Feature Creeping Ad Nauseam

[Eyesgood 2,121]

IMHO, Wurm Online is in eternal Feature Creep mode.  While that is great for the players, it does not address the underlining reasons for Wurm's decline over recent years.  I think the following reasons are obvious.

 

1.  Pricing Model.

     In an age of free-to-play sandbox MMOs, Wurm's monetary model is not only deprecated in the minds of most, it is a detriment to future growth.

2.  Top-Heavy Player Base.

     When you have a game that allows everyone to be everything, something has to act as a leveling mechanism to give new players a sense of worth.  Something besides money (i.e. Pay to Win).

3.  Positively Zero Marketing.  

     When was the last time you saw an ad for Wurm Online on any industry website?

 

Why do the developers of Wurm Online ignore these three major problems with the game?  It is in their best interests to address them and fix them.

 

Fan or Flame away.

[JakeRivers 2,921]

2 hours ago, Eyesgood said:

Positively Zero Marketing

 

Hey they did a post on face book last year!

 

 

[armyskin 930]

I found Wurm 6 years ago in a PCGamer article titled 100 online games you have never heard of. I think it would still make it on the list.

[Palgolak 450]

18 minutes ago, armyskin said:

I found Wurm 6 years ago in a PCGamer article titled 100 online games you have never heard of. I think it would still make it on the list.

 

In 2011 it was in their 100 best PC games of all time (as number 56): https://www.pcgamer.com/the-100-best-pc-games-of-all-time/5/.

[Angelklaine 4,266]

Here we go again. I think I have seen a few posts like this during my tenure here.

 

@Retrogradeyou should make a form people tic boxes in to auto create one of these posts. Would save us time.

[armyskin 930]

4 hours ago, Palgolak said:

 

In 2011 it was in their 100 best PC games of all time (as number 56): https://www.pcgamer.com/the-100-best-pc-games-of-all-time/5/.

thats the one, issue came out just a few months before I started, thought it was unknown games

 

[Niki 2,278]

good thread

[Wargasm 1,927]

Or just delete it, so the devs don't have to pretend to read something that isn't there.

[Ricowan 199]

95% of MMO players want to rush through the leveling process to get to "end game" content.  Wurm is a totally different kind of MMO.

Player count WILL NEVER get better, adjust your expectations.

 

Personally, I don't see the issue with the player count.

 

[Roccandil 959]

33 minutes ago, Ricowan said:

Personally, I don't see the issue with the player count.

 

As long as Epic missions are designed around 50+ pop per server, I've got a problem with the player count.

[Reylaark 1,100]

22 hours ago, Eyesgood said:

3.  Positively Zero Marketing.  

     When was the last time you saw an ad for Wurm Online on any industry website?

 

Given the other issues you mentioned, and those you didn't mention such as the User Interface that (apparently) people have trouble with:

How would advertising help at the moment?  Not being facetious, would love to hear your thoughts.

My thoughts... a vast majority of today's players won't love it.  Say you get 5 people out of 100 who get Wurm after trying it out.  I mean they get it like those of us that love it. 

Great to have 5 new people, absolutely, but that leaves 95 to go forth and spread trash about it all over the place.

Suddenly, your advertising campaign that hit 3 or 4 sites is completely overshadowed by dozens of sites filled by the opinions of 95 poor souls that just don't get it.

 

Advertising could work if insanely targeted (maybe)... and gaming sites aren't the place to go.  IMHO, websites geared towards medieval LARPING, or medieval weapon enthusiasts.  That sort of thing where the content is the lure. 

 

22 hours ago, Eyesgood said:

2.  Top-Heavy Player Base.

     When you have a game that allows everyone to be everything, something has to act as a leveling mechanism to give new players a sense of worth.  Something besides money (i.e. Pay to Win).

 

The number 1 issue here is the top-heavy characters never go away.  They get sold, and kept in-game in perpetuity.

Where, normally, a player wanting to quit or taking a break opens up a vacuum to be filled by up and coming players, that simply doesn't happen in Wurm (Online).

 

Suggesting an end to this practice would unleash far more vitriol than I have patience for.

 

22 hours ago, Eyesgood said:

 

1.  Pricing Model.

     In an age of free-to-play sandbox MMOs, Wurm's monetary model is not only deprecated in the minds of most, it is a detriment to future growth.

 

WTB, money.

There was talk of an online shop of some sorts at some point by some one.  It would surely be a worthy discussion and an interesting one, but without providing viable alternatives for financial solvency... what do you suppose they ought to do?

