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Roccandil

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad skillgain suggestion!

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Been thinking about how fearful the developers are about macroing, and all the anti-exploit hoops honest players have to jump through as a result, as well as the developers' continued push for "engagement" that translates to extremely repetitive actions (see the new fishing system, and how many people haven't liked it), not to mention however much GM time is spent tracking down macroers (and the harm of community suspicions, etc.).

 

My conclusion is that if I were designing a new Wurm, I'd attempt to eliminate macroing entirely, by meeting the following requirement:

 

Make botting not only illegal, but also ineffective.

 

At the same time, however, I'd want skilling up to still take a long time. So, how to do that? For starters, I'd balance the game around players' toons doing the heavy skilling while their players are offline.

 

A couple obvious issues:

 

- I don't want players creating a premium toon, logging it off, and coming back X year(s) later to a master weaponsmith;

- If offline skilling is more effective than online botting, what is the player actually going to be doing?

 

My solution is earned off-line skilling, via diverse action goals. For a possible implementation example, consider a hybrid of the new fishing system and the new journal system:

 

- Create a journal just for fishing, starting with simple goals, such as catch a fish with a net, catch a fish with a spear, etc.;

- Gradually increase the complexity and difficulty of the goals;

- Instead of awarding sleep bonus, however, award offline grinding time.

 

So, a player completes a simple goal, and gets, say, 1 hour to put their toon into a "study" state to think about their experience, in order to advance the fishing skill. The study state can run while player is logged off and doing something else, or it could run while the toon is logged in (say, sitting in a chair, or staring into space with a vacant expression). The player can also rack up study time as much as they want via completing goals, and then spend it whenever they want.

 

I'm sure the devil's in the details, but ideally, each skill would have a huge goal tree, and the players would get to do the fun stuff while they're online, and while they're offline, their toons would do the boring, repetitive stuff.

 

As the developer, it would be up to me to balance the goals to be fun, different, challenging, and expansive, while making it impossible for one toon to quickly become expert at everything (at least in a Freedom-like, long-term environment), and keeping the goal system more effective than someone who just decides to skip it and use a bot.

 

I'm sure this would be too much for Freedom, probably too much for Epic, but not necessarily too much for a new challenge-like server.

 

If nothing else, however, I'm curious to see what you all think. :)

Edited by Roccandil

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3 hours ago, Roccandil said:

players would get to do the fun stuff

 

3 hours ago, Roccandil said:

sitting in a chair, or staring into space

 

TIL sitting in a pixel chair is fun.

 

I understand you have not enjoyed most things since you started playing as evidenced by the plethora of threads but i think you will find a lot of people who play actually enjoy playing wurm and would rather it didnt play itself.

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-1 i don't understand how you can even think that the game playing by itself is a good suggestion

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Reminds me slightly of how EvE online does it's "grinding" you que up the skills you want to improve and then it's a time based event that happens no matter what you do.

Even though the suggestion itself is pretty cool and truly a unique idea, I do think it will remove from the game and also alter a big chunk of Wurm's core gameplay.

 

I'd do a -1 on this but it's I hope it leads to a great topic of discussion.

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6 hours ago, SmeJack said:

TIL sitting in a pixel chair is fun.

 

I understand you have not enjoyed most things since you started playing as evidenced by the plethora of threads but i think you will find a lot of people who play actually enjoy playing wurm and would rather it didnt play itself. 

 

5 hours ago, Gladiator said:

-1 i don't understand how you can even think that the game playing by itself is a good suggestion 

 

You both think a repetitive click-fest is "playing"? Do you really think most people enjoy doing ten thousand iterations of exactly the same mind-numbing task? Why are you so against the idea of relieving players from that burden, and letting them have fun with actual gameplay?

 

Note the following:

 

- The time required to level up a skill via goals could be exactly the same as the current mass repetition system; the goal system would just be less carp-tunnel inducing, and more fun for more people.

- Real gameplay requires thinking; mashing a button over and over again does not.

 

5 hours ago, Sn00 said:

I'd do a -1 on this but it's I hope it leads to a great topic of discussion.

 

Thanks! :)

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The game is full of top tier accounts with 90+ skills and the prices are constantly dropping. This would make it easier to get a high skill, which would only make things worse.

 

-1

 

Quote

You both think a repetitive click-fest is "playing"? Do you really think most people enjoy doing ten thousand iterations of exactly the same mind-numbing task?

 

Yep. I like it.

Edited by happysad

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8 hours ago, Roccandil said:

You both think a repetitive click-fest is "playing"? Do you really think most people enjoy doing ten thousand iterations of exactly the same mind-numbing task?

 

that's here to keep us busy between two messages in the chat.

 

-1

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8 hours ago, happysad said:

The game is full of top tier accounts with 90+ skills and the prices are constantly dropping. This would make it easier to get a high skill, which would only make things worse.

 

It isn't a question of speed: a goal-based system could be balanced to be faster or slower (years slower!) than the existing system.

 

8 hours ago, happysad said:

Yep. I like it.

 

I realize the existing, tiny playerbase likes the existing game, with all its faults. (Seems logical, eh? :) The people who don't like it aren't playing or commenting on suggestions! They're just gone. :( )

 

The real problem is the tiny playerbase, and the trends don't look so good. You'll note, however, I didn't suggest changing Freedom. I was thinking more along these lines:

 

On 1/10/2019 at 1:32 AM, Alexgopen said:

Seasonal resetting pvp servers allow innovation and experimentation with new mechanics between seasons.  Any changes you later decide weren't a good idea won't have a permanent impact on the rest of the game.  You have a fresh slate to improve or make changes each season until you have whatever mechanics you want to implement fine tuned from the feedback of so many people trying them out in such a fast paced and active environment.  Changes that some players disagree with won't cause nearly as much uproar because it doesn't devalue any long term time investment they put in grinding their main characters.  The seasonal mechanics don't necessarily ever have to go out to the rest of the game, they can be purely for that game mode as was the case with challenge.

 

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