Why did you quit playing WU?

[Gofs 280]

Hello Wurmians!

I'd love to ask why players online in WU are decreasing every week, month, or year.
That's very pity that this enormous, beautiful world is losing followers...

Share your reasons; what has been your turning moment? 
Maybe that was the time? Has the game required more and more time to achieve your goals?
Or maybe that was the feeling that the game has stopped growing and there is nothing to search for anymore?
Or maybe you found that graphic too old and not updating? 

Please share your minds 

[Finnn 3,323]

have you noticed all the survival coop games coming out, in the past month palworld, enshrouded, nightingale just released, and more are coming... not the same type of game.. but something new to try

 

maybe(?)

[Gofs 280]

18 hours ago, Finnn said:

have you noticed all the survival coop games coming out, in the past month palworld, enshrouded, nightingale just released, and more are coming... not the same type of game.. but something new to try

 

maybe(?)

Yeah I think same, new games can offer better graphic for sure, and new unexplored world. But maybe something else too?
Tbf my question is not pure interest, I'm working on my server, to improve it, and seeking for information and minds of other players

[Camelrider 222]

On 2/20/2024 at 9:03 PM, Gofs said:

Hello Wurmians!

I'd love to ask why players online in WU are decreasing every week, month, or year.
That's very pity that this enormous, beautiful world is losing followers...

Share your reasons; what has been your turning moment? 
Maybe that was the time? Has the game required more and more time to achieve your goals?
Or maybe that was the feeling that the game has stopped growing and there is nothing to search for anymore?
Or maybe you found that graphic too old and not updating? 

Please share your minds 

 

i don't play PvP servers on WU because of rampant cheating. I don't consider developing an anticheat because the dev team said doing so was against the TOS minus a very specific implementation that is unbearably heavy on the server (What Darklords and Sindusk worked on). I don't play PvE servers because they're all dead with no guarantee of persistence in a time-sink game except for Sklotopolis, and even then it's pretty dead.

Edited February 22 by Camelrider

[Batta 441]

I've found that a lot of players just want a new server. They enjoy the first part of the game where you're working to establish yourself, but then they lose interest in just "living" in the world and prefer to start the challenge again.

 

That said, the main reason I find that people are leaving WU is that other games are coming out to distract them. I have over 16,000 hours in WU and honestly if I didn't have people counting on me to keep producing the Sitheil series of servers I'd probably be off playing something else too. I've seen a lot of players lost to another game (Valheim, Ark, etc) only to come back for nostalgic reasons. I think there's a lot of love for Wurm, but people need variety and don't necessarily want a game that continues on endlessly after they've already done everything they enjoy in it. There are long-timers, of course, but a whole lot who just want the initial challenge.

 

[Finnn 3,323]

On 2/22/2024 at 4:49 PM, Batta said:

I've found that a lot of players just want a new server. They enjoy the first part of the game where you're working to establish yourself, but then they lose interest in just "living" in the world and prefer to start the challenge again.

 

That said, the main reason I find that people are leaving WU is that other games are coming out to distract them. I have over 16,000 hours in WU and honestly if I didn't have people counting on me to keep producing the Sitheil series of servers I'd probably be off playing something else too. I've seen a lot of players lost to another game (Valheim, Ark, etc) only to come back for nostalgic reasons. I think there's a lot of love for Wurm, but people need variety and don't necessarily want a game that continues on endlessly after they've already done everything they enjoy in it. There are long-timers, of course, but a whole lot who just want the initial challenge.

 

but there's no challenge.. within 1-2 days you'd find the most common resources or make it a week.. etc.. to obtain access to actually more useful resources.. wood/iron/rocks/clay/possibly other metal and shards.

there's no challenge as long you deed and fence the place, there's no threat past fencing your place

 

so.. maybe new exploration/dynamic coming and going servers to find new things could be a solution.. pretty much what currently nightingale does.. or how poe does seasons... new content on new seasons.. and whatever is really good .. sinks as content into standard league.. else new content keeps coming into new season or what we can have here as "new temporary clusters to unlock and experience new content for a limited time"

Edited February 24 by Finnn
TWO typos

[keoki 29]

For me, it was the lack of official content updates. Once they stopped updating WU, it was over for me. I kept seeing updates to WO and so WU just wasn't fun anymore. So, I switched back to WO.

[HatTrickPatrick 10]

I stopped playing it because they stopped developing it.

 

 

Edited February 24 by Red_

[Martynas5 435]

Can't mod game however i like ( lack of skill/knowledge). Learning a bit, not sure how it will go.

After playing in quite few servers it's easy to quit becouse lack of "initial struggle" after day or two, unless there are some interesting mods..

[Gofs 280]

Thank you all! That's a very useful info! 

@Batta, @keoki, @Finnn, @HatTrickPatrick
So about content
As I understand it can be like new creatures, new items, new types of buildings, new terrain
✅ What I been making so far is : New items, their parts coming as drop from creatures, I also going to add skills bonuses to armour items (each of them)  
✅ Added and adding new spells

❗I have plans to add new creatures, like orcs, golems and other creatures, but thats quite hard seems 
⁉️ My big dream to add palms, banana trees, that will grew at sand areas, and some bushes like ananas, but not yet even started and idk if that possible yet 
⁉️ I'd also would love to add balcony walls, that will let you build kinda transparent wall that you can pass 

======
I plan to add few new items like capes, rings, belts, necklaces, shoulders, every week (they also providing stats) So I hope make something like updating content for now at least about creatures. 

======
@Finnn, @Martynas5
About challenge
I tried at my server to:
1) reduce amount of clay
2) reduce amount of trees
3) reduce amount of creatures
4) reduce all metals amount
======
✅ Now it seems like only amount of metals have sense to reduce to create kind of challenge, but still decided to add boulders around the map. 

