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Rhystan

Unique spawning distribution

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There is an epidemic of private slayings going on. People saying that they have to do it or they can never get a suit of armor. And then, of course, that it's also a business, and so after they get their suits of armor, they will continue to do it because it's profitable. 

 

The core issue here is not just that uniques are very valuable and sought after, but in my opinion one of the core issues is that the spawning is not random. The people that hunt them know exactly where to find them. They spawn in the same handful of areas every time. Many of them have alts on 24/7 to watch. There are rumors of a packet sniffer program that can tell the mob locations, but I simply can't comment on that.

 

What I can say is, the system needs a rework. I'd like to start by suggesting that the spawning mechanic needs to be looked at, and given better randomization, similar to the mission system. When a unique is going to spawn, it needs to have a chance to spawn in various parts of the map, such as the SW, NW, NE, SE, center, similar to missions. Right now on Harmony all of the dragons spawn in the center regions near the "capital" cities, and it allows group of "unique hunters" to camp out and get the spawns. But they can't be everywhere. If the dragons spawned ALL OVER THE MAP, those of us who live in those places would have a fair chance at finding them before the people with alts camped out in key areas.

 

I really feel that these unique camping/spawning mechanics are killing the community. Everyone deserves a chance to play with these creatures. It should not be restricted to a few group of elitists who have memorized the spawn locations and can't give it up, because first "They need a full suit of dragon scale armor!" and then after they do "Why would we give up our business?". It's a business to them. It's about money. Everyone knows that silver = real life money. These mechanics really need a rework so that the rest of us can play too. These things only have value as long as there is a community to play with, and the way things are now, is very bad for morale and in my opinion is going to lead to a further drop in population, which is something none of us want.

 

Can someone please actually look into this issue? If you're not willing to work on making these mechanics better for the masses in terms of uniques, can you at least spread them around better so those of us who don't live (or camp out on alts) in the center of harmony can get some too?

 

Thank you for reading.

 

Rhystan

 

 

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As we can see there have been 29 Unique Dragon / Hatchlings killed in the last 7 months on NFI. 6 of them have been public, that leaves 23 of them private. I understand and have no issue with those doing the private hunts, it is how the game is set up currently, but I do agree that something needs to be done to make them more accessible to the broader community. I don't know the methods that people are using to find them, but it does seem to me that it is not as hard as some of those involved want to make it out to be, if they are spawning in the same areas and they simply are the first ones there to "capture" the unique. 

 

People talk about wanting more content added to the game, but here we have content that 99% of the player base has no access to. I don't care about the hide/scales, my concern is the game and the community and I wish to see both of those grow. 

 

 

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Edited by gnomegates
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If you look at the upcoming changes, the exploration update thats due sometime this summer is supposed to also alter the way uniques work.

 

No idea if it will improve the situation though ;)

 

For what it's worth, I agree with Rhystan's point though.

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55 minutes ago, Rhystan said:

Right now on Harmony all of the dragons spawn in the center regions near the "capital" cities, and it allows group of "unique hunters" to camp out and get the spawns

I took a look at the past slayings and they seem over the map, any unique slayer telling you they only spawn in the centre of the map is probably giving you bad info so that you're not competition 😅

59 minutes ago, Rhystan said:

Many of them have alts on 24/7 to watch

haha what

have you gone around the center casting reveal creatures to find stealthed accounts/seen lots of alts with no deeds in local?

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🧉😗 This 'gon be good.

 

Probably spawns in the middle of the map because people have deeded on the outskirts, and It's against the rules to sell silver / items for real world money.

 

1 hour ago, Rhystan said:

There are rumors of a packet sniffer program that can tell the mob locations

And if you're going to make claims like this you should go into detail on where you heard about it. Otherwise it just looks like you're trying to spread FUD.

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  • Location: wherever the uniques are

I am advocating for a better system than what we have now.

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5 minutes ago, Antony said:

And if you're going to make claims like this you should go into detail on where you heard about it. Otherwise it just looks like you're trying to spread FUD.

 

The only FUD I've seen so far is you and Oblivion's post which you liked trying to change the subject. This isn't about me. This is about fixing a broken system that people have railed against for years and have been ignored by the powers that be as well as the players currently reaping the benefits of the current broken system.

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You can do that without unsubstantiated claims about uniques only spawning in one area alt spamming and packet sniffers just fyi, baseless claims like that just make people ignore your post because it seems inexperienced/biased. Even if they changed how they spawn, they'd still be found by the same people because of a core problem - they're the ones putting in effort to find them. No amount of spawning changes will change the fact that the large majority of people spend very little time off deed (We've had multiple changes to unique spawns over the last few years, from changing how they're found, whether or not they say globally when they spawn, the locations they can be found, all didn't change the fact that co-ordinated groups find the majority of them), often staying within a few locals of their deeds, and the groups who find uniques are putting in a few hours a day between all their members, spanning the entire map, climbing mountains going to places far away from deeds etc. If a unique spawns on a mountain for example, it's only gonna be found by either groups going out of their way to look in weird places, or some very adventurous person. You can see from past slayings that multiple are at the base of mountains wink wink

 

 Humorous that you quoted my location which is a meme (I haven't been to a private slaying outside of pvp servers in half a year myself), but if your post is weird claims I can see how an ad hominem would be your next go-to. If you're actually interested in unique hunting hmu and i'll set you up with a guide on how to hunt them instead of relying on some really stupid claims that are in your post.

