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Update on development

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1 minute ago, WittleBunnBun said:

I would like to see a legitimate roadmap for product and development instead of a random post here and there.

Why does everything have to be so secretive--very honest question. Why does wurm development have to be masked in mystery.  

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you 🔪🔪🔪

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17 minutes ago, WittleBunnBun said:

Why does everything have to be so secretive--very honest question. Why does wurm development have to be masked in mystery.  

I can tell you without killing you (Archaed, put the knife away). It's been that way for years. It's been brought up many times in complaints, that more transparency is needed, that we in Wurm don't have to "generate hype" like AAA games, it's enough to talk to your players and keep them engaged. 

That does more for retention than pushing out mysterious updates. 

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Sorry for the double post, my browser lagged. (can delete this one) 

Edited by elentari

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18 minutes ago, elentari said:

it's enough to talk to your players and keep them engaged

I think this mark is not even being hit though. 

It feels devs are stuck reacting to something & posting on the forums and us waiting to hear &posting on the forums. Nothing productive is coming out of this cycle.
 

Maybe a roadmap is too much for the development team, okay thats understandable. But look at how active the forums are & how negative their reactions are after reacting to a product idea / update that they had no say or help in making. 

 

I would like to see more user-centered methods to be used to product develop that doesnt involve forum posting.

Why not hold user interviews, analyze user game play from youtube or twitch, A/B test product ideas, run more surveys that target specific feature developments, ..I mean there are even more but those are just the ones that come to mind right now.  

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Short note to Elentari: I am not speaking about graphics from years ago. I recently had a look at amazon's new world, and their graphics are definitely not more "shiny" than Wurm's (one may like or dislike them, that is not the point, but where are they "more modern"?). Only they cannot be changed by players. Valheim, which is no real MMO (instances with 9 concurrent players afaik) but at least somewhat terraformable, intentionally touted "old school graphics". Medieval dynasty, not (yet?) multiplayer, cannot compete with Wurm graphics. No need to speak about WoW, GW2, Diablo, or Runescape.

 

Granted, single player games like HZD, Witcher 3, Subnautica etc. have graphics which are close to photo realistic, but I cannot tell about a single MMO able to do that. And their worlds are pre-cooked and static.

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26 minutes ago, WittleBunnBun said:

Why not hold user interviews, analyze user game play from youtube or twitch, A/B test product ideas, run more surveys that target specific feature developments, ..I mean there are even more but those are just the ones that come to mind right now.  

That's something a Community Manager might do or someone from product testing (I don't think anyone on staff is designated to do that. It would imply actually browsing the suggestions forums to read what the players have been wanting for years) .

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1 minute ago, elentari said:

That's something a Community Manager might do or someone from product testing (I don't think anyone on staff is designated to do that. It would imply actually browsing the suggestions forums to read what the players have been wanting for years) .

I can guarantee it's not a community managers role, nor is it a QA role. It's a UX role, or User Experience. It's a discipline built around HOW players play a game, and how they interact with the game. It's got nothing to do with reading forums for suggestions at all as well. 

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25 minutes ago, Archaed said:

It's got nothing to do with reading forums for suggestions at all as well. 

I'd contradict that since players on the suggestions forums often base their suggestions on their User Experience.  

 

See how many bumps the nautical compass has for example based on players experience with sailing. 

 

So yeah the discipline you mention is related to the suggestions part of the forums. There's a lot there to unravel about players' experience with the game since most suggestions stem from exactly that. 

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I'am gonna sound like an old record.

 

We need additional developer that would take care exclusively of all those small suggestions and small fixes players suggested through last years.

 

Quick and easy changes that would bring a big improvement in quality of life.

 

That would bring much more joy for players then larger updates once in a year.

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25 minutes ago, elentari said:

I'd contradict that since players on the suggestions forums often base their suggestions on their User Experience.  

This is very surface level. 

 

51 minutes ago, Archaed said:

built around HOW players play a game, and how they interact with the game

Right on the nose. 

Its different to post something on the forums compared to actually implementing user-centered game development. 

Its more interactive than a forum post

EDIT: I would say though, maybe running a thematic analysis on the forum posts would also give better insights to the development team than just reading and could help make sure they are getting the full picture of what is being posted, but again the people on the forum are not the only people playing.

A good start point would be to build user group types (Pvp, PvE / play style types, interaction objectives, etc) & survey to get people into a study with equal type amounts. 

Edited by WittleBunnBun

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34 minutes ago, WittleBunnBun said:

A good start point would be to build user group types (Pvp, PvE / play style types, interaction objectives, etc) & survey to get people into a study with equal type amounts. 

Seems to me that one of the issues with user feedback is that isn't not centralized anymore.

 

In the past everyone used these forums. Now people post on steam, forums and discord. Info is all over the place. 

