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elentari

Old Freedom Isles is turning into Epic - A veteran's perspective

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I've loved this game since I entered the portal over 6 years ago. I've been on Cele always and will continue to be on Cele until the game officially dies. We do have a small community most times, yet we're fairly active still.

 

That being said, I do see the concerns. As mentioned above, with Rolf no longer involved with Wurm, his promise to keep the lights on as long as even one person plays is null and void. I'm happy that we have new servers to draw a larger crowd. I sincerely hope that there is more quality content added to the game in order to keep it interesting. We can't say there hasn't been improvements because there has been many - some great, some not so great. As long as the company continues to legitimately try to keep things moving forward AND listens to its community, I think we have a fair chance at staying around for many years to come. There's still so many skills, items, QoL changes that can be added over time if the company and we are willing to take the chance.

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9 minutes ago, PandyLynn said:

I've loved this game since I entered the portal over 6 years ago. I've been on Cele always and will continue to be on Cele until the game officially dies. We do have a small community most times, yet we're fairly active still.

 

That being said, I do see the concerns. As mentioned above, with Rolf no longer involved with Wurm, his promise to keep the lights on as long as even one person plays is null and void. I'm happy that we have new servers to draw a larger crowd. I sincerely hope that there is more quality content added to the game in order to keep it interesting. We can't say there hasn't been improvements because there has been many - some great, some not so great. As long as the company continues to legitimately try to keep things moving forward AND listens to its community, I think we have a fair chance at staying around for many years to come. There's still so many skills, items, QoL changes that can be added over time if the company and we are willing to take the chance.

Don't tell people where you live! It will bring them to kill your seals! Only I do that. But to the topic of thread, idk if I'd say it's dying more than usual, old server pop seems to be about the same as before just higher total due to new servers. And I don't mind since it will help keep game alive, old or new servers, and as much as I hate you people, I love the game. 

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The Devs aren't forcing people to play on the new servers. Have you guys maybe thought that it's a terrible experience for new players to join a server where everyone has high skills? What's the point of playing in the southern freedom isles and spending hours and hours grinding blacksmithing to 50 when you can just buy 70ql enchanted tools for copper? The only opportunity for new players to earn money on the old servers is by bulk making bricks etc. And even that can be done faster by veterans using alts with higher skills and WoA tools.

 

Even though there's tons of "available" space on old servers it's all been terraformed already. Just because the deed expired doesn't mean the land is unsettled. Why would people want to play in the ruins of someone else's deed instead of carving out a section of the wilderness to make their own? The way the game works, the gap between veterans and new players is just too large for any noobs to feel like they are contributing to the game in any meaningful way. How could the devs fix this? 

Edited by blameping
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Since I keep the Xanadu map updated, I check Niarja every day for disbanded deeds so I can remove them from the map asap. What I have seen since the Steam launch is that there are many more new deeds than disbanded ones. This suggests that there are more new players coming into the game than old vets leaving the game completely or disbanding their deeds and leaving their toons to move to the new cluster. Also, I've seen higher average population counts on Xanadu this last month than I've seen the last 2 years. Where there used to be very few days where the high pop was over 100, now it seems that there's more days over 100 than not.

 

I've been playing almost 3 years now, and have unfortunately seen too many of these "wurm is dead" type posts, to the point that I don't read discord anymore and have no patience for the toxicity of those type of posts. If you want to play with lots of people in your local, move to where the people are. If you want to stay where you are but want more people in your local then go recruit players to your area. But please, stop with the doom and gloom. These type of posts that claim wurm is dead or dying are nothing more than griefing in my opinion, and generally come from players who didn't get their way on some change made by the devs years ago.

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24 minutes ago, blameping said:

Why would people want to play in the ruins of someone else's deed instead of carving out a section of the wilderness to make their own?

I disagree. When I started, I deliberately sought out a flat piece of land that had been recently disbanded. It's easy enough to destroy pavement and do some landscaping, but flattening out a large enough area as a newb can be daunting. plus, having a guard tower right there was a literal life saver. So, no, some people like the abandoned deeds. Just because you don't, don't assume everyone wants to play the game the same way. That's the beauty of Wurm, you can play how you like.

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7 minutes ago, DaletheGood said:

I disagree. When I started, I deliberately sought out a flat piece of land that had been recently disbanded. It's easy enough to destroy pavement and do some landscaping, but flattening out a large enough area as a newb can be daunting. plus, having a guard tower right there was a literal life saver.

This may be how some people prefer but it is likely the minority opinion. Otherwise a significant amount of new players would be joining the old servers, not the new ones. And while it looks like some are, it seems to be less than 5% based on player counts. 

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“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

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One thing I do have to ask about the economies: will they get be close enough for there to be a merge?

