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Angelklaine

Devlog thread closed?

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4 hours ago, Nappy said:
9 hours ago, MrGARY said:

Action speaks, words don't

 

A lot seems to be undergoing currently.. either changes are happening a bit slow or community craves new content/change/fixes a bit faster than they are possible to happen, in the past few months we had some fast content changes and that might have given the idea that everything turns from words to actions in matter of weeks not months as it was for a while before that.

 

Can we just chill for another month-2 and see how dev stream content goes.. and what could be learned from that new media?

Calm your keyboards a bit.

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Cash shop always has my mind going crazy about to potential stuff that could be added AND actually create easy money for wurm development:

  • * Different poses for the colossi (buying a shaper-wand, lets you change the pose of a colossus 5 times)
  • * Different NPC's to plant on your deed that say random stuff every now and then, maybe walk around the deed, do a fishing animation near water, training against a trainingdummy, etc (makes things more lively)
  • * A huge variety of clothes, just cosmetic (the amount only limited by how hard you can whip the graphics-team)
  • * Everlasting varity of non-chopable trees, reskins ofcourse to set them appart from their normal variants (I really want a massive beautifull oak at the centre of my deed)
  • * Shield patterns
  • * Different designs for weapons
  • * ....

 

Lots of us are old folks, having a job and usually some money to spare. A cash shop has the potential to really bring in the money, I know I would spend allot if the option I mentioned above came into the cashshop.

 

 

That aside, I've never really been bothered by roadmaps. Wurm has enough to keep me busy (playing since 2009, 550 days of playtime), that I dont really feel the need to know whats coming.

I rather like the suprise to suddenly see that a new cooking sysytem is coming, new fishing system, chicken coops, animal cages, teleport spells, archeology, etc...

 

I'm happy with the info that dev's are working on big new features, thats more then enough for me, knowing that the future is safe for a while longer and new features/skills are on the horizon.

Tho I can imagen it being more frustrating for pvp'ers, being left in the dark about the future of pvp.

But as a freedommer, having so many plans that I still havent gotten the time to make a bridge of my own or test out the new fishing system, I dont see much harm in dev's keeping stuff hidden untill its good enough to be revealed/mentioned in a Valrei International

Edited by Lycanthropic
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Transmogs(like they used to have in wow) for our weapons, armours and shields with new unique but still realistic look would be cool. Imagine if you could turn your rare lonsword into falchion or saber or instead of having boring old one colored shield you could get some cool design on it :)

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18 hours ago, Sindusk said:

I believe there's a plan that would help Epic immensely and make it one of the best places to play. All it would take is to explain that plan and then commit to making it happen. It wouldn't come anytime soon, and would draw quite a few questions, but I truly believe that plan is one of the best ways forwards for Epic. At the very least, you'd see more players there. That's for sure.

Any more specifics? I bet all would like to hear that.

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18 minutes ago, Wilczan said:

Any more specifics? I bet all would like to hear that.

I think we should allow for CCAB to announce it. Lets give them time. 

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1 hour ago, Angelklaine said:

I think we should allow for CCAB to announce it. Lets give them time. 

Agreed. Let's see, what would be reasonable? We only started asking for a plan about two years ago. I think there was another group asking a year or two before that. Perhaps if we give them another five years they might feel inclined to share?

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4 minutes ago, Nappy said:

Agreed. Let's see, what would be reasonable? We only started asking for a plan about two years ago. I think there was another group asking a year or two before that. Perhaps if we give them another five years they might feel inclined to share?

Yes but you have to consider it hasn't been that long since the Dev team got into gear. When Sindusk joined the team we got a bunch of releases in a very short amount of time.  What I think Sindusk is alluding to is something he either saw or was involved in when he was a Dev. So its safe to assume something recent is in the works. 

 

Bringing up the point that the team was "lazy" 5 years ago doesn't mean they are "lazy" now. As a team the devs have recently pushed a few good releases. Give them a few months. I have faith it will be worth the wait.

