Nailed it, right?

Not sure what you are nailing there... It's not about whether or not you get a 0 or 10 as a score for shooting a target, It's the skillgain you get from it. If the scores i get are 2,5,3,9,7,0,10 I should gain skill no matter what. Succeeding in something should always give skill (until a certain cap like 40 for archery on the target) because you learn that you should do something like you did. Every mistake in something should give skill because you learn what NOT to do. You can go from shooting too low, to shooting to high, and eventually hitting near the target. The outcome, or score, should just represent how well you are doing. You are wasting your time if you are not progressing. Same should go for mining. Would be nice if every mining action on stone gave skill until 0-50, every action gives skill from iron in 10-60 (for noob reasons), etc. If a person mines the wrong way, they learn from their mistakes. If a person mines a right way, they know they should keep that up. So... no Not Nailed

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9 minutes ago, Yiraia said:

Succeeding in something should always give skill

 

No. It shouldn't. No matter how many times you add 1+1 you're not really going to be progress in your math skills beyond the most basic level (which is how Wurm works).

 

11 minutes ago, Yiraia said:

If a person mines the wrong way, they learn from their mistakes

 

No matter how many times you give a kindergartner calculus homework they're not really going to progress in their math skills (which is how WUrm works). The only thing they learn is the taste of failure.

 

When learning every skill I can think of in real life you need to hit the right level of difficulty. If it's too easy or too hard then the amount you learn is greatly diminished...just like we have in the game.

 

13 minutes ago, Yiraia said:

So... no Not Nailed

Perhaps I should have mentioned this in the beginning, but you completely missed my previous post's point.

 

It wasn't whether or not something should every action give you skill (which, on a side note, it shouldn't, as I explained above) but whether or not you should expect to get the exact same result in Wurm every time. And if we're for a "real life" answer, as Roccandil was trying to argue, is no.

 

Even Olympians have variances in their abilities. Closed skilled sports would be pretty boring if we could predict performance exactly.

 

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13 hours ago, Hailene said:

 

I don't understand where you're trying to go with this. Let's see if this example works. Let's use shooting at an archery target.

 

In Wurm if you shoot at an archery target 100 times you get different results. You'll get a mixture of successes and failures. Since you are doing "the exact same thing" (IE shooting shooting at a target) you think getting different results means this is random and is a waste of time.

 

In real lifeif you shoot at an archery target 100 times you get different results. You'll get a mixture of successes and failures. Since you are doing "the exact same thing" (IE shooting at a target) you think getting different results means this is not random and is not a waste of time.

 

Nailed it, right?

 

In Wurm you can easily do exactly the same thing, and get different results. That's functional insanity, and a waste of time and money, which will turn off certain players (at least me :P ).

 

In real life, however, it's very difficult (if almost impossible) to do -exactly- the same thing. That's actually what RL archery practice is all about: learning -how- to do exactly the right same thing every time.

 

9 hours ago, Cista said:

 

Chess is predictable enough that the best chess player in the world was beaten by a computer already 20 years ago. Meanwhile full-ring poker, which is based on predicting what your opponent will do given RNG and partial imformation, is still not possible for a computer to conquer and won't be in the foreseeable future.

 

This hasn't much to do with Wurm, except the fact that unpredictability also brings challenges. For example, if you bum out your meditation tick, you have to adapt, i.e. re-plan what you do the next 10 minutes or 1 hour. Or if you need a unicorn horn and the one you find does not give you one when you butcher, you have to rethink your hunting trip. This can actually be seen as a good thing. 

 

 

 

Unpredictability isn't the same thing as random (and the opposite may be argued, that over time random is very predictable). Deterministic systems, however, can provide unpredictable gameplay via emergent rulesets, which is how Real Life works. A hurricane's path is hard to predict, not because it's random (and believing that it was random would, ironically, would be a form of superstition), but because of the complexity of the mechanisms involved.