@Camelrider
About cheats at PvP
As I know there is 3 types of it:
1) Bot
2) ESP
3) SpeedHack
There might be more but idk of others. 
1) As for me Bot cheat, is not really cheat, as grinding part of game is not really funny, especially in WU where you need to create tones of similar items to increase your skill. That is really boring. Id love to see more challenging skilling, like you need to develop recipes, work on bunches of item that is needed to create this unique items by recipes that you found and then get nice skill. But for now I'm not sure that it possible to set. So I have an idea of creating books that you will read for few hours and get skill ticks. That will be not bot, as book will have cooldown, but also will remove need in bots usage. Hopefully that would work okay
2) ESP is definitely ruining gameplay, and that's very sad Mod, and as I know nobody yet found out how to fix it. 
3) SpeedHack well for PvP its only 1 time use. As after that player who got advantage in a fight with help of SpeedHack will 100% get banned, and player who lost course of it, will get back his stuff and skills. 

So what you guys think? If WU server will have growing content, adventuring gameplay, new creatures and spells, skills for players, will that help to bring players back to WU? Or there is something else that can be missing? I do appreciate any ideas, that you can bring here 

With kind regards Gofs 

[Martynas5 435]

Reducing won't solve thing i guess. Everything will take a bit longer though.

Could make all aggro animals to bash fences/walls to get to player, or just bash stuff if you dont secure it with guards or similar. Uniques could wreck stuff across all map till players slay them ( extreme but yeah )

Restricted foraging/botanizing due to seasons, farming also. Starving could have more effects ( bad ones i guess), now you can just ignore it basically.

Those two above eventually will become chores i guess, but somewhat more struggle.

 

Make use of those really small maps

Limited time, special resources, mobs(?), maybe find special item to teleport there.

Might be possible make a proper dungeon in that map without messing around in main server.

 

 

 

About bot cheat(somehow didn't notice that thing since recentlyish )

No idea if that (below) can be done but anyway:

Journal missions:

for example :

prerequisite: 20 carpentry

Mission: build a house, loom, rope tool.

Reward: Skillgain turned on till 30. or just straight to 30 depends how difficult, grind vs mission.

Additional challenges to get increased skillgain till x level. ( probably easier to do, after x level in skill obtain journal entry to do X things to get increased skillgain for Y time)

 

 

Wanted to write about something more but forgot. Well that's it for now 😕

[Ayluin 170]

All of the following message is meant to be a in a pragmatic tone to address the state of WU not how to make your server more popular which seems to be how this thread is trending, so don't take anything I say personally as I have no interest in sparking a debate.

1. Wurm Unlimited is purely a Steam game. The keys are cheap enough. There was never enough advertisement for WO or WU to gain the attention of a 'mass' playerbase. This has been touched on for years upon years within the WO community. The decline of WU specifically is impacted on the lack of feature development from WO, which to be fair, hasn't added anything of huge value since Rifts. Sure there's the occasional item here or there, and they did a fair job overhauling the UI whether one prefers the old UI or not, other than that, I don't know what'new' features have been added that really impact people on playing WO. People quitting WU due to the fact WO dropped support is their own choice, but this is fairly anecdotal in nature. Modders have added features into WU that WO does not have, or have later adapted to their own codebase. Much like we have variations of their Rifts in mods.

The numbers do not lie. https://steamcharts.com/app/366220#All The peak popularity of Wurm Unlimited was on launch which still was less than 2000 players. When I begain my server in 2019, it was around 500 players. As of late it is around 250 players or so daily.

 

2. The amount of servers in the launcher. At the time of writing this, there are 129 servers online in the launcher. 29 of these are password protected. This leaves 120 publicly available servers to choose from. 49 of these servers have at least 1 player on them.
The Wurm Server Launcher is misleading. Numbers can be and are faked by various servers for whatever purposes serve them. At the time of writing this there are "414" players online which doesn't add up when looking at Steamcharts. Additionally due to the implementation of login servers being the required point of contact and not everyone knowing how to hide their cluster from the steam query or choosing not to this also inflates the number of publicly available servers.

A hypothetical approach: Ah yes, I've heard of Wurm Unlimited through WO or a friend. I purchase the game on steam. I launch this bad boy up. I now have to choose from 120 different servers. How do I pick!?!? Well I can look at the forums to see which threads have been updated recently, I can look at the launcher and sort by players or ping based on my preference, I could look on the ranking website wurm-unlimited.com. But if I have no real knowledge of Wurm and just picked it up in a humble bundle and want to give it a go, I will likely end up on a dead server that has not been active in any fashion and get killed by an overwhelming amount of creatures in default starter gear within an hour and never login again. Or I'll join one of them super large populated servers and either land on a login server where I have to make another choice to go through a portal to pick my server, and when I arrive I say Hiya in GL-Freedom (If I even know what that means as a new player) and am greeted with crickets. I never login again.

 

3. Anyone can make a server, and this is the way it should be. Unfortunately, this is not a straight-forward process. If you have no knowledge of how to set up a dedicated server or a virtual private server, you are left with game hosts being the only viable option (Pingperfect, GTX, Citadel). There is one official documentation page on how to setup a server that has not been touched or updated since 2016 https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Server_administration_(Wurm_Unlimited) While it does a moderately decent job in terms of how to setup a server on Windows or Linux, some dependencies do not even exist in the current repos of Ubuntu and since the game is no longer developed, the guide then becomes difficult to follow and relies upon third-party help to get you up and going. This pushes so many people into paying the same price for a game hosting provider with a nice dashboard that unfortunately do not care about Wurm Unlimited due to its low playerbase; it's not their bread and butter like Minecraft, 7days to die, etc. These game hosting providers have their flaws, and no I'm not willing to argue on this for anyone coming out of the woods to claim any of them are perfect and do not have issues. These flaws range from one-click installation of mods that are outdated and/or improperly archived to killing the process instead of shutting the server down correctly which over repeated time will eventually corrupt the map and or database. You could be really lucky and not experience this for over a year, but it will happen eventually. But backups exist so you just restore, lose a day of progress or whatever you set your shutdown/backup schedule to on these dashboards since none of them can backup in real-time, and go again. Without sufficient knowledge of how run a server on a dedicated or VPS or knowing how to add mods manually, write mods for your server, get someone to write the mod for you, you're boned.

