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CistaCista

Wurm Online being skinned alive

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Wurm is currently being butchered on the MMO site Massively Online. In a 3-week installment a reviewer who seems to have no interest in learning sandbox games, is entertaining his audience with how impossible he finds it. In a peculiar journalistic odyssey he has spent two weeks getting as far in the gameplay as the average player does in the first half of the tutorial.

 

It appears the reviewer is refusing to reach out to any person in the game for help or advise. 

Anyway, I don't have an account there, but maybe someone will post there and at least let it be known that Wurm also has a fantastic ingame help channel capable of steering any new player through his first days.

 

Todays article:  https://massivelyop.com/2020/09/08/choose-my-adventure-mining-misadventures-in-wurm-online/

Last week: https://massivelyop.com/2020/09/01/choose-my-adventure-the-slow-burning-esoteric-start-of-wurm-online/

Edited by CistaCista
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Another game reviewer doing their best to live up to the stereotype that videogame reviewers are the least qualified people to review games.

 

"Yes, from the very off, my starting character is already bearing a load that’s too much for her to bear by mere dint of wearing armor — another possible throwback that makes about as much logical sense as coin weight does."

 

I just had to laugh at this part. Like OP stated, this is a blatant lie that the average wurm player would have figured out in their first hour of playtime by them self, perhaps 5 minutes if they would use the in-game help channel.

Edited by BDCKoolaid
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The more "outraged" Wurm players who click on those links,  the more successful you make the ignorant author.   I'll pass.

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Fix me if I am wrong, but isn't steel and flint on newbie toolkit? Wurm has issues, I pointed some out, but surely one of them isn't getting to iron requiring more than two pickaxes strikes. 🙂 And why he does a new mine? There are mines in the starting towns or around...

Edited by Platyna

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Wow, wanting to go for steel on day 1, without any help or advice from folks playing the game? I'm a new-ish player and I easily figured out that wasn't happening for awhile... and I also found the supplied steel and flint, right there in my inventory that I could light fires/forges with. It's almost like the guy did none of the tutorial, asked nobody for advice, and wants to "win" the game in a few days. I seriously doubt any input on the blog is going to change any opinions.

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There was a bug, some people ended up missing part of the newbie toolkit. Either they somehow dropped them, or didn't spawn with them, a few people were affected. During the peak of the lag storms.

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3 minutes ago, Kelody said:

There was a bug, some people ended up missing part of the newbie toolkit. Either they somehow dropped them, or didn't spawn with them, a few people were affected. During the peak of the lag storms.

 

So he could ask other players or on help and call a GM if his char was bugged. But there are more inaccuracies - the topology of starter areas was completely ignored. Sandbox RPGs are not Snake, you should at least read some player guides before playing, especially if you want to write a review. 

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I feel like we're missing a well maintained, up to date new starter guide for players on both the wiki and perhaps the forums? Wurm is such a wide game it's easy to get caught up on weird wordings, logic from other games and other weird things. I hope that there may be a chance to reach out to maybe offer support for next steps they could take, some game knowledge and the like.

 

I do think it's the wrong idea for people to automatically assume they're deliberately being bad to play a caricature though. Wurm is and always will be a niche game. Lets not make ourselves look unfriendly now that there is actually someone revealing the new player experience and mindset behind it.

Edited by Madnath
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4 minutes ago, Platyna said:

 

So he could ask other players or on help and call a GM if his char was bugged. But there are more inaccuracies - the topology of starter areas was completely ignored. Sandbox RPGs are not Snake, you should at least read some player guides before playing, especially if you want to write a review. 

 

I asked around multiple times for a rope to be given to me by staff since I had to do the suicide command to get to the correct spawn, and got nothing at all. It wasn't even clear if it was offered or a possibility.

Edited by Madnath

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3 hours ago, Madnath said:

I feel like we're missing a well maintained, up to date new starter guide for players on both the wiki and perhaps the forums? Wurm is such a wide game it's easy to get caught up on weird wordings, logic from other games and other weird things. I hope that there may be a chance to reach out to maybe offer support for next steps they could take, some game knowledge and the like.

 

I do think it's the wrong idea for people to automatically assume they're deliberately being bad to play a caricature though. Wurm is and always will be a niche game. Lets not make ourselves look unfriendly now that there is actually someone revealing the new player experience and mindset behind it.

 

https://wurm.gg/new

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3 minutes ago, Amantnovi said:

Thank you for sharing this. I will direct New/Newish players to this when they are in need of help!

 

 

2 minutes ago, McGarnicle said:


Wow...I didn’t know this existed!

 

It's fairly new. We just got a Wurm-themed link shortening service going. :)

 

There's also https://wurm.gg/rules which can be important too!

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That doc still mentions 2s in-game premium.  I thought that had been dropped.  Is it sill a thing?

