Perspective From The New: Grinding For Grind's Sake

[Iulianx 90]

You see the skill decay problem from a wrong perspective, losing skill constantly was a beautiful mechanic that prevented people form considering it an investition.

It is true what some will say now in defense to their work that skill decay meant more grinding.

But would you grind something up to a point knowing that you might lose that skill in the same way if you knew its there to stay?

What I mean is that if skills are more volatile you focus more on what you can do with them than the actual number. Let's face it Skill decay wasn't actually that goo at preventing JOATS but it altered the mentality in a good way. sorry I'm not that good with words :-S

[ReaverKane 363]

Arch, it's pointless. Just accept it. In wurm you face a unique very refined game which doesn't have an equal. There are other Sandbox games out there, but many with only PvP or Permadeath or no terraforming. Wurm is quite ok in it's own way, but it's not the best.

But as well as you got these points you also got a stubborn community and slow developement. A community who accepts that when you get stuck somewhere with money (which has Real World value) is something not to bother about. Because we all got too much money and can't spend enough. A community that says, "Why are you against lamps on deeds which need oil and guards to turn them on ? In real life you also need to turn on your lights by yourself." But at the same moment nobody says anything about wounds not healing while you sleep. Because we all know when you sleep your body totally stops and freezes.

A developement which lets you do do two hundred clicks, open two hundred context menus and find the entry "small nails" and also click that 200 times to create an items that you need as much in this game as you need air to breath. Developement which still lets you drop items back and forth between two containers and your inventory to manage storage or transportation so you need about 2 hours to load a ship. Two hours of your lifetime that you won't get back at all.

Just an example of how "cool" that grinding is: our neighbour deed had a blacksmith who was really engaged in his job. He spent 30 days of ingame time to get to level 90+, then got fed up with the game only being about grinding no matter what you do and left forever. GJ ! Good and potential long term customer gone. But that's something people don't see.

I read somewhere that Notch was asked what would happen to wurm when he left, and it's said the answer was "Wurm is going nowhere." And i'm still not sure how to interpret that.

There's so many things that would make the game more worthwhile and at the same time lack of an alternative on the game market. So we're just stuck here. You may hope for some nice features and that they come fast, but that's about it.

I guess maybe you need to play more real life... Some of us play it too often and need an escape from that, which is wurm, probably...

Well 90+ in 30 days, that would burnout anyone...

Its just lovely to see these kinds of posts... If you don't like it, don't play it, don't equate games to real life, because they aren't real life. There's hundreds of games out there, people who stick to wurm, find that wurm caters to their needs, and unlike what you say wurm is developing pretty fast, specially in the last years, and the community is keen to keep it on the right track. If you find that wurm needs to change at its core to cater to your needs, then this might be a very explicit sign that you should maybe find a game more to your suiting.

I play "regular" mmos paralel to Wurm, i've been recruiting guildmates to play here, and even the most hardcore grind-machines on MMOs have stopped playing Wurm after a month or so, at most.

Wurm requires people who enjoy creating, who enjoy making up stuff and then seeing them happen, who pace themselves. There's also some who play for the e-peen, and grind for it. Others reached levels where they simply need to grind.

Also FIY, most of those guys that go for 1000 pans or more a day are already at REALLY high lvls... I've worked as a pan filler for some (highly lucrative if you do it right) and they were getting ridiculously low gains (like 0.0000001) even at 1-2k pans a day.

Some would stop, but they devoted time and resources (well mostly my time, and their resources) to get there.

Me, my priest, 100-400 pans a day, plus around 600 tiles of farming (not everyday, not even every week), with the odd-fishing, forestry and meditation in the middle. And its getting there, eventually.

Great thing about Wurm, is that you really can play to your own style. But alas, there's always styles that simply can't be played on Wurm.

[KunAlt 844]

Skills decays is just another way to say: you are now limited to a single ¨class¨, because if you want to have high blacksmith then you need to do only that and forgot about any other profesion, because the moment you do anything different you risk your hard earned blacksmith go away.

[Iulianx 90]

thats BS, skill decay never properly prevented JOATS. And what's wrong with being sofly restricted to a class you can change aytime and still be pretty good at wwhat you did before?, why do you think the class system is so widespread in the RPG gaming industry, for being a pretty horrible and unbalanced system I guess. /sarcasm

Edited January 31, 2013 by Iulianx

[Raybarg 441]

People that say they never grinded are kidding themselves, but they are also playing the game to have fun as opposite to some other people I know.

He said "grinding for the sake of grinding" btw. When imping items to 90+ in quality, the process is technically just alot of grind. But when the goal is to imp something to certain quality, its about production, not for the sake of just grinding. Theres very very very big difference between the two.

The guy who got 90BS in 30 days... I dont know what sort of maniac that person is, maybe he is one of these "hardcore grinders" ppl speak of... who only grind for the sake of grinding and burn out left and right. I would burn out in few hours if I just imp needles to get BS skill.