Edited by Angelklaine

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Not a question of lazy now or 5 years ago. I actually don't think they are lazy or indeed ever were.

 

I think instead that they don't understand how to communicate, how to build up a community using communication etc. Instead they rely on silence and they fear sharing any info at all.

 

People sometimes read silence as indifference, lack of caring and things of that nature.

 

Look at this incident as an example.

 

Sindusk made a comment about something that might be happening. Chances are that he has shared information he wasn't authorized to, or he is just speculating on something privileged that he observed or guessed. It doesn't mean he is right or that they haven't changed direction since he left the team.

 

Due to his positive impression on the WO community when he was part of the dev team, his comment, regardless of correctness, did the one thing that no official communication has managed to do. It gave a community that feels abandoned and ignored the hope that maybe something good is finally about to happen.

 

That's the type of reaction that official communications need to start doing again. They need to build a sense of anticipation, a belief that things are getting better and that wurm is the place to be. In fact they should be conveying a sense that you should bring all your friends here too because if you aren't playing wurm then you are really missing out.

 

Instead what we get is gloomy silence, suggestions that the community needs to give them time, blah, blah, blah.

 

Start showing us you have a plan, that there is treasure at the end of the rainbow and that wurm will still exist years from now. If you don't well at some point the naysayers will be right and you will have lost the community that you took ten+ years to build through inability to communicate the plan.

 

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ok something a bit more constructive. my last post was a bit too emotional. :rolleyes:

https://medium.com/@jboogie/what-does-an-agile-product-roadmap-look-like-cf0dbe5be4ef

 

Spoiler

What does an agile product roadmap look like?

Go to the profile of Jeff Gothelf
 
Jeff GothelfFollow
Nov 12, 2018

One of the biggest challenges in product management is planning the work in a linear, visual way. Sure, we’ve had “roadmaps” for a long time but they betray the true nature of software development. Digital product development is not linear. It is iterative. We build some things. We ship them. We see how they impact customer behaviour. We iterate them and ship again.

The traditional linear roadmap model, one where there is a starting point and clear, feature-specific endpoint (almost always with a fixed date) is outdated. It reflects an output-focused mode of operating a digital business. Instead, today, successful product-led organisations focus on outcomes. Outcomes, as I’ve mentioned here time and again, are the changes in customer behaviour that affect our business success. They are the true measure of the efficacy of our work and how well we’re meeting the needs of our customers and users.

However, managing to outcomes is much more difficult as it dispenses with the pretence that we can predict the future, know exactly how our software will look and function and what our customers will do with it when they finally get to use it. How then do we build product roadmaps in a world of continuous improvement, learning and agility?

Here is what an agile product roadmap should look like:

 
1*XpFXZzvJc3zwmFMPhlWjoQ.png
An outcome-based product roadmap for agile teams

You’ll notice a few key components in this diagram:

  1. Strategic themes — these are the organisational product strategies set by executive leaders pointing the teams in a specific direction. These can be things like, “Expand our market share in Europe” or “Leverage the under-utilised time our fleet isn’t ferrying passengers to deliver other goods and food.” There can be multiple themes running in parallel for a larger organisation.
  2. Quarterly OKR goals — we’ve spoken here about Objectives and Key Results in the past but it’s worth reiterating that OKR, when done well, use customer behaviour as the metrics in the “key results” part of the equation. These quarterly outcome goals are where each team is going to focus in an effort to help achieve the strategic theme. This is the goal teams strive to achieve. It is their definition of success and their definition of done. They should work together with leadership to ensure these are aligned and properly levelled.
  3. Feature/product hypotheses — These are the team’s best guesses as to how they will achieve this quarter’s OKR goals. Looking out one quarter in advance a team can make strong, educated guesses about what product or feature ideas they think will achieve their quarterly goals. Looking out two quarters ahead, those guesses become less confident so the team makes less of them. Three and four quarters out, the teams really have no idea what they’ll be working on so these guesses become fewer and fewer. This is exactly the way it should be. Teams will learn in the next quarter or two how well their ideas worked, what moves the needles forward and what their next guesses should be. The boxes for Q3 and Q4 will fill up as learning from Q1 and Q2 gets synthesised and acted on.

