Complete Dragon overhaul

[warrior 455]

I think most people would agree that the current system for dragon doesn't work well. It usually ends with a couple of people trying to hoard all the dragons for themselves for personal gain. This ultimately hurts the game because it locks one of the only pieces of content we have, away from 99% of the population. My proposal will solve this issue by making dragons accessible to everyone, while also keeping the dragon hide rare and rewarding. 

 

Spawns

Spawns will no longer be random. Instead they'll be on a weekly timer, the exact day/time will be on a rotation so that it will spawn during everyone's time zone at some point, upon spawning there will be a notification to alert everyone to get out hunting! The dragon will also not hang around forever, if it's still alive after 48 hrs, it will fly away, leaving the server. This is designed to prevent people from penning the dragon with a deed and claiming ownership of the dragon. This will also mean that people will work together to find the dragon and kill it within the 48 hrs so that they can get the rewards, rather than letting it fly away.

 

Combat

Increase the mechanic difficulty of the fight. Right now it is fairly easy to kill a dragon with a bunch of alts, all just standing around and waiting for it to die. By making the fight technically harder, it will mean people have to be more agile and move around. Examples of these could be DoT's that get applied to people standing still for more than a couple of seconds or a tail whip that knocks everybody back 3 tiles. 

 

Rewards

Currently it is beneficial to try kill the dragon with as fewer people as possible to maximize the reward. This means that people keep the dragons to themselves and invite only their alts or a couple of friends. My suggestion is to not have loot scale with number of killers, instead every person will have a chance at a hide/scale drop. For example, every player might have a 1:10 chance to get a 0.10 hide or scale, regardless of how many people attend the fight (exact figures would need to be balances to mean there is the right amount of hide entering the game). This would mean whether there is 10, 100 or 1000 people at the fight, each person has the exact same chance of getting loot. This is important because it will mean scale/hide entering the game will scale with population. Say Wurm got super popular and had a 10k population, the current amount of hide/scale wouldn't be near enough, and visa versa if the population was super small. By also not setting a minimum drop, it means there is 0 advantage to killing the dragon with a small group or with alts. 

 

This idea is purely designed to try and make these fights more accessible to the wider player-base so that we have more content. This will in turn help with player retention and give people a reason to login weekly. 

 

 

Edited November 17, 2020 by warrior

[Gawain 622]

No. -1. Its not hard to go out and look. Tons of groups can and would take you in and on hunts

[Oblivionnreaver 5,174]

5 minutes ago, warrior said:

upon spawning there will be a notification to alert everyone to get out hunting

i think they got rid of that for a reason

6 minutes ago, warrior said:

Right now it is fairly easy to kill a dragon with a bunch of alts

a hatchling sure, a dragon you can't even damage with 20 strength accounts (you can see it in the hit counter for the black dragon which is one of the weakest dragons + it was starving + it wasn't venerable http://webbrar.co.uk/uniques/table.php?data=sbVQGcJqO3 only 35 people out of 155 attackers actually damaged it, and this is months into the server)so unless you've got 20+ prem accs over 30 strength, gear for them all and whatnot, and at that point with all the premium you're paying for these accounts you could just buy a scale set, no?

Have you actually seen anyone solo a dragon with alts outside of pvpers that have access to shared strong accounts or are you just assuming that it's possible and therefore a huge problem?

 

I don't really have any strong feelings towards changing or keeping the current system, but your suggestion seems to be based on the fear of something that isn't even feasible to profit from

[warrior 455]

20 minutes ago, Oblivionnreaver said:

i think they got rid of that for a reason

a hatchling sure, a dragon you can't even damage with 20 strength accounts (you can see it in the hit counter for the black dragon which is one of the weakest dragons + it was starving + it wasn't venerable http://webbrar.co.uk/uniques/table.php?data=sbVQGcJqO3 only 35 people out of 155 attackers actually damaged it, and this is months into the server)so unless you've got 20+ prem accs over 30 strength, gear for them all and whatnot, and at that point with all the premium you're paying for these accounts you could just buy a scale set, no?

Have you actually seen anyone solo a dragon with alts outside of pvpers that have access to shared strong accounts or are you just assuming that it's possible and therefore a huge problem?

