Drogos

WurmNode

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On 9/14/2022 at 3:14 PM, Viceren said:

Went through the updated site, and I love it. Even with it's current design, it's fully functional and good looking enough for continual use. The four rows is perfectly sized, even with the black space underneath. I imagine things will be added that'll take up the space over time. So that's good stuff.

 

The mouseovers are fantastic. Finally having Weaponsmithing get the STP love it deserves, and having visual confirmation with the mouseover warmed my heart. Even if it came at the cost of my HFC/Beverages gains which were relatively overvalued on Niarja.

 

Some things I've noticed regarding Sindusk's STP setup, it appears to give extra points to things the community considers difficult, yet there are things I would consider a little strange:

  • Small Axe appears to be worth 24,586,364 at max, while Large and Huge Axe are the base 14,049,351 - Is this a design choice? I'm not a PvP'er anymore, so I'm not aware of Small Axe being any more difficult to grind.
  • Preaching and Exorcism, two notoriously difficult skills, also don't get very high totals. Both at 2,341,558 - neither are easy to grind, and could be considered harder than even Meditating.
  • Meditating doesn't get a very high total, despite widely being considered one of the most time consuming and hardest skills in the game. It caps out at 7,024,675 which is lower than even my beloved Weapon Smithing at 23,415,585.
  • The value for Mind Speed at a sizeable 140,493,510 seems very overvalued even if it is harder to grind than the other characteristics.
  • Soul Depth is absolutely and extremely overvalued at 187,324,680 - considering it's one of the easiest characteristics grinds thanks to panfilling.
  • Short Bow, Medium Bow and Long  Bow appear to be undervalued. They aren't any easier or harder to grind than the other weapon counterparts.
  • Milling is very undervalued considering it's a creation grind. It could at least be on par with another creation grind that's relatively easy to gather materials for like Papyrusmaking.
  • Thievery, Stealing, Lock Picking and Traps also feel slightly undervalued considering they don't have improvement grinds.
  • Firemaking feels undervalued due to how irritating it is to grind.
  • Climbing feels undervalued due to how irritating it is to grind.
  • Shield Bashing and Taunting have base maxes at 3,512,337 despite being difficult to grind.

 

On 9/15/2022 at 11:08 AM, Sindusk said:

All good observations. I'll try my best to explain the reasoning behind everything. Before I get into specific points, I'll make a few notes here ahead of time:

  1. I went over some of the calculations today with Drogos and some adjustments have been made to fix calculation errors.
    1. The previous maximum value for a skill on Wurmnode was 99.99995 (4 digits of 9 after the decimal). After changes today, it is now 99.9999995 (6 digits of 9 after the decimal). This more accurately represents when Wurm actually displays a skill to 100 instead of using smaller decimal places. As a result, the maximum value for most skills has increased.
    2. There was a calculation error which was causing skills, mostly in the range of 99-99.9995, to be calculating their STP very incorrectly. It was much lower than expected. This calculation has been corrected and Wurmnode is now displaying properly calculated STP across the board.
    3. Soul Depth had a difficulty of 800,000 instead of the correct 200,000 on Wurmnode. This has been fixed and all values should be 1/4 of what they were before.
    4. As I was writing this, Drogos put all the same information in a reply above.
  2. STP at it's core is meant to display one thing: A direct measure of amount of time the skill is spending in the action bar. Some skills operate in ways that are directly counterintuitive to being calculated by STP, such as Meditation and Lockpicking. These have cooldowns, and cannot be grinded similar to other skills. However, this does not mean we should value them immensely higher than other skills. Instead, we need to register that while these skills are on cooldown or not being skilled, the player is doing something else. If we changed this logic and decided long cooldown skills granted higher STP, anyone who was diligent about skilling them would be granted more STP by default.
    1. In it's absolute most purest form, without any of the multipliers or similar being applied, a player's STP is quite literally "how many seconds have they spent skilling." When you see a character with 20 million STP, it's directly related to the amount of time they've spent skilling. 20 million seconds = 333k minutes = 5,555 hours = 231 days of raw action timer skilling. This does not account for sleep bonus, CoC, and other factors. However, it's designed as the best measure possible without being overboard on community opinions or conjectures.

And now, to answer your comments as directly as possible:

  • Small Axe appears to be worth 24,586,364 at max, while Large and Huge Axe are the base 14,049,351 - Is this a design choice? I'm not a PvP'er anymore, so I'm not aware of Small Axe being any more difficult to grind.
    • This is due to small axe naturally having a higher difficulty than other skills. Small axe has a difficulty of 7,000 whereas weapons such as medium maul, longsword, etc. are all 4,000. This results in it being almost 2x as difficult to skill.
  • Preaching and Exorcism, two notoriously difficult skills, also don't get very high totals. Both at 2,341,558 - neither are easy to grind, and could be considered harder than even Meditating.
    • I'd refer to note 2 which covers Preaching and Exorcism. Meditation has a multiplier of 3 because only 1/3 of the full action timer is used to apply skill gain.
  • Meditating doesn't get a very high total, despite widely being considered one of the most time consuming and hardest skills in the game. It caps out at 7,024,675 which is lower than even my beloved Weapon Smithing at 23,415,585.
    • Again, note 2 above is the best answer here. Meditation is valued higher than most other skills because every 3 minutes spent meditating only gives 1 minute of actual skill gain.
  • The value for Mind Speed at a sizeable 140,493,510 seems very overvalued even if it is harder to grind than the other characteristics.
    • This is correct. Mind speed is only obtained through fighting and shields. These have bad times multipliers in their skill checks (which is why most weapons/shields have 3x value of normal skills), so we give Mind Speed compensation in the STP calculations to match. If you look up the leaderboard for Mind Speed on Niarja right now, you'll see that even after 15 years hardly anyone has more than 70. Meanwhile multiple accounts rock over 90 in every other stat. The mind speed valuation is extremely high, because it's quite literally the hardest characteristic to skill in the game and it's not even close.
  • Soul Depth is absolutely and extremely overvalued at 187,324,680 - considering it's one of the easiest characteristics grinds thanks to panfilling.
    • This was corrected.
  • Short Bow, Medium Bow and Long  Bow appear to be undervalued. They aren't any easier or harder to grind than the other weapon counterparts.
    • This is something that could be looked into and changed. I never really looked deeply into how archery works so if it's not directly action timer -> skill then I'd need to know specifics to apply a proper multiplier.
  • Milling is very undervalued considering it's a creation grind. It could at least be on par with another creation grind that's relatively easy to gather materials for like Papyrusmaking.
    • I missed this. Milling is in fact creation only and I will apply the 3x multiplier to it accordingly.
  • Thievery, Stealing, Lock Picking and Traps also feel slightly undervalued considering they don't have improvement grinds.
    • Note 2 above covers Lock Picking. I don't know anything about stealing/thievery/traps if I'm being honest, never looked into them. But they are most likely covered by the explanation in note 2.
  • Firemaking feels undervalued due to how irritating it is to grind.
    • Note 2 above covers Firemaking.
  • Climbing feels undervalued due to how irritating it is to grind.
    • As terrible as climbing is to grind and how it feels incorrect... it's actually also covered by the explanation in note 2. Notably, though, if anything climbing might be more worthwhile to reduce in value since it can be skilled simultaneously with other skills, such as mining. However that goes against the philosophy of pure time, so it's probably best just left alone.
  • Shield Bashing and Taunting have base maxes at 3,512,337 despite being difficult to grind.
    • Most fighting skills get a multiplier of 2x or 3x because of how they interact with the times parameter when skilled. However, Shield Bashing and Taunting actually skill normally. So while they are extremely painful to grind due to both having a cooldown, action timer, and requiring a specific scenario... they're covered by note 2 philosophy.

In any case, STP will never be a completely perfect way to calculate investment of a character. If too much opinion gets injected into how it's calculated, it's going to become a divisive topic that holds very little meaning anymore. As of now, there are 3 skills (Cooking, HFC, and Beverages) that have multipliers that are arbitrary and not calculated. This is because panfilling ignores the action timer completely. There would be a case to be made for removing these skills entirely from STP since they go against the core philosophy. However, they extend into Mind Logic and Soul Depth, which makes things messy... so these arbitrary multipliers are applied to mitigate the issue rather than resolve it. The rest were calculated based on how they are skilled, referencing how they level up directly and reverse-engineering it into a multiplier for STP.

 

For those late to the party.

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40 minutes ago, Viceren said:

For those late to the party.

 

Doesn't cover most of what was asked. Small axe might be so, but it's worth more than 20K difficulty skill. Prayer also isn't covered in that post. Shovel value is still wonky given the skill diff difference. Also a weapon skill being miles and leagues higher than a imp skill is absord and other oddities like yoyo being more than puppeteering even though puppeteering is timegated for skillgain.

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old meta - panfill

new meta - grind random weapon/shield mastery to get new fake op score

ez lolz either way

 

neither shows player ability it's just meme score in the end

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12 hours ago, Madnath said:

Doesn't cover most of what was asked. Small axe might be so, but it's worth more than 20K difficulty skill. Prayer also isn't covered in that post. Shovel value is still wonky given the skill diff difference. Also a weapon skill being miles and leagues higher than a imp skill is absord and other oddities like yoyo being more than puppeteering even though puppeteering is timegated for skillgain.

 

This. And while we're on it, I'm also really not sold on the idea that characteristics are "5-10x easier than their in-game difficulty" (other than mind speed?) because you can grind them at the same time as other skills. Let's get technical...

 

Firstly, they are simply extremely high difficulty skills for which many actions will contribute a tiny amount of skill. Since the difficulty of the action needs to be 10-25 below your characteristic level, there are actually many actions (like imping at high quality) that give only miniscule amounts of characteristic gain, unless your characteristics are already extremely high. For many accounts, the best way to grind characteristics to high levels is by doing a very long, arduous and deliberate grind of those skills (e.g. by mining lower difficulty veins giving basically no mining skillgain but better characteristic gain), but under the current Wurmnode STP implementation that isn't fairly reflected. This also nerfs players who aren't grinders, and instead do deed work; low-difficulty digging or brick-making actions won't give much (if any) main skill gain, but will give a reasonable amount of characteristic gain (of which their effort on their account now isn't fairly reflected.)

