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Rolf

Creature deed protection

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With all due respect, but keeping an animal alive for that long in and out of pvp (Ive done it) isn't exactly easy. And if you can keep an animal alive for that long you should be entitled to use it as you please.

I don't think anyone is saying that lifespans be short, just that they end.

However I also think we need to see changes that take into account the animals that stuck on the sides of mountains.

Definitely. Different issue though.

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With all due respect, but keeping an animal alive for that long in and out of pvp (Ive done it) isn't exactly easy. And if you can keep an animal alive for that long you should be entitled to use it as you please.

I don't think anyone is saying that lifespans be short, just that they end.

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As I stated earlier, and this comes from a player that played longer then anyone of you in this thread.

I NEVER EVER seen so many animals on Wild as I have the last 6 months. I can go out and kill 100 animals in 1 hour.

BUT, I can understand there need to be a change on freedom. People hoarding 100 of animals in pens and no one is allowed to break in and kill. But alas we dont have this problem on wild :)

But, we need to understand one basic fact here, Freedom ISNT Wild. With that in mind I dont think there need to be a further discussion that involves Wild. Keep the change to Freedom.

/Edit: Dont compare 2 completely different servers to each other. Freedom is freedom and Wild is Wild, leave it at that. Changes that Freedom people want shouldnt apply to Wild server as ITS two completely different servers and play-styles.

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I would love to hear some of the other things that could be put into place to perhaps fix the problems that we have.  I do not have an issue with horses having a finite lifespan.  However, right now they reach venerable in a very short timeframe.  So I think the length of time it takes to reach that stage should be lengthened.  Or perhaps as Spellcast mentioned an additional stage that shows they are about to die.  I think with this change that horses should be allowed to breed once they grow out of the foal stage.  We will be taking even bigger chances on getting a good horse from them as it is now.  There should be a grace period in order to have the horses give birth so that the breeders will be able to at least get one birth out of the ven horses before they die.

For those saying just kill em all off it's not a big deal.  If you had spent the time that most breeders have spent getting their stock to the point they have, you would not feel that way.  Look at your highest most time consuming skills and wave bye to them.  See what that feels like to you then come back and make a comment.  I don't care how many resets you have gone through.  If you are asking others to be reset you should be prepared to go through a reset yourself and not of your few horses/cows whatever but of your skills.

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i just want to keep my one horse forever and ever, thats all i use and will forever use.

save my fastdance!!!  :'(

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i just want to keep my one horse forever and ever, thats all i use and will forever use.

save my fastdance!!!  :'(

I had a connection with my first horse, Runpot. In fact, upon his death, I gift-wrapped his butchered parts and keep them in an urn (sm chest) in my house.

Long story short, after losing my first one, I got over it.... the whole, "he will live forever and ever and be my bad . sidekick" thing.

PS - if any Freedomer reading this has a "Runpot", I will gladly purchase said horse from you. Contact me. lol

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Just be careful, Rolf. I see some of the people advocating for shorter horse lifespans are ranchers who are in the business of breeding for sale. Myself, I would like a scale for horse aging (I freely admit that I am not affected by other non-aggros lifespans) that is more reflective of their real world lifespan.

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The problem on Freedom seems to be that the changes have now worked us into an impossible position.  Folk are holding onto their venerable animals because they can't get replacements.  But since they are holding onto the venerable animals, no new animals can be born.  I too am in this exact situation - I had old (mostly venerable) horses and "suddenly" the animal change came into effect.

We should not be blaming players for holding onto horses - there is currently no way to replace them.  Players had become accustomed to having old animals with good traits, and kept them - for good reason.  Animals with good traits are very hard to find, and it takes alot of work or silver to acquire them.  Changes were made that caused them to die, not be able to breed, and not give birth.  I got caught by the change and had one of my horses die while pulling my cart.  I don't dare give up my other animals - there is no way to replace them.

But enough history.  How do we solve this problem?  IMO, the new rules seem fine, if originally implemented that way.  It makes sense that venerable animals die, even on deed.  The problem is we can't "suddenly" make this change - players have had no chance to prepare (the last few weeks of the "broken" animal situation do not count).  My proposal would be:

1) All venerable animals (just horses?  just with traits?) would have their age decreased to two weeks from the end of the next lower category (i.e. "old" for two weeks).  This gives "two weeks notice" of the changes, and gives owners a chance to breed these animals before they become venerable.

2) The animal cap be temporarily suspended until the above animals start dying (3-4 weeks?).  This would allow animals to give birth so replacement animals can be obtained.  Yes, I'm sure the hoarders will abuse this opportunity, but at least it gives other players a chance to replace their animals, and start looking for ways to obtain new ones.