 

22 hours ago, Eyesgood said:

IMHO, Wurm Online is in eternal Feature Creep mode.  While that is great for the players, it does not address the underlining reasons for Wurm's decline over recent years.  I think the following reasons are obvious.

 

Wurm Unlimited has served to address a number of the issues you've raised.  It's quietly marketed through Steam.  It has a one-time-fee pricing model.  Having many independent servers leaves room for players wanting to move up, and far as I know accounts aren't sold.

 

I do see a small but steady stream of new-to-wurm players choosing to continue playing on the server I enjoy.

Happy to talk about the reasons I believe that is the case if anyone is interested.

*************************************************************

 

One common refrain in ppl complaining about Wurm has been the eye-candy factor.  Many people have mentioned the graphics as an issue for them, and the new rendering engine certainly looks to me like it is helping in that regard.

That's going to affect how the new UI looks, I presume, so that will eventually be another big step towards wider acceptance.

Will today's players have the patience to sit and watch timers go by?

Will the have the perseverance to endure successive "fails"?

What about the combat system? 

 

There are big-ticket items to consider before inviting thousands of mini-critics to the party, imho.

[Roccandil 959]

2 minutes ago, Reylaark said:

The number 1 issue here is the top-heavy characters never go away.  They get sold, and kept in-game in perpetuity.

 

This shows just how many people would rather spend money for Wurm capabilities than grind them. It also shows that we really have two Wurms:

 

1) The Wurm you can play when you have the capabilities high-level skills represent;

2) The Wurm you -have- to play when you don't have those capabilities.

 

Wurm #2 -needs- to be fun, and not something people are willing to spend a -lot- of money to avoid. Fix that, and advertising might mean something.

[Reylaark 1,100]

6 hours ago, Roccandil said:

 

This shows just how many people would rather spend money for Wurm capabilities than grind them. It also shows that we really have two Wurms:

 

1) The Wurm you can play when you have the capabilities high-level skills represent;

2) The Wurm you -have- to play when you don't have those capabilities.

 

Wurm #2 -needs- to be fun, and not something people are willing to spend a -lot- of money to avoid. Fix that, and advertising might mean something.

 

Imagine every horse race started with 5 of 20 racehorses a foot from the finish line.  Why the heck would the other horses run all the way there?

The top 5 horses are always there, just a new jockey buys the right to sit on it. 

A more natural order of things is the top 5 eventually retire to pasture.  A remaining horse that was only level 60 weaponsmith is suddenly the best... it gets incentive to keep running to keep the lead, and others have incentive to run harder as they just may catch up!

 

Instead, we've got the champs a foot from the finish line.  Winning has nothing to do with training a horse to its best, that's been done.  Winning is just about buying the right to sit on the horse.  That's not much of a race.  Eventually, nobody bothers training a new horse. 

You get the 5 that keep changing hands, and a bunch of other sluggish horses nobody wants.

 

Don't know about you, but I'm taking my horse and joining another race that isn't quite so rigged.

[Roccandil 959]

16 minutes ago, Reylaark said:

 

Imagine every horse race started with 5 of 20 racehorses a foot from the finish line.  Why the heck would the other horses run all the way there?

The top 5 horses are always there, just a new jockey buys the right to sit on it. 

A more natural order of things is the top 5 eventually retire to pasture.  A remaining horse that was only level 60 weaponsmith is suddenly the best... it gets incentive to keep running to keep the lead, and others have incentive to run harder as they just may catch up!

 

Instead, we've got the champs a foot from the finish line.  Winning has nothing to do with training a horse to its best, that's been done.  Winning is just about buying the right to sit on the horse.  That's not much of a race.  Eventually, nobody bothers training a new horse. 

You get the 5 that keep changing hands, and a bunch of other sluggish horses nobody wants.

 

Don't know about you, but I'm taking my horse and joining another race that isn't quite so rigged.

 

If Wurm is a race, it's a time-dilated monstrosity that -nobody- ever finishes. Those top five horses will never quite make it to the finish, and if ridden, those other horses will -always- be gaining (even if they never catch up).

 

The trick is making it fun to gain.

[Wulfgarr 810]

On 10/28/2018 at 10:12 PM, armyskin said:

I found Wurm 6 years ago in a PCGamer article titled 100 online games you have never heard of. I think it would still make it on the list.

shut up and give my journal! 

[Scribble 57]

On 10/30/2018 at 12:31 AM, Reylaark said:

 

Imagine every horse race started with 5 of 20 racehorses a foot from the finish line.  Why the heck would the other horses run all the way there?

The top 5 horses are always there, just a new jockey buys the right to sit on it. 