 

The server creation standard: I'm gonna make the best Wurm Unlimited server ever created! I'm gonna have so many players it's going to be the best. I run my credit card through pingperfect and wambo bambo I have a server ready to go. I post on them forums, and woohoo! Here we go! Oh wait this user wants what mod? How do I get that? Oh I can install it on the dash panel okay great. One second guys, server's shutting down. Got it. Great. Boot it back up. Two days later, another mod needed? Okay I know how to do this I go to the dashbo- Oh wait.... They don't have this mod. What do I do now? Well we can live without it sorry guys! A few days/months later, I have this great idea for a mod! I will go to the modding discord and tell them about it. Oh there's about like 6 people who actually code anymore and none of them want to invest in it. Well nevermind, I'll learn that java one day and do it myself.

 

4. The amount of "pop-up" servers. I'm sure anyone who has played WU long enough knows exactly what I'm talking about. A new server on the forums, launcher, ranking site or word of mouth. People flock to it because it's new, argue with the owner about the settings, maybe even convince them to add mods or adjust settings they never wanted to touch. A month later, the server is gone. Okay maybe that's a bit dramatic, let's say within 3 months. All of the work you've done on that server as a player whether it's 1x/1x or 100x/100x is gone and now you've invalidated a bunch of people's time. This is the most common complaint in the MMO industry right now right? Don't waste players' time/Respect our time. Hell, even I encountered this when leaving WO as a CA/WA and going into my WU retirement. I joined a pingperfect server, the dude found out about my history on WO, made me GM. He assured me that he paid the server for a full year and don't even worry about it bud. Of course I was skeptical, so I looked into pingperfect and saw (at least at the time, don't know about now) that there was no such payment option for annual. I quietly began making my own server and sure enough on the renewal date, the server poofed, the owner never responded on discord, and that's how my server came to be. I could only handle this so many times before I abandoned the concept of WU entirely which has been touched on by others above this post.

5. Modding limitations, model limitations, animation limitations. I touched a bit on this briefly before. There are two modding discord servers for anyone to access. One was originally started by WO devs and has since been transferred to Bdew. The other was started by Angie around the time WO dropped support for WU and the first hadn't been handed over to Bdew. There are so many resources on these discord servers from video tutorials on how to create your first mod to how to create new models in blender, hell we even have a whole different forum from the official forums, but I'm not linking it on this post as it may be a conflict of interest. At any rate, we constantly get feedback from server owners or players asking can you make this? Can you do that? The answer generally is yes. I don't think any one is interested in monetary compensation for creating a few lines of java. Sometimes I fill a request and send it off via DM to the user, sometimes I post it if I think it's going to be generally helpful for lots of people, but that usually isn't the case. Model limitations exist due to the amount of polygons Wurm Unlimited can handle. You have to settle for some pretty basic stuff and then create your own textures utilizing Blender to create the collada file to add it to a pack in a mod to put in the game, and Bdew even created a collda to WOM converter to try and standardize the format to match what WO uses. Yet, even after all of these tweaks, there are still some enigmas that exist like how to get animations to work for new creature models. It's fine and well to create new models, but if they just sit there and are static, it looks quite boring. Frankly, all of it is possible, but the amount of time and effort to produce one single item with a custom model, texture, and the code to get it into the game generally just isn't worth it.

 

So I think it's great to ask these sort of questions from time to time. Find out what real people who have played the game think. See how they feel. But when you look at that Steam Chart it's pretty evident that while there may have been some dips during valheim, ark stuff, V Rising, Palworld, etc. we're never going to have a mass renaissance of Wurm Unlimited. I think as a server owner now, you make a server with the best of intentions, moderate it appropriately, enjoy the time you have with it while it is popular, continue to support it until there's no one left or until you can no longer afford to run it, and then move on. And of course, always come back when the nostalgia wave hits you. It happens to us all I imagine. Maybe some of us don't act on it anymore, but I think the majority of WO or WU players will look back on their experience as a mixed bag of shenanigans, maybe postively, maybe negatively, but fun nonetheless.

Edited February 24 by Ayluin

[Gofs 280]

10 minutes ago, Martynas5 said:

Reducing won't solve thing i guess. Everything will take a bit longer though.

Could make all aggro animals to bash fences/walls to get to player, or just bash stuff if you dont secure it with guards or similar. Uniques could wreck stuff across all map till players slay them ( extreme but yeah )

Restricted foraging/botanizing due to seasons, farming also. Starving could have more effects ( bad ones i guess), now you can just ignore it basically.

Those two above eventually will become chores i guess, but somewhat more struggle.

 

Make use of those really small maps

Limited time, special resources, mobs(?), maybe find special item to teleport there.

Might be possible make a proper dungeon in that map without messing around in main server.

 

 

 

About bot cheat(somehow didn't notice that thing since recentlyish )

No idea if that (below) can be done but anyway:

Journal missions:

for example :

prerequisite: 20 carpentry

Mission: build a house, loom, rope tool.

Reward: Skillgain turned on till 30. or just straight to 30 depends how difficult, grind vs mission.

Additional challenges to get increased skillgain till x level. ( probably easier to do, after x level in skill obtain journal entry to do X things to get increased skillgain for Y time)

 

 

Wanted to write about something more but forgot. Well that's it for now 😕

I Like Idea of uniques, and mobs that can bash in to your deed, but atm cant imagine how to set it up to make it really danger instead of just annoying. As players always can use caves, to hide in, im not sure how uniques or mobs can try to bash mine door, i think they dont have such option at all  So that all will turn to most probably penning uniques in caves and then calling friends to slay. 
I know that Trolls also have this mechanic to bash the walls / fences, but they doing it very rarely (if they got penned before) and got hungy. But still its possible, and can be done I will look for it. 

