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Mirowen

Uniques: Scale, Hide and blood, public and private.

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For my background on this, I'm the tank for the (what I believe) most successful private hunting/slaying team on NFI, I realize things are a bit different at the moment on SFI generally. I also suspect unique changes to come eventually, maybe even with exploration update. But just in case nothing is yet planned, here is an idea that I believe benefits both the private slayers, and the public.

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I've been thinking about this quite a bit for the last year or so. The current system we have always makes it so slaying a dragon or drake privately is beneficial to the finder, while humanoid uniques are always public. 


No one really -needs- scale or hide on pve, though it certainly is nice to have. However that blood, while also not necessary is generally far more useful to all players. Quite a good deal of drakes/dragons being privately slain reduces the amount of these bloods available to players quite a bit, even in some cases making it nearly unavailable (looking at you 1+ years till a red was done publicly)  

 

But what if we could have the best of both worlds? The situation is actually quite easy to fix, and the method already exists in game. Permissions. 

 

A permission could be added to deeds to allow for "Slayers". The people given this permission by the deed owner would be able to attack the unique, and would share in the scale/hide split, additionally there would be a cooldown time to turning this off, similar to disbanding a deed. Everyone present in local would still receive blood just as before. 

This changes the dynamic. Now there is no reason for a "Private" slay as it stands. Everyone can come and get blood, and if you are going to do a true "Public" slaying, you allow everyone from freedom isles the "Slayer" permission. If you are going to do it "privately", you simply add the people individually. This also largely alleviates the need for GM's to be called to deal with interlopers in private slayings, wasting everyones time. 

 

Why are only people given the slayer tag permission to attack? 
This is to prevent someone from making a "Public" slaying, and reaping the entire reward themselves through tricking everyone. If they want to do it privately, they still need to get enough friends, allies or hired help together to kill it. Unless you can actually solo a dragon or drake. In which case, go for it. 

 

Why the cooldown timer for turning this permission off? 
For the same reason as above. It would be entirely too easy for someone to turn off the status in the last few % of a uniques health and finish it off with 2-3 folks after having the public do the work. I'm not entirely sure its possible to easily do this, but if it is, this would be the safest. 

 

What if the unique runs off deed? 

Well that's your fault isn't it. But ideally this can be fixed by the slayers not being incompetent. Usage of a strong fence can slow it briefly, and pushing the deed size over its leash spot will solve the problem largely. 

 

Edit: Also, this isn't meant as "the solution". The current system needs a total rework, but this is a solution to the current systems largest weakness. 

Edited by Mirowen
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what I wonder is.. if bloods are what all are after, why are scale "slayings" the ones that nearly crash servers with the UNUSUAL HIGH amount of alts

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I was just after the journal requirements but at this point I'm giving up on that. Too many time restrictive ramifications and work for it to even be worth it so why stress it as long as the rift and unique requirements remain as they are.

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Guess I will throw my 2 cents into this uniques convo :) Firstly, a slaying permission would be perfect, allows for trusted player to get the loot and allows everyone else to get a blood, here is a slight tweak as I think the point is missed when it comes to the scale/hide drops more so the scale than the hide though. Is I would say, allow for a seperate pool that non slayers would be in, a .01 scale/hide. One of the big reasons why people bring so many alts (not just for the blood) is how much scale is needed to make a full set of Scale armour, even though yes, the drake/scale is not "needed" in PvE it is still something that everyone wants and feels that they need in many cases. Other than that, I'm liking the permissions idea :)

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I don't see why this would change anything really. By seperating the hide/scale distribution to a role, you're just allowing people to more freely hog the distributed contents.

 

Not a bad attempt at a solution, even if it's based on something a bit strange. Yes, scale and hide isn't needed, but that's most of the value of the unique. Drake hide and scale will always be valuable and sought after as endgame items.

Ignoring this will just result in a system that presents new issues in a different light, and we'd be begging for another solution in the future.  Massive points for not removing the hunting aspects of uniques however.

 

Edited by Madnath
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As my edit says, yes this is not a end all solution. The system itself needs changing at some point. But for now we have to work within the system we have. This makes things better both for public, and private without the major overhaul and complete change of concept that would be needed to "Fix" uniques. 

 

Just because you can't make a bad situation perfect doesn't mean that you should shrug your shoulders and just give up on making it better.