A more natural order of things is the top 5 eventually retire to pasture.  A remaining horse that was only level 60 weaponsmith is suddenly the best... it gets incentive to keep running to keep the lead, and others have incentive to run harder as they just may catch up!

 

Instead, we've got the champs a foot from the finish line.  Winning has nothing to do with training a horse to its best, that's been done.  Winning is just about buying the right to sit on the horse.  That's not much of a race.  Eventually, nobody bothers training a new horse. 

You get the 5 that keep changing hands, and a bunch of other sluggish horses nobody wants.

 

Don't know about you, but I'm taking my horse and joining another race that isn't quite so rigged.

 

There's always going to be top dogs in MMOs. The problem is that in typical crafter MMOs it either doesn't take as long for people to get up to a competitive level with the top dogs, or alternatively lowbies are valuable to the top dogs because they can provide a service or access to materials that isn't feasible for the top dog to do himself.

 

In the first case, Wurm performs absolutely horribly. Not only does leveling skills to a competitive level take a very long time, in many cases skills got rebalanced around high skill players at the detriment of the new player (farming), or methods that allowed a player to get a lot of skill rapidly where patched out after some players had already abused them and thus had an unfair competitive advantage. This makes Wurm Online feel like an old boys club that cares only about the high skill level whales while neglecting the new player experience, or even making it worse.

 

In the latter case, there are ways where new players can be of use to top dogs by either getting lucky and mining gems, which they can sell to priests, or by just doing a lot of menial labor that produces material where quantity is more important than quality (digging dirt for terraforming projects, mining out bothersome ore veins, etc). This latter is boring, though, and not necessarily how you want your newbies to experience the game.

 

 

[Milkdrop 278]

25 minutes ago, Scribble said:

Not only does leveling skills to a competitive level take a very long time

That entirely depends on the person who is playing though, how much time that person invest into the game etc. etc.

If you know what you do and get everything set up properly it can take 1-2 weeks for "normal" skills to hit 90 (I got some skills to 90 by just doing nothing else for an entire week and burning sleep bonus / affinity food etc. - to most that may be boring and I define fun differently too, yet it is possible).

 

Then you have the skills that have lower gains like Weaponsmithing, which basically just take more time but nothing else changes.

(WS 1-90 took me about 1-2 months RL time and I am sure I didn't burn as hard as I could have, had I thrown more sleep powder at it but thats where we dip into the pay to win lands I feel?)

 

And another type imo are the tedious ones, like Meditation (not hard, but takes time to see a real reward) or Metalurgy / Alchemy (lots of moving items and clicking and so on, not as simple as imping a bunch of things) - carpal tunnel killers.

 

Body stats are the worst to "grind" for me, I don't even set my mind onto grinding one of those, they just tickle in as I play really.

There is some ways to have nice gains in Mind logic or Body strength and so on and I do use affinity foods for some when I do tasks that give points there but yea... not gona go crazy on those.

 

That being said, in the end it's hard when you make a MMO to cater to every type of player. (in a single player game no one cares, but in a MMO with a whiff of competition... yea mhhh)

Make skill gains to easy / fast and the "hardcores" will steamroll your content and flood the markets and eventually quit in due time again to move on like a locust swarm.

Make the game to hard / grindy and the "casuals" who do not have the time or patience will slowly burn out and wittle away.

Finding a middle ground that works for everyone is really tough job here.

Also, when looking at other MMOs there is very few like Wurm, maybe EVE? Idk really, the run of the mill MMO resets every 1-2 years with a expansion, your entire gear and skill grind becomes obsolete and everyone gets a chance to start from scratch... we don't have that here.

 

One wrong decision and the entire game can fall apart really quick.

Like skill decay to force higher people to keep their skills polished?

Sure, no one would be able to take a longer break from the game anymore and then when you would feel like returning after half a year you see all the hours you poured into getting a skill to 90 being reduced to 70 or whatever.. yea no, rather play a different game then - player lost entirely. Taking things away from people never worked great.

The best option here would still be to prohibit character sales, but as often said people would find ways.

For this one issue I do not see any good solutions that everyone and truely everyone would be happy with.

The question is what will it be in the end, move forward and change things or change nothing...  either of those ways could spell disaster and no one knows it for sure until we reach the end of that way.

 

It's not all that easy as some people make it out to be, it's one thing to demand this or that to change but if you miss one small part of the whole picture it may as well just be the final nail in the coffin.

For now it's the easiest for devs to "polish" the game, improve the visuals and other things while being super careful to not make the current playerbase angry with nerfs to existing mechanics.

