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Bloodreina

How far can you expect to get by playing the game intuitively

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I haven’t read all of the comments yet, but I was player A from 2010 to the Steam launch. At the Steam launch I played like player C. My skills on my Harmony toon are better than those of my Indy toon… 

 

Playing the game casually and “just for fun” gets you no where compared to if you play effectively. 

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I'm definitely a Player A type who's been playing continuously now for 4 years. My favorite thing is to make beautiful landscapes, so my digging is 99.something, and my main alt who is also a digger is at 95.xx. My mining is 88.xx (no, can't be bothered to look the exact numbers up), and I've surface mined a LOT more shards than I've mined underground. I have only ever really focused on increasing my skill in one area, fighting, because I was tired of interrupting my game play to run away from trolls, so that skill is 87 or 88, with high(ish) skills in both Huge Ax and Staff (~80).

 

I have high enough skills in Carpentry, Blacksmithing, and things like that to facilitate my gameplay, but do need to buy (or find) highly imped tools and furniture. I have a smattering of other skills in the 60's and 70's, but I don't ever use sleep bonus, and rarely use affinity foods. And I would certainly never use a 1ql tool just so I could gain skill faster (except I have used a 1ql brush to increase AH in a toon). I would rather get the mountains of wurk needed for my projects done as quickly as possible using the highest ql tools with WoA (and CoC just because), and feel that getting the work done faster is ample compensation for the lower skill gain.

 

I did try to grind some skills a couple years back, and the tedium of sitting there grinding hour after hour, day after day had me on the verge of needing a really long break from Wurm, so I started on a (slightly insane) 5+ year project which I'm now 2 years into. And I'm still playing 8+ hrs a day on average. Yeah I sometimes get tired of digging and surface mining, but then I look at what I've done so far and I'm pretty satisfied.

 

I think that my style of gameplay has definitely increased my longevity in the game, since I can shift my attentions to something else when I get too much in a rut. If I'm tired of surface mining I can come down off the mountain and go build another building, make bricks or mortar, go explore and look for abandoned deeds with stuff to loot, or even [gasp] imp some lamps or whatever. I've noticed that those players who tend to leave the game, whether permanently or for extended lengths of time, have a higher percentage of type C (grinding) players than the more free-form Player A type.

 

As to the original questions, I think you can reach 70 skill in most skills being Player A, and that the skill gain would be probably about 15%-25% slower over the same amount of time. However, if you use high QL tools with WoA, you're going to get probably >50% more done in that time over using low QL skiller tools. Getting 70-90+ skills will probably take even longer to achieve using the fast, intuitive, method, but again, you get more done, and I'll take that over the incremental boost in skill gain. Every. Time.

 

One caveat is that all skills do not progress equally, so what works for mining or digging (the examples given in the OP) won't work on other skills, like meditation, fishing, all the priest skills, weapon and armor smithing, and many others. A lot of skills are simply grinds and if you're grinding you might as well try to maximize your skill gain, which in Wurm is, more often than not, counterintuitive. As I said, I don't grind, so other than that general observation I can't add anything of value to discussions about grinding those skills.

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I was once largely player A/B, though late game forced some player C onto me (a day or so of it every few months).  I hated being player C when I figured out how badly unintuitive the mechanics were, and how worthless the results were (high skill, but nothing gained doing it).  I easily hit 70 in skills playing as player A over a period of years (very much years, not months); I used B/C to push a couple of skills over 80, but getting over 70 as player A is impossible unless your desired activities align with the optimal grind method.

 

Honestly, I only lasted as long as I did because I stuck to largerly player A and enjoyed the game; if I'd ground as a player C or even overmuch as a player B I'd have left years ago.  I ran out of things to do about a month ago, and most new content doesn't feel geared towards my player type (which is fine, it's a very niche type and isn't a profitable one to create content for) so I trasitioned to player category D (unable to skill further; in my case becasue I let my premium drop and have no intent to renew).

Edited by Etherdrifter

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Player A, though I think in my 8(?) years of playing, I've had maybe a session of two of grinding for some purpose and long jags of being obsessed with one thing, like building or archaeology. There's nowhere to get in Wurm, there's no endgame, it really doesn't matter. You can make your own goals and do that, make no goals ever and wander around, some of both, neither. Basically, if I need validation and goals, I play something else for a while. It's probably a matter of personality. 

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