Sign in to follow this  
phennexion

Sooo... What is Wurm doing now?

Recommended Posts

Many of us went years without seeing any dramatic update - then we had a large amount of big game changes pushed out over the course of 4 years - then we had a decently large update in the last 9 months.

If you do not have the patience to wait for this game and its updates, you're playing the wrong game. Did you know how long it took, for bridges? For cave building? For TWO STORY HOUSES!? Jesus, we were horse surfing for a darn decade plus some!

 

 

  • Like 2
  • Cat 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, Madnath said:

see if they actually provide a good update with the next big one

Hope springs eternal.


But in all seriousness; lets not forget we got board games for Christmas which is a feature in and of itself.  It doesn't look like much, but it must have been a pain to code.

 

Also...  Voting with your wallet is your right as a consumer; exercise it with others and you might be surprised what you can achieve.  Personally speaking, I just de-preme when there hasn't been any new priest-accessible content in a while.

 

Speaking of...  PvE priest balance is coming when?

  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 minutes ago, Etherdrifter said:

Speaking of...  PvE priest balance is coming when?

Lets see if they ever unbreak priest skilling

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
41 minutes ago, Blazecraze said:

Many of us went years without seeing any dramatic update - then we had a large amount of big game changes pushed out over the course of 4 years - then we had a decently large update in the last 9 months.

If you do not have the patience to wait for this game and its updates, you're playing the wrong game. Did you know how long it took, for bridges? For cave building? For TWO STORY HOUSES!? Jesus, we were horse surfing for a darn decade plus some!

 

 

 

That's fine and all - I don't mind waiting for updates if they're good and great. Regular updates on progress is vital - look at star citizen, it's been in alpha FOREVER, but they're clear communicators and have a defined roadmap and goals to meet. That keeps their players trust in RSI. 


 

Game Chest is doing the opposite, I wouldn't be surprised if they're funneling money from Wurm into other projects they feel like be more profitable. There clearly seems to be no solid leadership/ownership on Wurm since Rolf left, seems to be a bunch of people who periodically pop in and give us minor updates to give the illusion the game's still being supported.

 

They fact that they recently enabled moon metals from Marks store shows that they're implementing more strategies to milk the playerbase for more money/pay to win instead of keeping moon metals rare from rifts.

Edited by phennexion

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
35 minutes ago, Blazecraze said:

Many of us went years without seeing any dramatic update - then we had a large amount of big game changes pushed out over the course of 4 years - then we had a decently large update in the last 9 months.

If you do not have the patience to wait for this game and its updates, you're playing the wrong game. Did you know how long it took, for bridges? For cave building? For TWO STORY HOUSES!? Jesus, we were horse surfing for a darn decade plus some!

 

 

Yup, I was around for that. 

The reason why people have a problem now is because the steam launch was supposed to be a huge moment for the game, and it was! A lot of time and money was poured in by players yet despite this boom in resources, nothing has/is being done in order to improve the game with said resources.

 

Back then, they likely didn't have the money to justify hiring proper developers to work on the game, thus irregular updates were understandable. Now, they do. This behavior is no longer understandable, hence people voicing their concerns and annoyance.

Edited by Jore
  • Like 4

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The amount of money that has exchanged hands during the Steam launch has to have been dramatically far smaller than you think.

Yes thousands of accounts signed up, but no, thousands didn't hang around to stay premmed. In fact, I know for sure over 400-500 of the accounts on NFI that were made were players from SFI that decided to move there, and instead allow their Prem to drop on SFI and start group deeds...which on average would lead to a drop in the monthly income. I know groups of 5-10 players that each had 3+ alts on SFI instead do the exact same activity on SFI.

 

If anything, that large 'burst' of income would have been directly offset by the server merging, increased server load and cost with the new servers of the launch, as well as the advertising, production and probably repaying the current staff the wages they're actually owed.

