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CistaCista

New mysteries of animal breeding

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7 days without any dev or staff response while complaints, negative feedback and overall a feeling of disappointment keeps piling on....what can I say.  Yeah some bugs were fixed and that is appreciated.

But here we are discussing balancing issues and no one is addressing them. Meanwhile having a toon with high AH seems pointless now. 

Edited by elentari
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5 hours ago, Fairyshine said:

I played Wurm on and off for years.  I love much of the decorations but most of all, my horses.  Despite these being pixels, I keep logging in every now and again to check on them and to see how the bisons and unicorns are.  I suspect many people are similar in their playing habits, especially when things in real life get hectic.

 

Every time new horse colours were added, many people played for hours and added more tiles to their deeds (or more deeds to their collections) to accommodate the new horses.  I was excited to read that AH would be improved, and thought perhaps people with higher AH would have more choice/control over which traits the babies got, or perhaps which name combinations to pick, etc.  I did not anticipate that people will now get fleets of useless horses and bisons, and people who like exploring and bringing ore/logs home would be far worse off than ever before.  Adding yet more pretty much useless traits to the mix amplified the useless offspring rates by ten.  Please remember that most people actually play the game to have fun, not to get frustrated and discouraged.

 

Long story short:  If these changes are permanent and not just something being trialed to be changed to something user friendly, with proper vehicle speeds, why would people bother? Can a dev please respond and tell us if these changes are set in stone or going to be addressed (and a timeframe if so.)  This include request for response about the offspring trait selection as well as the speeds of carts/wagons after the changes.

 

Thanks.

 

 

Well said. Should also bear in mind that even if the new pool of traits was very balanced and didn't add in any undesirable ones people consider useless....the new breeding system seems to be geared towards giving far more crappy traits in general. Prior to this i would breed all my horses and hell horses and i would maybe get one needing Genesis. At worst two horses would need a genesis cast and then it'd be about 50/50 if they had 5 speed traits or went in the bin. Now every single animal i have bred from that herd since the update without fail has had less traits, bad traits or literally no useful traits at all. The difficulty has been crraaaaaaaaaaaanked.

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I want to know why a returning player with high AH will now be unable to breed themselves an even halfway acceptable horse or bison from wild stock. They can make themselves a new tool set, weapons, farm whatever needed, with only their own skills to assist if they so choose. Making use of their AH skill? Nope.

 

I have 80AH, and decided to experiment with breeding some wild stock to try and get new traits, instead of battling to get non-speed offspring from all my previous 'good' stock. All but one have been born with negative traits. None have been born with more than two traits. So I now have a lot of untraited named animals, and am no further forward in breeding anything useful.

 

I really really want to like this update, I do. But I don't right now, and blank deathly silence from devs isn't helping with that.

 

 

 

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I read all this hoping to learn something new (since IMO, devs make bad game design choices when not explaining things). Well, little to learn. I wish we could talk about the features and figure out what's going on.

 

While I agree the new change is garbage I can't think of a single instance where wurm has reverted a major overhaul because of community objection. For wurm to revert it would take something like 90% of the players stop logging-in and threaten to let all that premium time laps. This is what happened to Rolf when he thought it was a good idea to let PvP'ers from Chaos raid (and do so under heavy nerfs, to be fair, but folks didn't care) the home PvE servers.

 

 

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To add one more annoying thing to the update on inspect mother and father of animals is reversed 😮

Can the dev's not tell male from female :D

 

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Breeding low traits from generic horses isnt new and is quite necessary to be able to isolate the traits that you want to breed into the next generation ESPECIALLY for those of us in a kingdom that does not allow fo/genesis, the difference now is that we are getting 95% straight out negative and 4.95% pointless traits. Ive bred over 300 horses since the patch went live and have still not seen one horse (from generic and named horse parents) with strong legs and id wager that ive killed 300 foals since also. I can not see how i am expected to produce anything usable from this without access to fo and i never complained about it before the patch because i didnt feel that disadvantaged, right now all i feel is about the same level of dissapointment as when my server got wiped after being told it would never.

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On ‎5‎/‎28‎/‎2021 at 9:51 AM, DemonaNightshade said:

It has been barely more than a day, so I think communication "drying up" is a bit much to say. The official information about traits will be coming soon. And yes, devs are aware that trait points don't add up. And, even the patch notes say that yes, our previous "5 speeds" will be very hard to breed.