 

I don't really have any strong feelings towards changing or keeping the current system, but your suggestion seems to be based on the fear of something that isn't even feasible to profit from

 

I more mean a small group with a couple of alts each, i'm not saying 1 person with 20+ alts. My suggestion is get more content for the general player-base. I feel like it would be good for the game and player retention to try and get as many people as possible involved in these sort of events. The current system just doesn't encourage that sort of community behavior. 

[TheTrickster 2,284]

 

1 hour ago, warrior said:

I think most people would agree that the current system for dragon doesn't work well. It usually ends with a couple of people trying to hoard all the dragons for themselves for personal gain

 

This is about where you lost me.  In my experience I am just not aware of hoarded dragons (oooh, dragon hoards would be some good game content). 

 

If you are looking for public dragons, just come to Release.  Stanlee puts on a public dragon slaying almost every weekend (okay, I exaggerate, it's probably more like every couple of weeks), and he's just one guy.

[Blazecraze 441]

-1

 

People already work together to capture uniques. They are very, very, very difficult to solo capture. Many people already host public slayings but if people hunt, capture and kill the unique with their small group, they deserve to keep the rewards. Tons of other people hunt for uniques that don't belong to the group that captures them for their own group or to do public slayings and thats fine. 
The weekly timer will highly undervalue what is already an undervalued resource.

 

The combat of a dragon in a small group can be challenging already, timing heals, ensuring aggro hits the correct person, positioning it properly for an efficient kill.

 

The final point means that people that do manage to attend the unique and survive long enough to be alive in the local when the dragon dies - aren't even guaranteed their measly bit of loot? 

 

 

-1 Man, sorry but a pretty ###### take on it.

[Finnn 3,303]

2 hours ago, Oblivionnreaver said:

Have you actually seen anyone solo a dragon with alts outside of pvpers that have access to shared strong accounts or are you just assuming that it's possible and therefore a huge problem?

 

I don't really have any strong feelings towards changing or keeping the current system, but your suggestion seems to be based on the fear of something that isn't even feasible to profit from

we just recently saw blu proving uniques are crab ez to lul alone

 

Spawns and hunts within 48 hours are not going to solve anything for the better, previous alerts for spawns only favored small groups hunting uniques - reviving the mechanic wont bring anything different than same sh.. fan spinning again..  current system spawns uniques on generally same places by the clock, there's little to NO rng in that, so if you have some experience you're hooked on it well, but for new players it's near impossible to find something with the spawn rate and inability to find them while some have it as a 'job' to pagerduty ping locations if new harvest is there waiting to be looted at right time.

 

Ideally uniques just have to join the rifts.. and be done with the drama.. limit/balance how much proper old and skilled accounts can get, same for sqush alts to prevent abuse.. obviously best suited in the end will be people who bought 2-5-20 pve/pvp crafter/fighters with good stats and skills.. but can't be helped ccab loves alts. At least that way anyone can go and get a piece of the endgame armor to eventually make one or sell it to others. 

Than we get into the other problem that rifts happen at mostly absolute ...... timings for most people, but that's another topic.

[Oblivionnreaver 5,174]

2 minutes ago, Finnn said:

we just recently saw blu proving uniques are crab ez to lul alone

gearing up 30 accs to kill one of the weakest uniques in the game = all of them are ez? you can kill a hatchling with 3 people so one guy needing 30 accs to kill it isn't really anything impressive. feel free to @ me when he kills a real dragon with alts. the rest of your post is your generic "guy who has never found uniques tells us exactly how uniques are found" drivel you always post so i won't bother commenting on that

[Darnok 203]

4 hours ago, warrior said:

I think most people would agree that the current system for dragon doesn't work well. It usually ends with a couple of people trying to hoard all the dragons for themselves for personal gain. This ultimately hurts the game because it locks one of the only pieces of content we have, away from 99% of the population. My proposal will solve this issue by making dragons accessible to everyone, while also keeping the dragon hide rare and rewarding. 

 

Spawns

Spawns will no longer be random. Instead they'll be on a weekly timer, the exact day/time will be on a rotation so that it will spawn during everyone's time zone at some point, upon spawning there will be a notification to alert everyone to get out hunting! The dragon will also not hang around forever, if it's still alive after 48 hrs, it will fly away, leaving the server. This is designed to prevent people from penning the dragon with a deed and claiming ownership of the dragon. This will also mean that people will work together to find the dragon and kill it within the 48 hrs so that they can get the rewards, rather than letting it fly away.