 

Edit 1: Between myself and 11 friends, over 90 accounts were created for many various reasons on NFI - and in one of our alliances of hundreds of players, there were only 20-30 real people, the rest were alts or burner accounts. These absolutely screw the numbers.

 

 

Edited by Blazecraze
  • Like 3

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think the worst part is the radio silence. I feel like communication is key. I maintain we need somebody to run community relations so that we have more of an idea of what's going on and somebody to give our feedback to the Devs.

  • Like 7

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, Etherdrifter said:

Speaking of...  PvE priest balance is coming when?

Be wary what you're asking for.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, phennexion said:

That's fine and all - I don't mind waiting for updates if they're good and great. Regular updates on progress is vital - look at star citizen, it's been in alpha FOREVER, but they're clear communicators and have a defined roadmap and goals to meet. That keeps their players trust in RSI. 

making star citizen as an example of game keeping player in trust is the most insane statement that ive seen in a while

2 hours ago, warrior said:

I think the worst part is the radio silence. I feel like communication is key. I maintain we need somebody to run community relations so that we have more of an idea of what's going on and somebody to give our feedback to the Devs.

exactly, thats one of the main problems.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Wurm already told us what's going on....

 

I don't think posting the same pie in they sky wish list over and over will help. Wurm has never kept players informed about precise details or asked of a communities wishes to make those details override developer opinions/wishes. Basically we wait for the devs to get 90% to 100% of whatever they are working on to be finished and then well hear about it. After that it might go to test to find bugs (but likely not change the details of the features to suit players wishes when contrary to developer opinions).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
20 minutes ago, Ogare said:

Wurm already told us what's going on....

 

I don't think posting the same pie in they sky wish list over and over will help. Wurm has never kept players informed about precise details or asked of a communities wishes to make those details override developer opinions/wishes. Basically we wait for the devs to get 90% to 100% of whatever they are working on to be finished and then well hear about it. After that it might go to test to find bugs (but likely not change the details of the features to suit players wishes when contrary to developer opinions).

 

That was over 3 months ago...

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
20 minutes ago, Ogare said:

 After that it might go to test to find bugs

Had a good laugh about that.

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
7 hours ago, Blazecraze said:

The amount of money that has exchanged hands during the Steam launch has to have been dramatically far smaller than you think.

Yes thousands of accounts signed up, but no, thousands didn't hang around to stay premmed. In fact, I know for sure over 400-500 of the accounts on NFI that were made were players from SFI that decided to move there, and instead allow their Prem to drop on SFI and start group deeds...which on average would lead to a drop in the monthly income. I know groups of 5-10 players that each had 3+ alts on SFI instead do the exact same activity on SFI.

 

If anything, that large 'burst' of income would have been directly offset by the server merging, increased server load and cost with the new servers of the launch, as well as the advertising, production and probably repaying the current staff the wages they're actually owed.

 

Edit 1: Between myself and 11 friends, over 90 accounts were created for many various reasons on NFI - and in one of our alliances of hundreds of players, there were only 20-30 real people, the rest were alts or burner accounts. These absolutely screw the numbers.

 

 



here's some numbers then:

https://gamechestgroup.com/investor-relations/press-release/20573

GCG in total amounted to 1.5m SEK profit or around 180k usd during just quarter 3 aka the steam launch; while this is a result of all of their platforms, most of their stuff doesn't actually bring in much money and a grand majority of that is wurm; they reported 6k subs which climbed up to 8k around october (and has already plummeted down to 6k again)

server migrations and the server costs of this game aren't; that high- infact the game is almost optimized to be as cheap as humanly possible.

most of the money clearly hasn't been reinvested into the game

Edited by RainRain
  • Like 4

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, warrior said:

 

That was over 3 months ago...

 

The point I was trying to make was the message they told us 3 months ago is still the same today. You want Wurm to tell you the same thing every week?

