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Valrei International. 094

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18 hours ago, Ostentatio said:

 

We're hoping that the change will encourage followers and priests to pray sometimes now when they otherwise wouldn't, and contribute to missions more often.

 

We'll be keeping an eye on things, though. Numbers can always be tweaked later if necessary, but it's hard to predict player behavior beforehand.

 

To be honest I don't see myself using pray on my followers, or contributing to missions more often, after this update, why would I? A bonus in the distant future in the form of an extra rite spell, which might very well end up being cast and in effect when I'm not even online? (I don't play every day, I'm not the only one...) That isn't going to do it for me.

 

What realy doesn't help is that many of the missions on Xanadu are a total undoable pain, like hunting down a traitor creature or doing a ritual on a specific location. That server is 16 times the size of the smallest one, so what we often see is that such types of missions end up timing out after a very long time, thus keeping a possible slot for a doable mission occupied. At the same time the doable missions (like crafting stuff) are completed in no time until we eventually end up almost only those undoable missions. Those kinds of missions really need to time out way faster if you want people to do missions more often, at least on bigger servers.

Edited by Ecrir
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20 hours ago, Ecrir said:

What realy doesn't help is that many of the missions on Xanadu are a total undoable pain, like hunting down a traitor creature or doing a ritual on a specific location. That server is 16 times the size of the smallest one, so what we often see is that such types of missions end up timing out after a very long time, thus keeping a possible slot for a doable mission occupied. At the same time the doable missions (like crafting stuff) are completed in no time until we eventually end up almost only those undoable missions. Those kinds of missions really need to time out way faster if you want people to do missions more often, at least on bigger servers.

 

Is the issue here mostly the vagueness of location on a huge server (e.g. "in the northeast"), or something else?

 

For the most part, I've always played on Xanadu, so I'm familiar with some kinds of missions going stale and expiring. Feedback on this is genuinely helpful.

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25 minutes ago, Ostentatio said:

 

Is the issue here mostly the vagueness of location on a huge server (e.g. "in the northeast"), or something else?

 

For the most part, I've always played on Xanadu, so I'm familiar with some kinds of missions going stale and expiring. Feedback on this is genuinely helpful.

The problem with the traitor creatures simply is that the server is too large for hunting down a single, non unique critter. Mind that even uniques are surviving damn long on Xanadu. Even if the location were rather specific, say e.g. "in the D/E 16/17 area", that would be approximately the size of Celebration, Pristine etc. so comparatively not specific at all. And depending on the location it would be doubtful that people not living close would bother to go there, depending on the level of adversity of the terrain.

 

For special places, we would need special places be charted. There was a project to do so, but I fear it is abandoned. But even when known, it will be not so easy to get a larger group of people to do the journey to the spot.

 

Generally, all missions requiring extensive travel are unlikely to complete on Xanadu.

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35 minutes ago, Ostentatio said:

 

Is the issue here mostly the vagueness of location on a huge server (e.g. "in the northeast"), or something else?

 

A combination of that, and travel time I think. The missions appear to refer to regions 1/9th of the server, for Xanadu that's about 120 square kilometers.

 

I think it would help if missions did not require you to go to one specific location. Something like "travel halfway across the server and find a needle in a haystack" is not appealing. It is okay if some searching or traveling is required but the things or places you need to find should be available all over the server, so people who log in and see the mission can go out and have a good chance at making a meaningful contribution to the mission in that same play session, instead of figuring they'd need to plan a multiday expedition.

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Find X avatar can be tricky on smaller servers too - happened that the avatar was found hundreds of tiles away from the deed that was hinted in the mission text - much closer to another deed (within a few hours after the mission popped up). Usually I don't bother to find them anymore.

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8 minutes ago, Jaz said:

Find X avatar can be tricky on smaller servers too - happened that the avatar was found hundreds of tiles away from the deed that was hinted in the mission text - much closer to another deed (within a few hours after the mission popped up). Usually I don't bother to find them anymore.

Maybe poll the location of the avatar/traitor once an hour and update mission note?

That’d help keep things more reasonable. 
 

You could also add a priest spell to locate the priest’s god’s avatar like locate soul. Pendulum would probably be good to keep for finding traitors. 

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3 hours ago, Ostentatio said:

 

Is the issue here mostly the vagueness of location on a huge server (e.g. "in the northeast"), or something else?

 

For the most part, I've always played on Xanadu, so I'm familiar with some kinds of missions going stale and expiring. Feedback on this is genuinely helpful.

 

That's definitely part of it. A location like "in the northeast" on Xanadu is still a huge area, it takes a lot of time to first get to that area if you don't live near it and then there's no way to further pinpoint the location of the creature, so you're likely looking at spending multiple days looking for a needle in a haystack, and quite likely returning home without achieving any progress on the mission.