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1 minute ago, TheTrickster said:

That doc still mentions 2s in-game premium.  I thought that had been dropped.  Is it sill a thing?

 

It was. I'll mention it to the Wiki team! Thank you.

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Sounds like they are just bad at the game. Sucks that they are inept. Not everyone can be a winner.

 

edit: its not even a good review. Like, what kind of %&^$ reviewer are they. 

 

"in order to use a forge you need charcoal" kekw okbuddy

Edited by Melros

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unpopular opinion, but i bet the net result of this thing is more people discovering the game. 
The people that find it and say "omg yeah that game sux" wouldn't have played it anyway.

This doesn't justify it at all though. Just a bit of "bad press is good press" sorta thing. 

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I just blasted him. He's blogging about a game which he has NO clue. You need charcoal to use a forge? Since when?? *sighs*

 

Stupid people blogging stupid things, and people think it's true.

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1 hour ago, ChampagneDragon said:

I just blasted him. He's blogging about a game which he has NO clue. You need charcoal to use a forge? Since when?? *sighs*

good job

1 hour ago, ChampagneDragon said:

Stupid people blogging stupid things, and people think it's true.

Welcome to the internet 😎 .

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10 hours ago, Kelody said:

Either they somehow dropped them

 

Very likely! You wouldn't believe how many starter items people drop while in the tutorial - for whatever reason! When regularly cleaning the area we usually find dozens of abandoned shovels, pickaxes, ropes, deed stakes, armour parts... as well as steel&flint, among other items. 

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6 hours ago, McGarnicle said:


Wow...I didn’t know this existed!

 

It's very useful. Actually, it's not really a "hidden" gem - a link to that FAQ has been on the Wurmpedia home page for years, and the page is also frequently mentioned on CA HELP 🙂

 

What's new is the nice short link Keenan mentioned. The original link is: https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Your_first_days_in_Wurm_Online

 

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A good idea might be to move the contents of that page in-game and alert new players to it.

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Some people are just "bad players" as in they have no intuitive logic when beginning any game.

 

They come into a game with the wrong attitude from the very beginning. They come with expectations and a closed mindset.

 

Any game should be approached without expectations and with an open mind and just let it take you on a journey.

 

Even as kids I remember my first few rpg's I played I simply held on to as many items as possible because "I didn't know if they had a later use".

 

Trust me when I say this but I've introduced many games to people and some simply have zero, and I do mean absolutely zero critical curiosity, logical thinking, the "what if I do this" attitude towards a lot of games. They don't explore the interface (which honestly is a trait any user needs to have for any digital software, whether games, apps or working with pcs in general), they don't read the tutorials, they miss key elements in their environments and so on.

 

I can't explain why this phenomenon happens since some people I know to be smart and they've worked in other professional software before (Autocad, MS Office packs, some were linux users, etc), but oh god, when it came to introducing them to a new game? They suddenly became computer illiterate and  utterly lose any manual dexterity on a keyboard/mouse and controller. I had to hold their hands and explain stuff to them as if they were kintergardeners.

 

A friend once began playing  Arx Fatalis (old school ultima like RPG) and he opens his inventory, sees he has a weapon but doesn't bother reading the tutorial to equip it. So he enters combat with a goblin and dies. He then rants "Why didn't the game tell me I had to equip a weapon before entering combat? I thought the game was supposed to do that!" Two issues there. 1. Making assumptions is rarely ever useful. Most of the time it's destructive. 2. He didn't use basic thinking considering the tutorial literally gave him messages on top of the screen telling him what to do , step by step.

 

And guess what?

 

Some of these types of people become : Gaming journalists.

It's just one of those professions where there is little to no responsibility to what you work on. There aren't many professions where if you're really bad at what you do, you don't get fired.

 

But gaming journalism just seems to be one of those jobs anyone can do these days without having any prior experience with gaming, PC software, critical thinking and so on. Wurm isn't a hard game but it does have a steep learning curve.

 

Difficult to learn i'd say, but easy to master afterwards. "Wogic" would be Wurm's main challenge.

 

But oh boy if you present Wurm to some gaming journalists? It will get tons of negative reviews by the bucketload simply due to brain dead "journalists" that have a 3 sec attention span to learn something.

 

Reminds me of that awful Polygon video from 2016 where some "gaming journalist" tried playing doom. One of the most god awful things I have seen.

 

 

 

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I made a new char and was on tutorial today...it is so foolproof now, there are signs everywhere tell you exactly what you have to do. Considering I had a rage quit first day because I didn't get what does that mean to activate a shovel, this is a game start served on a silver plate. Criticism and disbelief is deeply rooted in me, but it has to be constructive and after some research done otherwise it is just, can't find a better word, bitching. 

Edited by Platyna
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