Frequency of review:
Each team should present this type of outcome-based roadmap for review at the beginning of an annual cycle. It should align with the strategic goals leadership has set and ensure their OKR’s use metrics that ladder up to these goals (Want to learn how to do this? Start here.)

While it’s incumbent on the team to continually expose what they are doing, learning and deciding, official check-ins can happen on a quarterly basis. Teams meet with leaders to determine how well they’ve tracked towards their OKR’s, what they’ve learned during the last quarter and what they plan on doing in the next quarter. This is a perfect opportunity to reaffirm the validity of the team’s OKR’s going forward and to make any adjustments based on new learnings, market conditions or any other factor that may have affected the direction of the company.

Measuring progress:
Progress on this type of roadmap is not measured in how many features have been delivered or whether they’ve been delivered on time. Instead, progress is measured on how well we’ve changed customer behaviour for the better. If our ideas didn’t drive customer success, we kill those ideas and move on to new ones. The learning drives ideas for future quarterly backlogs.

These are living documents. We don’t fix these at the beginning of an annual cycle and leave them as if they were etched in stone. There is too much uncertainty and complexity in delivering digital products and services. Product-led organizations — those focused on customer success with empowered teams — ensure that they’re always pointed in the right direction. Outcome-based roadmaps ensure that leaders and teams are being transparent with each other, realistic about their goals and targets and most importantly about how they measure success.

 

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3 hours ago, Nappy said:

Not a question of lazy now or 5 years ago. I actually don't think they are lazy or indeed ever were.

 

I think instead that they don't understand how to communicate, how to build up a community using communication etc. Instead they rely on silence and they fear sharing any info at all.

 

People sometimes read silence as indifference, lack of caring and things of that nature.

 

Look at this incident as an example.

 

Sindusk made a comment about something that might be happening. Chances are that he has shared information he wasn't authorized to, or he is just speculating on something privileged that he observed or guessed. It doesn't mean he is right or that they haven't changed direction since he left the team.

 

Due to his positive impression on the WO community when he was part of the dev team, his comment, regardless of correctness, did the one thing that no official communication has managed to do. It gave a community that feels abandoned and ignored the hope that maybe something good is finally about to happen.

 

That's the type of reaction that official communications need to start doing again. They need to build a sense of anticipation, a belief that things are getting better and that wurm is the place to be. In fact they should be conveying a sense that you should bring all your friends here too because if you aren't playing wurm then you are really missing out.

 

Instead what we get is gloomy silence, suggestions that the community needs to give them time, blah, blah, blah.

 

Start showing us you have a plan, that there is treasure at the end of the rainbow and that wurm will still exist years from now. If you don't well at some point the naysayers will be right and you will have lost the community that you took ten+ years to build through inability to communicate the plan.

 

I find myself agreeing with this. You make a good point.

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1 hour ago, Griffith said:

ok something a bit more constructive. my last post was a bit too emotional. :rolleyes:

https://medium.com/@jboogie/what-does-an-agile-product-roadmap-look-like-cf0dbe5be4ef

 

  Reveal hidden contents

What does an agile product roadmap look like?

Go to the profile of Jeff Gothelf
 
Jeff GothelfFollow
Nov 12, 2018

One of the biggest challenges in product management is planning the work in a linear, visual way. Sure, we’ve had “roadmaps” for a long time but they betray the true nature of software development. Digital product development is not linear. It is iterative. We build some things. We ship them. We see how they impact customer behaviour. We iterate them and ship again.

The traditional linear roadmap model, one where there is a starting point and clear, feature-specific endpoint (almost always with a fixed date) is outdated. It reflects an output-focused mode of operating a digital business. Instead, today, successful product-led organisations focus on outcomes. Outcomes, as I’ve mentioned here time and again, are the changes in customer behaviour that affect our business success. They are the true measure of the efficacy of our work and how well we’re meeting the needs of our customers and users.

