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DemonaNightshade

Valrei International: Feeding time!

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55 minutes ago, Delone said:

Personally, I am increasingly offended by the idea that it appears that we are being encouraged to inbreed our animals, I am beginning to call this the Wurm "Morallly dubious" patch in my head. This is the embodiment of the puppy farm mentality - don't give a damm about the welfare of the animals, just as long as you can do well out of the offspring. Is this the kind of image Wurm wants? Because if it goes ahead with this, I can just see some of the reviews being posted, and may well be one of the ones making the effort to post a review specifically to mention it.

 

I am really hoping that the negative trait encouragement gets a rethink. It feels wrong and seems to have implications that have not been thought through very well at all (balance, global rite effect). New griefing method - build a 90ql Fo altar beside a breeders deed so that it covers all their breeding stock just before a Fo rite is up for casting? "Oh did that mess somebody up? I was just making a domain in the area for doing missions in." Or are we looking at changing the effect  of the Fo global? Having a global cast spell that can have a detrimental affect on others gameplay (morally dubious as it is) surely seems like a bad idea to me.

 

But that's all based off assumptions without really knowing the technical details. Perhaps you can get a max speed horse with 70-80 AH without needing any negative traits, if so then all that you're saying about needing to use inbreeding falls away, and inbreeding would then even be shooting yourself in the foot in the long run. The simple fact is that we were barely given any such details, so we really can't conclude one way or the other how it will turn out. Your point on the Fo Rite spell still remains an interesting one, I too wonder if they'll make changes to that.

 

1 minute ago, Minnie said:

Probably best to put off our panicking until we have all the relevant information and have had a chance to give the new system a whirl.  We can speculate until the cows come home (😜), but in the end it means nothing with regards to how gameplay will actually be affected.

 

Totally this. It's impossible to draw accurate conclusions at the moment due to a lack of information, most of the panic so far seems to be based off assumptions.

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27 minutes ago, Ecrir said:

But that's all based off assumptions without really knowing the technical details. Perhaps you can get a max speed horse with 70-80 AH without needing any negative traits, if so then all that you're saying about needing to use inbreeding falls away, and inbreeding would then even be shooting yourself in the foot in the long run. The simple fact is that we were barely given any such details, so we really can't conclude one way or the other how it will turn out. Your point on the Fo Rite spell still remains an interesting one, I too wonder if they'll make changes to that.

 

Assumptions? It seems to be one of the more clearly stated things that was said:

 

On 5/18/2021 at 5:49 AM, DemonaNightshade said:

This does make negative traits beneficial in some situations due to having a negative "cost", and leaving extra room for more or higher point traits.

 

 

Yes I can probably get a max speed horse at 70-80 AH without needing, but I can get one earlier by using neg traits, or get an even better one with other wanted traits by indeed getting higher AH and using it. Again I state it clearly: This encourages the breeding and keeping of sickly, malformed, hungry animals with the benefit of breeding better offspring, and is to me morally and ethically reprehensible. The parents will not be cured of these conditions, only the ones to be used or sold, as I said - Puppy farm mentality.  If the Dev responsible for this coming in hasn't thought of it in this light, perhaps they should, and see if it is really something they want to put their name to. 

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I must agree that this change is a communication disaster again. Many of the comments remarks and critique stated hit sensible and problematic areas. What I do not understand: The patch is cutting deep into existing mechanics, and seemingly needs evaluation, and most probably adjustment, balancing, and addressing of unforeseen side effects.

 

Especially the negative traits stuff, and its impact on priests, sounds worrisome. It may either be disenfranchising Fo priests once more, or creating a severe imbalance WL/BL, especially in PvP.

 

Wouldn't it be better to implement the patch gradually, introducing donkeys and cold/warm blood horses first, leaving AH and new trait system on test server for a couple of weeks, allowing players to test it, get accustomed, and detect probable flaws?

Edited by Ekcin
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7 minutes ago, Delone said:

Yes I can probably get a max speed horse at 70-80 AH without needing, but I can get one earlier by using neg traits, or get an even better one with other wanted traits by indeed getting higher AH and using it. Again I state it clearly: This encourages the breeding and keeping of sickly, malformed, hungry animals with the benefit of breeding better offspring, and is to me morally and ethically reprehensible. The parents will not be cured of these conditions, only the ones to be used or sold, as I said - Puppy farm mentality.  If the Dev responsible for this coming in hasn't thought of it in this light, perhaps they should, and see if it is really something they want to put their name to.