[KunAlt 844]

thats BS, skill decay never properly prevented JOATS. And what's wrong with being sofly restricted to a class you can change aytime and still be pretty good at wwhat you did before?, why do you think the class system is so widespread in the RPG gaming industry, for being a pretty horrible and unbalanced system I guess. /sarcasm

If i want to be in a classed game system I will be playing one of those RPG, i don´t like it, so i´m playing wurm.

Maybe you choose the wrong game? /sarcasm

[Cise 8]

The problem with Wurm in general is that it cannot under any circumstances support a giant community. Take half the trolls from other games and throw them into this one (assuming you could make them sit still long enough) and the GMs would be nuts in about 2 seconds. A game like Wurm is just too easy to troll people on and a massive community is not something the in game restrictions can support :/

[spellcast 983]

As a player who has been around for a while I can honestly say that wurm IS a very grindy game, if you choose to play it that way-

I think part of the problem is that with no pre-defined quests, players instinctively search for something, anything, to use as a measuring stick for the progress they are making, and the most immediate and obvious one is that list of skill numbers.

Personally, I have almost never done anything JUST to get my skill to increase. I have a dozen or more projects, large and small, going at any given time, and I work on whichever one catches my fancy that day. If none of them do, I either start a new one that does, or just stand by my forge, (because my meals are there and i DO like to eat) and chat in village, local, or the kingdom chats. As time has passed, my skills have gone up, and the tasks have gotten easier, but for the most part I find that the journey is more interesting than the destination.

[Ronnie 64]

The wurm freedom servers is pretty much a crafting game. If your not willing to grind to make what you want, buy it from others with coin. And if you dont like that then... really isnt much else left here for you. You can join a deed with other players to lessen the work load and work together on things. And the reason you are getting a lot of hate posts is because most of the players here play wurm because it takes you time and real effort to get things done and you really get that feeling of accomplishment once you have finished a long mind mumbing task.

If everyone and their grandmother could make 90ql items they wouldnt have any value at all.

And the game has been made a lot easier over the last 5months.

Scraps on failing have been removed, skill gains have been increased.

So really any more changing in such areas would in my opinion kill wurms "long term" player base

And everyone knows every game needs long term as well as short term players to survive.

Edited January 31, 2013 by Ronnie

[Sarcaticous 338]

Personally, I have almost never done anything JUST to get my skill to increase. I have a dozen or more projects, large and small, going at any given time, and I work on whichever one catches my fancy that day. If none of them do, I either start a new one that does, or just stand by my forge, (because my meals are there and i DO like to eat) and chat in village, local, or the kingdom chats. As time has passed, my skills have gone up, and the tasks have gotten easier, but for the most part I find that the journey is more interesting than the destination.

This ^

is how me and my friends play WURM. It's entertaining. It's not mandatory you play the game in any particular fashion. You play it like you want. It's okay just the way it is. No need to make wholesale changes in the way people can play. If someone is quitting because they don't like grinding then they must not know enough about WURM or have not tried to learn the game. You don't have to grind. Grinding is optional.

We have to make enough bricks and dig enough clay for two more guard towers. We have to make probably 5k bricks, dig clay and make mortar to stick the whole mess together into a castle. We will make pottery bricks for the floors. More digging. It won't be done all at once because people will stop and do other things.This is not grinding but skill levels will most certainly increase.

[Theodis 339]

Its not the only way to skill up. Like I always point out, being productive is a way to get skills as byproduct. Its your subjective way of seeing it as grinding for the sake of grinding. But when you make items for use or sales, youre producing, not grinding for grinding sake.

Increasing productivity is a great way to reduce skill gain. While doing some major terraforming with a high quality shovel with a wind of ages enchant I only got a few hundredths of a point of skill gain over 8-12 hour periods of time. Switching to a 1QL shovel I got a point of digging every 4 hours though with much longer timers. The difference is massive. Why do it then? Well when you have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dig actions the seconds of saved time on average per dig action really adds up. Without good skills you lose out on a lot of productivity due to larger timers and basic tasks become much more of a grind.

[GreenHero 72]

Find something to do.

Don't grind unless you want to.

Enough said.

[Vroomfondel 1,128]

Been reading this thread and I would have to say your friend made the big mistake of doing a hard grind on a single skill and not doing much of anything else, which would burn anyone out on this game. This game is all about the crafting, and it works best for you if you do everything at once, even if you will do it poorly at first. It is much more rewarding to spend a month building your compound and getting set up than it is to sit there staring at a forge all day, every day just watching the numbers go up. Yes, there are times you will find you need to grind a skill up some, so you can do other things. But mindlessly pushing a single skill at a time is not fun, and not the way you should play this game.

The need to grind is there for a purpose. It keeps many people interested simply because you don't get instant gratification by making a great tool or weapon in a short time, but you can make a useable one for now till you get better or can afford to buy a great one. That is also what drives the markets on those items and gives them value. How would you expect anyone to be able to sell to others, if anyone could master every skill quickly?

[Archaegeo 136]

I'm all for results of my labors, that's what makes the terraforming and building great. But needing to pave the world before I can put down a stone floor seems silly, and yeah, the priest grinding is nuts.

