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Bringing a gasp of life back to Epic

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On 2/10/2018 at 10:29 AM, Wargasm said:

 

 

 

Keep holding your breath.

When you first typed this I thought "He's being pessimistic". Unfortunately I was wrong and now have to admit "He was being realistic".

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27 minutes ago, Wargasm said:

 

Why?

My guess is he wants to breathe life back into epic.

 

Why is that confusing?

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According to niarja Epic has more than 0 players online at the moment.

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Being from Epic initially (started there) and transferring to wurm I can tell you that Epic is a complete waste of time.  I was so surprised they wasted any time at all to save epic.

 

Chaos does everything you need, allows people who want to pvp to pvp, and even then people still hardly go there.

 

This game really just isn't any good as a pvp game.  The travel times, sometimes I remember traveling around for 6 hours looking for someone...  Only to find them holed up in a mine when we came.

 

The combat isn't exciting, or interesting.  PVE is terrible too, but that's not why people play this game.  Most of the pvp was trolling someone while they weren't on.  Even that got old, when basically you were transferring hordes of goods back to... your hordes of goods.  The supply and demand (too much supply, no demand) means every player already had all they ever needed so there was no reason to loot each other.

 

I played UO back in the day and then shadowbane and I was hoping WU would replace shadowbane many years ago...  I had horrible experiences.  Free accounts logging in, joining your town, then taking your stuff and logging off or deleting/destroying things when you weren't on.  Trolls everywhere.  Then the long term accounts were always bullying the lowbies, so new players were nonexistent for this reason.   Either you joined them, or you were bullied until you quit. 

 

Still even without that...  This is an adult version of the sims with a setting a long time ago.  I'd be interested in a difficult PVE server, with stronger creatures and lots of them but not in a pvp server.

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A friend and I have been mucking about there this past week.

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The devs were too incompetent and irresponsible to see the project they started with pvp, through to the end. Now they are washing their hands off of it and throwing the towel. I'm sorry to inform you that if you still have the slightest of sliver of hope that the devs might somehow bring a 2003 game's pvp back to life despite all the issues that are practically unfixable due to the game running on a java engine, then you might want to just stop now because you'll end up hurting yourself even more. 

 

If the years and months of doing nothing and then dropping one or two simple fixes before sneaking back into the shadows whilst constantly promising grand plans for pvp, plans that they have yet to show to us despite the fact that they have been teasing them for literal years was not enough to convince you that there is no hope for pvp in wurm, then i don't know what to tell you. The best you would ever do is bring a few dozen old players back into the game, no matter how much advertising you do wurm pvp is never going to be popular simply because the game itself is so outdated. The devs would need to rewrite the whole thing on a better more modern engine which as we have been told is NEVER going to happen as it would be too much work. Almost all of the new players that the advertisements would bring, would play for a few hours or a few days, get confused and quit. Why would they bother playing this 2003 game with such an outdated combat system when they can just pop open ark, rust, wow lifmmo or so many other games. 

 

You may not like what i just said but it is the simple fact. If it was not true then wurm would have thousands of players and it would be popular as we speak, it's not. I don't think i needed to remind you that. The pvp servers are deserted and the pve ones are beginning to be the same. Just at a slower pace.

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Graphics aren't everything to everyone. Wurm's core mechanics, however, are too frustrating. Every action failure is a small voice telling the player they wasted their time, and those voices add up.

 

Action slowness can be bearable, but slowness plus random failure is an effective anti-population mechanic.

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6 hours ago, Roccandil said:

Graphics aren't everything to everyone. Wurm's core mechanics, however, are too frustrating. Every action failure is a small voice telling the player they wasted their time, and those voices add up.

 

Action slowness can be bearable, but slowness plus random failure is an effective anti-population mechanic.

 

I'd say the non-intuitive way the skill system works is worse than the action failures themselves.

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Years ago I saw a movie where a ship (might have been a submarine) was sinking and taking on water.  Some people were trying to seal off a section where the water was coming in, but they couldn't get the hatch closed.  So one of them sacrificed himself by jumping into the flooded room and pushed on the opposite side of the hatch so that the others could close it and survive.  The sad part was when his friend looked through the hatch window and saw him gasping for air, and then a while later he was just motionless and floating dead in the flooded room.