Don't really get why people are so upset, it it is a bit counter intuitive yeah, but if done right can provide interesting gamestyles for achieving same goals without the one being meta. you've got options for player with high AH skill, options with 50ish AH skill and Fo priest, even some kind of option for people with low skill, they can still get good horse in terms of speed that will maybe eat more or live shorter or something.... My bigger concern is actually RGN mess that Wurm is in all this, and i fear that keeping traits in categories isn't gonna be enough to comfortably control it, unless you got quite big heard, deeds to support it and quite some time to filter out all interesting combinations, which maybe immersive but its gonna be heck of annoyance. maybe if fo could select which trait exactly to remove(dispell choice on priests hello...) would help a bit, but not much

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56 minutes ago, Faerian said:

Aside from the technical details of the patch, as usual, this is a communication nightmare. 

 

Could someone official at least post something either like "we anticipated all these issues and we'll go ahead anyway" or "Good points, we didn't think of this, we'll need a while to consider it". 

 

Why do players have to point out EVERY SINGLE TIME that communication is key in a community and why do official channels here fail at it EVERY SINGLE TIME?

 

Whats so hard with single line status updates?

You might not get any because DemonaNightshade is not only brand new to the role of community manager but she has also said in another topic that she is quite shy.  In the prev update topic she posted a few times at the start of the topic but then no more word from her until this update, over a month later.

So I don't expect there will be any updates until this update goes live and then maybe just for the 1st page of the new topic or so.    Who knows.....She might post again hopefully and address the users questions but there is a ###### load to deal with and the drama too would discourage anyone to wade into it, I would say lol 

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3 minutes ago, Ekcin said:

I must agree that this change is a communication disaster again. Many of the comments remarks and critique stated hit sensible and problematic areas. What I do not understand: The patch is cutting deep into existing mechanics, and seemingly needs evaluation, and most probably adjustment, balancing, and addressing of unforeseen side effects.

 

Wouldn't it be better to implement the patch gradually, introducing donkeys and cold/warm blood horses first, leaving AH and new trait system on test server for a couple of weeks, allowing players to test it, get accustomed, and detect probable flaws?

yeah, my thoughts exactly. seeing from comments they have on hand an army of people willing to analyze and help for free to polish idea to best possible outcome so unhappiness and bugs are minimized if only they shared it in full detail prior to implementation... but they still decide to keep us in dark untill its too late.

And for second thought, instead of having one grand patch i belive it would be much better to structure change in smaller updates, get donkeys out first, do a skeleton for trait system that can be build upon gradually, i think player retention would be better if we had some small updates more regulary instead of going all this time with silence and waiting for one disapoiting large patch....

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My advice is to keep all the stock you have until after the update(s) then check to see what you have got.  Even then, don't be hasty to thin them out, as more patches may be needed, changes may be made or traits re-rolled.  Unless the new system is published for us before the update we have no way to know for sure how the new traits will be set up - we could all end up with a load of completely random traits - who knows. :) 

 

Cutest Beating Dead Horse GIF - CorvetteForum

 

Something that interests me is the body shapes - will a 2 speed trait horse look more 'speedy' than a 3 speed + 4 draft - i.e. will the draft-shaped body override it?  If that's the case horses with fewer speed traits could *look* faster than horses which actually have more speed traits. Looking forward to finding out...

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I do not blame Demona, she is doing a great job so far, but she cannot but communicate dev team and management decisions. And those are wanting. A large modification of game mechanics and meta is going productive without previous user acceptance testing. In professional multi layered IT infrastructure management that would be considered a fatal failure of the software and system administration.

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1 minute ago, Ekcin said:

I do not blame Demona, she is doing a great job so far, but she cannot but communicate dev team and management decisions. And those are wanting. A large modification of game mechanics and meta is going productive without previous user acceptance testing. In professional multi layered IT infrastructure management that would be considered a fatal failure of the software and system administration.

I think that some of you guys should be hired to work at wurm.  There are alot of people here who have the tech knowledge and in game data to help the game thrive.  I mean, Wurm really does need more staff to fill in the gaps :)    Yeah, she is doing a good job so far.  Though she can;'t be expected to do it all herself.  That's what a good team is for!  :D

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Isnt this how it allways been ?

Devs  give us updates ....we have to figure out what it does or what it not do ?

 

But might be easier for all, if you wait untill we got the new patch :)

 

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11 hours ago, Delone said:

This encourages the breeding and keeping of sickly, malformed, hungry animals with the benefit of breeding better offspring, and is to me morally and ethically reprehensible.


