Getting more players to Wurm - A brainstorming session

[Tallios 307]

3 minutes ago, Locath said:

 

Reason behind the perimeter is for a safe passage between deed which have you on KOS. There is a 10 tile safe zone where Templars don't chase you. While they are not exactly a threat for experienced players, I have 4 of them on one of my deeds. They slaughter unbranded hellhorses in seconds. Newbie/lowbie players wouldn't stand much chance either. Removing the perimeter will allow me or anyone else to lock any other deed using micro-deeds in order to make someone's life miserable. More rules and support calls to resolve grieffing issues like that.

 

Well if you take joy in being an ######, that's where the GM's can analyze the situation and deal with you accordingly.  I don't see the points you've made above as something that would really conflict with my suggestion.  I would simply add to GM's the power to forcibly disband an offending deed after all the necessary warnings.  If you decide to keep spending money on new deeds and spirit guards, all the better.

[Tallios 307]

12 minutes ago, Pashka said:

The problem with no borders has always been those few bad apples that will block an entire area by use of deeds.  While this might not be a problem for most but if you are the one following the edge of the lake trying to find a spot to get up only to find that it is all blocked, you might be a bit upset.  Or perhaps you are trying to find your way up a mountain or even down one only to get to a stop gap that has no way to get around it.  Just my 2 cents having dealt with someone like that in the past.

 

placing a deed or being an ass and building a very strong wall.  Jerks will be jerks, if they trap you the GM's can and should correct as necessary.

[Pashka 707]

As the deeds are now, GM's do not have anything to answer a call on.  There is a tile entrance.  I do realize there are friends that would love to have no perimeter in between.  I live next door to one of mine.  However if we got rid of perimeter, we'd have an entire penisula blocked off because we own all the deeds on it.  That just isn't a good thing even when it isn't a bad intention.

[Locath 533]

8 hours ago, Tallios said:

 

Well if you take joy in being an ######, that's where the GM's can analyze the situation and deal with you accordingly.  I don't see the points you've made above as something that would really conflict with my suggestion.  I would simply add to GM's the power to forcibly disband an offending deed after all the necessary warnings.  If you decide to keep spending money on new deeds and spirit guards, all the better.

 

This was my point exactly. People don't tend to read game rules so removing perim and replacing it with "don't do stupid things" would work only partially. Another rule would have to disallow fencing adjacent deeds in completely. While it can be done even in current system, perimeter decay is such nuisance that nobody bothers and if someone wants to open a passage, catapults allow that.

If perimeter was removed, GM team would be running around the world analysing if someone is grieffing or did someone report them because they don't like them and the reason for connecting the deeds was genuine (KOS aside). I would love to connect my deeds as well, create one, massive town along with my neighbours but the perim allows for the highway to exist. If we could use that additional strip of 10 tiles, the highway probably wouldn't be there. This is another "pro" for perimeter, more people who don't want a highway through their deed can have one going around their deed, especially in dense population areas.

[Trenix 31]

On 1/23/2018 at 11:43 AM, Xor said:

The community is one of the best let’s of this game. 

I completely disagree. There is very little difference between the community that existed 7 years ago and today. The Wurm community hasn't ever been very welcoming whatsoever. Sure you'll have people answer some of your questions time to time, but outside of that, people weren't that friendly and mostly tried to take advantage of players more than anything. I still remember how veterans felt like they were the game and the community pushed new players out like outcasts, which has always been problematic in this game and could be why it didn't succeed so well. It sort of reminds me of Age of Conan where the community treated new players terribly, that they ended up quitting and making the game fail. This is the game where you could just destroy people's entire base until they have nothing left. That game is already dead right now.

 

There is other games which acts similar to Wurm, Salem and Haven & Hearth. Except for those games, the developers were very nasty. They never did so well and have never been noticed much in the gaming industry. Salem was made by a gaming company that one of the developer's worked for which eventually ended up giving the game away to the developer because of it's failure. So again, the community and it's developers, truly matter. Thankfully, I never had any issues with staff members in Wurm, so that's a good thing.

 

Aside from the community, this game never did well as much as no one wants to hear, because it takes way too long to do anything, the game was never user-friendly, and generally no one wants to pay a monthly subscription. Haven & Hearth tried the whole monthly subscription payment model and failed, they had to change it to be free to play again. Paying for premium and having a monthly subscription is a dead horse. Very few games have succeeded, and I mean extremely few, yet everyone keeps attempting to pull it off. It's kind of sad, because I feel like Wurm could of been way ahead if it threw this idea out years ago. I guess not much has been learned by Notch's success. I mean Minecraft had a lot of similar ideas to Wurm, but it was faster, more user-friendly, and no subscription. Honestly, Minecraft lacked so much content and depth, still does, and yet Notch has billions. Wurm is far better game-wise, but there various of poor decisions that is holding it back.