The special places mission have similar issues. I certainly have no idea where any of them are, if there was some way to get directions in game to those locations then it could be an interesting sightseeing trip. So overall a similar issue to pinpointing traitor creatures. But even then getting a large enough group of people to all make that trip would be problematic due to the travel time involved, so the mission is still quite likely to timeout even then.

 

Overall I think neither type of mission scales well with server size and run into further issues when combined with low player density. Xanadu is just too big for those missions, with players spread out too thinly, even if there was an in game way to find the location of the traitor or the special spot. Missions that aren't area specific work a lot better because of that, like kill X of a creature, craft/sacrifice X of something. Perhaps it would help to disable these area specific missions on Xanadu and to add some new kinds of missions so that enough variety remains? For example maybe fishing related missions could be added, requiring the catching of a certain number of a specific type of fish? Are there any cooking related missions?

 

If the area specific missions do remain, perhaps add a spell or pendulum enchantment which helps track down the traitor creature once you are in the right area (like the northeast) of the server? Perhaps something similar could work for the special spots so that players have a way of finding them?

Edited by Ecrir

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Calysto? (Ausimus WU server) has a spell that can be used to more specifically locate uniques. I wonder if this mod could be used as a basis for helping with the search for everything from uniques to missions?

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I don't think using spells to alleviate problems with the game is a good idea. There are already a number of band aid spells around and it would be much better if those issues would actually be fixed instead of shunted to the priest system.

 

The selling point of priests should be that it opens other avenues of play, not that you should have a priest to work around adversarial game design.

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Be careful when you make changes to make wurm easier as to help a new crowd.

 

Wurm is a very unique game, it forces players to work together to be able to reach their goals. Especially early on in the game thats when the friendships were made, when you were as most vulnerable and dependant on others more experianced than yourself. 

 

I dont doubt you all are thinking carefully when you make the changes to wurm but always consider what you want wurm to be and if its not what wurm used to be then make sure you make it work for the new crowd as you might lose the old one in the change. :)

Edited by Nocturnes
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1 hour ago, Nocturnes said:

Be careful when you make changes to make wurm easier as to help a new crowd.

 

Wurm is a very unique game, it forces players to work together to be able to reach their goals. Especially early on in the game thats when the friendships were made, when you were as most vulnerable and dependant on others more experianced than yourself. 

 

I dont doubt you all are thinking carefully when you make the changes to wurm but always consider what you want wurm to be and if its not what wurm used to be then make sure you make it work for the new crowd as you might lose the old one in the change. :)

 

Wurm is plenty difficult and time consuming, you could remove 35% of its difficulty and it would still be harder and more time consuming than any other MMO

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30 minutes ago, Jeston said:

 

Wurm is plenty difficult and time consuming, you could remove 35% of its difficulty and it would still be harder and more time consuming than any other MMO

 

The average WU server is roughly that much easier (or say 50% which is still quite close) - and it loses all the fun for me in a few months.

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I think the general issue is people conflate "tedium" with the concept of "challenge" .

 

There is nothing challenging about doing the same 4-5 improving actions to raise a skill. There is nothing challenging in riding for 30 minutes across a map (or sailing) to cut down a tree or kill a traitor. It's just time consuming.

 

There isn't any real challenge to combat at all. After a while you simply know if you will win a fight or lose it before it even happens. You don't get to kite mobs in fights. You don't get to dodge fireballs or traps or mines in combat. Everything is passive and automatic with very little player input. Either the mob's healthbar drops or yours.

 

A challenge would be to kill certain mobs and survive the fight, using the terrain to your advantage. Tedium is killing 500 octopi , sailing around mindlessly for them.

A challenge would be to put a player on an island with nothing but steel&flint and have him build a working deed in a week, with tools, weps & a farm. 

 

If we're honest with ourselves, Wurm is extreme in the game design of tedium and grind. But outside of PvP , there is little to no challenge to do anything. There is little competition or motivation to accomplish stuff. I think it's one of the subtle psychological variables why many players quit. They simply feel that without a competitive aspect to it, there is little point to many things in Wurm. Grind burns out people but the accomplishment of said grind is very small or useful long term.

 

So if partially removing tedium from Wurm loses its "fun" , then perhaps the issue lies more with players who enjoy the midless repetition of wurm's grinds, than actually wanting a challenge. And how many players are left that love the grind and how many players quit due to Wurm's many frustrating and tedious mechanics?

Personally I want challenges in Wurm, but outside of a few player events I don't see any. PvP is dead, there aren't many competitions around to prove your skills, so they can have meaning.

It's just imp, grind, amass, create, repeat.

 

As someone who played a lot of sandbox games , I can honestly say Wurm needs more fun and challenges and less grinds.

 

Edited by elentari
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1 hour ago, elentari said:

As someone who played a lot of sandbox games , I can honestly say Wurm needs more fun and challenges and less grinds.

 

I just wanted to highlight and simply +1 that line, everything else you said is spot on as well.

