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CreZ

The current vision

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Well since the thread got locked and I never got a reply I'll just follow the advice given in the close message and start a new thread for this. I can't actually quote the post since the thread is locked so forgive me for the workaround formatting here.

 

Spoiler

 

 

Specifically:

Quote

Also, jsut what IS the new vision that the game is headed towards? Can we please get some clarity on that because we've had over a decade of what seemed to be a similar vision that we're all used to and now in 6 months it seems y'all plan to turn that all on its head to some new plan we can't imagine or depend on.

 

I know the *goal* is to launch on Steam, but what is the vision for the game? What will the game that is to be offered going to be like and where will it be headed afterwards?

I know that I and seemingly many others I've spoken to are no longer certain and steadfast in our decision to be lifelong players and supporters of the game and some reassurance or at least solid information would go a long way to either alleviating our fears or cutting us free and being rid of our negative sentiments caused by repeated dissapointment with changes or the implementation/communication thereof.

 

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While the OP is coming from a more critical perspective, even I as someone condoning the sentiment to shake things up had been wondering about the precise direction you mean to go now, just to get a feeling if sticking around for the Steam launch is worth it (so I guess we're both hoping for the same kind of clarity in a way).

 

I'm not expecting a huge manifesto or anything as this is probably thought of in more incremental terms, but what, for instance, would the dev team say is the most pervasive design principle in Wurm that is intended to be changed in the course of the coming updates? In other words, instead of just saying where you intend to go, what is something you want to go away from?

 

If that question even applies to the current plan, though I feel it can be reasonably answered and it might give a good insight into the direction the new winds are blowing.

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I'm not even trying to be critical, I just want to be somewhat informed. At this point I don't know what the guiding principles are for the game development, or if there even are any. It could well be that every change is being considered in isolation and response to external forces rather than there being any sort of cohesive vision or strategy. That would be understandable, if a bit dissapointing, but still great to know. I think your questions are very much on the same wavelength as my own, Flubb.

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Our current focus is still general balancing of the game and making it more accessible to a wider range of people. And no, that does not mean dumbing it down, as some tend to assume everything that's what any attempt at making the game more approachable is. This encompasses all kinds of tweaks and larger changes that we've already introduced and some we still plan to (most remaining now being related to early game experience)

For the past couple years the focus has been on new content, but for the while being we're more prioritizing the polishing and reconsidering some of the already existing features.

 

For a more inside view, in the upcoming weeks you'll see the some more instances of the new UI changes, of which many features will be of good use to more established players as well, a VI post will soon reveal some more details.

 

When deciding on the roadmap to the Steam release of Wurm Online, we essentially had two options - we could've introduced the major changes only to the new upcoming servers, cut off the possibility of a future merge and prevent any influx of players from the Steam release to the current server clusters, or we could introduce the changes to all of it and keep it a single unified game. We chose the second option, because we're not interested in splitting it all and cutting off the older servers already filled with players from the new marketing opportunities (which include Steam), but we were also not happy in bringing WO as it was to a possible wider audience. Wurm will always be a niche game, but we aim to widen that niche, which we really can't do without affecting the meta, and effectively making some not universally welcome changes.

 

This has been a very change intensive couple months and we appreciate anyone sticking with us in this time - this pattern of sudden gameplay changes is not something that'll be seen for long, but we've found it necessary so far.

 

While this depends strongly on the success of the Steam release, afterwards we'll most likely return to focusing on developing more content features, but we're still not entirely happy with the existing feature set and we'd like to tweak some stuff further on - for example, in the near future we'll revisit fishing, as while it's a good system, it does have a fair share of annoyances and drawbacks, and its complexity is a bit much for what it offers in return.

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Thanks Samool.

I'm still not sure I know quite what "making it accessible" means but I'm sure we will see as you unveil more of it. I wish beyond measure you'd taken the first option rather than the second with regards to Steam (WO Classic would have been my jam for sure). Regardless I do appreciate you taking the time  to explain things here. It helps to know what the priorities are even if I feel like they don't neccesarily include me or the game play I've come to love and expect. I remain skeptical, but I do remain so I hope you and the team will wow me and those who share my skepticism with some awesome changes that benefit established players and not just potential new players (often at a cost to us). If not I still thank you for all your efforts past and future and for at least giving us safe harbor in WU. =] Best of luck!

 

P.S. 

Seriously though you should calm down these idle animations...

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5 minutes ago, CreZ said:

I'm still not sure I know quite what "making it accessible" means but I'm sure we will see as you unveil more of it.