 

Yes, you would probably have more private slayings and that too is a good thing. Why? Because people who actually want a set of scale or hide should be out there hunting uniques

But they don't and do you want to know why? Why on earth would anyone who actually wants a scale or hide set go out and spend hours upon hours day after day actually going out to hunt uniques when they are just going to either be crushed by guilt doing it privately, or do it publicly and end up paying multiple gold to get the same amount they could have done privately. So we end up with the same 10 people across two separate groups out hunting uniques, and the public dragons/drakes are the ones that happen to be found mostly by luck, by folks outside of those organizations. If those two groups were more active and their entire group actually hunted vigilantly, there would be far less dragons and drakes made public. 

 

Furthermore, those slayings that saw record numbers of players (Including one at near 600) were slayings where the blood had never been available before. The scale and hide do incentivize more people to attend, but not quite as many as you might think, with many of the extra count being additional alts. The usefulness of certain bloods is extremely limited. A troll king will be half the population of a goblin leader for example. Half of the already low number of humanoid uniques just happen to have blood that isn't as desired. 

 

 

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7 hours ago, Katrat said:

I was just after the journal requirements but at this point I'm giving up on that. Too many time restrictive ramifications and work for it to even be worth it so why stress it as long as the rift and unique requirements remain as they are.

Epic has plenty of living uniques by the way. And we tend to organize slayings on homeservers every few months. Our freedom brethren are always invited to help out if they need the journal goal or if they simply wish to have multiple slayings. 

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Best solution I've seen yet! Great job Nin. Time and time again I see posts get shot down because it isn't the PERFECT solution. I hope for all of us on NFI that would love to see blood flow through the market like a steady river as opposed to the occasional sprinkles we have now that while this may not be perfect it is BETTER. And on our journey to find the perfect solution we should only ever discuss whether something is better or not. 

 

Unlike other solutions I've seen this should be extremely EASY to implement. I can't imagine this would take more than a day of dev time as opposed to the full on reworks that people have suggested. 

 

I see no cons to this solution other than it doesn't address making hide/scale more accessible, but that doesn't make this idea better or worse. This idea harms no group of people. EVEN private slayers have no good reason to hate this idea. 

 

 

 

Please lets all take the time to focus on the outcome of a change like this and discuss that, and not discuss whether it covers every single problem we all have private slayings. Keep on Wurming everyone and I hope we can better come together and make change in this game. ❤️

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Once the cluster borders fall, there won't be a blood shortage anymore, and the scale and hide shortage alleviated for Northerners. No more bandaids, just tear the wall down.

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I see the idea as parody.. it's not fixing anything for the rare resource, it's only giving some flexibility to share with all or not scale/hide or to allow only blood to people in local, this is still on-unique-death, check if it's ondeed, then share or not based on deed settings.. and apply rules to people in local..

 

This does not fix any shortage of anything or solve priv group farming issue, how uniques spawn, how they are found, how they are impossible content to normal people without a watch and beeping alarms and calendars - again.. this fixes nothing, it's a setting that wont fix anything...

Some of the people in priv-farming groups have potato pcs or just play in odd timezones to host public events, lag with the 300 alts spawned in local.. some cant play or wont bother with 2fps, does somebody really think this will change behavior for these problems?

 

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9 hours ago, Mirowen said:

As my edit says, yes this is not a end all solution. The system itself needs changing at some point. But for now we have to work within the system we have. This makes things better both for public, and private without the major overhaul and complete change of concept that would be needed to "Fix" uniques. 

 

Just because you can't make a bad situation perfect doesn't mean that you should shrug your shoulders and just give up on making it better.

 

Yes, you would probably have more private slayings and that too is a good thing. Why? Because people who actually want a set of scale or hide should be out there hunting uniques

But they don't and do you want to know why? Why on earth would anyone who actually wants a scale or hide set go out and spend hours upon hours day after day actually going out to hunt uniques when they are just going to either be crushed by guilt doing it privately, or do it publicly and end up paying multiple gold to get the same amount they could have done privately. So we end up with the same 10 people across two separate groups out hunting uniques, and the public dragons/drakes are the ones that happen to be found mostly by luck, by folks outside of those organizations. If those two groups were more active and their entire group actually hunted vigilantly, there would be far less dragons and drakes made public. 

 

Furthermore, those slayings that saw record numbers of players (Including one at near 600) were slayings where the blood had never been available before. The scale and hide do incentivize more people to attend, but not quite as many as you might think, with many of the extra count being additional alts. The usefulness of certain bloods is extremely limited. A troll king will be half the population of a goblin leader for example. Half of the already low number of humanoid uniques just happen to have blood that isn't as desired.

 

because like it or not, what's needed is a solution, it's what people have called for, and they've done this for a long time

we've seen bandaids many times that are just put in place to further stretch out the time for a solution, and I don't think uniques and their mechanics need more bandaids or time stretched out for a solution.