However, managing to outcomes is much more difficult as it dispenses with the pretence that we can predict the future, know exactly how our software will look and function and what our customers will do with it when they finally get to use it. How then do we build product roadmaps in a world of continuous improvement, learning and agility?

Here is what an agile product roadmap should look like:

 
1*XpFXZzvJc3zwmFMPhlWjoQ.png

An outcome-based product roadmap for agile teams

You’ll notice a few key components in this diagram:

  1. Strategic themes — these are the organisational product strategies set by executive leaders pointing the teams in a specific direction. These can be things like, “Expand our market share in Europe” or “Leverage the under-utilised time our fleet isn’t ferrying passengers to deliver other goods and food.” There can be multiple themes running in parallel for a larger organisation.
  2. Quarterly OKR goals — we’ve spoken here about Objectives and Key Results in the past but it’s worth reiterating that OKR, when done well, use customer behaviour as the metrics in the “key results” part of the equation. These quarterly outcome goals are where each team is going to focus in an effort to help achieve the strategic theme. This is the goal teams strive to achieve. It is their definition of success and their definition of done. They should work together with leadership to ensure these are aligned and properly levelled.
  3. Feature/product hypotheses — These are the team’s best guesses as to how they will achieve this quarter’s OKR goals. Looking out one quarter in advance a team can make strong, educated guesses about what product or feature ideas they think will achieve their quarterly goals. Looking out two quarters ahead, those guesses become less confident so the team makes less of them. Three and four quarters out, the teams really have no idea what they’ll be working on so these guesses become fewer and fewer. This is exactly the way it should be. Teams will learn in the next quarter or two how well their ideas worked, what moves the needles forward and what their next guesses should be. The boxes for Q3 and Q4 will fill up as learning from Q1 and Q2 gets synthesised and acted on.

Frequency of review:
Each team should present this type of outcome-based roadmap for review at the beginning of an annual cycle. It should align with the strategic goals leadership has set and ensure their OKR’s use metrics that ladder up to these goals (Want to learn how to do this? Start here.)

While it’s incumbent on the team to continually expose what they are doing, learning and deciding, official check-ins can happen on a quarterly basis. Teams meet with leaders to determine how well they’ve tracked towards their OKR’s, what they’ve learned during the last quarter and what they plan on doing in the next quarter. This is a perfect opportunity to reaffirm the validity of the team’s OKR’s going forward and to make any adjustments based on new learnings, market conditions or any other factor that may have affected the direction of the company.

Measuring progress:
Progress on this type of roadmap is not measured in how many features have been delivered or whether they’ve been delivered on time. Instead, progress is measured on how well we’ve changed customer behaviour for the better. If our ideas didn’t drive customer success, we kill those ideas and move on to new ones. The learning drives ideas for future quarterly backlogs.

These are living documents. We don’t fix these at the beginning of an annual cycle and leave them as if they were etched in stone. There is too much uncertainty and complexity in delivering digital products and services. Product-led organizations — those focused on customer success with empowered teams — ensure that they’re always pointed in the right direction. Outcome-based roadmaps ensure that leaders and teams are being transparent with each other, realistic about their goals and targets and most importantly about how they measure success.

 

Thank-you for sharing this post. Road maps are what is needed here with the appropriate expectation setting that goes along with them.

 

Sometimes people forget that a road map can be seen as very similar to a weather forecast. Today and Tomorrow's weather are almost certain however sometimes things happen. Next week's weather is way less certain and of course a forecast of what next winter looks like is likely to miss to have some real changes before it arrives. Agile road maps are like this too. Immediate iteration is almost certain, a month out less so, a quarter out even less certain and a year away is more about overall strategic goals then it is tactical reality.

 

Agile is also about smaller and more frequent releases rather then long delays between releases. This allows the development team to change direction in a hurry when there is a real need to do so.

 

Communication is around explaining how this works, clearly setting expectations around each timing block and then being very transparent and upfront about what is being done, challenges faced etc. It's also about guiding the discussion so that people can provide feedback, dev team can provide response and overall everyone feels like they've been heard etc.