 

I guess it's possible Wurm could start giving highly detailed feedback on what devs are doing and the progress being made. But from what I've seen Wurm doesn't like doing that.  I can guess why. Maybe they don't want to publicly commit to things until they are done; Hence the lessons learned with bridges. Maybe the devs are like most game developers who think their ideas of what's fun and what's proper game balance are superior. If one has no intention of listening to others why bother telling them what's going on? Just do it and afterwards tell the nay-sayers to stfu. Maybe it's the old adage...it's easier to ask for forgiveness then to ask for permission. By informing players of game feature details isn't exactly asking for permission but I guarantee players will try to influence the process at every step. So it's likely easier to tell the community nothing and then if it's a flop afterwards ask for forgiveness. At least something got done, right?

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
47 minutes ago, RainRain said:



here's some numbers then:

https://gamechestgroup.com/investor-relations/press-release/20573

GCG in total amounted to 1.5m SEK profit or around 180k usd during just quarter 3 aka the steam launch; while this is a result of all of their platforms, most of their stuff doesn't actually bring in much money and a grand majority of that is wurm; they reported 6k subs which climbed up to 8k around october (and has already plummeted down to 6k again)

server migrations and the server costs of this game aren't; that high- infact the game is almost optimized to be as cheap as humanly possible.

most of the money clearly hasn't been reinvested into the game


This is pretty interesting from that release.

"At the beginning of Q3, the group had around 2,500 subscribers... We had a launch, a goal of reaching 4000-5000 paying subscribers within the group. At present (November), the Group has found a stable basis for more than 6,000 payers subscribers and now in recent times also seen a mild upward turn again."

 

Also talked about is them hiring content creators on Twitch and Youtube with 20,000 to 300,000 followers.

 

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, RainRain said:



here's some numbers then:

https://gamechestgroup.com/investor-relations/press-release/20573

GCG in total amounted to 1.5m SEK profit or around 180k usd during just quarter 3 aka the steam launch; while this is a result of all of their platforms, most of their stuff doesn't actually bring in much money and a grand majority of that is wurm; they reported 6k subs which climbed up to 8k around october (and has already plummeted down to 6k again)

server migrations and the server costs of this game aren't; that high- infact the game is almost optimized to be as cheap as humanly possible.

most of the money clearly hasn't been reinvested into the game

Now this is the result for the parent company, not for Code Club AB. Look at those numbers back in 2019 for example, clearly not our numbers.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, RainRain said:



most of the money clearly hasn't been reinvested into the game

 

Boom, even if they only made $50,000 in Wurm since NFI launch, and god knows they easily hit that with how many Pay 2 Win people there are on the new cluster, I had a guy drop 7 gold into our deed's token on the first few days, and he had plenty more. I'm sure he wasn't the only one - I hear some team on pvp server bought a 600x600 or something sized deed right off the bat too. 

 

The fanbois need to start realizing that there was alot of money made, and alot of money not reinvested back into the game we love. They will keep up the Pay 2 Win milking of this game (if moon metals wasn't more proof), if we let them. Next thing you know we'll get daily login rewards lol.

Edited by phennexion

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I fail to see the point of most of these rants. In fact, the subscriber figures published are matching very well the mrtg statistics of unique users: https://jenn001.game.wurmonline.com/mrtg/weeklylogins.html .

(Of course not all unique users are subscribers, and not all unique users do log in in a given period, but both figures are closely connected and correlated). We can see that the game is not "dying" at all, nor "bleeding players" in any dramatic shape.

 

Kierkegaard gave an interesting link to an academic paper about player behaviour, player critique, and player retention in https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031210-184345/unrestricted/Statistical_Analysis_of_Gamer_Behavior.pdf . While not all from Xbox360 ecosystems may apply to WO and steam, the churn rate statistics in Chapter 3.3. , p.20-23 are impressive. Compared to those, WO has shown a remarkable degree of player retention. Also a result of that study is that player critique or rants like here do not significantly affect player participation.

 

While doomsaying may give the authors a slightly perverted feeling of satisfaction, it does not help the game or the players, nor is is likely to influence the devs or the management, at least other than there is not much of a point to listen to the forums, or even the players. And that I would indeed regret and resent, given the latest maldecisions and other problems which should be addressed.