Starving is cool idea, for surviving mod, as and water disease and cold at night. I know that other parts (but farming and foraging) already added. Starving can be a thing tho!

Idea of dungeon is something that I would defiantly work on, especially with help of mission ruler tool. Tho for atm Im a bit afraid to create linked server, as there can be issues for "travelers" to lose custom items that I made. 

Missions, like quests, yeah, why not
Atm players still getting more skill by equipping some specific items there % bonuse to skill, and when you remove item you get x3 gain to this skill. 

[Finnn 3,323]

1 hour ago, Gofs said:

Thank you all! That's a very useful info! 

@Batta, @keoki, @Finnn, @HatTrickPatrick
So about content
As I understand it can be like new creatures, new items, new types of buildings, new terrain
✅ What I been making so far is : New items, their parts coming as drop from creatures, I also going to add skills bonuses to armour items (each of them)  
✅ Added and adding new spells

❗I have plans to add new creatures, like orcs, golems and other creatures, but thats quite hard seems 
⁉️ My big dream to add palms, banana trees, that will grew at sand areas, and some bushes like ananas, but not yet even started and idk if that possible yet 
⁉️ I'd also would love to add balcony walls, that will let you build kinda transparent wall that you can pass 

======
I plan to add few new items like capes, rings, belts, necklaces, shoulders, every week (they also providing stats) So I hope make something like updating content for now at least about creatures. 

======
@Finnn, @Martynas5
About challenge
I tried at my server to:
1) reduce amount of clay
2) reduce amount of trees
3) reduce amount of creatures
4) reduce all metals amount
======
✅ Now it seems like only amount of metals have sense to reduce to create kind of challenge, but still decided to add boulders around the map. 

@Camelrider
About cheats at PvP
As I know there is 3 types of it:
1) Bot
2) ESP
3) SpeedHack
There might be more but idk of others. 
1) As for me Bot cheat, is not really cheat, as grinding part of game is not really funny, especially in WU where you need to create tones of similar items to increase your skill. That is really boring. Id love to see more challenging skilling, like you need to develop recipes, work on bunches of item that is needed to create this unique items by recipes that you found and then get nice skill. But for now I'm not sure that it possible to set. So I have an idea of creating books that you will read for few hours and get skill ticks. That will be not bot, as book will have cooldown, but also will remove need in bots usage. Hopefully that would work okay
2) ESP is definitely ruining gameplay, and that's very sad Mod, and as I know nobody yet found out how to fix it. 
3) SpeedHack well for PvP its only 1 time use. As after that player who got advantage in a fight with help of SpeedHack will 100% get banned, and player who lost course of it, will get back his stuff and skills. 

So what you guys think? If WU server will have growing content, adventuring gameplay, new creatures and spells, skills for players, will that help to bring players back to WU? Or there is something else that can be missing? I do appreciate any ideas, that you can bring here 

With kind regards Gofs 

What I think wurm (O & U) needs is content.. not server tweaks.. we've seen zip-zap left and right settings and playing around values... how about actually new stuff.. besides.. do you see this tree - ha - it's gone, NO TREE.. ok.. cool... but.. could there be a .. fine not a dragon... let there be something NEW, nobody is going to be amazed by easier or harder access to resources... what about access to NEW RESOURCES.. new stuff unseen and unexplored?

 

[Finnn 3,323]

4 minutes ago, Gofs said:

I Like Idea of uniques, and mobs that can bash in to your deed, but atm cant imagine how to set it up to make it really danger instead of just annoying. As players always can use caves, to hide in, im not sure how uniques or mobs can try to bash mine door, i think they dont have such option at all  So that all will turn to most probably penning uniques in caves and then calling friends to slay. 
I know that Trolls also have this mechanic to bash the walls / fences, but they doing it very rarely (if they got penned before) and got hungy. But still its possible, and can be done I will look for it. 

Starving is cool idea, for surviving mod, as and water disease and cold at night. I know that other parts (but farming and foraging) already added. Starving can be a thing tho!

Idea of dungeon is something that I would defiantly work on, especially with help of mission ruler tool. Tho for atm Im a bit afraid to create linked server, as there can be issues for "travelers" to lose custom items that I made. 

Missions, like quests, yeah, why not
Atm players still getting more skill by equipping some specific items there % bonuse to skill, and when you remove item you get x3 gain to this skill. 

wurm's too chill of a game to have dynamic or w/e alert, raid, etc... pvE is resident sleeper and that's totally fine... but the world could use a system to access excitement moments... something like rifts but with thought beyond.. "you'll surely miss 99% of them and that's ""OK""", no, it's not... it's a game... if there's something to do.. it should be possible to join the rare events.. like any other game.. people want to get done with school/homework/uni-college/work/.. log-in and maybe solo or team-up for something.. challenge or casual gameplay.. but eventually just the casual will likely get boring;

 

even wu could use some sort of class expansion.. and raiding system, and by raiding I still mean different portals to other worlds.. temp worlds.. with something to pillage or same world.. but with low-tier world impact... like.. nodes/enemies which wont mess with the environment more than few lights or visuals which clean up once even expires or gets completed by the player/s, etc....

 

as to wurm pvp... probably have a saving... but I can't say what drives people in/out of it and what wo/wu needs to give any of it some life

[Gofs 280]

23 minutes ago, Ayluin said:

All of the following message is meant to be a in a pragmatic tone, so don't take anything I say personally as I have no interest in sparking a debate.

1. Wurm Unlimited is purely a Steam game. The keys are cheap enough. There was never enough advertisement for WO or WU to gain the attention of a 'mass' playerbase. This has been touched on for years upon years within the WO community. The decline of WU specifically is impacted on the lack of feature development from WO, which to be fair, hasn't added anything of huge value since Rifts. Sure there's the occasional item here or there, and they did a fair job overhauling the UI whether one prefers the old UI or not, other than that, I don't know what features to really say impact people on playing WO. People quitting WU due to the fact WO dropped support is their own choice, but this is fairly anecdotal in nature. Modders have added features into WU that WO does not have, or have later adapted to their own codebase. Much like we have variations of their Rifts in mods.