 

Don't get me wrong, this can be challenging to get started, usually because of lost trust on both sides. In the early days it can also be easily derailed if there isn't a real commitment to seeing it through. With time however you create raving fans, people who start singing the dev teams blessings because they see results rather then excuses.

 

BTW: This isn't theoretical for me. It's what I do for a living. I usually am hired to take over a failed or failing project. Sometimes law suits are underway and in all cases the two parties no longer trust each other. In that world the only thing you can really do is show through actions that you mean what you say. It is a tricky walk for awhile however when it works it is a fantastic experience for everyone.

 

For the people on Epic, WO needs to show that they have a future, that they've been heard and that there is a plan being executed with a listing of what's been achieved so far in the past (insert timeline) and what's planned for the future (again with clear expectation setting on weather forecast idea shown above).

 

~Nappy

 

Edited by Nappy
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I do believe we have stated several times there is a plan for epic, but it's not on the top of our priorities, we know the issues with the map and systems and we do see several areas it can be improved.

 

We have shared roadmaps in the past, and as all roadmaps go they get derailed and things come up, which is fair. I do understand the desire to see an idea of what we have planned for the future and I will work on getting more information to share during our devstreams. For the past few months our focus has been the journal and bringing many graphics systems up to modern times (or you know, post 2010). The current core remains the same, polishing many areas of graphics including distant terrain, continued UI improvements and expanding some end game content. These are the things we are working on and expect to have in first. 

 

We're in the beginning of shifting from our previous style of pushing fixes and whatever content is ready every 2 weeks to actively planning what will be coming in each small update, giving us time to work on larger updates several times a year.  Part of this is to better facilitate sharing of what's coming and what we're working on, the larger time periods give us more solid work time (as anyone knows, start time/wrap up time is almost constant, but a longer chunk of core time in the middle is what we get). This also means that we can frame out what we foresee working on in the next 4-6 months in time frames that are easier to deliver on.

 

Up until last year we benefited greatly from Tich's long term projects guaranteeing us huge overhauls at least once per year (and several minor/major changes along the way). With her passing we need to re-evaluate our production focus and ensure we are working to our best efforts. 

 

Just because people have applied as volunteer developers does not mean they will get in, we do have a small team of volunteers that do a lot of work with bug fixes and features they work on as well. Taking on a new developer is a significant time and energy investment that at this point is better spend putting into the game with the existing developer team.

 

 

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32 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

I do believe we have stated several times there is a plan for epic, but it's not on the top of our priorities

 

Are you saying that this stance towards epic hasn't changed much in the past few years (or is it longer)?  The only "attention" epic gained was a different skilling system and allowing people to partially leave the cluster, neither of which is a plan for epic and if anything, just made the situation worse.  How long before epic is a priority?  Will epic ever be the top of any priorities, or pvp as a whole for that matter?

 

All I see is the same book with a different cover, excuses and generic pr comments to stall more and more time.  All we ask for is something tangible and to stop ignoring the elephant in the room and covering it up

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56 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

Taking on a new developer is a significant time and energy investment that at this point is better spend putting into the game with the existing developer team.

Well, every investment pays back later. If you guys invested in new developers 1-2 years ago, now they would be fully functional, helping whole team.

So delaying anything, couse here and now it isnt profitable, is a mistake.

 

If You cannot start Epic overhaul now, couse of other projects (let's be honest, there are always gonna be other projects), then maybe just start from smaller fixes, like repairing broken Valrei system, patching some bugs.

Believe it or not, but for most people that still play here, Valrei is some sort of end-game. And it is extremely frustrating, when you put a lot of effort into it, and all goes to waste couse of bugs.

 

I'am always curious, what's @Rolfpoint of view about Epic currently. I remember that someone mentioned that Rolf talks with a dev team on a daily basis. Maybe he could put any statement on this and soothe our minds?

Or he is like a "god" from a Supernatural series, that only watches and almost never interfere, no matter how shitty situation is?