 

We have been watching Epic gasp for air for a long, long time.  But there is no hope now.  Epic is dead, floating on the other side of a door the devs refuse to open for fear of what would happen to Freedom if they did.

 

So it is...

Edited by Eyesgood

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If epic is dead it is the fault of a lack of unique features, that were once unique to the server but can now be found everywhere.

 

And of course, evidently the cries of many for skill transfers were purely self serving in order to fully commit to their campaigns on Chaos, the original call harking back to a time people wanted to destroy the Empire of Mol-Rehan and the Dev team fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

 

I was one of those people asking for the skill transfer too, even though I knew it would be overall harmful for the game, but when everything is the same minus skill gain, why not change it?

 

Now we are seeing the same self serving people demand the epic armor changes, they want any unique features removed. I am not quite sure if these folks also want epic gone because they assume the pvp populace there will move to chaos, but I highly doubt they will.

Edited by FranktheTank

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I'm not a chaos player, i thought id have more interest in going there a year ago but lost interest though i feel thats a more general loss of interest in wurm.  the feeling that epic is doomed to just being a test cluster with the drastic change in skill system that was hailed as great but took tons of fixes to still be broken today, among other things, is what made me take advantage of the skill transfer and play freedom for now until i figure out my wurm future. 

 

That said.. while i despise the fact all of epics greatness being thrown onto freedom, it is what it is and no going back, but things like armor balance on chaos/freedom is better for the game as a whole since it is a balance, not a feature.  ill always want to see epic alive again but i have no answer on how and no longer feel any push or responsiblity to find ways to fix it

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2 hours ago, revengo said:

 

I'd say the non-intuitive way the skill system works is worse than the action failures themselves.

 

The Epic skillgain update helped a -lot- with that (only reason I'm still playing).

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Coming in from 2011 game time, I can say Wurm has been both a great a terrible journey. And with that perspective I can honestly say, all the fixes that Epic and Wurm overall needed had to be done in a window of opportunity. That window being when it had the most money and the most players.  Often times life kinda is obvious with that and punches you in the eye so you can look in a certain direction of what you can take advantage of. And the reality is, all the fixes Epic needed should have been done when Epic had around 1000 players at least. That's when it would have had most of the impact.  

 

Reality is , and I see many players recognizing this simple fact, Wurm is indeed a very counter intuitive game. Its mechanics are often times too complex for players bordering on illogical or nonsensical, absurd. Which I suppose is why the term "wogic" was invented in the first place. But that term , which was a nice joke in the beginning is just a bitter reminder now that some things should have been fixed a long time ago when there were players that really needed those fixes to stay in the game. 

 

The game is outdated, and at this point everything done is more like a patch on a sinking ship. It's leaking through more holes than you can plug at the best pace possible.  But as with many things in life, as long as you're still breathing it's not too late. And wurm still has some breath left into the game. It's nice (although I still see it with bitterness tbh) that barely 10 years later the team is doing some efforts to advertise wurm, albeit, the efforts are still kinda spray and pray atm. 

 

I've done suggestions on making a new trailer for wurm , on how wurm would look in a new game engine, how money could be raised for it through kickstarter or other crowdfunding platforms, how it would be better to really remake the entire pvp system instead of fixing one thing and breaking 20 more things in the process, but I am tired. I really am. Not because my suggestions or the suggestions of players much more knowledgeable than me are ignored, but because there seems to be no clear development path to Wurm for the past 3-4 years, other than adding some changes that are small quality of life improvements but the really buggy, clunky things, such as an awful tutorial, still are ignored. My brain often times explodes when I see a game with a crap tutorial in 2018, I get why for singleplayer games it can be a forgivable offence  since they usually come with manuals or at least you can do some online research on what to do. 

 

But for an MMO? Most mmos at least nail down the first 20 mins of a user experience since those 20 mins are usually all you get to draw in a new player or lose em forever. That's it. 20 mins. Maybe it's my game design philosophy but Wurm is really like an autistic child at this point when it comes to sucking in new players and give them a sense of awe and wonder other games do. 

