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JakeRivers

The Great Archaeology Rage Thread

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I also want to discover stuff myself, if you know from the start exactly what you can get from it then it ruins all the fun and mystery.. I love the lore idea with cooking.. maybe something in those lines can also be added here to guide you towards cool stuff.. but not just hand them to you and spoiling it.

I would also like as I go up in skill to get more specific investigation options (like with foraging) so you can stop getting so much junk.. investigate for weapons, investigate for tools, investigation for statues, etc..

 

Edited by faty
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we have spoilers for a reason... people can or cannot read them, it's their choice. Though keeping secrets is what lead to multiple bugs and feature being discovered late (WU release) or exploited or never used and as such were just wasted dev time.

 

Better known stuff (even if some surprise are kept) are better for everyone since they allow a quicker and better balancing of things.

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Well.. there's been two weeks since the skill was released and we already have masters and items completed.. If there are a few mysteries left I hope they are revealed only some months (officially, if ever) from now so that people have time to enjoy the discovery.. That's all I am saying..

1 hour ago, Odynn said:

we have spoilers for a reason... people can or cannot read them, it's their choice.

I'm pretty sure that the forums, GL chat and others will talk about these stuff if they pop up.. you would have to play with all the chats closed if you don't want spoilers :))

Don't get me wrong, i want them to pop up, but from people that discovered them, not as an official "archaeology walk-through for good stuff" manual..

Edited by faty

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There really needs to be a better middle ground between these two viewpoints. I'm not saying i'm the genius to come up with a perfect compromise but as things stand it's been over a decade of players (and Rolf) who prefer to "learn it all by playing and hoping to figure it out" being the favored side of information given on new things in Wurm. I like facts, i like data. I love that now thanks to WU i can punch in incredibly precise numbers to figure out the best way to do some things in wurm....i get that others like Faty don't enjoy that and that's cool too, i just feel like people such as myself are treated as the enemy for wanting to know things. As evidenced by the "algorithms to stop code divers learning things" comment earlier.


I use the information i've learned from the code every day to teach people in CA chat and it's basically the reason i'm staff. I would hope all those newer players appreciate that far more than "the mystery of figuring it out yourself" and from my experience talking to many of them over the months as a CA and now a CM....they really really do appreciate proper full disclosure.

Edited by Nadroj
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I made a suggestion two posts ago about a 'lore' like options that could give you clues about what you can find, where, what tool to use.. in the area maybe, I'm sure a lot of other variations can be made.

I'm not against knowing how stuff works, I can't imagine the cooking system without that option, we would of probably had new recipes for years and still not all would be found..

 

Maybe I'm misunderstood, about what i want to be a mystery, so I'll clarify.. I want to know all the mechanics of getting stuff and what tools you have to use and where.. what I would like to be discovered by the players are the actual items that can be dug up and restored.. and not have a wurmpedia list with 'this is what you can get from archaeology...'.

 

Edited by faty

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Didn't mean to single you out as the enemy of my viewpoint there Faty :P You were just the nearest example of someone who disagrees with it ^-^

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37 minutes ago, Nadroj said:

would hope all those newer players appreciate that far more than "the mystery of figuring it out yourself" and from my experience talking to many of them over the months as a CA and now a CM....they really really do appreciate proper full disclosure.

 

Some new players do, some don't. Some people like that they are able to do things most efficiently, some people don't care about efficiency.

 

With WU release that topic has sailed anyway. The code is available, every secret is in the open, whether people want to know it or not.

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I agree with you Nadroj, and I've always been critical of it, even to Rolf way back when.  There's absolutely NO reason i can think of that provides any value to Wurm in keeping secrets.

 

There's actually a business reason/case to stop this ridiculous attitude of keeping everything secret. You did mention that QA (because there's none, it's us) would be easier to find bugs/exploits. When players constantly have to deal with updates that come out which show huge promise, and then just completely fall flat because knowledge and attitudes are so amateurishly bad, players have no choice but to complain.

 

Full disclosure would probably be one of many easy things to do to stop the decline. With the huge amount of volunteerism in this game, i dont see how a few people couldn't keep the wiki up to date with ACTUAL game mechanics changes so that each feature update or 'fix' could explain in official detail how things should work. You could easily 'hide' it from the viewer via spoiler-tags or other methods. Those of you that want to find everything out by yourself, do not have to visit the wiki, and are in the minority. I know quite a few players who I've tried to get into Wurm quit not only because the grind sucks, but also because it's too difficult to understand how the hell everything works, because it's not posted, or otherwise detailed through 'hearsay'.

 

It's not black and white choices on what player type to support, clench those brains and figure out you can actually support multiple customer types without marginalizing! novel ideas to comel!