 

In games, "accessible" tends to be about the "easy to learn" part of "easy to learn, hard to master" that a lot of games strive for. If a game is "accessible" you can easily pick it up as a new player and get *something* out of it. Hopefully that then hooks you, and the accompanying "hard to master" keeps you entertained for a long time to come. I can't speak for the Wurm team of course but I can see where they're coming from.

 

5 minutes ago, CreZ said:

I wish beyond measure you'd taken the first option rather than the second with regards to Steam (WO Classic would have been my jam for sure).

 

That would effectively have been a death sentence for the current servers.

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7 minutes ago, Lisimba said:

That would effectively have been a death sentence for the current servers.

 

Maybe, maybe not and it could also depend on how you quantify death. Same could be said for option two though. Its still a bit of a gamble. We'll at least get to see how this one plays out.  Meanwhile anything about the other would just be speculation so its probably not worth getting into a discussion about really. 

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I for one am really happy that they decided to sit down and work on fixing current content and making things better overall. We have been asking for this for a really long time. @Retrogradecan attest to the creation of the colored buckets meme as our argument that the game was in maintenance mode for a while there. Seeing Samool take over and the recent changes has changed my perspective.

 

If the team wants to work for a bit on polishing the gem that is WO instead of just pumping half baked content like they had been for the past three years, I am all up for it. I am having a blast coming back so much that I quit the other mmo I was playing.

 

Trust me when I say, Wurm has a bright future coming up if things keep improving like this. This is what we needed, devs that cared.

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On "accessible" being the easy-to-learn part giving a short-term reason to hang around with the hard-to-master part playing out over longer term, I would suggest (as a still-new but at least had a look around player) that dealing with aggressive animals is a major put-off to newcomers.  Well, actually, the put-off is the complete inability to deal with aggressive animals and the total lack of knowledge regarding what animals I could reasonable attempt to handle and which ones deserve a response of running away all kermit-arms.  I still really don't know what I could handle or not most of the time, and finding out is usually fatal.

 

In the last couple of days I came across a champion spider in range of a guard tower, so called in the guards and then stepped in for my chop, only to find I was not permitted any attacks at all (the message was something like "You don't have enough experience to attack anyone."  Now I knew I was never going to take on a champion on my own, but I was surprised to find I couldn't fight it at all.  I think we need an additional outline colour here.  We have green for tame, blue for non-aggressive and red for aggressive. Maybe a yellow should be in there for "run away, junior, you can't handle this one" for stuff that is clearly out of your league.. Or make the red pulsate or double-width or something.  Just based purely on experience or fight skill, with no consideration of gear. 

 

Part of my reason for bringing up something this specific in a topic about vision and the steps taken in its pursuit is that I think that this is an example of something that most of the old guard would not even see, because it would likely only be triggered while experience or fight skill are low.

 

 

Edited by TheTrickster
not actually OT
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I think that the focus shouldnt be on making the beginning easier, but rather making the mid/end game more fun

Its the after the you made your deed or house or homestead part is when most people quit the game. 

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40 minutes ago, nitram20 said:

I think that the focus shouldnt be on making the beginning easier, but rather making the mid/end game more fun

Its the after the you made your deed or house or homestead part is when most people quit the game. 

 

I am not sure it is entirely accurate that most people quit after making a deed, or house, or homestead.  By the time I had made my deed and house and homestead I was irrevocably hooked for life.  But, the very very first time I logged in and saw the graphics, the quirky player models (they were very different back then) and such, that is when I closed the app.  I am glad I came back and made that deed, house, and homestead.  Doing things like getting rid of on-deed decay, doing away with fails on common building items, adding third person, doing away with RMT and toon trading are examples where I think the devs are knocking it out of the park.  Those are the kinds of changes that bring Wurm closer to the masses by delivering common expectations in an entirely unique package.

 

Now, if they would only take it further and 1) eliminate mailing fees, 2) if you can pick it up it should be able to be mailed (both QOL improvements, and 3) provide Marks purchasing in the Wurm Shop (source of revenue),  the game would be inching closer to primetime.

 

Hats off to the devs and what they have been brave enough to implement in the last 3-4 months!

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I don't have hard data of course but if it's anything like other games, most people quit before they even make it out of the tutorial area. After that, every step on the way will have some people quit, though progressively less so.

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53 minutes ago, Eyesgood said:

I am not sure it is entirely accurate that most people quit after making a deed, or house, or homestead. By the time I had made my deed and house and homestead I was irrevocably hooked for life.

 

Those who stay are hooked by then because of other factors that are probably hard to quantify. I felt the same way as you did, for reasons we could explore at great length.