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1 hour ago, elentari said:

As someone who played a lot of sandbox games , I can honestly say Wurm needs more fun and challenges and less grinds.

 

Indeed, but I think there's one important thing you didn't touch on in your post.

 

A lot of sandbox game worlds are ephemeral in comparison. There are very few that allow players to build on and change the game world and have their creations persist. I enjoy traveling across the land and seeing other people's creations, and I like building something interesting. It's the one thing Wurm does exceptionally well.

 

This cannot work if everything becomes effortless to accomplish. Some quantity of actual labour, in whatever form it may take, must go into creating something in the game.

 

That said, I think the dial for a lot of tasks starting out is way too far in the "tedium" spectrum. A new player should not have to spend several hours to create a 1x1 shed.

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1 hour ago, elentari said:

I think the general issue is people conflate "tedium" with the concept of "challenge" .

 

I don't think the problem is that anyone is confused with these two. Some people just have a different idea of a challenge. That's the fun of Wurm. Some people want new and interesting adventures. Some want to complete personal goals that have no relation to competition. Some want to compete with others. Some want to tame the land. I'm a personal goals person, so probably how I play Wurm is tedium or boring to a new experiences kind of person. They're both valid and both found in this game. 

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34 minutes ago, Batolemaeus said:

A new player should not have to spend several hours to create a 1x1 shed.

They should though, or longer. For an object that will persist for a good 30+days whether they ever return to use it or not there needs to be some level of commitment required. If a new account could make a shack in their first hour of playing then why wouldn't they spend 5 hours making a bunch of .shacks and then leave never to be seen again while the rest of us, and any subsequent new players, have to deal with that. People already complain about all the "abandoned" areas and how hard it is to find a place to build (granted most of them can't be bothered to walk 45 minutes from the spawn or go off the road 100 tiles to find something). Imagine how much worse that will be when every new character spams random houses because they can't think of anything better to do in their early days.

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Why would they make five houses? They'll make one and then start working on their garden instead, or on whatever else looks interesting.

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3 minutes ago, Lisimba said:

Why would they make five houses? They'll make one and then start working on their garden instead, or on whatever else looks interesting.

You're missing the entire point. Making it easy to build structures of any kind early on will lead to a new player making sheds and fences despite not being invested in the game. They then quit, leaving the mess to be dealt with by active players. 

The time investment involved in wurms progression early on creates a kind of filter protecting (most) of the starter areas from too many abandoned shacks being spammed about. Making it easier to construct these leads to messes that can't be dealt with by the people who actually play the game. Go to Havens Landing and look how many abandoned carts there are. Now imagine if those were actual buildings and fences taking up tiles all over the place. 

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They don't need to be able to put up a house in five minutes either. There's a middle ground. But actually making a house, even if tiny, is a great achievement that'll make people want to come back and play more. That's as opposed to getting too frustrated at the requirements and giving up.

 

For abandoned structures there are better solutions, like upping the decay on shacks under certain conditions or allowing easier destruction of garbage. Like if someone logs in new, makes a shack, then doesn't come back for the rest of the week, they probably gave up.

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7 minutes ago, Lisimba said:

They don't need to be able to put up a house in five minutes either. There's a middle ground. But actually making a house, even if tiny, is a great achievement that'll make people want to come back and play more. That's as opposed to getting too frustrated at the requirements and giving up.

 

For abandoned structures there are better solutions, like upping the decay on shacks under certain conditions or allowing easier destruction of garbage. Like if someone logs in new, makes a shack, then doesn't come back for the rest of the week, they probably gave up.

If they can only play on weekends and they come back to find their house gone they're all that much more likely to quit though. Its not easy to draw a line in the sand like that when people have different playstyles and lifestyles. Also making a house is even more of an achievement when you have to work harder to do it. That has always been one of the things about wurm, a task that in any other game is trivial is, in wurm, a grand feat you wind up feeling proud of at the end.

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If you've ever played Ark Survival on an official server you'd see countless little pillars placed at a certain distance from each other. They use them to keep people from building along the waterways or in a few cases they put them everywhere just to make it difficult for players to build anywhere. 

 

I don't think that the time for building a 1x1 will be as easy as that (although I am looking forward to testing it with a new character after the next patch). And if players did decide to build dozens of 1x1s I'd hope that the GMs would step in. 

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3 hours ago, Jore said:

The time investment involved in wurms progression early on creates a kind of filter protecting (most) of the starter areas from too many abandoned shacks being spammed about.

 

Yes, by filtering out all the new players. Let's make the attachment rate even worse to preserve your precious starting area…

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20 minutes ago, Batolemaeus said:

 

Yes, by filtering out all the new players. Let's make the attachment rate even worse to preserve your precious starting area…

You say this sarcastically but I agree with it in earnest. Lowering the bar so we can have more "bums on seats" is not going to "save the game". Having a filter in place to winnow things down to those with the right attitude and mindset to succeed longer term is actually ideal.

Edited by CreZ
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