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Nekojin

Prevent Useless Affinities

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There's a certain number of skills that are flat-out useless - they do nothing, affect nothing, and are basically just placeholders.

 

No, I'm not talking about Puppeteering or Yoyo. I mean specifically Body, Mind, and Soul. I've been told by people multiple times that these main Characteristics don't actually do anything, they're just a measurement for the subskills like Body Strength and Mind Logic.

 

So if these aren't ever in use, don't ever actually do anything - aren't beneficial to any skill usage or skill gain- then why can we have Affinities for them? I have an Affinity for Mind. If it affected my Mind Logic gain speed even a little, I wouldn't be upset about it. But it doesn't. It doesn't do anything. So that's a completely wasted Affinity gain. Thankfully (for me at least), that was just a random gain, not a purchased Affinity. If I'd spent anything to buy an Affinity and got that, I'd be pretty mad.

 

Can we fix this, please? Prevent the main skills that don't have any utility from ever getting an Affinity? And perhaps give rerolls to people who got them?

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I have an affinity in Body. :) No to mention a whole Thievery tree, that is useless on PVE. I have an affinity in lock picking, I doubt I will ever get a single skill tick in it, I do not PVP.

 

 

Edited by Platyna

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agreed the skills that are useless in pve should not be available for an affinity unless the person is on a pvp server, and i got you beat Nekojin i have 2 affinities for soul >.<

 

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like half the skills in the game are useless placeholders with 1 or 2 "uses" that are so incredibly niche that there's no point actually counting them though

Edited by Oblivionnreaver
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On 12/19/2020 at 1:01 AM, Platyna said:

I have an affinity in Body. :) No to mention a whole Thievery tree, that is useless on PVE. I have an affinity in lock picking, I doubt I will ever get a single skill tick in it, I do not PVP.

 

 

I'm one of those lucky ones who have a stealing affinity on freedom.

I agree that affinities can use some fixing.

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guess my affinity for paving is useful, just to me so much.

 

I suggested once before and do so again because squeaky wheel etc, affinities should be selectable.  Give players points to allocate to affinities of their choice and enrich the RP element of Wurm no end.

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It is quite a bad mechanic where players want to spend their loyalty marks that they've earned by supporting the game and the company and then they buy an affinity token with them.

 

And get....

 

Affinity in "channeling" as non priest, affinity in Hammer/Warhammer while playing Freedom, affinity in useless skills such as "Stealing" or "Thievery".

 

Considering that marks can be used to get infinitely more usefull stuff like A magic chest or a tome, spending marks for affinity tokens seem like loot boxes with an extra chance to get crappier items. Just my two marks. I'll admit my bias and say I've bought an affinity token only to get Channeling as a reward from it when I have zero plans to ever play a priest in game. 

 

 

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I got lucky with a marks-buy of affinity and got tailoring, in which I was already interested.  At least I have ONE useful affinity. 

 

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Myeah. Realistically the solution is to fix said useless skills and make them less dumb, but a bandaid to just say you can’t get affinities for them is fine too.

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The issue is what defines useless? Sure there are some skills that most can agree on are useless sure, such a warhammers, thievery, hammers, stealing, even something like traps, exorcism. But you can quickly get into gray areas with what is "useless." Take weapon heads smithing, or blades smithing, which historically were much more necessary when components had a chance to be destroyed when combining like sword blades, or yoyo which used to have the function of grinding Mind Speed. How about other gray areas like tracking? It is arguably one of the least used skills due to it not yielding as valuable as information as people would like. What about grayer areas like any of the war machines skills, as those are helpful to PvP but not nearly as helpful to PvE(which a majority of folks play on). What about something like climbing?

 

The suggestion here should not be "prevent useless affinities" it should instead be "add usage to under-utilized skills" or "make all skills have a purpose" because with those, it is very singular and achieves the goal of people feeling like they are getting only useful affinities vs. basing the adjustment of game mechanics on the quite gray area of what people feel are useless.

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6 hours ago, Shrimpiie said:

The issue is what defines useless? Sure there are some skills that most can agree on are useless sure, such a warhammers, thievery, hammers, stealing, even something like traps, exorcism. But you can quickly get into gray areas with what is "useless." Take weapon heads smithing, or blades smithing, which historically were much more necessary when components had a chance to be destroyed when combining like sword blades, or yoyo which used to have the function of grinding Mind Speed. How about other gray areas like tracking? It is arguably one of the least used skills due to it not yielding as valuable as information as people would like. What about grayer areas like any of the war machines skills, as those are helpful to PvP but not nearly as helpful to PvE(which a majority of folks play on). What about something like climbing?