But at the same time, I tried recruiting people, letting them build on my deed and/or see them run off making their own and making exactly the observation that nitram talks about. Over and over again.

 

My best guess is that us "stayers" (Though this isn't entirely accurate for me anymore, but I did play 3 years almost nonstop and lowkey looking for reasons to come back so I'm not one of the early quitters, either) had seen something in the game that the demographic nitram talks about didn't by the time they were done with the setup, and the lack of an actual endgame to actively look forward to is a point of contention I certainly share. (While still having been hooked by the breadth of possibilities to do on my own terms, which is why I had stuck around regardless.)

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"for example, in the near future we'll revisit fishing, as while it's a good system, it does have a fair share of annoyances and drawbacks, and its complexity is a bit much for what it offers in return."

3 cheers for more love given to the fishing system!

I am really in love with the current fishing system and the way it lends itself to a very peaceful and relaxing skill grind, and I find myself very quickly getting excited about the size of the catfish I see on my line or seeing a special tile fish swim it's way up to my float, and hurriedly typing to my village every time I catch a new personal best heaviest catfish (Currently 22kg)

but I've found myself at a point recently where I've hit a wall. I think to myself, "Ok cool, how will these huge catfish benefit me going forward? I bet I can make a huge meal with them that will last me a while at the least."

Well as well all know, you can't do a whole lot with a big fish. You can fillet it into little baby chunks that are the same size regardless of how big your fish was, or you can throw it in a pizza, but *only* if it's a certain size and maybe I'm just not well informed, but with my limited experiments, it seems that the size an FSB will split catfish into is not a size that will fit into a pizza?

I'm just rambling now, but I would love to see the devs develop more meaningful things to do with that prized catch you worked so hard to get and felt so much joy when you finally did. :)

Edited by BDCKoolaid
Forgot to quote :(

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13 minutes ago, BDCKoolaid said:

I'm just rambling now, but I would love to see the devs develop more meaningful things to do with that prized catch you worked so hard to get and felt so much joy when you finally did. :)

 

Taxidermy! Prepare it, perhaps with butchering skill and some alchemy or natural substances, then mount it on a board and hang it on your wall.

 

Or if you feel more silly, make the fish into a weapon so you can whack things with it like a club.

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On 3/10/2020 at 8:54 PM, Samool said:

for example, in the near future we'll revisit fishing, as while it's a good system, it does have a fair share of annoyances and drawbacks, and its complexity is a bit much for what it offers in return.

I'd say you could trim some parts of it and not sacrifice any of its depth honestly.

Make it more accessible by removing JS from pro rod, maybe remove heavy line and merge its properties into the braided line, and making higher ql lines easy by making the action easier. Getting high QL fishing parts is a pain in the arse for no real good reason and hurts the accessibility aspect significantly.

Also please make it so we can store more fish in an FSB, after a couple of hundred catfish it just nuked my FSB totally and its crap lol

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I favour the taxidermy option.  To conserve skill slots in the database, developers could always just use butchering skill or perhaps leatherworking skill (with the idea fish wouldn't be the only options to mount on a wall/floor in the future).

 

It would be a great new option for the use of fish, and add to the benefits of gameplay in the new fishing system minigame.

 

The mechanics would be similar to the animal rugs, such as using salt, only resulting in an item that could be 'placed' or mounted instead of just laying on the floor.

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On 3/10/2020 at 9:54 PM, Samool said:

but we aim to widen that niche


Hov 2 wiedn te niche:

1 - mov skillcap frum 20 tu 85 
2 - reduce rarity window chance by another 50% for non-prem
3 - still no bloods for non prem and other thing 2 easy 2 to abuse by multiaccount
4 - reduce deed creation cost and reduce min starting upkeep from 3months to 1month
5 - marks on shop (seriously, why not? lol)
6 - all skins available for marks (see above! :D)
7 - better servers cuz more people
8 - ???
9 - profit

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20 hours ago, Davih said:


Hov 2 wiedn te niche:

1 - mov skillcap frum 20 tu 85 
2 - reduce rarity window chance by another 50% for non-prem
3 - still no bloods for non prem and other thing 2 easy 2 to abuse by multiaccount
4 - reduce deed creation cost and reduce min starting upkeep from 3months to 1month
5 - marks on shop (seriously, why not? lol)
6 - all skins available for marks (see above! :D)
7 - better servers cuz more people
8 - ???
9 - profit

Making f2p skills cap at 85 would completely eliminate the need to pay prem from most wurm accounts. For example, very few priests would ever need to be prem as most spells dont need more than 70 faith to cast, and most players never even reach that high with years of play. (My highest skill is 86 PAS and I have been playing for years.)