 

I'm not saying this is a bad idea, I just personally don't align with this style of change

 

7 hours ago, Zuelatak said:

Best solution I've seen yet! Great job Nin. Time and time again I see posts get shot down because it isn't the PERFECT solution. I hope for all of us on NFI that would love to see blood flow through the market like a steady river as opposed to the occasional sprinkles we have now that while this may not be perfect it is BETTER. And on our journey to find the perfect solution we should only ever discuss whether something is better or not. 

 

Unlike other solutions I've seen this should be extremely EASY to implement. I can't imagine this would take more than a day of dev time as opposed to the full on reworks that people have suggested. 

 

I see no cons to this solution other than it doesn't address making hide/scale more accessible, but that doesn't make this idea better or worse. This idea harms no group of people. EVEN private slayers have no good reason to hate this idea. 

 

 

 

Please lets all take the time to focus on the outcome of a change like this and discuss that, and not discuss whether it covers every single problem we all have private slayings. Keep on Wurming everyone and I hope we can better come together and make change in this game. ❤️

 

isn't part of your schtick that players shouldn't concern themselves with dev time/costs lmao

Edited by Madnath

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I don't know how it is on NFI but on SFI a lot of humanoids are even private. With that in mind I don't see this has having any positive impact on the slaying system. Yeah something needs to get done, some players corner the market and spike the prices and it leads to newer players never being able to afford them. It's really quite awful, but a system like this I don't think will fix it. If you get a chance go look at Niarja and see all the humanoids that were slayed with small groups of players.

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the standard for  "public" slaying now is really private loot slaying anyway,people who attend dont get to roll for the corpse or tomes or bones or anything else. you would expect the removing rmt would make people less greedy. clearly it did not.

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These threads pop up every few weeks regarding uniques for years now. Personally I dislike the game design itself that allows any player or group of players to hoard any resource in a game. Could be a silver mine in an MMO, could be water wells in a desert based game, doesn't matter. 

 

The counter argument always goes this way: But if you want to find uniques go out and look for them. 

I always respond this way : This gameplay mechanic always favors those who have more free time than others. I'm not saying the working dads and moms out there should always be on par with the heavy 12 hour a day grinder, but it also creates a monopoly more or less for the same people. 

 

I never understood why we can't earn hide or scale in other ways, such as an extension of journal goal (perhaps repeatable goals?) or tougher RNG based solo missions (like kill 300 trolls in 24 hours?). At least that gives a player a sort of personal agency vs the current unique system which is luck based and favours groups. 

 

Fact is these threads will keep popping up in the near future until something is changed. 

 

If anyone has free time to check, they could probably find 50 more forum threads regarding this exact topic, always with the same mentality that favours greed for a particular few  vs any suggestion that might benefit the entire playerbase. You want to keep the current system? Fine then. At least expand it so there are other ways to earn hide / scales than just to be a part of a privileged group. 

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It is pointless to criticize that a rare resource is rare. Much less that those with more time have a better chance to find something that is rare, and those with better fighting abilities and equipment better opportunities to move around. Chances to find a unique (unless it finds you) will never be "fair".

 

And bit more honesty would be nice. Do the complainers want drake and scale armours devaluated by creating a glut? Any new mechanic not going into that direction will either end up at the same place, or even dilute scale and hide further.

 

There have been a lot of changes of the unique system since Rolf (or Notch?) stated that there will never be dragons in Wurm, from dragon breeding to announcement of unique appearances, the revocation of that, and the recent unique hunting netiquette (which is a reasonable step imho).

 

The proposal points in one good direction by opening a way of letting private slayers keeping their main loot, scales or hides, while allowing bystanders to collect blood. I don't consider it ideal, and think that opening the cluster borders would be a better relief for Northern shortages (among other issues), but if a mechanic in that direction can be implemented, it would be useful.

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2 hours ago, Ekcin said:

opening the cluster borders would be a better relief for Northern shortages.

but it would create a tremendous shortage in the new western isles cluster they would have to open when nobody wants to play anymore.

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On 11/16/2021 at 6:19 AM, Madnath said:

isn't part of your schtick that players shouldn't concern themselves with dev time/costs lmao

I'm not sure where I've advocated for complicated solutions over simple ones, but I do think players should speak their mind about a solution regardless of how long it takes to implement. 

 

Can someone please explain to me why this is a bad solution? All I see is people complaining that this doesn't change hide/scale. Which wasn't the goal of this proposed change to begin with, so why are we talking about it?