 

Secondly, I think it's extremely inconsistent to nerf the STP values of characteristics because they can be gained at the same time as other skills, but while not nerfing other otherwise-useless parent skills like Smithing, Tailoring, Mauls, Swords, or Axes, or dealing with the fact that multiple fighting skills can be gained at the same time, or nerfing tool skills like Pickaxe and Shovel that have no practical use but effectively increase the STP value of grinding the skills that use them. Only a couple of weeks ago, I recently started simultaneously grinding large metal shield, shields, aggressive fighting, shield bashing and weaponless fighting in pen training - that's five (5) skills at once, yet all of those skills generally have buffed values compared to their base Wurm difficulties. It's particularly bad because pen training can be done pretty much afk.

 

Why are some skills nerfed because they can be grinded in parallel with other skills (characteristics) but others (parent skills, combat skills) are not? Even worse: why, given this logic, do weapon skills see such a huge boost to their total STP values, when it's again perfectly possible to grind them at the same time as many other skills? E.g.: go out with a longsword and a large metal shield, and gain: weapon skill, weapon parent skill, shield skill, shield parent skill, shield bashing, fighting and fighting subskill... that's 7 skills (!!!) not including characteristics gained too.

 

I understand why Sindusk changed values from the defaults that Wurmnode used. It would be nice to have an STP system that more fairly reflects the difficulty of the skills in Wurm. But to quote Sindusk...

 

On 9/15/2022 at 7:08 PM, Sindusk said:

... In any case, STP will never be a completely perfect way to calculate investment of a character. If too much opinion gets injected into how it's calculated, it's going to become a divisive topic that holds very little meaning anymore. ...

 

Opinion has already been injected into how Wurmnode's STP is calculated, and quite a lot of it. This is, exactly as forecast, causing division. I think I speak for quite a lot of people (based on my own alliance) who preferred Niarja's STP implementation. It was at least consistent with the game code, and made only two very fair tweaks (creation skills are harder; meditation is harder.)

 

To summarise...

 

I see two possible good STP systems:

  1. Use the previous Niarja system, which is simple but consistent.
  2. Do full simulations of accounts using accurate code that reflects current Wurm game code, calculating once and for all which skills are easy and hard based on the exact amount of time it takes to grind them given typical conditions.

As it stands, the Wurmnode system is a weird mess between those two. It tries to extend the Niarja system (of which I understand why that could be nice to do,) but by using values that seem to be plucked from thin air -- meaning that total STP values are largely subjective, and are based on arbitrarily selected multipliers that can nerf some skills by as much as 10x but buff others by 3x. That's a 30x difference in range between skills from base game code, which is a huge change (that I do not think has been mathematically justified.)

 

Some possible solutions...

  1. Change the STP system to one of the two above
  2. Let users toggle between both Sindusk's custom STP and the original Niarja STP
  3. Provide multiple STP totals, e.g.: one for all combat skills, one for all creation skills, a total for the account but not including characteristics, etc; meaning that nerfs and buffs to balance total STP for very different parts of the game don't need to matter anymore, accounts would be compared more fairly based on what they're specialised in.

 

 

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Not that I care too much about STP, but just wonder, can you "train" characteristics directly? What about just removing those from the calculations all together, and give STP only for the actions that one trains? Eg, when doing mining, you get mining stp, not mining + mind + strength + logic, etc … Just a thought …

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2 hours ago, Drogos said:

Not that I care too much about STP, but just wonder, can you "train" characteristics directly? What about just removing those from the calculations all together, and give STP only for the actions that one trains? Eg, when doing mining, you get mining stp, not mining + mind + strength + logic, etc … Just a thought …

 

Yes (see the characteristics section towards the end of the OP in the grinding guide). I also know many people who do. Often, actions that skill characteristics quickest are not the best for skilling the main skill. For instance: at 40 body strength and 95 mining, copper, lead or slate (each 20 difficulty) would give much better characteristic gains than mining sandstone (45 difficulty, which is too high), even though mining sandstone is probably the best choice at that mining level for pure mining gains. And that doesn't account for people who use wounds to grind on lower difficulty veins/actions (once again, with basically no mining skillgain in that case).

 

A lot of why I'd be in favour of returning to the simpler Niarja system (with no subjective changes) is because there are so many things like this in Wurm, where you can't account for all ways everyone grinds skills in a fair way (and hence, introducing subjectivity only adds bias to what you choose to prioritise vs. not prioritise.)