 

My suggestion is capping Characteristics at 25, and skills at 50. This will give f2p players a good chunk of time before they have to throw money at the game and get capped, a realistic timeframe to test the game, and allows them to have skills at survivable levels without making premium pointless.

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1 hour ago, Angelklaine said:

Making f2p skills cap at 85 would completely eliminate the need to pay prem from most wurm accounts. For example, very few priests would ever need to be prem as most spells dont need more than 70 faith to cast, and most players never even reach that high with years of play. (My highest skill is 86 PAS and I have been playing for years.)

I agree, that would not make sense.

 

1 hour ago, Angelklaine said:

My suggestion is capping Characteristics at 25, and skills at 50. This will give f2p players a good chunk of time before they have to throw money at the game and get capped, a realistic timeframe to test the game, and allows them to have skills at survivable levels without making premium pointless.

 

That would make some sense, though it were a bold change. The advantage were that people might go on playing after de-prem or temporary unsub, so keeping the connection to Wurm. What should go under all circumstances are the harrassing messages when reaching the 20 skill cap. When I started in Wurm I found them highly unnerving, and they did not add a bit to my anyway given motivation to go prem, rather made me angry. I then wanted to bring some more skills near the cap before doing so, and due to the poor information about, I did not know about the 2s prem possiblility in addition. But I was molested every time when a skill already at 20 hit the cap with messages (big white letters too iirc) that the skill could not be raised further. There should at least be an option to switch that off.

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2 hours ago, Angelklaine said:

Making f2p skills cap at 85 would completely eliminate the need to pay prem from most wurm accounts. For example, very few priests would ever need to be prem as most spells dont need more than 70 faith to cast, and most players never even reach that high with years of play. (My highest skill is 86 PAS and I have been playing for years.)

 

My suggestion is capping Characteristics at 25, and skills at 50. This will give f2p players a good chunk of time before they have to throw money at the game and get capped, a realistic timeframe to test the game, and allows them to have skills at survivable levels without making premium pointless.

Forgot to mention that, just "not a priest"  , as it currently is.

Priests are mostly alts, and there's no reason to make them be free, it's an "enhanced version" of the game, would be a huge money loss, cause most people don't even have them for making high channeling casts but just because reasons

Ok, maybe 85 is a bit high, but i would skill go for at least 70,

Let's face it, current playerbase of wurm with no RMT is divided in 2 kind of players

- Those who want to pay for their own premium in game and strive to do so
- Those who don't care about that and just pay their premium from years, probably buy silvers to pay for deeds, and will continue to do so.

Are we scared that a portion of the players is going to turn "f2p mode" and enjoy the game like that forever? I seriously doubt so, and even if that happens, it's not going to be a lot of people, and probably people that wouldn't have even played otherwise


There is currently no imaginable welcoming  bigger middle finger for new players trying out the game than the 20 skillcap as it is now, even keeping the stats limited would be acceptable, but i'd say 30 is fine, it's gonna get a long time to get there anyway, while 25 could be annoyingly earl, and people have no reasons to skillup body stats above 30 from non-prem on chars that aren't their mains cause you can't sell accounts anymore

Edited by Davih

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1 hour ago, Davih said:

Forgot to mention that, just "not a priest"  , as it currently is.

Priests are mostly alts, and there's no reason to make them be free, it's an "enhanced version" of the game, would be a huge money loss, cause most people don't even have them for making high channeling casts but just because reasons

Ok, maybe 85 is a bit high, but i would skill go for at least 70,

Let's face it, current playerbase of wurm with no RMT is divided in 2 kind of players

- Those who want to pay for their own premium in game and strive to do so
- Those who don't care about that and just pay their premium from years, probably buy silvers to pay for deeds, and will continue to do so.

Are we scared that a portion of the players is going to turn "f2p mode" and enjoy the game like that forever? I seriously doubt so, and even if that happens, it's not going to be a lot of people, and probably people that wouldn't have even played otherwise


There is currently no imaginable welcoming  bigger middle finger for new players trying out the game than the 20 skillcap as it is now, even keeping the stats limited would be acceptable, but i'd say 30 is fine, it's gonna get a long time to get there anyway, while 25 could be annoyingly earl, and people have no reasons to skillup body stats above 30 from non-prem on chars that aren't their mains cause you can't sell accounts anymore

Ok so let me ask you this.

 

Why would I pay for premium if I can push all my skills to 70 and use high ql tools so I can imp my gear up to 75-80? If I can bring all my Skills to 70, what stops me from buying 95ql tools and breeze everything I have a skill on to 75? What in freedom makes a difference between 70 skill and 90 skill?