3) Immediately effect the new changes.  As I understand them:  Venerable animals die a week or two after becoming venerable, even on deed; Young and venerable animals cannot breed.

However, I don't think venerable animals should suddenly "die" while being ridden, hitched, or led.  I think the animal should become "sick" for a day or so before it dies which prevents riding and hitching, and parallels real-life.  It seems that if they acquire the existing trait "has some illness" when they become "sick", this provides an easy game mechanic to implement this.  Although the animal may still die while being led, at least you have some warning that it will soon die.

Addressing the hoarding problem, I believe, is a separate issue/topic, and there are other things that can be done to address that.  However, at least the above gets Freedom back to "functional" where now we have a non-functional system.

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Btw, if the intended result of killing venerable creatures on and off deed is so we can breed non-aggro's again on Freedom: it will have the opposite effect.

Say a player who now only has to keep 2 venerable horses with good traits to be able to ride around and pull a large cart with. When you make it that venerable animals die, that same player needs to keep at least 4 horses (1 male and 1 female at pre-venerable age and 1 male and 1 female foal as replacement). Throw in the long waiting time for foals to reach breeding age and the high probability that you get foals with bad traits even when the the 2 parents are superhorses, and you have a situation that we now are forced to keep more animals just to be able to do the same thing.

So as a stand-alone solution it will only anger the people who have invested time and sometimes money to get a superhorse, who unfortunately is now venerable.

I can understand if you say it's unnatural that animals live forever, but please make offspring of perfectly good traited horses also have the good traits.

PS. Rolf, if you envision only 10 animals or less per premium player on a server: make it a gamemechanic. That will end the discussions on who is a hoarder (on Freedom atm you are apparently a hoarder if you have more then 10 animals). Make it so each premium player can only keep that amount of animals.

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Mr. B let the wilders have what they want. When they inevitably come running saying "Oh no we have a breeding/population issue!" just:

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Btw, if the intended result of killing venerable creatures on and off deed is so we can breed non-aggro's again on Freedom: it will have the opposite effect.

Say a player who now only has to keep 2 venerable horses with good traits to be able to ride around and pull a large cart with. When you make it that venerable animals die, that same player needs to keep at least 4 horses (1 male and 1 female at pre-venerable age and 1 male and 1 female foal as replacement). Throw in the long waiting time for foals to reach breeding age and the high probability that you get foals with bad traits even when the the 2 parents are superhorses, and you have a situation that we now are forced to keep more animals just to be able to do the same thing.

So as a stand-alone solution it will only anger the people who have invested time and sometimes money to get a superhorse, who unfortunately is now venerable.

I can understand if you say it's unnatural that animals live forever, but please make offspring of perfectly good traited horses also have the good traits.

PS. Rolf, if you envision only 10 animals or less per premium player on a server: make it a gamemechanic. That will end the discussions on who is a hoarder (on Freedom atm you are apparently a hoarder if you have more then 10 animals). Make it so each premium player can only keep that amount of animals.

I'm pretty much on the same wavelength as you, Mirabelle. The bolded part I have brought to Mr.B's attention, as well, in my post. He noted it would need looking in to.

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Mrbloodworth, I hate to be rude but once again you are getting involved in things you have no idea about. You do not actively play on wild and you push these ideas as they are ideas that seem appealing to you and only you.

How many times must wild players post that this change is not needed on wild? We have a very good flow of animals as people hunt regularly in order to compete in pvp and raise skills. Therefore there isn't the issue of one person having 200 venerable horses on a deed like there is on Freedom. As such these changes are not needed on Wild. Putting them in on wild will only serve as a kick in the teeth to the current players on it and even more so since the idea was pushed by a person who has no experience on wild.

You may have played other games which you quite oftenly state that have superior methods and ways to wurm however thats that game and this is this game. This game is played by the people who do so because there is something they enjoy about it. If you change it then it'll only make them see no reason to keep buying premium and stick with wurm.

To Rolf, I hope these changes will only appear on Freedom. If they are needed there then let them be put in but wild do not want nor need these changes. Adding them will only be an insult to player feedback and the very reason you made this thread.

Quoted for truth.

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Domestic Animals breed more quickly than they will die, the rate at which a herd will grow is still quicker than the rate it will die off.  

Changing them to breeding less quickly than they die would of course be silly.

Therefore, in order to solve this problem there needs to be some other measure to regulate those being born and those dieing out other than old age.

To think this will end hoarders hoarding is madness.  Taken on its own, having venerable creatures die is not a logical solution to this problem.  The cap will still be reached and breeding will become unreliable again.  We may kill off unattended herds from folks who are not currently playing but the active hoarders will quickly eat up these slots and raise the population to the cap again.