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16 hours ago, kordethbludscythe said:

i would like to know how people are listing their guard towers on the site

This has to be done manually, since there is no public way to fetch them legally. Send me a pm on discord, and I will try fix it asap :)

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1 hour ago, Drogos said:

This has to be done manually, since there is no public way to fetch them legally. Send me a pm on discord, and I will try fix it asap :)

i will put together a list of the towers that are on my deeds and the ones that i had a hand in crafting as well as the exact locations of deeds i own/co-own and get it too you

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44 minutes ago, kordethbludscythe said:

i will put together a list of the towers that are on my deeds and the ones that i had a hand in crafting as well as the exact locations of deeds i own/co-own and get it too you

No need for list, you can do it all on the site. It is just a bit broken due to the much higher priority of character skills upload. Just hook me up on discord and I will explain workaround until the site is fixed to support it properly again.

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On 11/2/2022 at 2:47 PM, Madnath said:

@Sindusk

Some STP questions for you:

Why is weaponsmithing worth 31 million but small axe is worth 33 million?

Shovel being 4.4 million with digging at 4.1 million, even though shovel takes roughly 2.3x as much effort, why's that?

Also, Preaching is worth 3 million. Exorcismis worth 3 million.... Prayer? 6 million. Why?

Huge axe? 19 million. Carpentry? 5.5 million.

 

What the heck are some of these? These STP values seem way off and completely and utterly scuffed.

 

  • Why is weaponsmithing worth 31 million but small axe is worth 33 million?
    • Assuming you are in combat at all times, weapon skills raise at roughly 1/3 the rate of normal skills. Combine that with the fact that small axe has a 7k difficulty instead of the standard 4k like most other skills, it's basically slightly harder than weapon smithing. Small Axe: 7,000 * 3 = 21,000. Weapon Smithing: 20,000. This probably isn't even enough, as small axe cannot be skilled at all times unlike weapon smithing. However, this dives into the philosophy of action time versus infrequency which I've gone over before.
  • Shovel being 4.4 million with digging at 4.1 million, even though shovel takes roughly 2.3x as much effort, why's that?
    • Because they level hand-in-hand. You cannot skill one without the other, and it essentially counts as two skills instead of one. Valuing shovel at it's normal rate would make digging a more valuable STP action over other skills. It's probably still more valuable in spite of the reduced STP of shovel.
  • Also, Preaching is worth 3 million. Exorcismis worth 3 million.... Prayer? 6 million. Why?
    • This is covered by the philosophy of following actual game time used for the action as opposed to accounting for cooldowns/infrequency of executing the skill. Refer to previous post for a more detailed explanation of that philosophy.
  • Huge axe? 19 million. Carpentry? 5.5 million.
    • Again covered by weapon skills being roughly 3 times slower than normal skills.
On 11/5/2022 at 2:26 AM, Shrimpiie said:

Yoyo is 11million STP but Puppeteering is 3million... 😛

 

This is covered by the philosophy of action time instead of infrequency of the skill. Unlike most other criticisms, this is fully identical to how Niarja valued these skills.

 

On 11/8/2022 at 4:52 AM, Docterchese said:

As it stands, the Wurmnode system is a weird mess between those two. It tries to extend the Niarja system (of which I understand why that could be nice to do,) but by using values that seem to be plucked from thin air -- meaning that total STP values are largely subjective, and are based on arbitrarily selected multipliers that can nerf some skills by as much as 10x but buff others by 3x. That's a 30x difference in range between skills from base game code, which is a huge change (that I do not think has been mathematically justified.)

 

In my previous post, I made this exact statement: "As of now, there are 3 skills (Cooking, HFC, and Beverages) that have multipliers that are arbitrary and not calculated." There are no other values "plucked from thin air" - at worst they are rounded. These are calculated modifiers to the difficulty system with the intent of balancing skilling, regardless of what skill it is, in regards to how much STP it gives per time. Imagine grinding prospecting to 100 versus grinding mining to 100. Prospecting gives no characteristics and a single difficulty skill. Meanwhile mining gives 3 characteristics (body strength, body stamina, soul strength) on top of a tertiary skill (pickaxe) which provides yet another characteristic (mind logic). Every action of mining would give 10 (11 if you count body double, which it does in the skill system) skills worth of STP while prospecting gives 1. The reason these multipliers are so dramatic is to balance out the actions.

  • Niarja System Values (Prospecting vs Mining):
    • Prospecting: 1.0
      • Total: 1.0
    • Mining: 1.0
    • Mining -> Body Strength: 1.0
    • Mining -> Body Strength -> Body: 1.0
    • Mining -> Body Stamina: 1.0
    • Mining -> Body Stamina -> Body: 1.0
    • Mining -> Soul Depth: 1.0
    • Mining -> Soul Depth -> Soul: 1.0
    • Pickaxe: 1.0
    • Pickaxe -> Misc Items: 1.0
    • Pickaxe -> Misc Items -> Mind Logic: 1.0
    • Pickaxe -> Misc Items -> Mind Logic -> Mind: 1.0
      • Total: 11.0
  • Sindusk System Values (Prospecting vs Mining):
    • Prospecting: 1.0
      • Total: 1.0
    • Mining: 0.669
    • Mining -> Body Strength: 0.18
    • Mining -> Body Strength -> Body: 0.1
    • Mining -> Body Stamina: 0.18
    • Mining -> Body Stamina -> Body: 0.1
    • Mining -> Soul Depth: 0.18
    • Mining -> Soul Depth -> Soul: 0.1
    • Pickaxe: 0.36
    • Pickaxe -> Misc Items: 0.45
    • Pickaxe -> Misc Items -> Mind Logic: 0.18
    • Pickaxe -> Misc Items -> Mind Logic -> Mind: 0.1
      • Total: 2.599

Previously, every action of prospecting was equivalent to 1/11 of an action of mining. In current values, as a direct comparison, it's worth about 1/2.6. This is offset by the fact that it's unlikely to be within proper skilling difficulty for all 11 skills that mining provides. Mining is still better, but it's no longer overwhelmingly better.