 

The suggestion here should not be "prevent useless affinities" it should instead be "add usage to under-utilized skills" or "make all skills have a purpose" because with those, it is very singular and achieves the goal of people feeling like they are getting only useful affinities vs. basing the adjustment of game mechanics on the quite gray area of what people feel are useless.


Sure, but as i mentioned, a bandaid can suit this fine for now. Asking the dev team to rework several skills to make them feel better to have an affinity for is a much bigger request than asking for certain skills to be blocked off from affinities for now, especially the outright literally zero use ones like parent characteristics or pvp only skills on the pve server.

 

Especially since the dev team probably shouldnt be overburdened with work at the current pace if updates.

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I do not know how hard that would be to implement, but couldn't one get a choice of max, say 20 skills (or whichever number seems reasonable) to exclude when choosing the random affinity? That list could be included into the personal configs on client, or better be stored on server.

 

This would still leave not few not so much desired outcomes, but exclude the worst duds, and leave choice to everyone. Personally, for example, I would not mind lockpicking because I love it (useless as it is in PvE), but hammers (where I already have an affi ;) ) and warhammers are duds, so is for me - as I shall never turn priest - all praying, channeling etc. stuff. Personally, I prolly would even not exclude full 20.

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7 hours ago, Shrimpiie said:

The issue is what defines useless?

 

Since that is so subjective, let players choose their affinities.  Simple solution.

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It's not that subjective. 

 

We now know some skills are completely useless. 

 

Tell me what use is catapults skill at 70 vs at 2? Tell me what use is "Soul" or "Mind" ? 

 

Tell me what use is Religion and subskills for people who do not play a priest? Thievery and sub skills on pve? Sure, they have a role in pvp, but those who only play freedom ?

 

Tell me what use does Knives skill have? 

 

I could go on with the entire wurm skillset, we could even ask a volunteer to delve through the code and see just what (zero) effect some high skills have on the game. And please don't make assumptions, give me an actual real significant effect on certain skills. 

 

The key academic word here is "significant" which in statistics has a certain meaning. If a high skill has no significant effect, it shouldn't be in the game at all. 

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53 minutes ago, elentari said:

It's not that subjective. 

 

It is, widely.

 

53 minutes ago, elentari said:

We now know some skills are completely useless. 

 

A few, yes, at least for nearly all of us. Hammers/Warhammer for example, but a holder of the Hammer of Magranon may contradict.

 

53 minutes ago, elentari said:

Tell me what use is catapults skill at 70 vs at 2? Tell me what use is "Soul" or "Mind" ? Tell me what use is Religion and subskills for people who do not play a priest? Thievery and sub skills on pve? Sure, they have a role in pvp, but those who only play freedom ?

 

The connection between parent and sub skill is a shady one and may need overworking. But that said, it is not useless. After all these years, Wurm is still work in progress (like my deed, lol), and will continue to be. That also means it has potential.

 

While my cata skill is ashamably low (12.21 :) ) I could observe my hit rate going up with rising skill (while demolishing fences), or at least I believed so.

Though I do not plan to do PvP in any near future, and prolly never with this character, I still reserve the possibility, and I love lockpicking. After all. sitting all day and playing computer games is not really more useful than lockpicking. And one may choose to priest, at least for some time. So all that is subjective.

 

53 minutes ago, elentari said:

The key academic word here is "significant" which in statistics has a certain meaning. If a high skill has no significant effect, it shouldn't be in the game at all. 

Mind what Wittgenstein wrote about the relationship of "expert" and natural language. And mind that we used to teach in empirical science 001 that significance is not relevance.

 

All that said, I am all for leaving a choice to players instead of blind RNG on giving affis. Thus my proposal with the negative list.

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12 hours ago, elentari said:

Tell me what use is Religion and subskills for people who do not play a priest? Thievery and sub skills on pve? Sure, they have a role in pvp, but those who only play freedom ?

 

I think that shows the subjectivity of it, for each there is a context where it is useless and a context where it is useful.  The problem to me is we get to choose our context but not the affinities that go well with it.

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When buying affinity from Marks Store, it should give a player choice between 5 random affinities.  That way we still have a game of chance AND a decent chance for a good affinity.

 

As far as useless skills go:  Remove the ones that do absolutely nothing, then maybe use those freed up slots in the skill library for a revamp of others, like weaponsmithing.