[Scribble 57]

Quote

If you know what you do and get everything set up properly it can take 1-2 weeks for "normal" skills to hit 90 (I got some skills to 90 by just doing nothing else for an entire week and burning sleep bonus / affinity food etc. - to most that may be boring and I define fun differently too, yet it is possible).

 

The new player doesn't have access to any of this, and even if he did, 1-2 weeks is an insanely mindboggling long time to expect a person to spend on grinding a single skill to what is considered a 'competitive' level.

 

Years ago, the devs still spoke of the "the dream". A final version of Wurm Online where there were no progress bars. Where you would click on trees to chop them down, click to swing your sword, etcetera etcetera.

That game exists now. It's called Minecraft, and it was and still is a smash hit. Made by Notch when he left the team because he disagreed with Rolf on what the game should be. Not some kind of progress quest with shiny graphics where you have to cancel your day job, become a hermit and prepare your poop sock and pee bottle in order to play the game 'properly'.

 

Underneath the surface, Wurm Online is a great game, but the grind is dragging it down like a malicious cancer, making it really difficult to enjoy the game, and it's the main reason new players last about a week before they log off never to be seen again, and the old userbase has gotten so used to it that they don't or can't see the elephant in the room.

 

Unless anything is done, Wurm Online will die a slow death where the playercount gradually decreases as one by one the veterans grow up and carry on with their lives, and nobody comes in to replace them.

Edited November 3, 2018 by Scribble

[Roccandil 959]

1 hour ago, Scribble said:

Underneath the surface, Wurm Online is a great game, but the grind is dragging it down like a malicious cancer, making it really difficult to enjoy the game, and it's the main reason new players last about a week before they log off never to be seen again, and the old userbase has gotten so used to it that they don't or can't see the elephant in the room.

 

This.

[Ayes 3,715]

There has always been a great resistance by the Developers to reduce the time grind for skill leveling. Then also much new content follows this extended time requirement, being that newer more desirable additions to the game are mostly setup as taking longer to create or build than older models which provide the same basic function. At the core this basic concept has changed little over the years.

 

Now however Wurm Unlimited has entered the picture with the ability of Public Server owners to reduce these time grinds considerably, offering advanced WO game content to a more casual player on a shorter time frame investment. This is Wurm Online's great competitor now for those who would wish a faster opportunity to advance in game options and play-ability and I see little interest from WO Developers to try and match it.

 

=Ayes=

[Ascorbic 265]

I think Retro deserves some credit for the streaming community he has been building up.

Honestly, I think they should focus on trying to convert WU to WO.  I thought that was the intention of WU, but I feel like the ball got massively dropped.  

There needs to be many reasons for a WU player to want to play on WO.

 

I lost my whole village to WU...  8+ people (and alts) that consistently paid monthly to play Wurm moved to Unlimited, because there was no incentive to keep playing online.

 

Reasons I play Online over Unlimited:

The Economy, which is so broken, I've thought about going back to unlimited.

The Wagoner

AND THAT'S IT!

 

 

 

[armyskin 930]

That feel when you remember starting back in the day and all those big accounts were miles ahead of you but you played anyway and now they are only feet ahead of you and everyone alongside or behind you has stopped the race.

[Muse 2,223]

As it's been said many times, there are two kinds of new player: A and B.

 

When they see a high level player they react differently:

 

A "One day I'm gonna get that good!"

B "One day I'm gonna get that b*****!"

[Reylaark 1,100]

6 hours ago, Ascorbic said:

I think Retro deserves some credit for the streaming community he has been building up.

Honestly, I think they should focus on trying to convert WU to WO.  I thought that was the intention of WU, but I feel like the ball got massively dropped.  

There needs to be many reasons for a WU player to want to play on WO.

 

I lost my whole village to WU...  8+ people (and alts) that consistently paid monthly to play Wurm moved to Unlimited, because there was no incentive to keep playing online.

 

Reasons I play Online over Unlimited:

The Economy, which is so broken, I've thought about going back to unlimited.

The Wagoner

AND THAT'S IT!

 

I don't really think there's any turning the back the clock on WU.  I think the only unfortunate thing about it is there isn't a more long term monetization of it.

 

The ability to customize the environment at the server level means things like a cold winter are possible for those interested.  Removal of the road system is possible.  There's just so much potential with dungeons, events, bounties, etc.

 

I don't think the focus should be a competition with WU. 

I think if they could figure out a way to monetize WU on a more continual basis, that would be the more productive way to go.  I have literally no idea how they would do that.