 

I want to further clarify the point that these values are not arbitrary but instead calculated in this post, since it's important to me that it's not seen as my opinion. Instead, they are a calculated response to how Wurm skilling works on a fundamental level. You had much more to say and I intend to respond to the rest of your post in a future reply. I just did not want to lengthen this post further.

 

Some Closing Thoughts

 

I'm happy to answer questions regarding the STP system used when I can. It might not be fast but I'll check back every now and then and answer when I can. That said, the reason values look strange is because they were not so easily compared until now. WurmNode does a great job displaying all the information without spreading it in different layers of the UI. When everything is on display side by side, it's easier to pick out what looks like a discrepancy or inaccuracy. With that said, I find it hard to argue that the rudimentary Niarja STP system was more accurate. It's well known that heavy HFC & mining grinders were always at the top. I was in the top 10 on NFI for a year after I stopped playing because I had over 90 mining and HFC. The way it valued player time was silly, and the goals behind the changes were to equalize it so it wouldn't matter if you grinded plate smithing, fine carpentry, mining, leatherworking, or coal-making. The amount of STP you gain by doing the action is roughly equivalent between all of them.

 

The system you see was not done overnight. The multipliers you see here was after an immense amount of research and reverse engineering of multiple systems of the game. Combat, skills, action timers, etc. It lead to the discovery (or re-discovery) of the action timer overlap and was patched out of Wurm Online several weeks later.

 

Again, this system is not perfect. It's an attempt at equalizing STP across all the different skills instead of allowing a few simplistic skills that provide far too much. If you'd like to see changes, I need hard evidence and real research into the reasons why my calculations are off. I can't really act on statements that simply assume "this looks off to me, it should be like this" without supporting material. If anyone is willing to invest their time to show calculations of skills that are being incorrectly weighted, I'm happy to admit I am wrong and will change values accordingly. I know this is a hard ask since I don't have all of my research written down to be used as a reference. The closest I can provide is my spreadsheet with some sporadic comments and tons of unorganized values that was utilized to create most of the system.

 

STP Worksheet (Google Sheets)

Edited by Sindusk
Weird formatting issue
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This portion of the response I separated because it will be much more technical and go into some of the mathematics and philosophy behind the calculations that determined the current state of the system.

 

On 11/8/2022 at 4:52 AM, Docterchese said:

This. And while we're on it, I'm also really not sold on the idea that characteristics are "5-10x easier than their in-game difficulty" (other than mind speed?) because you can grind them at the same time as other skills. Let's get technical...

 

Firstly, they are simply extremely high difficulty skills for which many actions will contribute a tiny amount of skill. Since the difficulty of the action needs to be 10-25 below your characteristic level, there are actually many actions (like imping at high quality) that give only miniscule amounts of characteristic gain, unless your characteristics are already extremely high. For many accounts, the best way to grind characteristics to high levels is by doing a very long, arduous and deliberate grind of those skills (e.g. by mining lower difficulty veins giving basically no mining skillgain but better characteristic gain), but under the current Wurmnode STP implementation that isn't fairly reflected. This also nerfs players who aren't grinders, and instead do deed work; low-difficulty digging or brick-making actions won't give much (if any) main skill gain, but will give a reasonable amount of characteristic gain (of which their effort on their account now isn't fairly reflected.)

 

From the outside looking in, it does seem weird that the parent stats - the most difficult ones - are valued the lowest. However, the logic behind it was actually the basis behind the system.

Problem: Skills that gave multiple characteristics would be multiple times more efficient in STP grinding than skills with less or no characteristics.

The solution to this was far more trial and error than calculation to overcome when designing the values and basis for the STP system here. In the end, my approach was to essentially combine skill + characteristic STP into one total value. Instead of 1 skill + 1 characteristic = 2 STP, I broke it into a split. 0.5 skill + 0.5 characteristic = 1 STP. This was the initial idea, so for example prospecting would be valued at 100%, then something such as a nature skill would be valued at 50% and the other half would be covered by soul depth (which comes from nature) giving the remaining 50%. What I noticed was that this didn't really solve the problem. Mining was still immensely better because it would be granting 0.5 * 3 = 1.5, without even accounting for mining itself. The multiplier for mining was irrelevant. I then kept progressing this split with less of the multiplier on the characteristics and more towards the skills. 60/40, 70/30, so on and so forth. This continued until skills with less characteristics started to equalize with multi-characteristic gains of other skills. Off the top of my head, remembering years ago, I believe the test case was a nature skill versus mining. In the current system, leveling a nature skill is roughly equivalent in STP value to mining. Drawing the slider any further towards characteristics (80/20 for example) made mining more efficient. Drawing the slider any further towards skills (95/5 for example) made nature more efficient. The current is what was found to be an estimation of the best equalization for these purposes.