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7 hours ago, Oblivionnreaver said:

they're the ones putting in effort to find them. No amount of spawning changes will change the fact that the large majority of people spend very little time off deed

That's just plain wrong!! Other players do try to find them and spend countless hours doing so. Saying we all hide on our deeds is an insult!!!! In fact I spend a majority of my time hunting off deed, you don't get to over 90 fs as I have sitting around the deed as you suggest!!! And in my travels I have yet to find any uniques! All the slayings I've been too have been hosted public slayings! With the exception of one that was lured to a rift. And if I was not on the forums as many players are not I would have never known of those public slayers either! That is not a system that works for the majority of players!

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You know, threads like these always make for interesting reading.  They tend to tell you who has been on successful private hunts recently.

 

I suppose, in theory (and this is theory, I only use scripts for scraping data or automating my RL job) you could intercept all incoming packets for your client (wireshark watching for a specific ip) and (if you knew the format for the data, and could decode the packet [it has already been sent to your machine after all]) you could likely get a list of mobs within a certain range using a script without ever having to interact with the game client, if only because we know the game has to render them.

 

However, theory and practice are very different, and the actual implementation (decoding and parsing the packets, setting the IP etc) is likely to be a huge undertaking.  It is not entirely unlikely that such a tool exists, as dragons were worth real cash till fairly recently.

 

However, wurm's spawn mechanics could be gamed by anyone with access to the code; that part isn't theory.  I say this as someone who had that kind of access in a different game, and just knowing how things spawn gives you a huge edge as you can literally rule out a massive search area.

 

One need only see the behaviour of Xanadu rifts before the population collapse to understand that.

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1 hour ago, Katrat said:

In fact I spend a majority of my time hunting off deed

even if you are, server choice is a huge impact on it (an hour of hunting on a 8x8 is more likely to find a unique than a week of hunting on xanadu for example), and how fast you're killing mobs and moving around is also impactful. Back when i was hunting i could 100% search cele in about 2 hours, compared to hunting for an entire day would take me from one side of the server to the other, without searching mountains and such places that aren't very good for hunting, multiply that by however many people a group usually has unique hunting compared to only a small fraction of a servers population hunting and it's quite the disparity. I'm also talking about population in general, you hunting to 90+ fs doesn't change the fact that the majority of the playerbase doesn't. 

 

48 minutes ago, Etherdrifter said:

However, wurm's spawn mechanics could be gamed by anyone with access to the code; that part isn't theory

To this day I still laugh about how the wurm devs thought leaving the unique spawn code in wu, and later straight up posting the spawn parameters on the forums was a good idea

Edited by Oblivionnreaver
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To see who has fought dragons/drakes to death it simply needs to read e.g. https://www.niarja.com/uniques/2986

 (last public slaying on Independence yesterday). These data are reported not only in settlements' area history, but in servers' IRC too, so may be read without need to be logged in.

 

But I fail to see that the servers disclose mob distribution in any region over the internet other than to priests casting reveal creatures, players using certain meditation abilities, or pendulums detecting champions, traitors, special fish etc., none of them identifying uniques. Those are only found when users spot them or interact with them, or they are interacting with them in any local area. Even in those cases, I am not aware how the data set representing a creature is transmitted to clients over the internet, but almost certainly not in clear text, but as some binary token the client matches with its internal representation and presents the according description and graphical presentation.

 

In summary, even if being the NSA and/or GCHQ, and overhearing the complete internet traffic in and out from and between WO servers I doubt that would be of much help to identify uniques. If wielding such power it would be more helpful to put surveillance on the usual slayer suspects and their activities ;)  .

 

Back to the topic, there is not much hope, neither with private nor public slayings, to give NFI users a considerable chance to get an armour. Roughly spoken, one dragon or drake gives the material for one armour set plus/minus a bit (exact values mentioned in other threads already). That means, that no more than maybe 30-32 sets may exist in all NFI (PvE) at all, but this already is a hypothetical figure. Of the 6 public slayings it is unlikely that more than one set has arisen, given that the pieces are mostly stuck in private storage, not few of them lost for long time if not forever (when a player keeps them in inv or bank then quits). The private slayings give a better chance that an armour set is crafted and possessed or marketed by a player.

 

A sound estimate of subbed player accounts in Wurm over the year at this time and in the months ago is around 7000+, well half of them in NFI. Even if dragon detection and slaying speeds up further no more than 60-80 drakes and dragons can be expected to be slain over the course of a year. In a way this is working as designed making this kind of armour extraordinary. But it means that it is out of reach for practically all northerners no matter how many complaints. And more public slayings will only worsen the situation.