 

Among them an outlook for the still quite new year as promised would be welcome. Personally, I am not so eager for neither dramatic changes nor brand new shiny content (with brand new not so shiny bugs). I would prefer an aim towards stability and eradication of known bugs and problems over that. Also, I would like if some long due changes would be implemented, e.g. a skill re-transfer from Epic to Freedom, maybe along with Epic being reachable from NFI (it is not, or?) as well, to introduce the Epic cluster as a hunting and adventuring cluster for all of Wurm (other than closing it down). And if the devs find the time for, and the effort is not too huge, a restart of Jackal, also for NFI and SFI, should be considered.

 

 

 

  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, Ekcin said:

Among them an outlook for the still quite new year as promised would be welcome. Personally, I am not so eager for neither dramatic changes nor brand new shiny content (with brand new not so shiny bugs). I would prefer an aim towards stability and eradication of known bugs and problems over that. Also, I would like if some long due changes would be implemented, e.g. a skill re-transfer from Epic to Freedom, maybe along with Epic being reachable from NFI (it is not, or?) as well, to introduce the Epic cluster as a hunting and adventuring cluster for all of Wurm (other than closing it down). And if the devs find the time for, and the effort is not too huge, a restart of Jackal, also for NFI and SFI, should be considered.

See even you have a wish for more communication. While I think most of this thread is a bit to aggressive in tone and too much conspiracy about the money we can agree that the way Wurm is updating us on content and development is not right for modern standards. In a lot of Devtalks for Indi games there is always the point of talking to as much people as possible during feature development. It's not about getting critique it's about finding things that maybe looks obvious to you but are really strange concepts for a larger player base.

I think good relative fresh examples for this are the current Diablo 4 Development and the GGG people from Path of Exile. After all the critique with D3 they see they need to get more feedback during the development cycle and have settled on a Quarter year update.

The people know that they come and keep quiet (well except after 10 weeks they there is this small window where people ask where it is but that is way better than a "pls update us on things" every week) And the communication from the PoE people are top. Of course a lot of players maybe don't read about it and ignore it and the same will go for the Wurm Dev blogs probably. But you reach the people that care that will spend part of their day thinking about it to find flaws in your argument and plans. Ask questions like how the new Y will interact with old feature X and you are maybe go like "oh yeah there is a small interaction I did forget about I was focusing on Z what is way heavier influenced by Y"

 

There is a reason we want more updates on current things. It Its not that we doom say the game. I am sure Wurm will "survive" another 10 Years until someone manage to get a better thing out there then the other copy attempts. But we don't want this game that would be awesome with a large community to be just keep being enjoyed by 2-3k people if ther are millions of gamers out there that maybe would find Wurm great if it would feel more polished. Wurm is one of these games that feel forever alpha/beta and this is a problem that will hinder its growth. It was ok in a time of this was more or less a single person developed game and progress could be slow. But Wurm is out of the phase where we should accept as a community glacial progress without reasoning. Or bugs that are in forever and still don't get resolved (bug hunting can be hard so on this front is always a up and down but the current thing looks more like minimal effort and random finds that get fixed along the way not intentional bug hunting).

 

I currently not really excited for the game and I log in for my Village and the people there at the moment not because the game give me anything. Its more the act of being there for the people that still have fun with it and be happy that Wurm give me a framework to interact with them. But I would have the same fun in every other game with the same people it's not a unique Wurm feature that keeps me here.

 

  • Like 5

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
5 hours ago, Ekcin said:

While not all from Xbox360 ecosystems may apply to WO and steam, the churn rate statistics in Chapter 3.3. , p.20-23 are impressive. Compared to those, WO has shown a remarkable degree of player retention. Also a result of that study is that player critique or rants like here do not significantly affect player participation.
 