 

giphy.gif

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https://trello.com/b/TTAVI7Ny/ue4-roadmap

look a simple no set time road map that shows a list of upcoming features that gets added and taken away from and slowly moved over as things progress

as for your developer comment retro that is not true if you find a proper java developer who is willing to help out it does not take a significant amount of time and energy to such a degree that it would slow down the entire staff team and cause delays it might take 1 person a few days to a week or 2(depending on what you want this dev to work on) originally to be fully up to speed and honestly it will be a worthwhile investment

 

1 hour ago, Retrograde said:

The current core remains the same, polishing many areas of graphics including distant terrain, continued UI improvements and expanding some end game content. These are the things we are working on and expect to have in first. 

 

this right here if this was posted up somewhere as a simple roadmap add in some extra fluff around it and publish that in an official capacity somewhere besides a forum post in a random topic and it will go a looooong way to pleasing people who are worried that the game is dead and development has gotten down to nothing it isnt that much work really we know you can do it it might take a hour or 2-3 of work but a list can be created of currently planned features and what is currently being worked on and give no release time as it is not needed and most people will see "hey wurm has things in the works i want to see how this plays out" and it will keep interest in the game we dont need major skill overhauls every 6 months(infact most of us hate or dislike it) we just want there to be more information about the state of development about the game we love and spend so much time and money on that is all

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1 hour ago, wipeout said:

if this was posted up somewhere

 

Samool and Saroman are doing a fantastic job holding the team weight here but sadly its not either of them (client or art devs) that will save epic/pvp, this needs a server dev that isnt doing an overhaul of the UI for the past 4 years or weird valrei changes without base stabilisation.

tl;dr

Telling the starved and anemic pvpers that skin textures are about to become amazing sadly isnt going to spark any hope

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1 hour ago, wipeout said:

this right here if this was posted up somewhere as a simple roadmap add in some extra fluff around it and publish that in an official capacity somewhere besides a forum post in a random topic and it will go a looooong way to pleasing people who are worried that the game is dead and development has gotten down to nothing it isnt that much work really we know you can do it it might take a hour or 2-3 of work but a list can be created of currently planned features and what is currently being worked on and give no release time as it is not needed and most people will see "hey wurm has things in the works i want to see how this plays out" and it will keep interest in the game we dont need major skill overhauls every 6 months(infact most of us hate or dislike it) we just want there to be more information about the state of development about the game we love and spend so much time and money on that is all

The issue there is on paper it looks fine, but in reality seeing no progress on things creates extreme frustration. The ue 4 roadmap you show is carefully curated in order to show progress is being done. The valrei International is that showcasing what's in the works, the issue we face there is being fortnightly progress isn't always that fast on projects, which means the news feels diluted. 

 

It's something I've been looking at along with the dev team, with the goal of identifying how we can make the VI informative and less watered down. One idea is to shrink it to a monthly production with a fortnightly dev stream, so the dev stream replacing the fortnightly news and the VI being the blog of what's coming in the next update. I also want to include more community stuff with what's going on, will be continuing to think about it. 

 

1 hour ago, Wilczan said:

If You cannot start Epic overhaul now, couse of other projects (let's be honest, there are always gonna be other projects), then maybe just start from smaller fixes, like repairing broken Valrei system, patching some bugs.

 Believe it or not, but for most people that still play here, Valrei is some sort of end-game. And it is extremely frustrating, when you put a lot of effort into it, and all goes to waste couse of bugs.

If there are bugs I can nag with the reports alectrys will have logged them, I'll need to check the bug reports section. If you have any you can directly link me please do so. 

 

2 hours ago, MrGARY said:

Are you saying that this stance towards epic hasn't changed much in the past few years (or is it longer)?  The only "attention" epic gained was a different skilling system and allowing people to partially leave the cluster, neither of which is a plan for epic and if anything, just made the situation worse.  How long before epic is a priority?  Will epic ever be the top of any priorities, or pvp as a whole for that matter?