If this change is implemented regardless of rational examination of its flaws then please at least consider the following:

Firstly, make good traits easier to pass on from parent to foal in a herd to limit the incentive to keep large herds.

Secondly, give those breeders who have invested months and years of work a chance to keep their bloodlines before vens are culled.

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I would hope the dieing of old age rule would apply to both servers.  There is no actual logical (non-selfish) reason why it wouldn't.

I can't believe there are so many people would prefer to stagnate in a flawed game design.

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There is no issue on wild and never has been. We have pvp as Madt mentioned and people clear out animals constantly. Tyre has a lot of horses being breed and we clear them on a weekly basis on a strict litmus test of what traits do they have and if they don't have this or that trait they are killed for meat and hides.

The reason I would not include venerable deaths on wild is that we use only venerable horses for selective breeding in order to produce more horses for villagers to use in pvp with certain traits. They die a lot due to pvp and so we don't have the issues you all are having on freedom. I have said it several times before and will say it again that people on freedom horde animals no matter what traits they have and do not euthanize the ones that are not up to snuff because well they don't need the type of horses that we do for pvp.

The atmosphere is completely different when it come to hording animals. We breed out of necessity and not to just be doing it. I use every bit of what I butcher off the horses we do not keep but at any given time we have at most 20-30 horses for breeding purposes all at venerable for producing better off spring but we do kill off venerable ones if we breed a better horse and use it for our purposes.

As always the non-pvp servers have done the mass hording and now with breeding it is very easy to do. I would suggest making this a freedom only change but have mass population of animals die within a certain tile distance. If the player has more than 30 non-agro animals in a 50x50 tile area I would suggest having the surplus fall over dead from lack of resources. This is not required on wild as we never have and never will have these issues. We kill our critter population all the time with repeat hunts going on by just about everyone. I don't know a single person that doesn't go hunting at least once to twice a week.

I leave you with this because this is what you could find all the time on JKH before Rolf fixed it. This has always been and always will be a issue for the non-pvp servers.

wurm316.png

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Not to make this a wild vs freedom thing, but hey that seems to be the wild thing.  I don't think horses are any easier to breed good ones on freedom vs wild.  So I don't understand why anyone would say here here here let them have it they deserve it.  If you don't want to see something happen, help come up with alternatives.  Noone is begging for their horses to be demolished.  I doubt anyone is looking forward to it.  But we all know it is going to happen.  So why not try to come up with ways that we can lessen the blow.

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Well, were not trying to turn it into a freedom vs wild thing, but it simply is not an issue on wild, and it is on freedom.

It would be strange to "punish" wild players for something freedom players have aproblem with, like freedom players didnt get

"punished" with the rock terraforming change.

What I was personally thinking was.. Why not let horses not count toward the animal cap? Remove their AI. Turn them into items, like boats - mountable, but different traits affect speed. Like enchants and ql on items would. Horses barely move on their own anywasy, so you can remove that much.. Not sure how feeding, killing and breeding would work but Im sure there are ways.

Might be complicated, but its just an idea..

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Havent taken the time to read all of this thread so if Im duplicating anyone " sorry ".

Domestic type animals that are not groomed when they are needing it age a bit faster, regardless if on deed or off. So if you keep your animals groomed they will last a bit longer, as well as not get diseased or die prematurely.

Once they get to venerable they should be put out to pasture so to speak. Animals do not live forever, and this is the end of the line, but they can still be ridden or pull a cart till they expire.

I would also suggest that any venerable animal does not give off a pelt/hide or any usable items if butchered. This would replicate the fact that the body parts etc are beyond use at that age.

I do not believe any of this should be server specific, and we should count all domestic type animals collectively and not single out any one type.

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Killing off venerable creatures is not a fix on freedom.

The population will rapidly increase and be capped again

(except that some people will lose all their nice breeding horses cause they aged out)

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Oh goodie - the "not on Wild crowd" has managed to completely derail the thread already. Personally I agree with them - keep it a Freedom fix since only Freedom is broken. At least until an actual soultion has been found instead of grasping in the dark for whatever draconian quick fix has gotten more +1's.

So yeah, I'm probably going to quit over this. Breeding horses was one of the very few things that motivated me to keep logging in after you turned our server into a Tokyo subway car. It's an absolutely asinine situation.

I don't agree that deeds should provide endless protection. But as I have mentioned before SEVERAL TIMES responsible non-hoarding breeders had small herds of old animals instead of large herds of young animals. Out of my 10 high quality horses, 3 are usable and only one will be by the time breeding is actually possible. In real life terms, most of these animals are yearlings, not old animals so I'm tired of hearing bunk arguments about realism. Horses live longer than hamsters...but not in th new wurm. Give me a way to keep the benefits of the time and effort I put into my herd and you might keep me as a customer.

Many of these "fixes" have been utterly counter-productive.