 

Exactly my point and to add, the study highlights and contradicts most of this threads arguments. New consumable content provides temporary player increases but does not stop the rate at which players stop playing the game (section 4.1). The entire argument about releasing new consumable content is the wrong approach because it does not keep players playing the game. However, I think content can be separated into two categories: consumable and process. Adding consumable content like Op's "because PvE doesn't have an end game" suggestion is the wrong approach to adding more content.

 

Consumable content is what the study describes. It is adding new raid levels in WoW and probably similar to Rifts in Wurm. It is content that can be played and consumed. People play and then get bored and leave. This is not the type of content that Wurm should add. PvE should not have an end game because it then can be consumed. It should be open architecture, deep and complex. It is not deep and complex today.

 

Process content (there is probably a better name) is content like the Cooking Update. I've listened to FactionalFight talk about the Cooking update. The Cooking update is one of the most impressive content improvements I have ever seen (gaming since UO - haven't played Runescape), probably only second to SWG Online (MMORPG) crafting/eco system. It is impressive because of its deep integration and its complexity. If the developers took the Cooking update approach (level of detail, complexity and thoughtfulness) to all the major elements of this game, there would be improved player retention and increased long-term player growth. It will be interesting to see if the fight mechanics update is an inch deep and a mile wide or something more complex and detailed like the cooking update.

 

Edited by Kierkegaard
  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
16 minutes ago, Kierkegaard said:

 

Exactly my point and to add, the study highlights and contradicts most of this threads arguments. New consumable content provides temporary player increases but does not stop the rate at which players stop playing the game (section 4.1). The entire argument about releasing new consumable content is the wrong approach because it does not keep players playing the game. However, I think content can be separated into two categories: consumable and process. Adding consumable content like Op's "because PvE doesn't have an end game" suggestion is the wrong approach to adding more content.

 

Consumable content is what the study describes. It is adding new raid levels in WoW and probably similar to Rifts in Wurm. It is content that can be played and consumed. People play and then get bored and leave. This is not the type of content that Wurm should add. PvE should not have an end game because it then can be consumed. It should be open architecture, deep and complex. It is not deep and complex today.

 

Process content (there is probably a better name) is content like the Cooking Update. I've listened to FactionalFight talk about the Cooking update. The Cooking update is one of the most impressive content improvements I have ever seen (gaming since UO - haven't played Runescape), probably only second to SWG Online (MMORPG) crafting/eco system. It is impressive because of its deep integration and its complexity. If the developers took the Cooking update approach (level of detail, complexity and thoughtfulness) to all the major elements of this game, there would be improved player retention and increased long-term player growth. It will be interesting to see if the fight mechanics update is an inch deep and a mile wide or something more complex and detailed like the cooking update.

 



i don't understand what the point of bringing up that topic over and over again is; yes, any game that gets a new surge in players will lose that surge and often quickly (although the study used a ton of singleplayer game examples which feels rather misleading to compare to a kind-of-sort-of MMO like wurm because the former is MEANT to be consumed and forgotten, whereas mmo's typically aren't)- that's perfectly well understood, but wurm is doing a fairly poor job of conserving that lead when compared to other games in modern days that receive new updates; you can look at the steam analytics charts for practically any ongoing game (https://steamcharts.com/ it's literally the same sort of ###### all over the study you posted minus more comparable to wurm because of the focused multiplayer aspect- that said i'll refrain from picking a game because comparing to wurm is hard specifically because it's a niche title; the closest comparison we have is likely life is feudal which experiences extremely similar drops in playercount until it ultimately snuffed out- though wurm is more resilient due to it's cheaper hosting nature and predatory community-reliant staffing tactics)

consumable content alone isn't necessarily a wrong approach; infact it's a perfectly fine approach for many games so long as developers can maintain a steady stream of development- which it's very clear to anyone who's kept up with this game's dev patterns that they aren't; but an additional problem that wurm is constantly hitting is based on it's own structure