 

Now lets look at Life is Feudal. They made their own Wurm-like game on a small island where people could create their own servers and players could play together. The game was pretty expensive for the price and yet it was still a top seller. I bought the game and so did many other players. However afterwards this company made the worst business move by switching over to make an MMO like Wurm Online. Guess what, the MMO was a complete failure and because the company ignored the privately hosted server game, the reputation for the company and the game has just died. I'm not sure if anyone on the Wurm team knows anything about business, but they don't seem to be watching at all of what is going on in the gaming industry. Personally I think Wurm Unlimited is the biggest shot they have of being acknowledged.

 

To be honest, after Wurm Unlimited was released, I've seen updates for the game increase significantly. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if the game is making quite a bit off of this business move. It was possibly the best thing they've ever done. I truly think Wurm Unlimited is the future for Wurm if it is kept in check and improved. It can target far more potential customers than Wurm Online could ever, especially in this time and age. As for the Wurm Online idea, I mean it really hasn't done well, at all. The fact that many players switched over, also shows where they stand. If something hasn't been working, I'm actually surprised it's still the main focus. I'm sure many will be angry with what I say but honestly it's very truthful and someone has to say it. I personally would like to see Wurm stop being this underground game which no one knows about.

 

Suggestions

- Put the focus on Wurm Unlimited and add content with it in mind

- Make the game more user-friendly with improved UI

Edited February 5, 2018 by Trenix

[Flubb 773]

Wurm Unlimited was a grand advertisement for Online in the first place. Sure, some people left to Unlimited, but that means they were offered a solution that fits them better, which is a good thing from a consumer viewpoint. Meanwhile, you do find the stray player coming from WU wanting to try "the real thing", so it wasn't entirely ineffective either. However, Umlimited already appears to have plenty more content thanks to modding, if anything, CCAB stands to integrate some of the better mods to WO. You don't get a better indicator of what people really want than popular mods in a sidebranch of your game that are actually being used, and the code cannot be that far away from being usable.

 

You may be pleased to know that a new, overhauled UI is actually underway, and I agree that it's sorely needed. I'm sparse on info about it, though. I'm not sure how much of it is publicly known, actually.

 

On a side note, whenever a newbie asks for something in freedom chat, it seems like 3 people are always jumping up to their mailbox trying to send helpful stuff along the way, and generally seem rather courteous. Sorry for your bad experience, but from what I can tell it's the game itself that fails at new player retention more than anything else, as the numerous discussions and gripes about the tutorial testify.

Edited February 5, 2018 by Flubb

[Roccandil 959]

4 hours ago, Trenix said:

I completely disagree. There is very little difference between the community that existed 7 years ago and today. The Wurm community hasn't ever been very welcoming whatsoever.

 

At least in my experience, the in-game Wurm community has been very good. A few vocal posters in the forums have left a negative impression, but I suspect they aren't representative.

[Trenix 31]

With my experience in business, the developers should take out all the statistics of Wurm Online and Wurm Unlimited and put them side to side. They should see what attracted more players when Wurm Unlimited was released. If Wurm Online players have dropped because of Wurm Unlimited, well now you see what kinda of customers you should be targeting. To be very honest, I personally have no time to pay monthly for a game where my stuff may end up missing if I were to stop playing. I instead rather play when I want and how I want, which is why I favor Wurm Unlimited more. I may be the minority or I may be the majority, which is why you should use statistics to find out the reality. The very real truth is that the Wurm Online player-base is dropping and it only seems to be getting worse. I don't believe it's because of features or advertising. I mean take a look at a game like EVE online. I never seen any form of advertising from them and they're doing pretty good for an underground game.

1 hour ago, Flubb said:

Wurm Unlimited was a grand advertisement for Online in the first place.

Like this for example is just a terrible business move. Life is Feudal did the same crap and look how it turned out for them. Why would Wurm want to follow their footsteps? Now Wurm Unlimited could of been a far better success but it was essentially Wurm Online that was privately hosted. Why would they even pull that? They could of made a smaller world and allowed players to be more likely to host smaller servers which they could actually handle. Now for me, I have a beast of a computer so it doesn't matter, but why on earth would you expect regular gamers who mostly don't have the best computer, have to host such a large world that they most likely would never fully explore anyway? All that is left is for people to buy their own private hosted servers and once they stop paying to keep it up, the community gets angry and quits which means bad reviews.

 

Aside from that, this game has a terrible issue with iron and has these issues from the very beginning. As a new player, without iron, you really can't do anything. In Wurm Online you just team up with a settlement so it's whatever. Hell, you might even find an abandoned mine somewhere. Yet in Wurm Unlimited, where there are less and more fresh servers, finding iron is something you would ragequit from. This is not included the combined frustration of having low digging skill, mining skill, and climbing skill. I had to cheat to get iron just to start out. It also wasn't very easy to comprehend how to cheat for iron. This needs to be seriously fixed. Again, the future in this game is Wurm Unlimited. Selling Wurm Unlimited for $1 so it can possibly lure people into Wurm Online is just a terrible business move, especially seeing the state of Wurm Unlimited where the mechanics don't really work well for a small private server. It's just throwing out money.

 

Another suggestion is to have a developer focus on Wurm Unlimited exclusively, which will benefit that community rather than having the game revolve around Wurm Online. Maybe then the developers could see the potential of a buy to play community over pay to play.