 

RNG is a crutch to simulate the outcome of that kind of complexity, but as you alluded, computers are now powerful enough that I no longer find that a good reason for RNG.

 

As a matter of fact, the old game whose deterministic mechanics I was trying to emulate in code provided sufficiently unpredictable gameplay to be a lot of fun. Boulder Dash was the name (and I'm dating myself :P ), and I recall no RNG in it at all. Because of the emergent nature of monster movement, however, and the twitch nature of player movement, it was very hard to do exactly the same thing each playthrough.

 

If I were to attempt to fundamentally replace RNG in a game, that's where I'd start: doing exactly the same thing must always yield the same results, but doing exactly the same thing shouldn't necessarily be easy (and should often be very hard).

 

That's more realistic, and I think, ultimately more fun. At the very least, I would attempt to avoid any gameplay mechanic that told the player they were wasting their time and money. :)

 

 

Edited by Roccandil

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While I'm at it, I'll congratulate Wurm for a deterministic mechanic that (IMO) works very well: cooking affinities. I realize that the initial possible affinities are random for each character, but as far as I can tell, if I make diced feline meat with chopped parsley and sassafras in a pottery bowl in a normal oven, I'm going to get the same affinity every time with the same character.

 

Because of the variables involved, however, I now have an incredible number of possible combinations to research to find affinities I want to get, and for me, that's a lot of fun. :)

 

So, this at least roughly fits my archery practice answer and solution to RNG: doing the same thing yields the same result, but getting the right result is hard. (And once I get the right result(s), I then have to prepare to grow the right stuff if I want to keep making that same affinity.)

 

Just so I don't triple-post:

 

I'll also congratulate Wurm for how Fight skill develops. As far as I can tell, at least up to 70, you -always- get exp for a kill, the amount modified by the difficulty of the enemy and whether or not you had help. That just makes sense to me. :)

 

Having said that, I wish -all- skills worked like that. :( Skillgain in general seems rather perverse; I don't always get exp for actions, and you're telling me I'll eventually need -low- quality tools to get the most exp, and should change tool QL to match my skill? What? :P

 

And I really don't get mining: seems like there ought to be separate mining sub-skills: rock/iron/tin/gold/etc. How does getting good at mining gold make me better at mining iron?

 

Rather, I think vein QL -should- matter, and low quality ore should provide less exp as you get better, the way easy enemies provide less Fight exp.

Edited by Roccandil

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2 hours ago, Roccandil said:

In Wurm you can easily do exactly the same thing, and get different results. That's functional insanity, and a waste of time and money, which will turn off certain players (at least me :P ).

 

In real life, however, it's very difficult (if almost impossible) to do -exactly- the same thing. That's actually what RL archery practice is all about: learning -how- to do exactly the right same thing every time.

 

But we're not doing the exact same thing in Wurm. Every attempt is different and every attempt gets a different result. Just like real life.

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33 minutes ago, Hailene said:

 

But we're not doing the exact same thing in Wurm. Every attempt is different and every attempt gets a different result. Just like real life.

 

But the player -is- doing exactly the same thing. Click the ore, click your pickaxe, click mine. Same thing, different outcomes. Insanity. :)

 

As far as I can tell, you're trying to justify RNG as an abstraction of the complexity of the Real World, but it's a -bad- abstraction. And, as I've pointed out, systems already exist in Wurm that -don't- rely on RNG abstraction, and are, as a result, more fun. (As a new player, Wurm feels somewhat inconsistent in that regard.)

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Rng is percieved differently by different people. Lets take your mining situation as an example. When a miner hits a rock with their pickaxe, they can break a rock with one hit, two hits, or more depending on how they hit the rock. In wurm this translates in rng quality of the product which is modified by the skill of the miner and quality of the pickaxe. A 99 skill miner with a 95ql pick axe will get max quality iron every single time, with perhaps a minimal amount of lower quality (fails) here and there. As skill and quality of tool is reduced, the quality of the product goes down.