for one, we have a large community split across several servers; while some servers you can travel across freely, for most of a person's gameplay they're going to be on their chosen server. in effect, this splits a population up into even smaller sizes which wouldn't be a bad thing were this game not so incredibly dependent on having a strong community in order to be enjoyable - minus solo players who are probably better off just playing WU instead anyhow. this creates a sort of deadly feedback loop where once players start to drop off, because an already small population is split across many servers (doubly so for SFI), the servers become much more barren and the existing players start to feel isolated/bored of being alone/whatever you want to call it. It's bad for pve but it's a gamekiller for pvp where you RELY on people being there on the other side whenever you're available yourself in order to actually participate in the servers intent- pvp. Now add in the fact that pvp is split across five damned servers in 3 different clusters and you have a recipe for death. thankfully rifts can be travelled to in time and the economy works across servers, but the cluster split also works against the game as well (not to imply a merge is desired or even a good idea at all, but they shot themselves in the foot going for this tactic)

also, saying wurm should add "process" based content without actually giving any idea of what that content should look like doesn't really help anyone at all. i'd rather have consumable content than no content at all :)

the cooking update's ambition and intentions are definitely the sort of thing that should be coming out on a regular basis for this game; i struggle to admire it as much as you because the system boils down to being something fairly simple, and the mechanical benefit of it has been reduced to spamming a single type of food to get a small boost in experience- a lot of love went into something with a fairly small reward, and i honestly feel like most of that work went into filling the cookbook with a ton of different recipes rather than the core system itself anyhow. definitely don't see the level of detail/thoughtfulness going into it, but it was still better than the old cooking system for sure, although it frankly failed in improving on it any (you can still ignore 99% of foods and just cook meals and nothing else at all and be max ccfp/nutrition, which a large complaint was that other foods are useless in comparison to meals, which for plenty of foods is still the case. you also don't need to do silly pizza schenanigans unless you like staring at 12+ hour affinities either)

 

also i wouldn't be optimistic about the combat update, that needed to have been out 3 months ago if they wanted to inspire any hope and their dead silence about it is only adding to the flames, not to mention that it seems to just be culminating into mostly a UI update with tweaks to special moves, which... isn't a combat update. Not in the way that anyone who cares about it views it anyhow.

  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I really highly doubt the combat update will be good, from what the sneak peak showed was only UI updates, which is cool I guess. But doesn't change the actual combat in the game. Doesn't change peoples life pools/combat related skills effectiveness. Other than 100% Health and 100% Stamina bars, you can't tell how much damage reduction you're getting or how much total health you have in your personal pool it's always been a guessing game and number crunching. Little minor stuff like that would be nice. Like an update to the paper doll to show peoples stats like that would be neat. I would personally scrap the whole combat system and start fresh with something and thoroughly test it. Give access to the community and not just keep it hush hush until you release it and it's total and utter garbage. Like I'm fairly positive it's not hard at all to code it for a test server specifically. Adding more weapons/armors/shields with specific stats would be a nice add to the game which you can get from rifts or something. Then make rifts more common for a PvE side of things. Item's actually having a hover over of what the % of reduction/effectiveness rather than spreadsheets would be nice and simple for just QoL within the game. These are just some of the minor and major things I'd like to personally see eventually make it into the game. But at this rate with how updates have been going, the game went back to it's core group of players plus a very small amount of people that stuck around from the steam push.

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Most of the friends I've made are gone. My neighbors are gone.

 

I might as well just play WU because I'm already alone.

 

Personally I'm done with the game, had a lot of fun but I wont be back unless theres actual content added.

 

Goodbye everyone 

 

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I would very much like to know what their planning are for the future, dont want to spend more money into this, if this barely get anywhere. So are they lack of developers? or skills??

 

There are many things i like to see in the game and it does feel pretty old at the moment.

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Darkelf, the devs have posted a roadmap. Wurm online has had a very dev group with some volunteers. Wurm has slowly had improvements over many years since its inception. I would not expect major content updates like AAA companies.

Edited by Kierkegaard

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this