 

1) Defiance is separate from the pve servers, meaning no hota statues through pvp will go to pve, no kingdom items, etc.

2) More servers on the old cluster (at this point) means more uniques spawning and more slayings, meaning the number of scale, drake, and other items will just increase over time, currently at a faster rate than with the new servers.

 

Of course skills are going to catch up over time, but economy wise, it actually might not.

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well but where is the issue? When there is a thriving economy on NFI, skills at par, why shouldnt they buy PMK wagons and stuff, and drake and dragon stuff, which, the low pop notwithstanding, is still short on demand and expensive on SFI.  There will be some extra opportunities for some sellers, but so what?

 

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For many vets the New Southern World it's just like a summer vacation. It's nice the sun bath and the pina colada but eventually you get back to your life after a couple of weeks. Give it time. People that invested years will not abbandon the North.

I know I am not ;)

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5 hours ago, Zalxis said:

For many vets the New Southern World it's just like a summer vacation. It's nice the sun bath and the pina colada but eventually you get back to your life after a couple of weeks. Give it time. People that invested years will not abbandon the North.

I know I am not ;)

 

For some reason I strongly suspect you mixed up the Northern Isles and the Southern Isles in your post.  The North is new, the South is the earlier cluster. :)

 

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I also played on Epic, from day one, through to the last year or so, Epic’s low population is a complex issue, it’s not simply neglect, that’s too easy, and doesn’t really reflect the reality for PvP servers since I began playing, when it was just a Wild and Independence, Wild was dying then, with very few players, and eventually it was closed down, and following a short interruption as a freedom server, it became chaos, and it too went the same road as Epic, initial interest, healthy player base, plenty PvP for all. Yet it went through the same cycle as Epic, and population crashed again. Neither shared anything other than being PvP, yet both have suffered from boom and bust cycles like no other servers have. 
 

Perhaps, at some point, we need to honestly examine why PvE thrives while PvP needs constant reinvigoration, resets and new servers? It may not be the lack of focus on PvP development, but something deeper, something that affects players, something like terminal boredom once we hit certain levels and it becomes a chore to go out looking for PvP, or defending a deed yet again. 
 

Maybe I’m totally wrong of course, but it cannot be denied that in the last 10 years PvP servers all go through boom and bust cycles, every attempt at revival ends in the same boom and bust, every change to PvP or skilling or weapons armour or religion balancing does nothing to prevent the inevitable.

 

Perhaps regular wipes are needed for PvP servers, I know the idea was floated before Epic began, although it was never promised or implemented.

 

At this point I can fairly and honestly say that Epic, and Serenity in particular are dead as a door nail, the uniques outnumber the players about 10:1 on a good day, it’s not unusual to port over and find no one on at all at times, on Serenity at least, I’m aware Desertion is about the same, with only Affliction and maybe Elevation having a poor, rather than dire population.

 

SFI is highly unlikely to go the same way, PvE does not suffer the same sort of terminal population cycles as PvP servers do, it dips a bit as new servers, and opportunities arise, but it’s much more resilient than PvP. Every new server has always seen a high number of players when it opens, and as it matures many fall off, go back to their old servers, take up where they left off, or resettle, I know, because this is exactly what I’ve done on freedom, chased new servers, played a few months or so, then gone back to Indy, where it all started for me.

 

It’s far too early in NFI’s life cycle to cry doom for SFI, it might be worth revisiting the topic in a few months, when there’s a clearer picture of how Wurm is doing, over all, and for the other clusters in particular.

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The playerbase in wurm that steam brought in just isn't enough - it's not enough to fill in all the old servers, epic, and the steady stream of new servers.

The new amount of players online at any time is what 1000 more than before, maybe more in the more populated times?  If only we saw numbers like that befo.... oh right we did, with way less servers and it wasn't enough.  Maybe pve can thrive with servers that see 5-20 people on it, but pvp cannot.  Chaos/epic only get any kind of boost when someone decides to make something happen, and it never lasts.  Invigoration by devs via resets and updates only generate worse results every time.

 

The servers need consolidation.  It won't ever happen for pve, so start with the obvious glaring issue; the only servers in wurm that have different mechanics than the rest - epic.  Those poor souls that still play there (Epic cluster players 1/3200) are people that will either play chaos, play freedom, or get mad and quit which is still a better fate than playing epic.  Merge accounts/items to freedom and delete servers, merge everything, merge nothing, just do something before we all die from corona wave #37 god damn

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Close all the old servers and get rid of years of mistakes an exploits. Compensate old players somehow so the can start over on new cluster.

 

Merging north and south will do nothing good to wurm. 10 half empty pve servers what good it adds to game?