Hi Demona

 

This response of the 28th May is appreciated, I guess I missed that message.  From what you said on the 28th May, it seems that the devs heard the community saying that they would like a way to help them get the basic five speed horses plus maybe other "good traits" if they get over 50 AH with more control over the offspring, and in response the devs went and made it virtually impossible to even get the basic five speed horses with zero control for the breeder?  In all honesty, that pretty much broke the AH for many people.  If someone was a bit unhappy before but still survived with the 50 AH cap as long as they got the five speeders to keep playing for fun, imagine how they are feeling now that they aren't even getting that.  People are not happy.  Here are some suggestions, and others may have better suggestions than these, but at the moment the system is NOT WORKING. 

 

Suggestions:  Add the option for people to PICK some traits to set in stone as they baby is being created, so say a person with 50 AH breeds two horses, then all the parents' skills pop up in a selection window and the breeder can pick say 4 traits if they have 50 AH, the fifth trait is a random roll out of all the possible traits.  The baby will be born with at least those four traits, plus one random trait generated by the Wurm gods.  If the person breeding the horses have 60 AH, a window pops up with the parents' traits, they can pick 5, and the baby will have those five plus one more random trait, etc.  If it is wild horses, and they have 80 AH, then there will be a random roll which include at least 7 "good traits" and the breeder can select percentage of traits out of "speed" or "draft" box, so e.g. they can pick to weight the random roll to include 50% out of the speed trait selection and 50% out of the draft trait selection, so the baby out of the two wild horses will have a random chance to get 3 speed, 4 draft, and one random other trait.  Something like that?  And add a potion or craftable item genesis so people in non-fo kingdoms or people without fo priests can still genesis the babies.

 

I would also suggest immediately change the slow wagon/cart speeds.  At least revert back to the pre-update speeds. 

Edited by Fairyshine
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12 hours ago, elentari said:

7 days without any dev or staff response while complaints, negative feedback and overall a feeling of disappointment keeps piling on....what can I say.  Yeah some bugs were fixed and that is appreciated.

But here we are discussing balancing issues and no one is addressing them. Meanwhile having a toon with high AH seems pointless now. 

 

Feeling the same as you, as do many other people from what I read here and in chats around the game. Some people I know, who played WO even longer than I have, even mentioned looking into current WU servers without this change and perhaps still offering some kind of meaningful incentive for having high AH ... I guess we will have to wait and see if there actually is a response by a dev/communication guru to say they are hearing the community.

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Honestly, having a window asking me to select traits every time I breed would be rage inducing. Keep it simple and just do something like eliminate negatives through skill and if you cant give us something to deal with the weird so called positives then give us a profile option for preferences... definitely not a horse by horse process

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To be fair, Smaool said this almost 4 days ago.

Quote

 

Apologies for the drop in communications, we've been quite busy fixing the reported issues and still revising the general balance of things such as vehicle speed. Vehicle speed is also subject to some bugs (that we believe we've fixed already for the next update), but in general we'll still be tweaking them to make vehicles faster.

 

Expect an update tomorrow fixing most of the annoying things, and after that we'll chase up the remaining issues that weren't confirmed to be bugs yet and either fix those or clarify the intended functionality. The update won't contain vehicle speed tweaks yet, but we'll try to get that in as soon as possible.

 

We're also working on clarifying some of these patch notes, as it seems some of those were taken from an outdated source, mainly regarding the horse traits - we'll clarify all of those here by editing these patch notes and we'll work with Wurmpedia staff to get the confirmed details on Wurmpedia as well.

 

 

 

 

I don't know how much further they are going into things, but it does seem they are working on something, what that is I don't know.

 

I do agree that continued silence is not healthy, someone is dropping the ball on basic communication.

 

 

 

Edited by gnomegates

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1 minute ago, gnomegates said:

Expect an update tomorrow fixing most of the annoying things, and after that we'll chase up the remaining issues that weren't confirmed to be bugs yet and either fix those or clarify the intended functionality. The update won't contain vehicle speed tweaks yet, but we'll try to get that in as soon as possible.

THIS is probably the one "most annoying" traits that affects EVERYONE, not just breeders.

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2 hours ago, SmeJack said:

Ive bred over 300 horses since the patch went live and have still not seen one horse (from generic and named horse parents) with strong legs

 

You are not breeding right then. 

And this goes for all the people that are loudly rejecting the new breeding system: if you fail in succeeding, it does not follow that it is the system that is a failure.

 

The team has stated that there will be a breeding delay before we are back to horses with equal speed as the old 3/2-speed horses. Nevertheless, people are definitely getting the new traits like Strong Legs. And 4-speed draft horses now have been birthed

 

.

Edited by CistaCista

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9 minutes ago, CistaCista said:

 

You are not breeding right then. 

 

lol ok, so someone new with generic horses wont be able to breed "right" by your assertion.... well done you have just shown that the new system is in fact completely broken.  

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1 hour ago, SmeJack said:

 

lol ok, so someone new with generic horses wont be able to breed "right" by your assertion.... well done you have just shown that the new system is in fact completely broken.  