 

 

I could go on and write a novel about all the things that should've been fixed in the past 6 years. Things that should not have been implemented. Game design choices that seemed to have been a sort of a sadistic joke more than well thought things.

 

In any case, I'll make my point in a shorter version. Wanna really bring life to wurm? Start changing it, in extreme ways, either new engine or redesign many things. Small things like putting items on tables will not bring in significant numbers of players. Advertise, fix tutorial, make a clear development path, because in the end, java will not be able to keep up with the market. Not with an MMO at least, where the standards are fast and unforgiving competition. 

 

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If Epic is dead, then I think devs don't mind throw us something, epic exclusive.

 

I don't know, maybe shooting lasers from eyes? Creating moonmetals from woodscraps and water? Badges of insanity for players paying premium on Epic? (nah, forget about last one, yellow potions are good enough for us)

 

Or just give me possibility to build 23 slope bridges (ofc if it's not couse an error in the matrix, leading to the total cataclysm).

 

All options are fine.

 

Anything?

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Spoke to my lawyer, the NDA has no legal weight so.... 

 

I've been in lengthy talks with the devs, we're still negotiating the finer details but, we're about to sign a deal where Epic gets digging with swords.

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21 hours ago, FranktheTank said:

If epic is dead it is the fault of a lack of unique features, that were once unique to the server but can now be found everywhere.

._.

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On 6/19/2018 at 8:20 PM, Sklo:D said:

According to niarja Epic has more than 0 players online at the moment.

 


Wow, more than 0, thats.....EPIC, i guess

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On 6/21/2018 at 4:40 PM, FranktheTank said:

If epic is dead it is the fault of a lack of unique features, that were once unique to the server but can now be found everywhere.

 

Epic was already as good as dead before it lost it's unique features. PvP simply isn't Wurm's strong suit and there's been a huge amount of competition from other PvP games. The pvp gaming market has changed, and Wurm didn't manage to keep up (which makes perfect sense, how could it possbly keep up when many of those games have vastly bigger development teams and budgets). People eventually move on to those newer PvP games, and since Wurm is so far behind compared to said other games it obviously had a hard time attracting new PvP players. The end result is a server like Epic. Could the Wurm dev team have done something to actually save Epic? I doubt it.

 

The lack of unique features is an obvious consequence of that, not the cause. They did the smart thing by salvaging what they could from the dead.

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19 hours ago, Ecrir said:

 

Epic was already as good as dead before it lost it's unique features. PvP simply isn't Wurm's strong suit and there's been a huge amount of competition from other PvP games. The pvp gaming market has changed, and Wurm didn't manage to keep up (which makes perfect sense, how could it possbly keep up when many of those games have vastly bigger development teams and budgets). People eventually move on to those newer PvP games, and since Wurm is so far behind compared to said other games it obviously had a hard time attracting new PvP players. The end result is a server like Epic. Could the Wurm dev team have done something to actually save Epic? I doubt it.

 

The lack of unique features is an obvious consequence of that, not the cause. They did the smart thing by salvaging what they could from the dead.

 

I can give you a list of problems of why over 150 individuals I know personally no longer play on a PvP server, and most of them are very glaringly obvious balance issues, followed by people wanting a new map once those are changed.

 

A significant portion wanted to move over to freedom with the merge, but CC waited years too long, and they lost interest in playing the game after they made them wait on a dead server for 3 years.

 

When they took the unique features, that was reason for people to leave, because Epic was alive at that point, although certainly not booming like it was at launch, with you know, all those advertised features that weren't actually implemented at the time.

 

PvP is a buggy POS.

Edited by Prophetears
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Another big hit to PvP both Epic and Chaos.

 

I don't want to lose interest in PvP either.  Because then I'll quit the game too.  I don't get why developers are not trying to get these people playing massive accounts to stay in the game with changes needed to PvP that actually matter to the community.

 

I understand the graphic engines and stuff, but just ignoring us is _______________ !

 

 

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It's waaaaay too late to bring back pvp. Whatever the devs to from now on is simply going to slightly extend the inevitable. Every month and year that passes makes the wurm engine more and more out of date compared to its competitor. Dev team has no desire nor the realistic funds or logistics to create a sequel by rebuilding a new engine from ground up, they already confirmed that.

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