 

+100

One of the biggest surprises in Wurm for me was the fact that players can imprison unique creatures and guarantee themselves a reward. In other games, doing so will ban the player.

Dragons and other unique creatures should reside in their sanctuaries, as I described in my suggestion, or wander and attack the player and their deeds.

They can destroy guard towers and retreat from the given deed after destroying the tower and there could be some mechanism to ensure that the unique does not attack the same deed twice if not provoked.

 

Quote

Combat

Increase the mechanic difficulty of the fight. Right now it is fairly easy to kill a dragon with a bunch of alts, all just standing around and waiting for it to die. By making the fight technically harder, it will mean people have to be more agile and move around. Examples of these could be DoT's that get applied to people standing still for more than a couple of seconds or a tail whip that knocks everybody back 3 tiles. 

 

If players are still able to imprison unique characters, then the fight with them should be solved completely differently.

At the moment of being released, a unique creature flies away/runs away from the place of imprisonment at the greater distance the longer it was imprisoned and destroys everything in its path... tents, vehicles, kills abandoned horses etc.

If the number of attacking players exceeds a certain limit, the unique should increase the strength of the blows and after dealing 2-3 very strong blows flies away at some distance.

Additionally, dragons should sense players who have already killed a dragon and attack them in the first order, so even if someone uses alts, his main will only be protected during the first dragon fight, in the second he will be the main target.
 

 

 

Edited November 17, 2020 by Darnok

[Finnn 3,303]

1 hour ago, Oblivionnreaver said:

gearing up 30 accs to kill one of the weakest uniques in the game = all of them are ez? you can kill a hatchling with 3 people so one guy needing 30 accs to kill it isn't really anything impressive. feel free to @ me when he kills a real dragon with alts. the rest of your post is your generic "guy who has never found uniques tells us exactly how uniques are found" drivel you always post so i won't bother commenting on that

work with what you have.. it was done on the new cluster

still it's solo unique kill

 

not that it's hard to be done on the old cluster with proper setup ..

It's supposed to be something big and scary but... small "team" can do it, something somewhere stinks a lot around the whole unique content... rework always gets pushed.. like the drama through the years of it all is never enough and more is due  

[Jaz 2,665]

59 minutes ago, Darnok said:

 

 

Additionally, dragons should sense players who have already killed a dragon and attack them in the first order, so even if someone uses alts, his main will only be protected during the first dragon fight, in the second he will be the main target.
 

 

 

Actually I feel they do. I am targeted within a 100 ppl crowd all the time

[Jaz 2,665]

The current system is not that bad as it is pictured by some of the playerbase. No notification on the spawn and being semi random did a big change. Lately quite pretty amount of uniques are found by random wanderers - or better the uniques find them.

I'm not against a nice overhaul but making uniques another rift would put another nail in the coffin of the sandbox aspect of the game. Rifts and clocked events are utterly boring after the third one and become nothing more than chores (I'm so VERY happy I'm over the 100 rifts and probably will never go near one anymore). Rift scout camps are much more within the Wurm sandbox style, I actually enjoy finding and fighting them.

The incentives should go towards making people leave deed and wander and not the contrary. Ppl hidden away in the depth of their deeds will make wurm lands feel empty which I don't see how being good to the game.

[Darnok 203]

44 minutes ago, Jaz said:

Actually I feel they do. I am targeted within a 100 ppl crowd all the time

 

And the fact that such a powerful creature waits in one place to be slaughtered like a sheep is very sad.

 

 

[Jaz 2,665]

2 minutes ago, Darnok said:

 

And the fact that such a powerful creature waits in one place to be slaughtered like a sheep is very sad.

 

 

I'm fully into overhauling unique AI. They should leave combat when they feel themselves in danger, drakes/dragons are even supposed to be able to fly... so?

Even a stupid rift mob will teleport away when fears to be slain.

 

...although I'm a bit worried about combat AI overhauls, it was done to the valrei mobs then at the same time they were removed from the game...

[Tor 523]

-1 I am more in for making some new Uniques/enemies//whatever that drops/award some new stuff and leave the old broken stuff as is, maybe just removed the possibility to be penned and tweak the loot distribution

[Gawain 622]

Where did the poll go?

[Blazecraze 441]

@Gawainprobably removed as it was a resounding 'No' on the poll and doesn't look good on the thread.