 

If you take out the rng aspect, then you will get 100ql ore every single time. That in turn makes the skill level of mining pointless. Then there would be no need to skill..  and you would be getting iron blocks out of veins which will mean you are playing Minecraft.

 

Skill makes up everything in our game. Every chance of improving, every chance of a higher quality product, every hit or miss, every rare roll is based in chance. Take that chance factor away and you are playing a "3d" platformer with sandbox simulation that very few current Wurmians would like to experience.

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46 minutes ago, Roccandil said:

But the player -is- doing exactly the same thing. Click the ore, click your pickaxe, click mine. Same thing, different outcomes. Insanity. :)

 

Just about every video is that way. There are multiple reasons for it. Out of universe it crates uncertainty (and, if done right, excitement). In universe it's supposed to replicate the variances in that do happen in real life.

 

Look, I'm not taking fault with your opinion on whether games should have an RNG element. That's personal opinion and there's probably no way I'm going to change that.

 

I'm taking fault with your idea that Wurm is somehow "more" random than real life.

 

If you take the stance that a whole bunch of different variables affect something and you never can truly anticipate and calculate every variable is "random" then Wurm is in fact random. But so is real life (and you made the argument that real life is not truly random...just overwhelmingly complex).

 

But if you assume that life is not random then neither is Wurm The results rely on specific variables and fall within set parameters. The more you understand it the "less" random it appears.

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7 hours ago, Hailene said:

No. It shouldn't. No matter how many times you add 1+1 you're not really going to be progress in your math skills beyond the most basic level (which is how Wurm works).

Read my un-edited message ._. I said that the actions give skills until a certain point. Like the archery cap on a target. At that point you should stop doing 1+1 and do 1*1.

Here

8 hours ago, Yiraia said:

Succeeding in something should always give skill (until a certain cap like 40 for archery on the target) 

 

7 hours ago, Hailene said:

No matter how many times you give a kindergartner calculus homework they're not really going to progress in their math skills (which is how WUrm works). The only thing they learn is the taste of failure.

Again, Read my un-edited message ._. In my example you get skill every time between 10-60. a person with 7 mining would get no skill from iron in my example.

8 hours ago, Yiraia said:

Same should go for mining. Would be nice if every mining action on stone gave skill until 0-50, every action gives skill from iron in 10-60 (for noob reasons), etc.

 

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1 hour ago, Yiraia said:

Read my un-edited message ._. I said that the actions give skills until a certain point. Like the archery cap on a target. At that point you should stop doing 1+1 and do 1*1.

 

I'd assume we already have a basic idea of a given skill at 1. After all, even at 1 of a skill we can do basic things (cut down trees, cut planks, make nails, put together a mallet). I figure we're past the 1+1 part of our skilling.

 

We need some challenge to push us towards improving our skills (from an in-universe perspective).

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16 hours ago, Roccandil said:

 

. A hurricane's path is hard to predict, not because it's random (and believing that it was random would, ironically, would be a form of superstition), but because of the complexity of the mechanisms involved.

 

 

 

Actually superstition is the act of believing A will happen if B were to come to fruition..1) bad things WILL happen if I walk under this ladder.. 2) if I GIVE this beggar money on my way to gambling I will WIN BIG TIME at gambling.., so as you see superstitious is absolute faith just like Christianity its absolutely got nothing to do with a mathematic concept such as Randomness or RNG as in Wurm..as I think somebody mentioned a long time ago Wurm only uses a small slice of RNG  to get results those results are based on qualities of tools, material s , your skills and the rng just accounts for the universe in of its self where maybe a bird ###### on you and you missed an archery shot or whatever but it is doing the same calculation every shot you make its just changing the amounts of your skill and the materials and the arrow quality maybe at the  targets ql,,.. your distance form the target (is it ideal , or too long too short) you get what we are trying to say.. if there was a random role of dice just to determine your outcome you'd be aware of it.. 