  • [o]Raising the age requirement to breed?  Okay - you just created an extra population of useless animals in herds instead of every horse being useful. Now to have 4 breeders I need to have 3 or 4 young ones maturing. And didn't we already have foal and calf life stages?
    [o]Making them die of old age? Oh brilliant - yeah make it so people that would otherwise not be breeding need to so instead of 2 old horses to pull the cart they keep 4 or more.

I'm not saying that all animals should be immortal. We need drains like Mr.B said. Disease and starvation are jokes in their current implementation. Start there. Disease needs to be based on population density of an area greater than one tile and it needs to be DEADLY not slightly inconvenient. Age culling needs to be the last of several drains, not the primary one.

Likewise we only really need domestic animals to die so that A - wild animals spawn, and B - we can breed new ones. A is a near continuous process but B isn't. Why not have the game cull old animals as needed instead of at an arbitrary age? Server wants to spawn 100 non-aggro animals? Cull the 100 oldest non-aggro animals on the server. Asidecay's horse gives birth? Cull the oldest horse on the server. Realism after game play. There is no reason why my horse (that is only middle aged at best in the 8:1 Wurm time scale) needs to die because somebody across the server thinks its "realistic" when its not at all.

An animal per player cap is also a vital...I repeat VITAL component of any long term fix if you are going to insist that we pack into one server like cattle along with anyone and everyone that want's to sign up for a free account and hoard deer in a legally protected free enclosure with a shack. As I have suggested elsewhere - this cap should be skill based - not "bigger deed/wallet" based and not "everybody gets 10 regardless of payment or effort". Failure to incorporate one is a deal breaker for me. I simply am tired of losing quality of game-play because I have to be a walking talking ad for your game.

I suggest using a system where a premium player gets a certain amount of points based on their Animal Husbandry skill level to designate animals as "being cared for" by that player. Animals that are "being cared for" experience lower levels of death by aging/starvation/disease as a function of the skill's level, while animals that are not "being cared for" experience much higher levels than they currently do.

A player would begin with the capacity to "care for" a few animals (say 1 or 2), would be able to "care for" around 10-15 5 or so(edit: too high) by the time they had 50 skill with diminishing returns after that. They can turn the status of the animal's care on or off by right-clicking the animal, and will be informed of how much capacity they have at that time. (eg "You will now care for Young Rolfebony. You can care for 0 more animals."). The "cared for" status would turn off on its own after a long period (week? month?") requiring it be reapplied to the animals.

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I agree with Spellcast's idea ..it makes a lot of sense. Venerable is, in human terms arund 60 or 70 y/o..people live longer than that. So a horse should live beyond the 'venerable ' age as well. Let it pass to the 'feeble ' age, where it is effectively 'put out to grass' as it were. Cannot be ridden or pull carts etc. If it is looked after properly [groomed, kept fed] then it'll last until , say 3 months after reaching that age. The balance will be met because I guarantee there will be whole herds that are NOT being groomed, therefore should die out as a result.

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I guess you can make breeding pop out perfect horses every time then there would be no need to keep very many.  If you don't want this then deal with them being able to die, simple enough. 

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Havent taken the time to read all of this thread so if Im duplicating anyone " sorry ".

Domestic type animals that are not groomed when they are needing it age a bit faster, regardless if on deed or off. So if you keep your animals groomed they will last a bit longer, as well as not get diseased or die prematurely.

Already in effect as they now starve if not fed, perhaps can leave untended with enchanted grass but thats a different problem, I know for a fact 9 animals starved to death at an abandoned deed close to us.

Once they get to venerable they should be put out to pasture so to speak. Animals do not live forever, and this is the end of the line, but they can still be ridden or pull a cart till they expire.

I would also suggest that any venerable animal does not give off a pelt/hide or any usable items if butchered. This would replicate the fact that the body parts etc are beyond use at that age.

Venerable animals are kept to produce new offspring with desired stats or one or 2 favorite animals for the more sentimental types, the lack of hides and products will not entice people to kill them sooner, if that's your intention with this logic, using realism in this respect is semi pointless as it seems more a smoke screen to rid the server of the current glut of venerable animals to pray it will enable your last failed attempts to fix the problem take hold.

I do not believe any of this should be server specific, and we should count all domestic type animals collectively and not single out any one type.

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Grooming 10-20 horses is a chore. We have way to many chores in the game as it is. I think simple solutions are best than over complicating things as everything seems like a chore already.

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Have your solution, as it is tied to Freedom mostly due to population:

1) Venerable creatures should die after a time, period, though not in a shorter time than it takes to breed one, perhaps three times as long. The change should hit wild as well as it makes sense.

2) Now, to fix it, make breeding premium only.

Solved.

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