Wurm animals are not members of the moral community, nor are they rightly viewed as targets of moral consideration. They're nothing more than entries within a database, visually and audibly represented by computer data within a simulation. Treating real, life animals in such a way would (likely) be morally and ethically reprehensible. To say that you can act immorally or unethically toward Wurm creatures is on par to saying that it's immoral to turn your tv off because it harms the people on the screen. 

 

There's no real moral consideration (unless you truly believe digital npcs to rightly be considered as subjects of moral consideration, in which case I suggest that you have a moral obligation to not participate in any game that rewards the slaughter of such creatures), the problem as far as I can tell is just that those without easy access to genesis are at a significant disadvantage, as it seems that breeding superior creatures will be immensely easier via processes that involve breeding in as many negative traits as possible to raise the point cap for beneficial traits, then later removing the negative traits from offspring. I hope that genesis is tweaked in some way to allow it to still be useful, but not to facilitate this method. Perhaps something like a one time cast on creatures, where it halves the effect of all negative traits on the creature. It would still be very useful that way, but it wouldn't promote breeding 10 neg horses to be able to get maxspeed+maxdraft horses

This concern was addressed by the removal of negative point values from negative traits

Edited by Arronicus
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So I do apologize, I have had a very busy and stressful past few days IRL and have not been online much in general. I have not read through the many pages of comments yet. Just want to show that I am here and will be looking through it. On one note: I think a lot of the speculations are making people get more freaked out and that's spreading to others. Things are getting blown way out of proportion and won't be nearly as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be. It's not going to be overly complicated or make your current stock completely useless, and literally nothing is changing with the "Care For" system (which I said the first time we mentioned the Animal Update a few VI's ago, and noone believes so they continue to freak out over it). If you need reassurance, keep in mind that I personally base 90% of my gameplay around pet and animals, have only 54 animal husbandry, and do have a horse market myself, and I am not worried and am in fact extremely excited for this update to go live. I also have many pets (champion and named critters) that are extremely sentimental to me and many that I have had for several years since I first started playing. I literally cried when my first named pet died when I crossed servers, I'd had him for 3 years. So, I have many of the same situations that people are worried about going on for myself, and with me being very sensitive I'm one of the most likely people to be extremely effected by anything bad happening to my animals.

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3 minutes ago, DemonaNightshade said:

Also, there will no longer be negative point traits.

 

 

As much as I was looking forward to stacking a few negative traits to be able to get more good traits at lower levels, I honestly think this is probably the fairest decision without having to fundamentally overhaul genesis or holy crop

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3 hours ago, Arronicus said:

the problem as far as I can tell is just that those without easy access to genesis are at a significant disadvantage

 

Yes.

 

Those without strongwall are at a disadvantage making canals

Those without Circle of Cunning are at a disadvantage skilling

 

But through the powers of trade, you can hire Mags to collapse tiles, you can buy tools, and you will be able to buy horses.

There's no need to utterly kneecap the Fo arsenal, which stands to allow players to self-direct breeding and create horses good for use and bad for breeding (an interesting situation that I'm sure every breeder has dreamed of, rather than knowing the 5speeds they sell can go on to dilute the market)

 

Also everyone complaining that people will use inbreeding to get the best horses, just wait until you learn about horses IRL; a lot of racehorses are very inbred, but they're also some of the best horses because of that. But they're also very prone to serious genetic issues, which sounds a whole lot like what we'll be doing we were planning to do.

Edited by Stanlee
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1 hour ago, DemonaNightshade said:

So I do apologize, I have had a very busy and stressful past few days IRL and have not been online much in general. I have not read through the many pages of comments yet. Just want to show that I am here and will be looking through it. On one note: I think a lot of the speculations are making people get more freaked out and that's spreading to others. Things are getting blown way out of proportion and won't be nearly as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be. It's not going to be overly complicated or make your current stock completely useless, and literally nothing is changing with the "Care For" system (which I said the first time we mentioned the Animal Update a few VI's ago, and noone believes so they continue to freak out over it). If you need reassurance, keep in mind that I personally base 90% of my gameplay around pet and animals, have only 54 animal husbandry, and do have a horse market myself, and I am not worried and am in fact extremely excited for this update to go live. I also have many pets (champion and named critters) that are extremely sentimental to me and many that I have had for several years since I first started playing. I literally cried when my first named pet died when I crossed servers, I'd had him for 3 years. So, I have many of the same situations that people are worried about going on for myself, and with me being very sensitive I'm one of the most likely people to be extremely effected by anything bad happening to my animals.