 

Epic received the valrei mission overhaul along with the faster skilling system and allowing transfers for those who wished to continue to play on freedom with their skills. As for how long until it becomes a priority, I don't know, that depends on how long the things before it take, they'll be part of what goes into any work on epic. One thing we want to do is bring the varied combat dynamics that the spawn of uttacha has to other Valrei mobs, it's been wanted by us for a while. 

 

PvP has had a lot of focus with the majority of the priest rework and the tower chaining system, the hota system as well, Sindusk did a lot of bringing those floating ideas out into the game as well as including his own, it would be unfair to say PvP has not had any attention lately, but I can understand the glaringly obvious issues Epic has such as the map being somewhat annoying that they're not resolved with just wiping the map, but that's also unfair to many players who still play and invest time and energy into the epic cluster. 

 

1 hour ago, Wilczan said:

Well, every investment pays back later. If you guys invested in new developers 1-2 years ago, now they would be fully functional, helping whole team.

 So delaying anything, couse here and now it isnt profitable, is a mistake.

We have a solid developer team with both epic, PvP, and PvE experience as well as GM experience too, a well rounded team with a lot of knowledge of the game working well, the new developers we took on a year or so ago are very functional and working well within the team. 

 

 

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9 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

The issue there is on paper it looks fine, but in reality seeing no progress on things creates extreme frustration. The ue 4 roadmap you show is carefully curated in order to show progress is being done. The valrei International is that showcasing what's in the works, the issue we face there is being fortnightly progress isn't always that fast on projects, which means the news feels diluted. 

 

It's something I've been looking at along with the dev team, with the goal of identifying how we can make the VI informative and less watered down. One idea is to shrink it to a monthly production with a fortnightly dev stream, so the dev stream replacing the fortnightly news and the VI being the blog of what's coming in the next update. I also want to include more community stuff with what's going on, will be continuing to think about it. 

 

Honestly once a month or once every 3 months a post about current status of ongoing projects is fine by most i think so long as we know a longer term plan that is loosely held up without any set deadlines thats the thing we dont expect you guys to do once every week content  updates from here to the moon the game is far to old for that and the dev team way to small we just hope for more info and more to look forward to and like i mentioned here and in other posts before once a month posts is fine just fill them with worthwhile content as that is a lot better then "here is some pretty pictures of these 2 minor features" we rather just hear "we made some progress on these things and we are happy to say some of our projects are getting closer to the stage where we can talk about them" and that along side a roadmap of sorts will make people wonder "hey i wonder what features they are talking about" it makes people bit more hyped 

But ya for me personally i just hope for more info if that info comes once every month or once every 3 months that doesnt matter just share more and that will be good

Also we do love you guys(well most of you ;) ) and keep up the work and slowly work to becoming better and better we know you guys can do it

Edited by wipeout

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I don't think that fancy graphics, UI, better textures, visuals are going to attract people or keep them interested.

 

Back when i started, the game looked a lot worse, and simplistic, yet had a lot more players than it does now. Veterans and older players aren't going to be suddenly interested or return because there has been some improvements to terrain rendering or changes to the UI or other visual changes. The game will always look kinda eh since it is in Java. People who thought or said that it looked like ###### back then will most likely continue to say that. At least, people whom i've recently spoken to. 

 

At this point, even the old "release a new server every year to get a sudden boost of players" sounds more attractive. Then again, i heard Xanadu still suffers from issues... 

Edited by atazs
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13 hours ago, Retrograde said:

If there are bugs I can nag with the reports alectrys will have logged them, I'll need to check the bug reports section. If you have any you can directly link me please do so. 

 

Most of these bugs have been on the bug tracker for years, known to exist well before the valrei update, and known to exist during and after with plenty of updates via bug card, forums, and irc.

 

13 hours ago, Retrograde said:

Epic received the valrei mission overhaul along with the faster skilling system and allowing transfers for those who wished to continue to play on freedom with their skills. As for how long until it becomes a priority, I don't know, that depends on how long the things before it take, they'll be part of what goes into any work on epic. One thing we want to do is bring the varied combat dynamics that the spawn of uttacha has to other Valrei mobs, it's been wanted by us for a while. 