 

Is this proposed idea that should take a single day of dev time better or worse than the current system? The answer to me is clearly yes. More blood = better system. I don't understand how this is being labelled as a band-aid solution. It's literally just a solution. A step towards fixing the problem as a whole. Can we please stop shitting on every idea because it doesn't solve every problem in one swoop and just focus on taking small steps to move towards that perfect solution. 

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55 minutes ago, Zuelatak said:

I'm not sure where I've advocated for complicated solutions over simple ones, but I do think players should speak their mind about a solution regardless of how long it takes to implement. 

 

Can someone please explain to me why this is a bad solution? All I see is people complaining that this doesn't change hide/scale. Which wasn't the goal of this proposed change to begin with, so why are we talking about it?

 

Is this proposed idea that should take a single day of dev time better or worse than the current system? The answer to me is clearly yes. More blood = better system. I don't understand how this is being labelled as a band-aid solution. It's literally just a solution. A step towards fixing the problem as a whole. Can we please stop shitting on every idea because it doesn't solve every problem in one swoop and just focus on taking small steps to move towards that perfect solution. 

It's an inherently bad idea that fails to address ANY issue that the current legendary system supposedly has. It does not stop private slaying groups, and does not address hide distribution, and it also doesn't stop entitled people think they have a right to turn up and get loot for it. 

 

And to add on, "that should take a single day of dev time" is ridiculous to the point of laughable. 

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On 11/30/2021 at 5:08 PM, Archaed said:

It's an inherently bad idea that fails to address ANY issue that the current legendary system supposedly has. It does not stop private slaying groups, and does not address hide distribution, and it also doesn't stop entitled people think they have a right to turn up and get loot for it. 

The issue it addresses is that due to private slayings dragon blood is scarce. This would allow for that blood to be as free as any humanoid's. None of the reasons you listed are reasons why this change would be BAD. They are just problems that also need addressing. An actual reason for example would be to suggest that this change would make blood more scarce or that somehow it could be abused. Again you're demanding an entire system be reworked and anything less should be discarded. We should be taking the steps that we can to improve the system and something like this would be so much easier than what you're wanting.

 

On 11/30/2021 at 5:08 PM, Archaed said:

And to add on, "that should take a single day of dev time" is ridiculous to the point of laughable. 

I have no idea how spaghetti the code base is for this game, but to add a deed permission and tie the hide/scale drops to it does sound like something that could be finished in 8hrs. Most of the work being art changes. 


Would you rather, have the system stay the same OR have more dragon blood in the market?

No one has provided any good reason as to why the system should stay the same and we shouldn't have more blood.

Edited by Zuelatak

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52 minutes ago, Zuelatak said:

Would you rather, have the system stay the same OR have more dragon blood in the market?

No one has provided any good reason as to why the system should stay the same and we shouldn't have more blood.

No one has provided any good reason to do this changes, so why would anyone bother giving reasons against it.

 

Edit: NO "i want to have my cake and eat it too" isn't a good reason.

Edited by Tpikol
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8 minutes ago, Tpikol said:

No one has provided any good reason to do this changes, so why would anyone bother giving reasons against it.

Do you consider more dragon blood in the market not a good reason? Cause that's the whole point of the post.

 

On 11/15/2021 at 9:43 AM, Mirowen said:

Quite a good deal of drakes/dragons being privately slain reduces the amount of these bloods available to players quite a bit, even in some cases making it nearly unavailable (looking at you 1+ years till a red was done publicly)  

 

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there's like 5 different non-blood things being discussed lol, what an acid trip of a thread

 

i don't mind the idea but all these weird permissions on uniques and stuff don't feel very sandboxy, but then again neither does a ghost scythe man threatening to ban you for standing nearby i guess

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4 minutes ago, Zuelatak said:

Do you consider more dragon blood in the market not a good reason? Cause that's the whole point of the post.

The issue is, even the uniques that only give blood are still private for the most part. If you take a look at Niarja you can see every unique slayed recently on each server. Just taking a quick look you can see a bunch of private Troll Kings, Forest Giant and Goblin Leaders. They only give out bloods, yet they are still private. The reason being that the players that want the hide and scale market to stay high, also want the blood market to stay high. While the uniques definitely need some sort of solution, I fear this is far from the answer. 

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12 minutes ago, Zuelatak said:

Do you consider more dragon blood in the market not a good reason? Cause that's the whole point of the post.

do i consider that private slayers being able to buy more bloods with more fake public slayings whenever the feel like the need more blood for their own items is a good thing?

No, nobody but the people that benefit from that think its a good thing.

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