 

For skills that only apply to PVP, put in some code that adds or removes them based on what server you are using.  We already have other things that change when crossing between PvE and PvP, so why not these skills?  Another way to handle it would be to have the skill set default to PvE based skills and in profile, the player could choose to enable the few PvP only skills, while still on PvE, for the chance at affinities on PvE that would help when in PvP.  But personally I'd be inclined to only have those available when on a PvP server, using marks there.

 

If you think about it, spending 10k for random affy and getting warhammer is the same as getting a message "sorry, no affinity for you, you big fat loser - oh thanks for the 10k marks.. haha!!"

 

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On 12/22/2020 at 4:27 PM, Shrimpiie said:

The issue is what defines useless? Sure there are some skills that most can agree on are useless sure, such a warhammers, thievery, hammers, stealing, even something like traps, exorcism. But you can quickly get into gray areas with what is "useless." Take weapon heads smithing, or blades smithing, which historically were much more necessary when components had a chance to be destroyed when combining like sword blades, or yoyo which used to have the function of grinding Mind Speed. How about other gray areas like tracking? It is arguably one of the least used skills due to it not yielding as valuable as information as people would like. What about grayer areas like any of the war machines skills, as those are helpful to PvP but not nearly as helpful to PvE(which a majority of folks play on). What about something like climbing?

 

The suggestion here should not be "prevent useless affinities" it should instead be "add usage to under-utilized skills" or "make all skills have a purpose" because with those, it is very singular and achieves the goal of people feeling like they are getting only useful affinities vs. basing the adjustment of game mechanics on the quite gray area of what people feel are useless.

 

For the purposes of avoiding too much conflict on this, I ask once again:

 

What purpose or benefit does my having an Affinity in Mind give? Or other people with Affinities in Body or Soul? I've asked multiple times on CA HELP, and was always told, by both CA and normal players, that they do nothing, their skill scores are functionally meaningless. Is this correct, or is there some benefit to having my Mind skill go up 10% faster?

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On 12/23/2020 at 12:27 AM, Shrimpiie said:

Take weapon heads smithing, or blades smithing, which historically were much more necessary when components had a chance to be destroyed when combining like sword blades

How about other gray areas like tracking? It is arguably one of the least used skills due to it not yielding as valuable as information as people would like.

What about grayer areas like any of the war machines skills, as those are helpful to PvP but not nearly as helpful to PvE(which a majority of folks play on).

What about something like climbing?

As for weapon heads/blade smithing, we aren't balancing for the past. We're balancing for now and the future.

There's no grey area for tracking, you've not been able to suggest a good reason why it's there in this post. Weird take mate, not gonna lie.

As for PVP stuff, I'd rather the actual people on PVP here and now say if these war machine skills are useful or even used, none the less enough to warrant an affinity.

As for climbing, idk, seems like nobody wants to grind it though, I was under the impression it was useless.

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parent characteristic skills and affinities should be completely removed or made it so that if you have an affinity in the parent skill - it affects the skill gain for all the other skills governed by that parent skill. the way it is now is just simply useless. I have 7 or 8 affinities distributed within my Body Mind Soul skills. What do i get out of them? can any dev explain that to me? as far as i know i get nothing in return, so why are those even there? 

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On 12/21/2020 at 8:22 AM, TheTrickster said:

guess my affinity for paving is useful, just to me so much.

 

I suggested once before and do so again because squeaky wheel etc, affinities should be selectable.  Give players points to allocate to affinities of their choice and enrich the RP element of Wurm no end.

 

 

Another fantastic idea, 

 

You could buy Affinity skill points from the marks store or gain extra points from using a skill randomly like we can gain affinities now. 

At character creation give players x amount of points to assign anyway they choose, could even have a "reset option" that costs marks if a player made a mistake?

 

very nice idea and with some fleshing out could be the way forward big plus 1 

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I have handful of useless affinities, not much can do about it :( depending the roles you are doing and what servers too.

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On 12/23/2020 at 2:36 AM, TheTrickster said:

 

Since that is so subjective, let players choose their affinities.  Simple solution.

 

This is an excellent idea, but would require a new system to be put in place to track 'affinity points', assign affinity point costs to skills (because obvs. milking, weapon smithing, and body strength should not have the same affinity point costs), a method of earning these affinity points and so on.

 

I think it's worth doing, but also recognize that it will take a LOT of work and the implementation of new systems in wurm has been kind of hit-or-miss - no disrespect to the devs intended.

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