The numbers do not lie. https://steamcharts.com/app/366220#All The peak popularity of Wurm Unlimited was on launch which still was less than 2000 players. When I begain my server in 2019, it was around 500 players. As of late it is around 250 players or so daily.

 

2. The amount of servers in the launcher. At the time of writing this, there are 129 servers online in the launcher. 29 of these are password protected. This leaves 120 publicly available servers to choose from. 49 of these servers have at least 1 player on them.
The Wurm Server Launcher is misleading. Numbers can be and are faked by various servers for whatever purposes serve them. At the time of writing this there are "414" players online which doesn't add up when looking at Steamcharts. Additionally due to the implementation of login servers being the required point of contact and not everyone knowing how to hide their cluster from the steam query or choosing not to this also inflates the number of publicly available servers.

A hypothetical approach: Ah yes, I've heard of Wurm Unlimited through WO or a friend. I purchase the game on steam. I launch this bad boy up. I now have to choose from 120 different servers. How do I pick!?!? Well I can look at the forums to see which threads have been updated recently, I can look at the launcher and sort by players or ping based on my preference, I could look on the ranking website wurm-unlimited.com. But if I have no real knowledge of Wurm and just picked it up in a humbe bundle and want to give it a go, I will likely end up on a dead server that has not been active in any fashion and get killed by an overwhelming amount of creatures in default starter gear within an hour and never login again. Or I'll join one of them super large populated servers and either land on a login server where I have to make another choice to go through a portal to pick my server, and when I arrive I say Hiya in GL-Freedom (If I even know what that means as a new player) and am greeted with crickets. I never login again.

 

3. Anyone can make a server, and this is the way it should be. Unfortunately, this is not a straight-forward process. If you have no knowledge of how to set up a dedicated server or a virtual private server, you are left with game hosts being the only viable option (Pingperfect, GTX, Citadel). There is one official documentation page on how to setup a server that has not been touched or updated since 2016 https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Server_administration_(Wurm_Unlimited) While it does a moderately decent job in terms of how to setup a server on Windows or Linux, some dependencies do not even exist in the current repos of Ubuntu and since the game is no longer developed, the guide then becomes difficult to follow and relies upon third-party help to get you up and going. This pushes so many people into paying the same price for a game hosting provider with a nice dashboard that unfortunately do not care about Wurm Unlimited because due to its low playerbase, it's not their bread and butter like Minecraft, 7days to die, etc. These game hosting providers have their flaws, and no I'm not willing to argue on this for anyone coming out of the woods to claim any of them are perfect and do not have issues. These flaws range from one-click installation of mods that are outdated and/or improperly archived to killing the process instead of shutting the server down correctly which over repeated time will eventually corrupt the map and or database. You could be really lucky and not experience this for over a year, but it will happen eventually. But backups exist so you just restore, lose a day of progress or whatever you set your shutdown/backup schedule to on these dashboards since none of them can backup in real-time, and go again. Without sufficient knowledge of how run a server on a dedicated or VPS or knowing how to add mods manually, write mods for your server, get someone to write the mod for you, you're boned.

 

The server creation standard: I'm gonna make the best Wurm Unlimited server ever created! I'm gonna have so many players it's going to be the best. I run my credit card through pingperfect and wambo bambo I have a server ready to go. I post on them forums, and woohoo! Here we go! Oh wait this user wants what mod? How do I get that? Oh I can install it on the dash panel okay great. One second guys, server's shutting down. Got it. Great. Boot it back up. Two days later, another mod needed? Okay I know how to do this I go to the dashbo- Oh wait.... They don't have this mod. What do I do now? Well we can live without it sorry guys! A few days/months later, I have this great idea for a mod! I will go to the modding discord and tell them about it. Oh there's about like 6 people who actually code anymore and none of them want to invest in it. Well nevermind, I'll learn that java one day and do it myself.

 

4. The amount of "pop-up" servers. I'm sure anyone who has played WU long enough knows exactly what I'm talking about. A new server on the forums, launcher, ranking site or word of mouth. People flock to it because it's new, argue with the owner about the settings, maybe even convince them to add mods or adjust settings they never wanted to touch. A month later, the server is gone. Okay maybe that's a bit dramatic, let's say within 3 months. All of the work you've done on that server as a player whether it's 1x/1x or 100x/100x is gone and now you've invalidated a bunch of people's time. This is the most common complaint in the MMO industry right now right? Don't waste players' time/Respect our time. Hell, even I encountered this when leaving WO as a CA/WA and going into my WU retirement. I joined a pingperfect server, the dude found out about my history on WO, made me GM. He assured me that he paid the server for a full year and don't even worry about it bud. Of course I was skeptical, so I looked into pingperfect and saw (at least at the time, don't know about now) that there was no such payment option for annual. I quietly began making my own server and sure enough on the renewal date, the server poofed, the owner never responded on discord, and that's how my server came to be. I could only handle this so many times before I abandoned the concept of WU entirely which has been touched on by others above this post.

5. Modding limitations, model limitations, animation limitations. I touched a bit on this briefly before. There are two modding discord servers for anyone to access. One was originally started by WO devs and has since been transferred to Bdew. The other was started by Angie around the time WO dropped support for WU and the first hadn't been handed over to Bdew. There are so many resources on these discord servers from video tutorials on how to create your first mod to how to create new models in blender, hell we even have a whole different forum from the official forums, but I'm not linking it on this post as it may be a conflict of interest. At any rate, we constantly get feedback from server owners or players asking can you make this? Can you do that? The answer generally is yes. I don't think any one is interested in monetary compensation for creating a few lines of java. Sometimes I fill a request and send it off via DM to the user, sometimes I post it if I think it's going to be generally helpful for lots of people, but that usually isn't the case. Model limitations exist due to the amount of polygons Wurm Unlimited can handle. You have to settle for some pretty basic stuff and then create your own textures utilizing Blender to create the collada file to add it to a pack in a mod to put in the game, and Bdew even created a collda to WOM converter to try and standardize the format to match what WO uses. Yet, even after all of these tweaks, there are still some enigmas that exist like how to get animations to work for new creature models. It's fine and well to create new models, but if they just sit there and are static, it looks quite boring. Frankly, all of it is possible, but the amount of time and effort to produce one single item with a custom model, texture, and the code to get it into the game generally just isn't worth it.