 

Sure having 90 skill is nice, but is not that important to make me pay a monthly fee just so I can skill 20 more points.

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2 hours ago, Angelklaine said:

Ok so let me ask you this.

 

Why would I pay for premium if I can push all my skills to 70 and use high ql tools so I can imp my gear up to 75-80? If I can bring all my Skills to 70, what stops me from buying 95ql tools and breeze everything I have a skill on to 75? What in freedom makes a difference between 70 skill and 90 skill?

 

Sure having 90 skill is nice, but is not that important to make me pay a monthly fee just so I can skill 20 more points.

 

Let me direct you to a post I made when steamwo was first announced that would help a different f2p system work which even got Rolf's interest

 

On 9/24/2019 at 3:48 AM, MrGARY said:

If you want wurm to survive whether its ogwo or steam wo, it's long past time to update the premium model from pretty much all or nothing.  Adopt a system like Runescape has.  In runescape f2p, you can max out a skill, but you can't use bonus xp (which is like our sleep bonus just used differently), a few skills are locked at 5, areas and certain gear/high end gear are locked, better methods of grinding skills are locked, etc. 

 

So for adapting that to wurm with some changes to fit better, that would be something like as f2p:

You can use sleep bonus, but it will only affect a skill if it us under 20.  Decide if this is enough to encourage premium or if post 20 needs a higher difficulty to gain skill.

Most skills can be grinded to 100 as per usual, but some could be locked to 20 to encourage premium.  For example, weaponsmithing, fine carpentry, all thievery and war machines, stuff like that.

You can ride a large cart, but not a wagon.  Yes that's a downgrade from current if you already had the mind logic, but its a small trade off for quite the f2p change.

You can ride a cow and a horse, but nothing after that.

You can't be a priest as f2p, so it would work as it does now without premium, however you need to close the loophole of f2p priest allowing non-priest actions or just disable skill gain from doing a prohibited action to prevent the priest AND crafter loophole that existed with dual faith priests with chaos libs.

You can't create or improve high end gear; Along the lines of moon metal and dragon armor.

And probably way more to tweak that I don't care to think about and write because I'm not the ones being paid to do this.

  

On 9/24/2019 at 6:19 PM, Rolf said:

Also the monetization and premium model will be questioned. We might tweak it in such ways MrGary suggested.

 

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2 hours ago, Angelklaine said:

Ok so let me ask you this.

 

Why would I pay for premium if I can push all my skills to 70 and use high ql tools so I can imp my gear up to 75-80? If I can bring all my Skills to 70, what stops me from buying 95ql tools and breeze everything I have a skill on to 75? What in freedom makes a difference between 70 skill and 90 skill?

 

Sure having 90 skill is nice, but is not that important to make me pay a monthly fee just so I can skill 20 more points.

Even in that model, there a lot of things that you can't do from prem:

get bloods - rifts rewards - being priest - create anything of decent quality - excel is one skill - create rares , how will you even find the money to buy 95ql tools (or mantain them) if you are not premium?

I would personally pay premium even if the skills weren't limited at all, not because "supporting the game" or stuff like that, just strictly for ingame advangates.

Some people might end up not even bothering with premium for the first months, but honestly, who cares? it would be a welcoming model, people would pay more willingly in general if they don't receive the costant harrassing message "you are not skilling up cause you don't want to pay, away with you" at just 20 skill, and that can be achieved literally in 2 days even starting from total noob status, and it's extremely annoying, i quitted wurm after a week the first time i tried it because of that and because i couldn't even afford a deed, i felt forced and i didn't want to pay. I required more knowledge and patience and actually managed to pay for my first premium and deed a year later when i tried (harder) again. Keeping players, even freeloaders, around for a few more weeks could be a winning strategy.

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3 hours ago, Davih said:

how will you even find the money to buy 95ql tools (or mantain them) if you are not premium?

The same way a player capped at 20 pays for their own premium: Foraging. You forage until you get a silver and then you buy your premium gear. Or you chip bricks and sell those. Or mortar. Or nearly any bulk out there really. Or you make rares, or literally do anything in the game that can generate money. Because being 70 on skills really lets you do pretty much anything. 50 animal husbandry and you can sell 5 speed horses. Or with 70 metallurgy you can break bank selling steel or other alloys. I could keep going but you get the idea.

 

3 hours ago, MrGARY said:

 

Let me direct you to a post I made when steamwo was first announced that would help a different f2p system work which even got Rolf's interest

 

  

 

See thats a great way to address it as well. The f2p model should be modified pre steam release if this game is to survive.

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