  • Each skill multiplier is a calculation of the remaining split after the base 10% value of each parent. This is equivalent to 2 - (1.1^(numParents)). For mining: 2 - (1.1 ^ 3) = 0.669. This leaves room for the 10% valuation of the primary characteristics to fill in the missing amount from skilling each skill.

 

On 11/8/2022 at 4:52 AM, Docterchese said:

Secondly, I think it's extremely inconsistent to nerf the STP values of characteristics because they can be gained at the same time as other skills, but while not nerfing other otherwise-useless parent skills like Smithing, Tailoring, Mauls, Swords, or Axes, or dealing with the fact that multiple fighting skills can be gained at the same time, or nerfing tool skills like Pickaxe and Shovel that have no practical use but effectively increase the STP value of grinding the skills that use them. Only a couple of weeks ago, I recently started simultaneously grinding large metal shield, shields, aggressive fighting, shield bashing and weaponless fighting in pen training - that's five (5) skills at once, yet all of those skills generally have buffed values compared to their base Wurm difficulties. It's particularly bad because pen training can be done pretty much afk.

 

This, I concede, is perhaps the greatest flaw of the system as it stands. I made a minor improvement here over the original Niarja version by reducing the mutiplier of skills based on how many parent skills they had. However, The unfortunate truth is that there's problems at play that I had no solution to, so I left it alone.

Problem: Skills that have a parent give significantly more STP than those that do not.

I could not find an elegant solution to this problem. There are skills such as Weapon smithing which prevent an elegant solution. If you mathematically reduce the parent skill STP multipliers based on all skills below them, it leaves weapon smithing sorely lacking. Players do not typically skill their subskill. If you reduce the value of STP, you're doing a disservice to anyone skilling it.

This is additionally problematic due to the fact that some accounts are soft locked, unable to skill their parent skills for weapons. I did a quick google search trying to find the where that topic originated, and found this thread if you're interested in what's happening there.

On one hand, you have a parent skill which must be valued fully otherwise you're doing a disservice. On another, you have parent skills which don't raise properly because the way the combat system works. So if you value them appropriately, they don't actually function correctly for the system. It's a mess that I could not find an elegant solution to, and am happy to hear opinions on how to resolve.

 

On 11/8/2022 at 4:52 AM, Docterchese said:

Why are some skills nerfed because they can be grinded in parallel with other skills (characteristics) but others (parent skills, combat skills) are not? Even worse: why, given this logic, do weapon skills see such a huge boost to their total STP values, when it's again perfectly possible to grind them at the same time as many other skills? E.g.: go out with a longsword and a large metal shield, and gain: weapon skill, weapon parent skill, shield skill, shield parent skill, shield bashing, fighting and fighting subskill... that's 7 skills (!!!) not including characteristics gained too.

 

This was the most difficult portion of the system to resolve. The fundamental truth is that weapon skills do not skill at the same rate as other skills. When you parry, how big of a skill tick do you get for your sword? Is that 5 seconds worth? 2 seconds worth? If you parry once every 10 seconds, are you training your weapon skill efficiently? Is there a difference between parry skilling and dealing damage? If you equip the same weapon in both hands, do they skill at twice the rate?

 

I took a long, deep dive into the combat system a while ago, and really dug deep into getting these types of answers. In order to answer one of the questions I've asked: it's 1 second. You get 1 second of action time per parry. Is it even possible to parry once per second? Kind of. It's a soft cooldown, where your chance to parry improves as time goes on. If you're lucky you could be fighting 20 trolls and get 20 parries in under a second. How do you account for that?

 

I took a simulation of assumed combat: 1 versus 1 combat of equally skilled combatants - and used that as the foundation to build the skill multipliers for weapon skills and combat skills in general. In my simulations I found that weapon subskills and shield subskills raised at roughly 1/3 the rate of normal skills when in constant 1 versus 1 combat with an equal skilled opponent. That is why they all have 3x the value of similar difficulty skills. It could be argued that this is subjective or based on a faulty assumption. That's a reasonable argument to make and I'd be happy to re-evaluate the calculations done if a case is made that there's a more accurate scenario to assume, or an analysis of the combat and skill system is made which proves my results inaccurate.

 

On the topic of fighting skilling multiple skills, this is a problem throughout all of Wurm which, as stated in the second block, doesn't really have an elegant solution. When you skill platesmithing, you're also getting armoursmithing, smithing, hammer, and miscellaneous items. The philosophy is that combat is not much different to this type of scenario. If all of the fighting skills increase independently at 1/3 the rate, shouldn't they all get a 3x multiplier to compensate? If that logic is faulty, then it should be reconsidered and I will do so.