 

So I think it's great to ask these sort of questions from time to time. Find out what real people who have played the game think. See how they feel. But when you look at that Steam Chart it's pretty evident that while there may have been some dips during valheim, ark stuff, V Rising, Palworld, etc. we're never going to have a mass renaissance of Wurm Unlimited. I think as a server owner now, you make a server with the best of intentions, moderate it appropriately, enjoy the time you have with it while it is popular, continue to support it until there's no one left or until you can no longer afford to run it, and then move on. And of course, always come back when the nostalgia wave hits you. It happens to us all I imagine. Maybe some of us don't act on it anymore, but I think the majority of WO or WU players will look back on their experience as a mixed bag of shenanigans, maybe postively, maybe negatively, but fun nonetheless.

Very grateful for the detailed answer!
I understand that today's online players are limited.
It is really very sad that new players essentially do not have convenient tools to understand what this or that server is about.
It’s also a pity that players cannot know for sure whether a particular server is playable. But here we can only shrug our shoulders; the WU platform will not change.
I won’t talk about the nightmares that every server owner dreams about  Im lucky to meet @Arathokhe helps to bring my dreams in to the game. 
I also understand that most probably any server in WU/WO will die with time, as competitors are growing way faster. So I think its impossible to promise to the players that their story will be kept forever, that is pity. But what we still can offer, to provide some short runs of fun. 
It would be out of MMO direction, more like round games. Like Conter Strike, Dota, there you dont have any story that game keeps but your own experience. The more I playing WU/WO - more I think that this option would work better for this game then MMO Sandbox long story 

[Gofs 280]

43 minutes ago, Finnn said:

What I think wurm (O & U) needs is content.. not server tweaks.. we've seen zip-zap left and right settings and playing around values... how about actually new stuff.. besides.. do you see this tree - ha - it's gone, NO TREE.. ok.. cool... but.. could there be a .. fine not a dragon... let there be something NEW, nobody is going to be amazed by easier or harder access to resources... what about access to NEW RESOURCES.. new stuff unseen and unexplored?

 

That exactly what I do at my server, New items, like Capes that providing you bonuse to body str, to channeling, to masonry; rings, with stats, and other items like weapon artifacts. 
They have unique design, and effects.
And to create them you need to use their parts + some unique resourses, that you can create. For example Skull Powder, or Common Magic Liquid. 

But my server has PvP setting on, so instead of seeking for glimmeradamantinableseryll, that would be super mega top metal, I adding value to simple iron, by making it rare, so players can not only look to find it, but also use Trade zone + Merchants to sell it. (P.S. Id love to make some kind of glimmeradamantinableseryll but for now I dont have enough skill) 
 

38 minutes ago, Finnn said:

wurm's too chill of a game to have dynamic or w/e alert, raid, etc... pvE is resident sleeper and that's totally fine... but the world could use a system to access excitement moments... something like rifts but with thought beyond.. "you'll surely miss 99% of them and that's ""OK""", no, it's not... it's a game... if there's something to do.. it should be possible to join the rare events.. like any other game.. people want to get done with school/homework/uni-college/work/.. log-in and maybe solo or team-up for something.. challenge or casual gameplay.. but eventually just the casual will likely get boring;

 

even wu could use some sort of class expansion.. and raiding system, and by raiding I still mean different portals to other worlds.. temp worlds.. with something to pillage or same world.. but with low-tier world impact... like.. nodes/enemies which wont mess with the environment more than few lights or visuals which clean up once even expires or gets completed by the player/s, etc....

 

as to wurm pvp... probably have a saving... but I can't say what drives people in/out of it and what wo/wu needs to give any of it some life

Yes I like idea of dungeons alot, that would be nice to have, but roaming uniques is also, cool, would be nice if they would be super large and not very fast, so they move to some Village, that became their target would not happen immediately, but would take a real day or so. 

[Spolmit 627]

I played WU from 2016 to 2021 as well as continuing to play WO.

 

The server I was on was Mystic Highlands and was light rp and 1x 1x server. If I am honest I enjoyed playing the server so much that I was playing WO less and less simply to keep my deeds 'going'. There were many community events, uniques, auctions and extras such as dungeons and other challenges like a maze. At one time, our server was easily matching others in terms of popularity and had a loyal player base.

.

Our server owner was excellent and for all of the time put hours and hours into maintaining, cajoling people to attend events and improving the server. Unfortunately the server was closed down in 2021 and this is the reason why I have not played WU since.

 

I love playing Wurm but for me, the strength of WO is the fact that the servers- and therefore all the time and efforts put into the game- are more or less guaranteed to remain. I do not blame the server owner but after putting more than 3000 hours into the server only for it to go 'poof' this is the prime reason why I am unlikely to go back to WU.

 

I appreciate that many people love the different challenges and speeds available in WU, however, I think one possible reason why WU appears to be losing players is the fact that a significant number of players are like me and like to keep their little place in cyber-space as permanent as possible. These may be the type of players that are causing numbers to fall?

 

I hope my comments and reasons help you in your quest.

[Ricowan 199]

Notch had it right when he left Rolf/WO to make Minecraft instead.  WO (and by extension WU) just plain isn't fun for the vast majority of gamers.