 

Yeah the ones that post here, including myself,  we're actually very few in number these days. And I doubt we represent more than 1/3 of the entire population (assuming the ones that simply browse the forums but rarely if ever post here). 

35 minutes ago, Wilczan said:

We need additional developer that would take care exclusively of all those small suggestions and small fixes players suggested through last years.

 

Agreed.

 

Wurm has gained a lot of annoying bugs and glitches that could probably be fixed in a short amount of time with a dedicated dev towards such fixes. Personally I'm still pissed that every time I cross a server I end up in the sea and have to disembark and reembark. It's an annoyance really but when you couple that annoyance with 100 other annoyances I've "conditioned" myself to ignore over the years, they start to get to you. Like a leak in a roof, you can ignore it, but when the roof springs dozens more leaks.... 

 

Or how apparently due to players feedback, "rare windows" are wasted on every action you take, including opening a pm chat in game with another player, or clicking on a bed. Stuff like that needs overhauled. 

 

 

Edited by elentari
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5 hours ago, WittleBunnBun said:

Why does everything have to be so secretive--very honest question. Why does wurm development have to be masked in mystery.  

 

It's because of ancient history from 5+ years ago. People got into bad habits from bad situations and haven't been able to break those awful habits ever since.

 

Quote

Does anyone remember Sparta? I wasn't there, but boy do I remember the fallout from it. We try very hard to not do anything unilaterally and to ensure our communication channels with players are public and open to ensure another Sparta doesn't happen.

 

Source: 

 

 

Sparta was a settlement on Chaos in 2014 which was raided. When that was first mentioned (2 years ago), I had no idea what Sparta was nor any of the "fallout" that was mentioned. In fact, the only story of it online comes from an obscure Life is Feudal forum thread talking about Wurm. Posted by Arowhun in that thread:

 

Quote

The recent problem that Cndo mentioned has to do with the Chaos PvP server. Basically, the Jenn-Kellon stronghold of Sparta was destroyed by Mol-Rehan raiders. Using a game mechanic that has been around for a long time (Ever since it was added in 07 or so), Jenn-Kellon secured their gear inside Sparta's mine. Suddenly, Rolf appears and claims that the mechanic is actually a bug, and he opens up the mine for Mol-Rehan. MR then went in there and took the 250e worth of gear that was left inside there. People got mad and talked with Rolf. He decided to compinsate them by giving them lumps of rare "moon metals", which were worth about 50e. The reason this has gotten people so angry is that Rolf has allways had a policy of never intervening in a PvP situation, especially when it involves such massive amounts of money as this. It appears to me that something fishy was going on here between Rolf and Mol-Rehan.

 

Of course, players who were directly involved with the event at the time have much stronger opinions of the events that unfolded...

 

However, that's ancient history. It was 7 years ago. Discord didn't even exist in 2014. These communication policies are old and spoiled. The fact that they haven't been revised and improved is mindboggling. They should stop using ancient history as a foundation for how they communicate, and instead use more recent history like the past year since Steam launch.

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4 hours ago, Wilczan said:

I'am gonna sound like an old record.

 

We need additional developer that would take care exclusively of all those small suggestions and small fixes players suggested through last years.

 

Quick and easy changes that would bring a big improvement in quality of life.

 

That would bring much more joy for players then larger updates once in a year.

dat

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On 8/19/2021 at 7:03 PM, Yserin said:

 

 

your comparison is a joke.

 

 

 

First time talking to Darnok?

 

ETA something about VR.

 

It's nice to hear communication from devs about things being quiet recently, and what to looks forward too... until VR is mentioned. Because when I see VR, what I read is, "We neither understand nor care about the game or its players." VR support in Wurm is going to be, best case, a stupid gimmick, and most likely a massive sink of developer time and effort. Source: my years developing a VR arcade game and numerous other computer and video games.

Edited by Sheffie
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VR for Wurm... VR FOR WURM... Hahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahaha

 

Wait, you're serious? 🤡

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Yesterday, we had a dragon hunt on Deliverance. There were over 300 toons there. Afterward, the server was messed up for over an hour, and I had to log out and log back in FIVE times just to limp back to my deed on Deliverance with my horse.


With all respect possible, how are you going to be able to support the demands of VR when something as minor as 300 toons in the same spot renders the server virtually unusable for any amount of time? If the idea is to attract and retain more players, the servers need to be able to support events that could potentially have a large number of toons in the same area at the same time. 

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Client fixes have been asked by many players by now. You can see the feedback from the VR announcement is generally a negative one for a reason. Wurm can't handle too many players in local which is a crying shame since it's once of the reasons we can't have sprawling cities like those presented in the steam trailer. 