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10 hours ago, Sindusk said:
  • Why is weaponsmithing worth 31 million but small axe is worth 33 million?
    • Assuming you are in combat at all times, weapon skills raise at roughly 1/3 the rate of normal skills. Combine that with the fact that small axe has a 7k difficulty instead of the standard 4k like most other skills, it's basically slightly harder than weapon smithing. Small Axe: 7,000 * 3 = 21,000. Weapon Smithing: 20,000. This probably isn't even enough, as small axe cannot be skilled at all times unlike weapon smithing. However, this dives into the philosophy of action time versus infrequency which I've gone over before.
  • Shovel being 4.4 million with digging at 4.1 million, even though shovel takes roughly 2.3x as much effort, why's that?
    • Because they level hand-in-hand. You cannot skill one without the other, and it essentially counts as two skills instead of one. Valuing shovel at it's normal rate would make digging a more valuable STP action over other skills. It's probably still more valuable in spite of the reduced STP of shovel.
  • Huge axe? 19 million. Carpentry? 5.5 million.
    • Again covered by weapon skills being roughly 3 times slower than normal skills.

 

But that's the thing with weapons, that logic is a touch too wonky to sit right. A single hit at 50% damage is equal to 30 seconds of skillgain, so that's 60 seconds of skilling on the right mobs. In the time it takes to level a weapon to 90, even with 109c tools you'd struggle to get WS as high as fast if you're going for the best mobs, irrespective of combat downtime.

Shovel is a weird one, I'm sort of seeing the logic but digging (ha!) my foot down that shovel is still undervalued. Digging at 3k and shovel at 7k means eventually that shovel skill will teeter off if you're focusing digging. Shovel still needs to be higher based on the skill difficulty difference alone I'd say. The idea is there, but the value is still off.

 

Edited by Madnath
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2 hours ago, Madnath said:

But that's the thing with weapons, that logic is a touch too wonky to sit right. A single hit at 50% damage is equal to 30 seconds of skillgain, so that's 60 seconds of skilling on the right mobs. In the time it takes to level a weapon to 90, even with 109c tools you'd struggle to get WS as high as fast if you're going for the best mobs, irrespective of combat downtime.

 

I haven't looked for the exact values recently, but that does sound right to me. The calculations for the combat multipliers were done with an assumption of 1 vs 1 combat with an opponent of equal skill. It's totally possible that it's a faulty assumption to make and I'd be willing to revise it if a better assumption scenario is presented.

 

2 hours ago, Madnath said:

Shovel is a weird one, I'm sort of seeing the logic but digging (ha!) my foot down that shovel is still undervalued. Digging at 3k and shovel at 7k means eventually that shovel skill will teeter off if you're focusing digging. Shovel still needs to be higher based on the skill difficulty difference alone I'd say. The idea is there, but the value is still off.

 

This is logical and I'm not opposed to splitting the value between the two skills equally instead of having it weighted to one side. The original thinking was that digging was the primary skill, so the STP should be valued fully. The shovel was simply a tool and could have it's value reduced to compensate without hurting the primary skill. If it's better to split their value equally, then that's logical as well and should have no negative effects since the two skills are so intertwined. If there's no objections to it, then I can adjust it alongside all similar skills (like mining and farming).

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On 11/9/2022 at 10:16 PM, Sindusk said:

The calculations for the combat multipliers were done with an assumption of 1 vs 1 combat with an opponent of equal skill. 

 

If the multipliers for Mind Logic and Soul Depth are based on the fact, they can be quickly trained using panfilling (the optimal way of gaining them), why are you basing combat skills on a non-optimal way of skilling? For 99% of the population, they are not going to be fighting 1v1 against an equal skilled opponent, pretty much ever. Training weapon skills is most commonly gained by fighting a whole lot of low-armored domestic creatures, aiming to do ~50% of their health in damage per hit.

 

How you would model that in your simulations, I don't have a clue, but having weapon and shield skills account for roughly 120m out of 191m on the current top account, seems insane.

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11 hours ago, Shydow said:

 

If the multipliers for Mind Logic and Soul Depth are based on the fact, they can be quickly trained using panfilling (the optimal way of gaining them), why are you basing combat skills on a non-optimal way of skilling? For 99% of the population, they are not going to be fighting 1v1 against an equal skilled opponent, pretty much ever. Training weapon skills is most commonly gained by fighting a whole lot of low-armored domestic creatures, aiming to do ~50% of their health in damage per hit.

 

Mind Logic and Soul Depth are not affected by external multipliers. At one point early on they were, but not anymore. All characteristics are identical outside of Mind Speed. This is an exception because it can only be gained in combat, which has bad times multipliers.

 

11 hours ago, Shydow said:

having weapon and shield skills account for roughly 120m out of 191m on the current top account, seems insane.

 

The STP calculations for combat are based on existing mechanics for combat skilling. The top accounts did not skill through current mechanics. To achieve them using the method above, I estimate that they'd have to kill about 880,000 creatures. Assuming you kill a creature using the method described above at a rate of once per 5 minutes (24 hours a day), you would need to do this for about 8.3 years straight in order to obtain their current skill levels.