 

pvp has restarted on defiance so no need to maintain any more pvp servers. Connected pvp to pve was bad idea from start anyway.

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3 hours ago, Tristanc said:

 

For some reason I strongly suspect you mixed up the Northern Isles and the Southern Isles in your post.  The North is new, the South is the earlier cluster. :)

 

You are correct, thank you for pointing that. Anyway, i should have only pointed out Old cluster and New cluster...

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I moved back to Release last year. We have a nice neighborly community and have even seen some of the more adventurous newbs come through the portal. I do wish we could get a portal from the North to the South because there's plenty of room (and who doesn't love that chance to employ a newbie to do their extra labor?), but just the small trickle is a nice bit of new blood. I see newbies in GL on the old servers constantly. I think we'll be okay. 

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2 hours ago, Sandyar said:

Close all the old servers and get rid of years of mistakes an exploits. Compensate old players somehow so the can start over on new cluster.

 

Merging north and south will do nothing good to wurm. 10 half empty pve servers what good it adds to game?

 

pvp has restarted on defiance so no need to maintain any more pvp servers. Connected pvp to pve was bad idea from start anyway.

 

Sorry, but the developers had many months to think this over and do a complete reset of the game together with the Steam launch. They took the easy way of making everyone happy, while we all knew that these kind of topics and complaints would emerge. A complete wipe would have solved a lot of issues and would have forced players to link their accounts to Steam.

 

Oh, people have not been exploiting on NFI? You should re-read the patch notes.

 

It's quite hilarious that some advocate a complete removal of SFI whilest they were part of of the problem in the first place. Perhaps a better solution for NFI and SFI would be to retroactively ban the characters that have been RMT'ed?

 

This game might have more visibility and is easier accessible now due to Steam, so it is completely understandable that they are focusing on attracting new players, but no one knows what the situation will be in a year from now. 1 Question comes in my mind: how many new players do we have and how many are returning or active players on NFI?

 

Some seem to forget that this game has terrible customer retention. I would recommend not to disenfranchise the old player base.

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I consider all that babbling about closing servers as rubbish and remote from reality as ever.

 

Any "complete reset" would have killed Wurm. Period. According to Retro on a Wurm Official stream, the subscriber count has about doubled since the launch, maybe more now. But even taking in account that, it means that about half of the paying customer base is situated on the "old servers", paying upkeep as well as subscription. Though a considerable number has created new accounts in the northern cluster, few have stopped subbing in the south so far. Chaos has more logins than anytime last year, Epic has ist normal 10 to <20, southern Freedom more than any of the last summers, with numbers slowly rising.

 

All those "concentration" ideas stem from shortsighted microeconomists. Any "forcing players" spells driving away most of them.

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18 hours ago, Radni said:

There is a north-south portal, it's called make a new account.

 

That wont work, look up the Sunk cost fallacy

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1 hour ago, Ekcin said:

I consider all that babbling about closing servers as rubbish and remote from reality as ever.

 

Any "complete reset" would have killed Wurm. Period. According to Retro on a Wurm Official stream, the subscriber count has about doubled since the launch, maybe more now. But even taking in account that, it means that about half of the paying customer base is situated on the "old servers", paying upkeep as well as subscription. Though a considerable number has created new accounts in the northern cluster, few have stopped subbing in the south so far. Chaos has more logins than anytime last year, Epic has ist normal 10 to <20, southern Freedom more than any of the last summers, with numbers slowly rising.

 

All those "concentration" ideas stem from shortsighted microeconomists. Any "forcing players" spells driving away most of them.

Alright, lets take this apart:

 

"According to Retro on a Wurm Official stream, the subscriber count has about doubled since the launch" - I'd be disinclined to trust this, the data used to be visible for everyone but that is no longer the case.  Even if true, it would be around 4000 or so, not that high.

 

"it means about half of the paying customer base is situated on the old servers" - Except in the scenario where a player rolled a new character (and premiumed them) for the new servers and their premium has yet to expire on the old servers.  We've no measure of this, so we can't actually draw your conclusion as the number of "emmigrants" might be quite high.

 

"Though a considerable number has created new accounts in the northern cluster, few have stopped subbing in the south so far" - Given that premium is usually purchased in lots of 2 months or more, you won't see the real subscriber drop off until that minimum period elapses.  Even then, there is no public data on subscriber counts and where they are distributed, so we can't prove or disprove this statement.

 

"southern Freedom more than any of the last summers" -

Average of the peak player counts (bring generous here as average of the minimum player count was 141) in the past 2 days - 286.5

My total average for August 2019 (playing during non-peak times) - 290.5556

 

It's pretty close to even I'd say, possibly a little higher or a little lower on average (once I have weekend data I'll have a better picture).  I'd err on the side of lower though, since I only compared the peak times at the moment and someone told me my 2019 data isn't from peak times.