Wurm is a challenge and you earn everything.. from that wood scrap you fought off a bear to grab to the great bridge you built.. all of it

 

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Wurm does give some skill gain on every action, if you consider the actions on average, rather than particular, specific actions.  So mining 50 times gives a certain amount of skill, but it's 'lumpy' in distribution - some actions got (more than the average) skill, some got none.  Adjusting the difficulty vs. skill (e.g. making mining harder by moving to more 'complex' veins, or using a crappy pick) allows you to increase the average skill gain, but it's all about averages.  Aside from a few skills (like meditation), there isn't really any restriction over fast you can skill, beyond the in-built intrinsic compound rates (i.e. the basic rate, adjusted by skill, difficulty, bonuses, etc).  The problem is that at high skills, the probability of a tick (and the resulting tick size) drops waaaay off - the effort to get from 95 - 100 is probably at least the same as getting to 95.

 

For a lot of skills, you already get skill for every successful action; the problem is that what you consider successful and what the game considers successful aren't the same.  As far as wurm is concernes, any action that has a result of 1 - 40 (exclusive) is successful, anything else isn't.  For resource gathering skills (mining, woodcutting, etc) this translates as a result item with a quality 1 - 40.  You get a skill tick for every one of those.  Producing a log of ql 56 wasn't a success on that criteria, so no skill tick.  If you want skill ticks, you adjust your setup to give the maximum probability spread of outcomes in the 1 - 40 range.  The advantage of gathering skills is that it's really easy to see where your output range is centred, because you get an output item for every action (including the failures); for a production skill, you have no way of knowing the result value directly, you have to infer it based on skill tick size and ratio. 

 

As I remember, always getting an item for gathering (even when the action failed) was added to make the game less painful for newbies and low-skill characters.  The compromise was that you didn't gain any skill for fails, but you still got some resource (if you're low skill, you probably don't care about ql anyway).  If you need to link this to RL, you can consider that an action that is too easy teaches you nothing (or very little), while one that is so difficult you just make a mess doesn't really get you anywhere either - you need to be in that sweet spot of challenged enough, but not too much.

Edited by Wonka

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On 27/09/2017 at 0:52 AM, Kadmint said:

like mining, you actually gain a little bit of that skill and every 3-5 time you gain the actual tick since the counter is filled and recognized as full tick.

You get a mining skill tick if the ore is 1.01-39.99ql. It's not random by any mean.

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19 hours ago, Angelklaine said:

Rng is percieved differently by different people. Lets take your mining situation as an example. When a miner hits a rock with their pickaxe, they can break a rock with one hit, two hits, or more depending on how they hit the rock. In wurm this translates in rng quality of the product which is modified by the skill of the miner and quality of the pickaxe. A 99 skill miner with a 95ql pick axe will get max quality iron every single time, with perhaps a minimal amount of lower quality (fails) here and there. As skill and quality of tool is reduced, the quality of the product goes down.

 

If you take out the rng aspect, then you will get 100ql ore every single time. That in turn makes the skill level of mining pointless. Then there would be no need to skill..  and you would be getting iron blocks out of veins which will mean you are playing Minecraft.

 

Skill makes up everything in our game. Every chance of improving, every chance of a higher quality product, every hit or miss, every rare roll is based in chance. Take that chance factor away and you are playing a "3d" platformer with sandbox simulation that very few current Wurmians would like to experience.

 

Not everything in Wurm is chance. I've found no chance of failure building wooden walls, for instance, or applying support beams. The RNG way I spend time doing nothing but hitting the "create" button until I get lucky (casinos :( ), and the other way I hit the button once, and it gets done. Either way it gets done. The one way is simply more frustrating.

 

From the perspective of the world itself, the difference in outcome is minor (if anything, and could be balanced if needed), but the difference in player experience is huge.

 

Nor does skill have to be tied to RNG. Were I designing a game like Wurm, I would make every action provide skill, just less or more depending on difficulty (rather like Fight), and simply not allow certain actions if a player isn't skilled enough.