 

Personal Opinion: the top two accounts on WurmNode right now - Silakka and Rocklobstar - are way ahead of the accounts below them. If you select any characteristic that is not Mind Logic or Soul Depth, they're #1 and #2 in all of them (outside of Body Control, honorable mention to Spacelamp). They also are the only accounts with over 90 in characteristics outside Mind Logic and Soul Depth. They are 2 of the 3 accounts with 100 mining, and 2 of the 5 accounts with 100 digging. They also have the highest shovel skill among those accounts with 100 digging. While there are better accounts for general crafting - Finn for example - they do not have multiple skills at 100 like the current top accounts. Niarja had several accounts well known for high crafting, but they're not uploaded to WurmNode as of this time.

 

If the old Niarja crafters such as Figs or Dadd were uploaded to WurmNode, you'd be able to see that it's not heavily skewed towards STP for combat. It's just that the current combat accounts dwarf the existing uploads of crafting accounts.

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what about 6/+ creature kills per minute instead of 1 in 5minutes, just to be a bit more realistic with how weapon skill mastery is gained ingame, you find a pack of "domestic" creatures and go ham on gains and ticks, it barely takes any effort if you know where to look for such

Edited by Finnn

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1 hour ago, Sindusk said:

Personal Opinion: the top two accounts on WurmNode right now - Silakka and Rocklobstar - are way ahead of the accounts below them. If you select any characteristic that is not Mind Logic or Soul Depth, they're #1 and #2 in all of them (outside of Body Control, honorable mention to Spacelamp).

 

Sad soul str having noises 😕

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3 hours ago, Sindusk said:

If the old Niarja crafters such as Figs or Dadd were uploaded to WurmNode, you'd be able to see that it's not heavily skewed towards STP for combat. It's just that the current combat accounts dwarf the existing uploads of crafting accounts.

If these were public, I am still working on importing the public ones. Sorry about slow progress. Lots to do irl these days.

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2 hours ago, Finnn said:

what about 6/+ creature kills per minute instead of 1 in 5minutes, just to be a bit more realistic with how weapon skill mastery is gained ingame, you find a pack of "domestic" creatures and go ham on gains and ticks, it barely takes any effort if you know where to look for such

 

Then it would take 101 days of grinding to get to their skills. If that's commonplace, then I'm shocked that more players don't have similar skills by now.

 

The STP calculations aren't based on 1 every 5 minutes anyway. They're based on actual in-game combat time. The goal was to get 10 seconds of combat = 10 seconds of smithing/mining/etc. Admittedly, it could be off and my simulations could have had false assumptions in them. The way I simulated it was through my program that sandboxed the WU combat/action/skill code into a standalone program, then ran tests with player combat to see the results. It's the same program I used to get many of the results found in the WU Datamining thread I made years ago. It allowed me to run thousands of "loops" of combat in seconds and analyze skill gains during that time period. It gave direct access to the multiplier passed through the times parameter and into the skill system. These were then averaged to a 10 second interval, then compared to what was gained from 10 seconds of action bar skilling normally through the skill system. The simulations came out to be around 3x lower than what would be expected in that timeframe if you were skilling something like smithing or mining. That's how the multipliers ended up where they are today.

 

I really wish I still had that program and could run it again, so I could give accurate simulations and raw data to support the conclusions that I came to years ago. The sad truth is that this was all designed years ago when I was both more invested as a player and more interested as a developer than I am today. However, proving it accurate or inaccurate doesn't require such drastic measures. Players can present results of how much skill was gained over periods of time in combat through in-game data collection. If players track their amount of time in combat and their start/end skills after a hunting session, it would go a long way towards improving the system. This requires a lot of attention to detail since sleep bonus, weapon CoC, and other skill gain multipliers would need to be accounted for and reversed to ensure accuracy.

 

Regardless, there was an immense amount of time put into these top accounts on WurmNode and it's not surprising they have the highest STP. That's the only point I was going for.

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18 hours ago, Drogos said:

If these were public, I am still working on importing the public ones. Sorry about slow progress. Lots to do irl these days.

 

Shouldn't it be up to those players if that data is imported to Wurmnode? Seems weird to just add random public accounts to a whole new site without permission.

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6 hours ago, Rocklobster said:

Shouldn't it be up to those players if that data is imported to Wurmnode? Seems weird to just add random public accounts to a whole new site without permission.

ok, I buy your point. Not going to import them :)

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Why is papyrusmaking valued less than many other imping skills in terms of STP?

As far as I know, it shouldn't be any easier to grind papyrusmaking than it is to grind let's say cloth tailoring.

Edited by Borstaskor

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1 hour ago, Borstaskor said:

Why is papyrusmaking valued less than many other imping skills in terms of STP?

As far as I know, it shouldn't be any easier to grind papyrusmaking than it is to grind let's say cloth tailoring.

 

Same skill difficulty and same imp tools as cloth tailoring, so makes sense that really they'd be the same value of STP honestly.

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On 11/12/2022 at 1:51 PM, Rocklobster said:

Sad soul str having noises 😕

 

I only today just realized that I noticed Rocklobster has more soul strength than the other two. Why are you and Rocklobstar basically having the same name? Lol.

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