Edited by Shazaam
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                                                            The scale of player knowledge

Ragequit Inducingly Cryptic <-------X----------------------------------------------------> Immersion Destroyingly Informative

 

This pretty much gives you a scale of where things are; currently wurm sits where the X is.  However, the idea of publishing full game mechanics would basically mirror image us to the opposite end of the scale (see "players who actively choose a disadvantage" and you'll realise that if it's there, folks will use it).  Here's a hint, you don't want to be near either end of the scale.

 

A very simple shift to a middle ground would be the publishing of mechanics in a non specific way.  For example:

 

Botanise is currently thought to be influenced by a few things (tile type, nearby trees etc).  But no-one can find out more without code diving because there is no way for a player to find out a good approximation of the mechanics via ingame testing.

 

What if the devs specifically listed what factors influenced botanising and indicated some rough effects : eg "Oak trees increase the chance of finding acorns at the cost of reducing the chance of finding x,y,z".

 

It's enough information so that anyone with enough time can find the "true" numerical mechanics (or a close approximation), but also enough to satisfy the folks who like the discovery element of the game.

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On 11/15/2017 at 8:07 PM, Robus said:


I have 2/26 can we be friends then find 23 other friends?

only if they allow me to have the rockshard when its finished

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Just some food for thought, I hit 90 archaeology 5 days ago, since then I have 3146 investigates in my log counter and 1301 failures. That is a failure rate of 30%~ as I make it out using a 99ql rare trowel. A good run of 100 fragments yields 6 mask/statue pieces, the rest is junk and is thrown away. I don't even get the 90 level information every 100 investigates. I like the archaeology system, I think it needs a lot of work to be playable. Right now it's brutal because it reminds me of how epic was when it first launched years and years ago, bug ridden and sort of playable. I don't want to see loads of promises of it being "better" "good" or "playable" at some later date. We all see how that worked out for epic.

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2 hours ago, Pingpong said:

Just some food for thought, I hit 90 archaeology 5 days ago, since then I have 3146 investigates in my log counter and 1301 failures. That is a failure rate of 30%~ as I make it out using a 99ql rare trowel. A good run of 100 fragments yields 6 mask/statue pieces, the rest is junk and is thrown away. I don't even get the 90 level information every 100 investigates. I like the archaeology system, I think it needs a lot of work to be playable. Right now it's brutal because it reminds me of how epic was when it first launched years and years ago, bug ridden and sort of playable. I don't want to see loads of promises of it being "better" "good" or "playable" at some later date. We all see how that worked out for epic.

 

Because of how brutal of a let down it is I know one person who has currently quit over it.

 

The system is a huge let down in so many ways, it had so much potential and there it is, gone.

 

We have the wurm pr man doling out hints here and there to buddies or random threads and a dev who says the whole shebang should be encrypted. 

 

I say just scrap it or make it work, no in between.

 

This is bridges 2.0 where after 2 years or more bridges are still bugged and don't work as they are supposed to, new content is nice, but if its bug ridden and not worth the time we are better off without it.

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another fun fact, get a fancy rune or enchant on a tool/weapon head and its all for naught cause just like rarity it does not carry over once finished, so useless

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This system isn't one designed to pump out the unique items constantly, it's something that requires working towards, the failure rate reflects the difficulty of actions. If you expected to hit 90 skill and be able to dominate a market or be inundated with the rarer items then you likely will be disappointed. 

 

the fragment requirements has already been adjusted once for the masks, but we'll be keeping an eye out on the availability of other items and if necessary reducing their fragment requirements. Remember, this has only been around 20 days and people already have 90+, calling it slow by any means seems a tad exaggerating. 

 

As for revealing details or hints, if it gives a significant advantage to know the full facts, I totally support giving all the info. But if there's things that don't impact someones play and are more for fun or surprise then they may be revealed at a later date. Take the recipe system as an example.

 

Wurm always has been a game of exploration, and when possible, will continue to be so. 

 

 

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I see nothing wrong with exploration, not "pumping out" rare items or the like, I am concerned that 50 and 90 skill give the same reward rate for a skill that reminds me very much of foraging/botanizing. Also using shovel/trowel seems to give the same rewards. Using much different ql tools gives the same rewards. Grinding a 90 skill in 3 weeks is pretty average so I don't see anything wrong in that time slot, if anything it's slow considering how much sb (20 hours?) was given out. However I've listed my stats for arch and I think overall archaeology has been a huge improvement over turrets :P

Edited by Pingpong

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6 hours ago, Retrograde said:

But if there's things that don't impact someones play and are more for fun or surprise then they may be revealed at a later date.

 

We all know how that worked for priests when they spent years grinding soul depth/strength.

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Over 70 Archaeology skill now and the ratio of junk to actual useful items is insane still.