Even having 40 people in local for a sustained period of time can make lag insufferable.  For a short period of time, you won't notice anything but I can see the RAM requirements spiking when I get too many people in local at once.  The only thing that remotely helps is that sometimes I go to the legacy client which sort of "fixes" the issue temporarily. An MMO that can't handle the ""MM" part. Hope updates are done in that direction. 

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One should not confuse client and server issues. Certainly, there are or may be client issues with many players in local. But I must say 80 to 100+ players in local during impalong for several hours, without considerable lag on both clients and server. That memory is leaking and running out faster when more players are present is a known albeit unpleasant phenomenon which should be adressed, as well as lag situations with lower double digit number of players in local.

 

The server synchronization failure on Deliverance was a different beast. It was obviously server side, not client caused. I had it for 4 different charactes, only two sharing one PC, the others on different boxes, all of them with relatively recent and sufficiently powerful cpu and graphics controller, and sufficient RAM (32GB). I had the (re)login failure due to being perceived moving by the server on 3 characters I had logged out, and after that error having timed out, and relogging, lag and sync failure were recurring.

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Yeah my bad, I should have said "server" not client issue there. Still the issue is there.

As for impalongs, I sense there's a certain factor at play where if players are standing still the client doesn't actually use up a lot of resources. But if a lot of players suddenly move around or if GMs spawn animals for us to fight in an arena, that's when I see the FPS slowly drop or get random lag spikes, not related to internet speed. 

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10 minutes ago, Jimmy_Norman said:

Lol please tell me the VR thing is a joke?

 

I'm thinking that VR with current interface would be a pain to work with because of all the menus and submenus, but if in process of developing VR solution the interface gets reworked somehow, to make it usable with controllers in some other way than opening the same list of options and scrolling or pointing at them to dig in to the option you want to click, that could be a good thing to be given as an option for the normal client.

 

We are used to the current, spreadsheet form of the menus, because that's all we know and because of the sheer number of things we can do, it's the easiest solution but maybe something better will come out of it as a side effect?

 

Togglable, so that the auld gits like me, who are used to this system for years can still use the current interface.

 

Fingers crossed.

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26 minutes ago, Jimmy_Norman said:

Lol please tell me the VR thing is a joke?

it's not, it seems to be 1 of the highest priority "side"-developments that currently are being worked on, it's happening no matter what you think, just roll with it

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I think Finn put it correctly. It was a management decision as it seems. Technically it is not impossible with some limitations, especially for exploration, traveling, and combat. And the management seems to eye the 2.6% (several million) steam users with VR equipment, rightly or not. Yet situations like in Deli recently would certainly drive away any VR user. They were bad enough for us ;) .

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1 hour ago, Ekcin said:

And the management seems to eye the 2.6% (several million) steam users with VR equipment, rightly or not.

Let's take Wurm which is already a niche game on the PC market, now also accesible also to steam, and try to hit an even more niche market.

A VR market that doesn't have a customerbase with tastes tailored to sandbox type games....

 

Well at this point it's either going to be a disaster or it will actually bring in a few players for only a few months, then they'll all quit because Wurm still has retention and turnover issues. Either way, it's going to be an interesting time. 

 

Edited by elentari

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I had an opportunity to rent a VR headset for couple of weeks. Surely I downloaded every interesting VR title there was on Steam and completely cluttered my hard drive with games. What did really surprise me were games which were "ported" to the VR. Games like Skyrim, or Fallout for example. These titles were made to be played on a computer screen, which made the VR experience less impactful. In Skyrim you could not pick up objects with your hands, it felt like I was playing the game on a big screen, I was not immersed it the world (You had to download a fan made mod to be able to pick up objects). Good VR games are made for VR only. Half Life Alyx for example was made to be played with a headset only, so the whole design of the game fits it perfectly, hence the praise for it (The game was superb! I felt like a kid again, wanting to play more and more  each day). I would be very intrigued to see my deed through VR goggles and just see the scope of what I have acomplished over the months playing the game. I think that is what the devs are aiming for. But playing and exploring? Would I be able to take the mug off my bar table and rotate it in my hands? Would I be able to put said mug into my inventory by dropping it behind my back? 

 

What I want to say: VR requires immersive worlds. Objects responding to player's inputs, detailed textures and realistic physical behaviour of these objects is the key for a good VR experience. Ports never work in my oppinion, since you clearly see the limitations of the game.  It would be interesting to see what the devs are aiming for, because it would require a complete new game to make all content of Wurm playable via VR.  Physics, new sound engine, new high res textures, new movement system, new UI etc...

Say I wanted to check the damage on my hammer through VR. Looking up the number on a PC screen is fine, but doing that in VR is no fun, so the hammer should be somehow visibly damaged or some indicator shown on a mallet itself.

 

I must say I am very intrigued to see how VR would affect Wurm. But honestly, I'd take new content updates before VR any day.

Edited by Xheth
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