 

PvP has had a lot of focus with the majority of the priest rework and the tower chaining system, the hota system as well, Sindusk did a lot of bringing those floating ideas out into the game as well as including his own, it would be unfair to say PvP has not had any attention lately, but I can understand the glaringly obvious issues Epic has such as the map being somewhat annoying that they're not resolved with just wiping the map, but that's also unfair to many players who still play and invest time and energy into the epic cluster. 

 

Honestly, and this isn't a new feeling and it's felt by many as you could see if you look at pretty much any mention of valrei since the update, the "overhaul" only made things more convoluted and worse.  God stats aren't fair, people don't even know what they do or why every god needs a ton of stats, and this has been on the forums so its not a quiet whine.  Some missions are objectively worse, especially readding sacrifice missions that literally no one enjoyed nor wanted back especially not worse than it used to be before it was removed.  I don't really get how a quick tweak to a few things and making things more complicated really constitutes giving epic real attention, and that's probably apparent by the fact people that still play epic need to use alts in order to get all 9 possible rewards from winning a scenario.  Do you really believe the wu skill system that people protested against combined with transfers to freedom once and freedom to epic all the time was a fix for epic?  Is encouraging people to leave epic and only come back or try it out if they want to mess around without risking their freedom skills a good thing for epic?

 

The priest overhaul is joint pve and pvp.  The tower chaining system is hardly a huge overhaul or much of an overhaul at all, and if anything is just reverting to an older pre-existing system with some slight differences.  The new hota I'll give as something kind of new, but the fact is, if we give some big leeway and consider all 3 things to be heavy pvp oriented overhauls and content updates, can we consider 3 notable updates after years to be a lot of attention?  Is it complicated to understand that you can't just give pvp one thing and then ignore it until the next thing a year later or whenever?  It is not self sustaining and it needs more focus than "yeah well we gave you guys this or that update each year why isn't that good enough?"  What makes it worse is when you realize this focus is really all a reality because of the same single volunteer dev that actually took action, but then he quit.

 

If when you think of glaringly obvious issues that epic has and the one and only thing that comes to mind to mention is the map, then I don't think anyone with the power to change anything or direct anything to be changed is actually listening to the players.

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6 minutes ago, MrGARY said:

The priest overhaul is joint pve and pvp.

Barring the summon soul spell?  It was ENTIRELY balanced towards PvP, trust me on this.

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4 minutes ago, Etherdrifter said:

Barring the summon soul spell?  It was ENTIRELY balanced towards PvP, trust me on this.

 

I wrote up the core thesis behind the priest overhaul with deity changes, spell changes, and new spells so a dev (which would be sindusk) could use it and make whatever the dev team thought was good a reality plus their own tweaks/ideas, so I think I'd trust myself on this.  I even wrote it based on player god religions being outright removed, but that would never happen because of pve having control over a pvp feature.

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7 hours ago, Etherdrifter said:

Barring the summon soul spell?  It was ENTIRELY balanced towards PvP, trust me on this.

Many people disagree with this statement, myself included. I believe a whole major kingdom would be happier if the priest changes were reverted, so no its not a pvp balanced change.

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10 hours ago, MrGARY said:

I wrote up the core thesis behind the priest overhaul with deity changes, spell changes, and new spells so a dev (which would be sindusk) could use it and make whatever the dev team thought was good a reality plus their own tweaks/ideas, so I think I'd trust myself on this.  I even wrote it based on player god religions being outright removed, but that would never happen because of pve having control over a pvp feature.

 

Just going to quickly confirm this is true. Gary wrote multiple pages worth of documentation outlining the work needed for the priest update. I took that outline and expanded on it slightly, which then went through revision with input from the rest of the development team. Without Gary's efforts, the priest update would not hold the shape it currently does. While I'm proud of the changes that occur and feel they've made Wurm healthier on both PvE and PvP, credit needs to be given to Gary. I may have gotten the ball rolling, but Gary designed the ball.

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