 

Still not a single mask frag, and I am fine with that cause I am sure if i started getting those I would get even fewer statue bits than im getting now, which is barely any at all and I estimate chipping off 50,000 frags before I will see enough frags of the same type to assemble one statue.

 

Still only doing my searching on Exodus and most of the deed locations I have been working are so long gone that they are not in the Niarja records.

 

using a 92ql trowel

Edited by JakeRivers

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1 minute ago, JakeRivers said:

Over 70 Archaeology skill now and the ratio of junk to actual useful items is insane still.

 

Still not a single mask frag, and I am fine with that cause I am sure if i started getting those I would get even fewer statue bits than im getting now, which is barely any at all and I estimate chipping off 50,000 frags before I will see enough frags of the same type to assemble one statue.

The ratio isn't reasonable. You're clearly better off leveling weaponsmithing than working on a endless grind for statue fragments that probably wont make up for the time spent getting it. I feel like this skill was delivered poorly, RNG shouldn't be used like this.

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On 30.11.2017. at 4:01 PM, JakeRivers said:

Over 70 Archaeology skill now and the ratio of junk to actual useful items is insane still.

 

Still not a single mask frag, and I am fine with that cause I am sure if i started getting those I would get even fewer statue bits than im getting now, which is barely any at all and I estimate chipping off 50,000 frags before I will see enough frags of the same type to assemble one statue.

 

Still only doing my searching on Exodus and most of the deed locations I have been working are so long gone that they are not in the Niarja records.

 

using a 92ql trowel

There is significant difference in getting masks from 75 skill towards 80 now i get around 2- 3 mask frags and 2-3 statues from 100 frags using 92ql trowel sometimes a bit more, but i try to search for a very old deeds that lasted long time on Deli. Honestly i like insanity of low number of statue fragments, don't think i would like them to be more common but thats just me. I agree with you that if you want more statues and no masks it seems better to stick to 70ish skill that way you could get 1 or 2 extra statue part from 100 frag sample

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I dunno what universe you're living in where 100 fragments gets 4-6 statue/mask parts but it's not the one i live in o.o 

My experience in all attempts to force myself to see this skill as worthwhile have all lead to me giving up because i get 1-2 useful things per 100 fragments. I've tried a variety of areas and my skill is well over 70 and still it's just abysmal and soul destroying.

Edited by Nadroj

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Just to check, based on a comment from someone the other day, you ARE identifying these fragments, right? 

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2 hours ago, Retrograde said:

Just to check, based on a comment from someone the other day, you ARE identifying these fragments, right? 

 

If that is directed at me yes I do identify these fragments, using coc high ql tools you are looking at roughly twice the time and then some to chip the dirt off as it takes to pick them out of the ground, 71 archaeology and 62 restoration. I can't imagine going to the trouble to scratch these out of the dirt and then not identify them.

 

I have had statue frags identified upon digging up, during the chisel stage and during the brush stage, so there really is no way of knowing what you are going to get till you polish off the crud and find the end result.

 

I limit my hunts to every few days for around 300 frags cause that is about my limits of boredom for polishing them all off to the end result, all for 6 or so random statue frags.

 

I would add though I still love discovering old forgotten deeds, but the info seems very sporadic on getting a hit on what the deed name, mayor name, founder name or age of the deed disbanding.

Edited by JakeRivers

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My findings of about 2% of fragments being statue/mask is after i've wasted my time identifying it all. Hell i almost have 70 restoration too now >.<


Just not bothering anymore, every attempt to see if arch is better because a) different area b ) news says its changed a bit c) my skill is a bit higher always comes back to me with "i just wasted several hours of my day". Hell as far as i can tell the time it was reported to have been changed in the news it actually got worse, i found more junk after that.

 

Edit: For the record I never found a single mask piece >.<

Edited by Nadroj

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I am probably one of the very few idiots out there that has been consistently working on the skill since release ( 1 day collecting, 1 day processing, repeat). I gathered early on that the skill was not going to be a major factor in things and have just been collecting and processing through as many fragments as possible, No real grinding apart from the odd bit here and there, Yesterday i managed to finally finish up collecting enough parts for an Eagle stat after going through approx 21k fragments and hitting 89 skill in Arch and after all that i am still only halfway through collecting enough parts for the other stats apart from the worg which requires another 11 parts.

 

The fail rate on finding any info on deeds is atrocious, Feels a lot like surface mining, Miss after miss then 2-3 hits in a row. Also the QL of the items found is frustrating, I am 89 skill now and since hitting 80 and going through atleast 8k of fragments, Not one of those fragments has been in the 80ql range, Highest Ql Fragments i have seen in my stacks is 76ql and even then it is maybe 1-2 out of every 100 found.

 

 

Edited by Belfesar

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