I have personally introduced WO and WU to eleven friends.  Some of them are big MMORPG players (WoW, FF, etc.), some are more into sandbox and single player games (Minecraft, Vintage Story, No Man's Sky, Elder Scrolls, etc.), some like them all.  NONE of them liked WO/WU.  None of them wanted to stare at a rock wall for minutes at a time before the tile broke.  None of them wanted to work on a skill for MONTHS before they could produce something worthwhile.  None of them thought the combat was at all fun, and PvP was a joke.

 

I enjoy playing the game, it's casual and calming for me.  When WU came out, I never looked at WO again, because I could increase the action timers a lot, and the skill gain a bit.  Add mods, write mods, etc.  None of these tweaks were enough to get any of my friends to try WU again.

 

For PvP...  well, my opinion is that open world PvP cannot be done correctly in any MMO game.  Full stop.  Wurm's PvP is almost entirely PvE except the "E" is player owned.  Nobody can defend their deed when they're offline.  Nobody wants a fair fight.  Nobody wants to share.

[Gofs 280]

13 hours ago, Spolmit said:

I played WU from 2016 to 2021 as well as continuing to play WO.

 

The server I was on was Mystic Highlands and was light rp and 1x 1x server. If I am honest I enjoyed playing the server so much that I was playing WO less and less simply to keep my deeds 'going'. There were many community events, uniques, auctions and extras such as dungeons and other challenges like a maze. At one time, our server was easily matching others in terms of popularity and had a loyal player base.

.

Our server owner was excellent and for all of the time put hours and hours into maintaining, cajoling people to attend events and improving the server. Unfortunately the server was closed down in 2021 and this is the reason why I have not played WU since.

 

I love playing Wurm but for me, the strength of WO is the fact that the servers- and therefore all the time and efforts put into the game- are more or less guaranteed to remain. I do not blame the server owner but after putting more than 3000 hours into the server only for it to go 'poof' this is the prime reason why I am unlikely to go back to WU.

 

I appreciate that many people love the different challenges and speeds available in WU, however, I think one possible reason why WU appears to be losing players is the fact that a significant number of players are like me and like to keep their little place in cyber-space as permanent as possible. These may be the type of players that are causing numbers to fall?

 

I hope my comments and reasons help you in your quest.

Yeah, I see what you mean, like you always can get back to your WO toon, in the end, even if your deed will decay after you will stop pay for it, you will always able to get back there, and start laying on that toon that you spend time on, with all memories that you have... Thats true, WU is very depended on online of players, and I doubt that its alot of server owners who will keep the server running with no regular online, or they can stop by personal reasons that would also have value. But the fact that the time that you invested can be gone is really something that can push players back off.

Thank you for your answer!
 

11 hours ago, Ricowan said:

Notch had it right when he left Rolf/WO to make Minecraft instead.  WO (and by extension WU) just plain isn't fun for the vast majority of gamers.

I have personally introduced WO and WU to eleven friends.  Some of them are big MMORPG players (WoW, FF, etc.), some are more into sandbox and single player games (Minecraft, Vintage Story, No Man's Sky, Elder Scrolls, etc.), some like them all.  NONE of them liked WO/WU.  None of them wanted to stare at a rock wall for minutes at a time before the tile broke.  None of them wanted to work on a skill for MONTHS before they could produce something worthwhile.  None of them thought the combat was at all fun, and PvP was a joke.

 

I enjoy playing the game, it's casual and calming for me.  When WU came out, I never looked at WO again, because I could increase the action timers a lot, and the skill gain a bit.  Add mods, write mods, etc.  None of these tweaks were enough to get any of my friends to try WU again.

 

For PvP...  well, my opinion is that open world PvP cannot be done correctly in any MMO game.  Full stop.  Wurm's PvP is almost entirely PvE except the "E" is player owned.  Nobody can defend their deed when they're offline.  Nobody wants a fair fight.  Nobody wants to share.

Had same problem, with friends who I did brought in to the game. Action timer in WO, skill gain, everything is super uncasual, in a world where 99% of games that is coming in to our view are way more casual. There no real reason to have super slow action timer in game but to make players invest their time in to it, and this days it makes people feel it, and skip such offer on the very beginning. And even after in WU you can change it, there is too big part of Wurm that built on RNG, its hard to understand how can you be the fighter with 99 fight skill and keep missing, you may have 99 channeling and still get 0 power casts, or shatter items, you may have 99 weapon smith and have 98% to create some item and still fail, losing valuable piece of metal. 
This RNG settings prevent people from calculating their chances of achieving the goal, and can reduce wish to invest time in it. 
But atm I started with spells, already made few, damage of it depends string on your skills avoiding RNG, I hope in future bring more of this settings.
Atm game more like DnD, where you tossing the cubes and always can get back luck. 

But it is very interesting that you telling non of MMO, cannot done PvP in open world correctly. Will PM you if you dont mind.  

[Nyrhlashir 13]

Well i am not completely abandon WU, i do lose interest playing WO though. Cause the world of WO is corrupted and ruin. For me i like to settle a new world that hardly anyone in it, like living in nature, rather than destroying it. Sorry that how i am in the heart. For WO i have seen so many corrupted souls and feel like they dont care and that is where i find peace on WU, depending on the server i choose.

 

That is true, most players like empty worlds and start from the beginning and then one day, they will start losing interest hanging on. For both good and corrupted souls.

 

Wife and I like to hang out in ESO sometimes, cause it got some actions in it and it is quite fun to play time to time. I do love the DnD, been along time since i got into PnP DnD, just that not very many games in these days are making them. So i just go with the flow and enjoy life in wurm

Edited March 26 by Nyrhlashir

[TheTrickster 2,291]

The multitude of WU servers works against all of them.  It means that population on any given server at any given time is low.  I played on two of the most popular servers and apart from once seeing a cart pass me at a crossroads, I did not see another player or even signs of recent activity on either of them.

 

People think they want challenge, so when they are well established on a server they lose interest and leave.  Conversely, they only THINK they want challenge and when a server provides that they get frustrated and leave.  As to new content, despite people thinking that is what they want, when it is provided they say it is all to much to keep track of and they leave.