 

Unpredictability and uncertainty would not come from RNG, but from opportunity cost. Yes, I can grind skill doing anything, but do I want to spend a year grinding Mining against easy ore (provided it lasts), or do I want to find a better way? (I'm reminded of the Final Fantasy challenge someone took to max level a character in the opening scene against the easiest enemies. I don't think anyone's finished it yet; it takes -so- much grinding. :P )

 

Besides, I've experienced enough good gameplay without RNG to reject the idea that RNG is all that's keeping us from blandness and boredom. Personally, I think the opposite is true. People have relied on RNG for so long they can't imagine a better way, but I believe there -are- better ways.

 

 

19 hours ago, Hailene said:

 

Just about every video is that way. There are multiple reasons for it. Out of universe it crates uncertainty (and, if done right, excitement). In universe it's supposed to replicate the variances in that do happen in real life.

 

Look, I'm not taking fault with your opinion on whether games should have an RNG element. That's personal opinion and there's probably no way I'm going to change that.

 

I'm taking fault with your idea that Wurm is somehow "more" random than real life.

 

If you take the stance that a whole bunch of different variables affect something and you never can truly anticipate and calculate every variable is "random" then Wurm is in fact random. But so is real life (and you made the argument that real life is not truly random...just overwhelmingly complex).

 

But if you assume that life is not random then neither is Wurm The results rely on specific variables and fall within set parameters. The more you understand it the "less" random it appears.

 

As the previous poster said, random can mean a lot of things to different people. :) From a practical gameplay perspective, however, I see no good reason to set up a situation where the player simply spams a button until they get lucky, and while they're not lucky, they're getting nothing for their investment of time in the game. (I'm amazed at how many people, not just here, defend that practice.)

 

It's even worse when a game forces a player to do X unfun activity for Y time until they get enough of Z to do something they actually want to do. When the player then has to risk Z on all-or-nothing chance, that's abusive, as far as I'm concerned, and exploiting the inherent weakness to gambling that is human.

 

(And I'm not referring to surprises like rares, which I think is a fun system, despite RNG, because it's a bonus thrown on top of existing player activities. At least, that's how I look at it. Maybe if I were grinding for rares, I'd think differently.)

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So what's the alternative? Make sure every action is guaranteed to be "successful" (whether that be skill tick, creation, or continuing) but then increase timer length by a factor of 3. Then have skill and other items reduce the timer length to what we have about now?

 

Of course skill ticks would not scale with the extra timer length (the guaranteed success makes up for that).

 

We'd also have to change how many actions we get from mind logic. Drop the original queue to 2, maybe 1. Then give a new action once every 20 mind logic instead of 10.

 

That cuts down on the "randomness" (which isn't really random since it has to use some sort of equation).

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7 minutes ago, Hailene said:

So what's the alternative? Make sure every action is guaranteed to be "successful" (whether that be skill tick, creation, or continuing) but then increase timer length by a factor of 3. Then have skill and other items reduce the timer length to what we have about now?

 

Of course skill ticks would not scale with the extra timer length (the guaranteed success makes up for that).

 

We'd also have to change how many actions we get from mind logic. Drop the original queue to 2, maybe 1. Then give a new action once every 20 mind logic instead of 10.

 

That cuts down on the "randomness" (which isn't really random since it has to use some sort of equation).

 

As an aside, mind logic seems odd; it doesn't really provide gameplay value, and my best guess it's to prevent bots. From a Real Life perspective, how much mind logic does it take to tell myself to go chop wood until further notice? :P  Mind logic might make sense if it only applied to doing -different- activities, like switching from mining to crafting. But at that point, it probably becomes a pointless skill. (At the very least, I wish you could queue "Rest" to get stamina gain, so you didn't have to stop queueing actions to get stamina back.)