 

Someone breeding new generic horses will not be able to get every trait they want in the first generation. That is the way it should be.

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2 minutes ago, CistaCista said:

 

Someone breeding new generic horses will not be able to get every trait they want in the first generation. That is the way it should be.

 

No one even said that should be a thing lol

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4 hours ago, CistaCista said:

Someone breeding new generic horses will not be able to get every trait they want in the first generation. That is the way it should be.

But existing traits should be transferred to the next generation, with higher probability than non existing ones. So when 2 old "8 good trait" animals mate, the child should have their traits with highest likeliness, everything else with much lower, be it negative or just useless like resource gathering at horses. Else all the breeding concept is rubbish. When it is plain rng it deteriorates into a weird lottery requiring mass baby slaughter.

Edited by Ekcin
typo
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I apologize, it's hard to keep track of every single non-official post where people want a reply and where they are located. The cart speeds are being worked on, as well as more tweaking with the animal husbandry traits and such. The pick-a-trait option is something I do not see becoming a thing, however. There's going to be an adjustment period, as with every change. Things will be tweaked and eventually settle down a bit.

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1 hour ago, Ekcin said:

But existing traits should be transferred to the next generation, with higher probability than non existing ones.

This has been the foundation of the old system. It's why it worked so well. Simple yet elegant. 

 

Now this new system? Doesn't matter what traits the parents have, welcome to RNG hell that doesn't make any sense at all. Parents with good legs = foals with malformed legs at 90 AH...yeah. Explain that please. 

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8 hours ago, Ekcin said:

But existing traits should be transferred to the next generation, with higher probability than non existing ones.

 

This is a critical subject.

 

I am sensing two different factors are at work:

a) Speed traits and draft traits look like they mutually exclude each other on new horses. Why would they make it like that? Doesn't make sense, since they do not exclude traits from the combat or resource categories.

b) Those traits that do come from outside the majority are possibly drawn in complete randomness out of the total pool of traits, *without regard for existing traits* in the parents. 

If this is true, this would indeed be a catastrophe for breeding as a serious profession in Wurm.

 

To me at this point it seems obvious that a) is true unfortunately.

I haven't verified b), because the horses I am currently using don't really have any neutral traits. I would love (not!) to hear more evidence. 

 

EDIT:

The very first newborn foal I just looked at has the USH inherited from the mother, even though the father has no neutral trait.. 

I also have 2 other foals out of a small handful where they have the neutral trait, but where I am not completely sure they were conceived after the patch.

I doubt that we are truly in the land of pure RNG - I will keep counting from now on.

 

 

Edited by CistaCista

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My experience with my bison is this:

 

both parents old fives plus fight fiercely.

 

Out of 16 babies born ALL had four SPEED traits (the three passed on plus the water one). Several had the pick up things randomly trait, a few had other various "misc" traits, and two had malformed legs. Now, if I were breeding horses I'd be feeling pretty good. I'm not. Speed bison are useless from what I have gathered. I did hook up four young to an empty wagon and at young they were roughly the same speed as four wild bison (non-traited) at aged and old. So maybe speed isn't completely worthless. Two young on a marginally loaded cart gave roughly the same speed as two old five speed plus USH aged fat horses gave (unshoed). 

 

I do not have horse results yet. I held off on breeding them because honestly on Indy there hasn't been much demand for horses, so knew I had time to grind up AH before I started worrying about them. After seeing bison results I went ahead and bred them all.

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45 minutes ago, ChampagneDragon said:

both parents old fives plus fight fiercely.

 

Did any of the young have fight fiercely?

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1 hour ago, CistaCista said:

 

Did any of the young have fight fiercely?

Not that I can recall, and with the exception of the four I have on the wagon for testing, none survived, as bison should theoretically be draft traits.

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1 hour ago, CistaCista said:

 

Did any of the young have fight fiercely?

Ok, so  doing survey of ones just born and the four on the wagon:

 

Slow metabolism x1

Pick up stuff x2

USH x2

 

And one that ... there's always "that" one

speed traits x2

USH (misc)

Slow metabolism (misc)

seems more friendly (combat)

spark (misc)

and to cap it all off some illness

 

Not one fight fiercely trait amongst them, despite ALL parents having it.

 

 

 

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have anyone figured what the dig up stuff trait actually does, so far haven't seen that to trigger anything at all.

Quote

[13:27:10] It will fight fiercely. It looks very unmotivated. It seems more friendly. It seems to pick stuff up. It seems to be a graceful eater. It looks more friendly than normal. It has been bred in captivity. 

🤔💤

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From description in the patch note, supposedly when it eats it can dig up stuff from the ground @Finnn. What stuff? No idea, haven't seen anything so far. 

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