 

Essentially WU's nature has conditioned its players to treat servers like a buffet, try a bit and move on.  Players then are not really playing WU so much as forever sampling it, which eventually becomes boring so they stop. 

 

This is my theory, based on being on easy servers that were almost empty and being on challenging servers that people complained about the challenges until they overcame them and then left, leaving them almost empty.  

 

I am not particularly active right now, but I love the server I am on and I have no intention of quitting.  

 

 

 

[Raix 100]

Around WU launch, I convinced two of my friends who I regularly play other games with to try out Wurm. While one of my friends is a DND enjoyer and appreciated the text-heavy UI and features, the other wasn't able to stand it. They both ended up quitting within a week, with the former believing it was too much of a grind (on a 2x+ server). This was before a lot of QOL mods had been created. Those sorts of mods may have helped with my first friend, but there was no hope of keeping my second friend entertained. I chalked it up to Wurm simply not being for everyone, just as Gofs' post outlines.

I personally stopped playing WU for a number reasons, many of which have already been mentioned:

• The option of WO and it being the best bet at securing my progress. Sklotopolis has been around pretty much since the beginning, but if I had to make a bet, WO will last longer. 
• It stopped receiving updates.
• PVP is scarce. I'm a pvper! And it felt empty before ESP and other hacks were popular.
• The "wow"-factor is reduced for me on the most popular servers. Coming across huge deeds on WO humbles me. Not in WU, because of multipliers. Furthermore, I've never been wow'ed by huge GM-spawned starter areas.
• I have an established account on WO. I don't want to play catch-up and new servers aren't appealing because it amplifies my concern of bullet point #1.

 

Edited March 27 by Raix

[atazs 965]

1. Lack of players. 

 

To me, Wurm is and will always be about the community and other people. My fondest memories are of interacting with others, taking part in "invasions" group projects, server projects, slayings and anything that brought the community and others together. To me, building stuff on my own with nobody to talk to, engage or meet, is the most unappealing thing ever and i consider it a complete and utter waste of my time. It's part of the reason why i also don't play WO these days. Another thing is how servers fake their numbers, whether deliberately or not, i don't know. I've personally begged the devs both in game and on discord back in the day for a long time to fix this but they didn't. It's extremely off putting and should not have been a thing.

 

2. Lack of updates.

 

Enough said here. I feel like if they at least updated it on par with WO, we'd see a massive influx of both new and returning players. The fact that they completely abandoned it meant that most people simply just left and most server owners simply quit or dissapeared. While some of you might argue "what updates? what new features?" there's been more than just new content to WO that simply does not exist in WU and never will, not even with mods. Then let's not even talk about the outdated client and the performance issues that were long fixed for WO.

 

3. The lies over the years and the audacity of Rolf and the (then) developers when it came to treating WU 

 

As someone who followed the development of WU and clearly remember everything that was promised and then NEVER fulfilled it's shameful. I clearly remember how it took them months to fix a crash when it came to GPU drivers and people were flatly told to just "roll them back": I remember the lies about modding, and much, much more. In truth, WU was a rushed out, poorly thought out cash grab that failed massively. Partly due to the humble bundle, but also because they had no clear goals moving forward or any ideas on what the future long term consequences of releasing a one time buy version of an already low populated, sparsely updated MMO ran by volunteers (for sometimes as cheap as 2 dollars) would be. It was obvious that it wasn't going to bring in any sort of money that they thought it would thanks to poor management. They should have done a Rust like system where every private server is hosted through Code Club and they get a % of the money. This would have guaranteed a steady monthly income. 

So yes i am still bitter about this. The way they then treated people like Bdew and others who really wanted WU to shine, were also disgusting in my opinion. 

 

 

Servers shutting down and losing all my work are also a thing (i've experienced in a few times over the years during my 2k hours in WU) but personally i don't mind that as much, if there were actual updates and players to make it worthwhile to start again on other servers. But as it stands, i have no desire to waste my time playing on a server that has at best 3 people logged in daily on a 2-4k map on any given server regardless if it's 100x 100x or 1x 1x and unfortunately those players will never come unless the game gets some sort of an update or revival. 

 

Edited March 27 by atazs

[TheTrickster 2,291]

8 hours ago, atazs said:

1. Lack of players. 

 

To me, Wurm is and will always be about the community and other people. My fondest memories are of interacting with others, taking part in "invasions" group projects, server projects, slayings and anything that brought the community and others together. To me, building stuff on my own with nobody to talk to, engage or meet, is the most unappealing thing ever and i consider it a complete and utter waste of my time. It's part of the reason why i also don't play WO these days. Another thing is how servers fake their numbers, whether deliberately or not, i don't know. I've personally begged the devs both in game and on discord back in the day for a long time to fix this but they didn't. It's extremely off putting and should not have been a thing.

 

I totally get this, but the flipside is that when people stay away due to "lack of players" then they are helping to create the lack of players.  In the wise words of another "What you are doing is the opposite of helping."  That is not meant as any kind of rebuke, just observing that the phenomenon is self-perpetuating.   You could get 10 people log into the starter spawn location at the same time and they would consider the server nicely busy.  Or they could log in at different times over a few days, never interacting but each poking about for a few minutes and leaving the "dead server".    It is a vexing issue - the WU server I call home has an amazing map, a hugely wide variety of environments and locations, a bunch of unique content and game play, established starter town infrastructure and a small community that cares, but a lot of it feels wasted because players won't stick around long enough to interact with each other and grow the population.

 

On this WU server players tend to be active in chat but generally each working on their own stuff, with some exceptions.  The thing is, this is exactly the same as my experience on WO, only on WO it is even quieter.  

 

8 hours ago, atazs said:

2. Lack of updates.

 

This is probably unfixable under the current paradigm, as the WU and WO have well and truly forked.  If somebody were to develop a FOSS game of similar style and function but updated , I expect that there could well be a WU exodus.