[Forests 8]

To me the penning seems to be the issue. While I enjoy being able to know when the fight will commence, one person having control of who knows about the unique killing and when it will happen seems problematic. If it was leashed to a public spot, maybe that would encourage more "rallying cries" to get everyone to attend.

[DaletheGood 1,073]

Big -1 to this idea. If you want to fight a unique, go find one. As stated above, there are plenty of public unique slayings around. They are not as numerous as rifts, but they are uniques, so they shouldn't be happening every week. And as for the lamenting and gnashing of teeth about people being able to pen them, how else would there ever be a public slaying? If you find a unique in the middle of Xanadu say, how are you ever going to get enough people to come to the slaying if you can't pen it? You gonna follow it for the day or two it would take to alert everyone to it's presence and then have those players clear their RL schedules to travel the several hours to the last seen location? No, you'd never kill another unique again if you can't keep it in a known spot.

[kochinac 1,395]

Devs should try no penning option for couple of months just for funs lol.

Yeah i agree that just no penning with current situation wouldnt work well.

Don't think it will make uniques more accessible, i fear it will be opposite, but prove me wrong...

[Lethyria 161]

Time to necro this thread and point out that 6/8 dragons on nfi have been done privately, the distribution mechanic of splitting a pool means this is the optimal strategy, is it time to change that mechanic?

[Finnn 3,303]

On 11/17/2020 at 10:15 AM, Oblivionnreaver said:

gearing up 30 accs to kill one of the weakest uniques in the game = all of them are ez? you can kill a hatchling with 3 people so one guy needing 30 accs to kill it isn't really anything impressive. feel free to @ me when he kills a real dragon with alts. the rest of your post is your generic "guy who has never found uniques tells us exactly how uniques are found" drivel you always post so i won't bother commenting on that

Numerous times it was confirmed that they spawn on generally same spots, and times after last death, only change is that there's no text to announce the spawn.. *maybe* something about the spawning changed as it was talked about, yet 1st month after the changes absolutely nothing changed. Relatively same rate of priv/pub uniques remained, same teams doing same things, same posts on forums, same thing explained over and over, until people started confirming it and posting locations just to 'give other equal chance', like the game should be stalking that 1 farm tile.. to ripe.. to go harvest.. rather than have game events that all could enjoy.

 

In the past 2 years there have been around 10 posts if not more about unique, how they are and that there should be changes.. but nothing.., well 2 years with no significant changes.

 

Unique etiquette post, well who wouldn't be annoyed to deal with the greed of teams and abusing game mechanics, stealing uniques and doing tricks to each other.. some doing that several times..

That's just 1 of the reasons we have the 'rules' now.. but does it change anything as game content for the many.. no.

[Ekcin 2,407]

56 minutes ago, Lethyria said:

Time to necro this thread and point out that 6/8 dragons on nfi have been done privately, the distribution mechanic of splitting a pool means this is the optimal strategy, is it time to change that mechanic?

Why? Seems a good rate to me, given that the servers do exist but a couple of months. Btw., other 3 drake/dragon slayings on Defiance, at least two apparently faction public. On Har/Mel/Cad altogether, 9/15 unique slayings were public. That is ways more than on SFI, and means a public unique slaying nearly twice a month. I fail to see anything in need of change.  And I were against scale or drake armour for everyone without effort (mind I own neither).

[Lethyria 161]

1 minute ago, Ekcin said:

Why? Seems a good rate to me, given that the servers do exist but a couple of months. Btw., other 3 drake/dragon slayings on Defiance, at least two apparently faction public. On Har/Mel/Cad altogether, 9/15 unique slayings were public. That is ways more than on SFI, and means a public unique slaying nearly twice a month. I fail to see anything in need of change.  And I were against scale or drake armour for everyone without effort (mind I own neither).

I'm not trying to conflate uniques with dragons, I guess this is the wrong thread I'm not  a fan of the dragon scale/hide distribution which discourages public slayings. My point is that all the other uniques are done publicly only dragons are privately killed, this means the bloods are much rarer and it makes it harder to attend a dragon kill, I'm not advocating for an abundance of scale or easy scale for everyone just a rethink of the distribution that doesn't directly disincentive public kills. I'm biased as I'm only playing on NFI so don't look at SFI. I also don't blame the people who run private kills if you put the work in you don't want to share the reward with hundreds of people.

[McGarnicle 1,463]

Make it so everyone gets 0.25kg of hide regardless of how many people attend. Make hide similar to bloods or rift points.