 

I'd like to do a full comparison on August, but I only finished my scraping script a few days ago.

 

 

"Chaos has more logins than anytime last year," - Yes, you're quite right there.  In fact, the amount of logins is downright abnormal for Chaos!  They're up from single digits to the 2nd/3rd most populated server on the old cluster some days.

 

"with numbers slowly rising" -

I don't have enough evidence to contest this or verify it; I'd be surprised if you did.

 

Edited by Etherdrifter

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"Average peak" is somewhat of an oxymoron. I have slight doubts into that kind of "models". I recall your prediction that Freedom would be under 200 average end of 2019.

Edited by Ekcin

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47 minutes ago, Ekcin said:

"Average peak" is somewhat of an oxymoron.

 

Not really, I just took the maximal values for each of the 24 hour periods (I log once per hour) and took the average of those.  Since I am arguing population has most likely fallen, and even the maximal values compare poorly, it makes a stronger argument.

 

If I were to use the full daily averages then my running average so far would be 141; however I don't have weekend data yet so using those seems unfair.

 

Also, for comparison - The running average for the new cluster in the past 2 days would be 1136.568

 

Quite a disparity no?

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Decreasing quality of play in Wurm happens when players tend to leave en masse.

 

On Epic this was clearly lived by the few that are still playing there. It's incredibly difficult to movitate yourself to play when you don't have more than a handful of people to play with.

 

I believe there is a strong correlation between the number of players playing on a server and a new/old player's ability to not want to play there. As was stated by many, a player enters a server, sees there's no one there and leaves.

 

For those that stick around, especially Epic people, the number of uniques outsrip the number of players. This is another issue where it leaves you constantly repairing your deed or trying to pen them somewhere so they don't grief people.

 

Hunting them is almost certainly out of the question. Not enough people for that.

 

Keep in mind that there are certain types of content in Wurm that can ONLY happen if there is a critical mass of players to make them happen.

 

Examples :

 

1. Rifts.

2. Unique hunts.

3. Impalongs

4. Missions.

5. Big community projects (highways, bridges, tunnels, etc.)

6. TRADE, whether skills or services (horses for example can be difficult to acquire if all players who are breeders leave)

7. Community assistance (having people help you with info, questions, etc)

 

These aren't just my opinions regarding what's taking place on SFI right now. This is a phenomenon I've witnessed on Epic for 3 years before it died. Without a critical mass of people on a server cluster the game turns into a single player experience. WO players might just leave for WU instead.

 

The symptoms are there. Granted, there's still a critical mass of players to do rifts on SFI, but this is because unlike Epic, there's is one kingdom on Pve aka the "Freedom Isles Kingdom". People sail from everywhere to do rifts for their journal goals. Same applies to uniques and other things.

 

Trade on the other hand is quite dead on Freedom, no point in discussing the reasons right now, we all know the factors (not enough items sinks, not enough buyers, too much supply, lot of high lvl accounts, etc).

 

I wonder when will people finally realise that these symptoms lead to an outcome that has already occured on Epic. When it's too late?


This isn't Doomsday talk for me. This is something I have witnessed by playing both the Epic cluster for half a decade and on Freedom for 2-3 years. It's a phenomenon, not an opinion.

I know the majority of people on SFI haven't played Epic or aren't familiar with the details involving its slow descent into emptiness, but you should care now since for some of us, this is history repeating. For you it might be a new thing. For others, it's just season 2.

 

Edited by elentari

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Coulda just been like ma girl Elsa and "let it go" and joined the new servers like the rest of us :)
Things are still fresh, so the window to join and not be behind is still open. 

Or, don't let it go and continue posting this same thread every week :(

It sucks, sure. But at some point you gotta choose to accept the bigger picture, or just step away. Ruminating won't fix a thing.

(this reply is too short for this thread i think XD)

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5 hours ago, Etherdrifter said:

Quite a disparity no?

Where are your last year figures from? I have no official data available, but all my counts from my log files are telling me you are wrong. Granted, I have only those from current server on login, data on crossing, and sparsely a / who inbetween. And mind you yourself were predicting the login count falling under 200 by end of 19.

 

In addition, the predictions, by you among others, told that on opening of steam servers, Freedomers would abandon the servers in droves. Where is this decrease then, now? Honestly, I was somewhat astonished myself, that not more let their Freedom character sleep for a while for the new server experience (and to dominate the newbies :) ) . I had expected some significant, albeit temporary, decrease, and am bit astonished myself that it is nor the case. Jackal hit us harder ;) .

Edited by Ekcin
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