 

The only relief in sight would be the opening between north and south, where, due to more servers and longer history, a larger stack of unique armours exist. It would spell skyrocketing recent hide and scale prices on SFI but so what ;)  .  Or the devs and GM would decide to helicopter tons of hide and scale over NFI, whether that may be wise or not.

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to the ones crying again about the uniques.. I pay 5s per dragon found on my server. 5 dragons alive in total, so its whooping 25s pay day if all found. No one else basically plays on the server, so no one will steal your pay. Come over, practise finding them and get payed. Might make you realise how easy it is to find them lol

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8 minutes ago, Skatyna said:

to the ones crying again about the uniques.. I pay 5s per dragon found on my server. 5 dragons alive in total, so its whooping 25s pay day if all found. No one else basically plays on the server, so no one will steal your pay. Come over, practise finding them and get payed. Might make you realise how easy it is to find them lol

That is Epic, I guess. No chance for NFI people to get there.

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2 minutes ago, Ekcin said:

That is Epic, I guess. No chance for NFI people to get there.

 

yeah Epic, but they can come over and practice finding them. Its even easier to find when you know all are alive rather than speculating if they respawned yet or no. Good learning curve and might make them shut up finally realising its not so easy..

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I agree that the best way to find a dragon is when the dragon finds you 😜

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Easy workaround is to set up uniques not to be able to enter cave.  No chance to trap it and hide it from others... And that would add  a little joy to dragon hunting :) 

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15 minutes ago, MarkSilard said:

Easy workaround is to set up uniques not to be able to enter cave.  No chance to trap it and hide it from others... And that would add  a little joy to dragon hunting :) 

no thats a bad idea, would make it hard to organize a kill.

And dont need to be in cave to "own" it, if im not mistaking first to find it has all the rights to it.

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19 minutes ago, Stinboi said:

first to find it has all the rights to it.

Don't understand.  What rights? You buy something  from webpage or ingame store or from trader with ingame coins to claim ownership ?

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23 minutes ago, MarkSilard said:

Don't understand.  What rights? You buy something  from webpage or ingame store or from trader with ingame coins to claim ownership ?

this wil explain what i mean :)

 

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There's something been bothering me.

The demand "it needs to be random!".

What is random? Java-mathematically, even the random function itself is not "truly" random, it's just "random enough".

 

Do we want a dragon randomly spawn in our bedroom? Probably not.

So we add criteria, must spawn x distance from deeds. But that's what it does now... and we're not happy, apparently.

 

I don't know about NFI and I would not be surprised if there is different mechanics there. But Xanadu has had unique spawns all over the places.

 

Just saying.

It's not broken if it works as programmed.

If some people have figured out the logic of the program, then good for them. Still doesn't mean it's broken.

If the logic gets changed, and rewards remain high, then someone will figure out the logic, take advantage of it, and we're back to "fix it".

 

 

I have not found a single unique in 6 years. But it's one of my goals. That day will come!

I've been to one private slaying just recently, I don't even know why I was invited. Lucky with my friends list, I guess.

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1 minute ago, Shmeric said:

Do we want a dragon randomly spawn in our bedroom? 

 

i get the feeling that's exactly what some people want lol. Just log in one evening and you have a dragon to kill in your back garden. Wohoo!

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i have (i hope it is new) idea:

change uniques to not spawn in random places on map, make it by finding map fragments:
1) from archaeology (obvious)
2) from digging (similar to archaeology)
3) from mining
4) from woodcuting or/and forestry (you spotted hole in a tree, and there is something)
5) generally time to time in random places on map, like valrei mission items

6) maybe something from tracking?

7) even can be farming (when tending field you wandering why there is piece of paper in the soil :D
8 ) .... other ideas what i not have in mind in 5 minutes of writing that post :)

when collect for example 200 map fragments, you can assemble them together and like it already works at archaelogy, you can get direction to place where is burried huge egg (random unique can be bring to life from it)
when you get that egg, you decide where you hatch it, decide public or private, and my favourite thing i written below :D

 

 

 

other thing is bring back usability of large saddles :D
as in that mechanics, uniques don't need to be limited to 1 of each type per map,  people can be able to mount them, and my suggestion is: once mounted will not give any loot if slayed in future

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9) even something for people who are addicted to priesthood : when praying you getting salt, flint, gem, mushroom, when sacrificing you get a potion, and now can be: "your deity rewarded you by fragment of map"

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On 5/16/2021 at 11:03 AM, Skatyna said:

 

yeah Epic, but they can come over and practice finding them. Its even easier to find when you know all are alive rather than speculating if they respawned yet or no. Good learning curve and might make them shut up finally realising its not so easy..

The last time I was on the epic, 5 minutes after I ran out of the start village for hunting, I was killed by a dragon :)so I think it's not that hard to find a dragon. was it luck? I don't know, but I didn't think I would ever see a dragon with my own eyes.

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