 

Anyhow, I realize the game is designed around RNG, and so any attempt to mitigate that would cause problems, probably some unforeseen, but even so, it sounds like it -could- be done. Plus, it's not so much "RNG" or "random" that's the problem, as it is the all-or-nothing RNG of gambling with a player's time.

 

For instance, I've played games with RNG where its design was such that it almost never wasted a player's time. Heroes of Might & Magic was like that, as is Eador - Genesis. Even though, as you can see, I don't like RNG, I didn't mind the RNG in those games, because my gametime was rarely (if ever) gambled away; the games weren't subliminally telling me I was wasting my time (even though I probably was :P ).

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I think this is mostly a matter of perspective.

 

Yeah, things suck when you don't get a skill tick. But if you had to do 1000 20 second actions or 2000 10 second actions with a 50% success rate...in the long run, and on average, you break even. Don't let it get in your head.

 

It's harder to do when you're staring for a meditation tick that you-stayed-up-for-one-hour-and-you-have-work-in-6-hours-but-hey-your-question-is-up-and-you-want-to-rank-up-asap and you fail is a bummer...but in the long run it's a wash.

 

Sorta like life. Ups and downs. You just roll with it. As long as things are on a upward curve you're probably doing fine.

 

On a side note, the "RNG" portion of the game is rewarding as well. Maximizing skill gain with optimal difficulty and tool QL is a nice feeling.

 

Skilling up and getting those high successes is nice. I specifically leveled plate armor smithing to make my scale. Failure to make scale armor means losing part of the scale (which can cost many silvers for each failure). Now with all pieces but the chest piece I have a 100% chance of success (though that doesn't necessarily mean I will be always successful since the number is rounded).

 

It's a nice pat on the back for my hard work.

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8 minutes ago, Hailene said:

I think this is mostly a matter of perspective.

 

Yeah, things suck when you don't get a skill tick. But if you had to do 1000 20 second actions or 2000 10 second actions with a 50% success rate...in the long run, and on average, you break even. Don't let it get in your head.

 

It's harder to do when you're staring for a meditation tick that you-stayed-up-for-one-hour-and-you-have-work-in-6-hours-but-hey-your-question-is-up-and-you-want-to-rank-up-asap and you fail is a bummer...but in the long run it's a wash.

 

Sorta like life. Ups and downs. You just roll with it. As long as things are on a upward curve you're probably doing fine.

 

On a side note, the "RNG" portion of the game is rewarding as well. Maximizing skill gain with optimal difficulty and tool QL is a nice feeling.

 

Skilling up and getting those high successes is nice. I specifically leveled plate armor smithing to make my scale. Failure to make scale armor means losing part of the scale (which can cost many silvers for each failure). Now with all pieces but the chest piece I have a 100% chance of success (though that doesn't necessarily mean I will be always successful since the number is rounded).

 

It's a nice pat on the back for my hard work.

 

Gambling is "rewarding", which is why developers deliberately exploit it. It probably wouldn't be polite of me to describe what I actually think of that. :P

 

But consider what you said: if it sucks when you don't get a skill tick, but in the long run it's a wash and that's how we should look at it, why -not- balance the game around that "wash", to make it simple to look at it that way? It comes out the same, it's just less frustrating.

 

Couple other things:

 

- Needing low QL gear to level up seems very odd, even backwards from reality. For one thing, in my own profession, I don't learn and advance best with poor tools, rather I learn to use better tools to do an even better job. Advanced tools should be beyond beginners, regardless of quality (and that would probably require something else to model it), but for simple tools like axes, better quality should help anyone do a job better/faster and learn ideal ways of doing things (poor quality tools provide poor lessons, which might even need to be unlearned with better quality tools).

- Ductile material loss during crafting also seems very odd. For molten metal and clay, if a crafting failure occurs, everything should be able to be lumped up again and reused (matter, after all, doesn't get destroyed). For things like wood, on the other hand, loss on crafting failure makes sense; you can't lump it back up again since it's been changed into a useless form (unless you count particle board, which I think is a crafting failure no matter what :P ). I don't know if scale would be considered ductile, but I assume so since it's using platesmithing.