 

Will current 5 speed horses/hell horses/bison become slower with the new update? 5 speed horses go around 25km/hr peak without horse gear. 5 speed bison go 18km/hr on a wagon. I am not sure what a 5 speed hell horse peak speed is since I’ve never rode one before.

 

We appreciate your response.

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We are going to make sure there isn't too detrimental of a speed change, but they will become a tad slower.

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2 hours ago, Stanlee said:

 

Yes.

 

Those without strongwall are at a disadvantage making canals

Those without Circle of Cunning are at a disadvantage skilling

 

But through the powers of trade, you can hire Mags to collapse tiles, you can buy tools, and you will be able to buy horses...

 

Not if you are in a black light kingdom

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4 hours ago, Stanlee said:

Those without strongwall are at a disadvantage making canals

Those without Circle of Cunning are at a disadvantage skilling

 

You don't generally make canals all the time, it's a more high end later game project for pve players.  Breeding horses for riding or hitching is more of an every day occurance for players of all kinds and even noobs can get decent horses fairly easily.

You also aren't getting a new coc cast every day/week.  Breeding from scratch to get all the correct traits is a potentially many months long process.

 

But ah, yes.  Classic wurm response, if an update makes something horrible or impossible, just buy it instead of accepting that its bad for some people or quite literally impossible by normal game mechanics for others.

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11 minutes ago, MrGARY said:

 

You don't generally make canals all the time, it's a more high end later game project for pve players.  Breeding horses for riding or hitching is more of an every day occurance for players of all kinds and even noobs can get decent horses fairly easily.

You also aren't getting a new coc cast every day/week.  Breeding from scratch to get all the correct traits is a potentially many months long process.

 

But ah, yes.  Classic wurm response, if an update makes something horrible or impossible, just buy it instead of accepting that its bad for some people or quite literally impossible by normal game mechanics for others.

 

Except you've missed the part that negative points traits are not happening thus no need to breed for bad traits and genesis.

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Thanks for the clarifying info Demona, it is greatly appreciated despite the continu(ed/ing) bickering. 

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41 minutes ago, DemonaNightshade said:

Except you've missed the part that negative points traits are not happening thus no need to breed for bad traits and genesis.

 

I'm back to being in the wait and see pool, now that the neg trait thing is dead, but with the trust I have for how Wurm RNG manages the production of new traits based on dominant ones, I don't really expect things going back to being optimum any time soon. Draught horses from current  5 speed stock, and especially bison, with many having what I see as being 3 speed traits being what they have currently been bred for, have a complete reset ahead.

 

With so many more traits in the pool, that means an even longer time period than we are used to for creating a new line, and low AH may again be of benefit by simply limiting how many new traits get tossed into the mix at once. Till we get more details on how it works, I'm sitting on the fence, but not feeling excited about the changes to AH. I had been really hopeful that we would be able to somehow selectively influence traits, I know previous April fools jokes made light of training animals to be better was a thing.... but I saw this as an opportunity to actually do something along this line, based on your AH being high enough, now that would be a real enticement to higher AH.

 

The feeding additions looks really nice though. I don't know if it will help with being able to not have to pen animals to prevent them getting diseased, and being able to have my animals roam paddocks like I would really prefer they could... but here's hoping :) 

Edited by Delone

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55 minutes ago, DemonaNightshade said:

 

Except you've missed the part that negative points traits are not happening thus no need to breed for bad traits and genesis.

 

Im sure its a step in the right direction making it less of a game the system situation but with such a massive number of new traits im not sure that it evens the field at all with a complete lack of access to fo.

I also doubt he missed anything but some people remain ignorant to bigger issues and sometimes you just feel like trying to get through to them

Edited by SmeJack

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Beside calming several unrealistic snowflakes I'm not sure removing negative points for traits actually does something or it even makes things worse. It was not actually that bad idea for the system and it's grounded somewhat in reality. 

I would like more detailed explanation how traits categories work and how it's going to prevent that sitting at XX AH skill is meta and going above that will not punish you for breeding optimal speed and optimal draft animals for example like it was the case now?

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6 hours ago, DemonaNightshade said:

Also, there will no longer be negative point traits.

 

 

Oops. That was a turn of events.

 

Then the question that breeders would like answered is: how many traits will there be in a fast speed category? How high AH skill is needed to collect those traits in one horse?

Because we were hearing that the effect of negative points was it was helpful for breeders that maybe did not have the astronomically high AH skill. So we can't but expect that a higher AH skill is now needed to produce the fastest horses. 

 

Or maybe not, we will find out in the end I am sure :)

 

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