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Think less about whether or not you need a "good" tool to progress and more on the difficulty of the action. People learn best when work is challenging but not overwhelmingly so. It's not a perfect match but there is some logic behind it.

 

For failed attempts...I think there'd either be some material loss and/or some quality loss. You can only mess up so many times before you ruin the dough, you know?

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While I'm thinking about it, here's a rough idea of how I would handle your scale crafting situation in a non-RNG way:

 

- At X skill you can craft scale of Y QL at 100% chance, but a beginner would use a lot more material than a master to craft the same item at a lower QL, and have more by-products, which, like wood scrap, could be used for something else, or if a ductile material, perhaps re-processed and re-used. Either way, I would want "scale scrap" to have interesting gameplay value. :)

 

In short, a master would waste a lot less material than a beginner making something, and the result would be higher QL, but there would be no gambling involved.

 

Oh, and I don't see how one loses an element like gold, especially if you're working with molten gold. Remelt it, re-refine it if necessary, but it's not going anywhere easily. (Dough is a lot more complicated. :P )

Edited by Roccandil

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Did it occur to you that people will prefer RNG rather than longer timers? We already have the longer timer system in place for many things. Noobie players can get timers of 3 minutes when repairing buildings or flattening a piece of land. Even when mining you can have timers óf several minutes when you queue 3. This forces the player to do something else while playing Wurm.

 

If you were to ask players: do you want longer timers on everything, I believe they would mostly answer no.

 

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Wurm isn't reality, although some aspects of it are similar.  It's a game, with its own rules about how things work.  If some things in Wurm don't make sense when considered against the real world, so what?

 

Ultimately, what you seem to be asking for would involve a significant redesign of quite a bit of very fundamental bits of how the wurm world works; I'm not saying thats necessarily a bad thing (although I'm not convinced your proposal really improves anything), but given the complexity of that sort of refactoring, I can't see that it's likely to happen any time soon, if ever.

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On 28/09/2017 at 6:00 AM, Oblivionnreaver said:

You get a mining skill tick if the ore is 1.01-39.99ql. It's not random by any mean.

the ql you get is random. There is also very little knowledge given by wurm on what ql you should use on different ores. If you need to get between 1.01 and 40, and you have a chance to get between say 1 and 30 (1 happens pretty often because thats considered a "fail") That chance is enough to make the skill "random." In that case, you don't learn from your big mistakes in mining.

 

20 hours ago, Hailene said:

That cuts down on the "randomness" (which isn't really random since it has to use some sort of equation).

If you flip a coin in the air for 2 seconds and theres a 50% chance you get either heads or tails, you can end up with the result Heads Heads Heads Heads Heads Heads after 6 trials taking you 12 seconds (non stop flipping). Assuming Heads was you failing an action in wurm, thats super annoying (and that happened to me while i was a noob making kindlings). Now if we made it so we always get a success we take the inverse of the chance (50%=1/2, so 2) and multiply it by the timer and get Tails Tails Tails after 3 trials taking 12 seconds.

 

I know that technically the more trials you get, the more your data resembles the 50/50 chance, but we all know thats not really the case in wurm. People have complained about failing 2-4 times in a row with a 99% chance.

19 hours ago, Hailene said:

Sorta like life. Ups and downs. You just roll with it. As long as things are on a upward curve you're probably doing fine.

Don't most people play video games to experience something other than real life?

 

6 hours ago, Cista said:

Did it occur to you that people will prefer RNG rather than longer timers?

The majority of people I have talked to said they would rather click once with a large timer and have multiple actions take place rather than sit down and click over and over again. I had one friend that was interested in playing the game but he had to look up at the screen every 30 seconds to continue what he was doing and it disrupted his homework. And in those 30 seconds some fails would happen. Im pretty sure he would have preferred 60 seconds to spend more time doing what he needed and looking up to see his materials.

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