And as someone else,said though, we probably couldn't handle a larger community due to grief era and rules that just be enforced by gms vice hard code.

[Theodis 339]

Honestly if you find the grind too hard you can go to epic. Its a joke how fast skills can be raised there... If even that is too slow for you then maybe wurm isnt for you

Over the past year I've spent more time playing than I would have working if I had a full time job. The last 5-6 months of which has been invested in my village which is still a pretty skeletal framework and I'll spend the next few years working on before it's really finished. I know skills aren't super important but without them it'd be even slower than it currently is for me to keep developing. And without higher quality walls you end up spending a bunch of extra time in maintenance. When I hear comments like this I can't even imagine how painful freedom is particularly for those with an actual life to deal with. I enjoy the game and there isn't really anything else quite like it, but I can certainly understand where some people are coming from who find it too much of a time investment for even basic things. I haven't been able to get a friend in to play with me because if you only have a half an hour to an hour to spare here and there, there just isn't anything really enjoyable you can do in that time. Heck most the time I use that or more just to get myself set up for what I'm actually going to be doing. Even building a simple wooden house like that with a new character would probably take weeks if not longer.

[Raybarg 441]

Increasing productivity is a great way to reduce skill gain. While doing some major terraforming with a high quality shovel with a wind of ages enchant I only got a few hundredths of a point of skill gain over 8-12 hour periods of time. Switching to a 1QL shovel I got a point of digging every 4 hours though with much longer timers. The difference is massive. Why do it then? Well when you have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dig actions the seconds of saved time on average per dig action really adds up. Without good skills you lose out on a lot of productivity due to larger timers and basic tasks become much more of a grind.

Now... "a major terraforming". As you call it major I must assume its not just digging (since then you would have said "a major digging job").

So, lets go on productivity. Its quite clear that its a bad choice to do your digging in a major terraforming project with a skill shovel because this hinders your productivity more than you gain skill in the process. So, you have high quality woa shovel to do the digging... then you go use the dirt for your flatraising needs, where you use that 1ql high coc shovel because this only increase your skill gained tremendously and does not hinder productivity at all (as I assume you have noticed that high QL woa shovel has same timers on flattening actions.)

The same point youre making about woa and hindering the skilling by the name of productivity, I might want to argue about this with a skill that actually does matter. My past experience is such that upon reaching 50 skill in blacksmithing I was also reaching the point that I was actually having some "loose" ingame money, which I spent to purchase tools for smithing. What did I choose? Everyone told me to choose Coc tools... but instead I went for coc+woa tools. Ever since I allways used high woa tools to do my PRODUCTIVITY tasks (because to me, that is of the utmost importance... skilling was just a byproduct). Now, some time later... maybe year has passed... and I never consider myself doing grind imping for the sake of getting skills and I have pretty much all crafting skills quite high (in my alliance its considered an achievement to get past me with atleast one skill).

I find your argument invalid as an argument to my previous comment.

[Raybarg 441]

Even building a simple wooden house like that with a new character would probably take weeks if not longer.

I'll make new toon, fresh out of the tutorial and go on about playing it 45mins a day (its good average for your 30min-1h) and make log of it. Lets see when the house is completed.

[Scribble 57]

To be honest, imagine what an awesome game we would've had if Notch and Rolf took the best of both their ideas and made them into one game. Instead we have Minecraft and Wurm Online, which are essentially similar games, yet with completely opposite design philosophies. If that makes any sense.

[Raybarg 441]

I'll make new toon, fresh out of the tutorial and go on about playing it 45mins a day (its good average for your 30min-1h) and make log of it. Lets see when the house is completed.

/>http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/74854-raynewbie-fresh-from-tutorial-to-build-a-house/

[Hordern 2,177]

As I said n the other thread as well, I am not saying every player wants it that way, I am saying we are losing players because they feel from their short experience that its the only way.

Well they're entitled to their own perception and opinions. It's just a pity those players don't see the game for the possibilities it provides outside grinding. It's not the game that needs to change, but the perceptions of the people who believe grinding is the only way.

[ReaverKane 363]

Well they're entitled to their own perception and opinions. It's just a pity those players don't see the game for the possibilities it provides outside grinding. It's not the game that needs to change, but the perceptions of the people who believe grinding is the only way.

This!

[Drpox 73]

If you behave like a dog chasing a squirrell, then this game will be fun and never feel like a grind. Yes I have one skill in the 90s alot in the 80s and 70s.

Keep getting distracted by new things and such that you do or dont want to do and it will just come naturally.

[Garis 210]

needing to pave the world before I can put down a stone floor seems silly.

I didn't "pave the world", but moved to the wilderness and built highways to connect my deed to my friends' deeds. No grinding involved. Now that those roads are in, we need more roads (not fewer). The project is growing geometrically, there are so many good roads to build and old roads to fix. New people need new roads. And yet people sit in their gardens at home, packing the dirt, thinking only of their skill gain.

There are dozens of articles about how following your passions is entrepreneurial suicide. Rather than grinding, find something that will be helpful and useful to other people, and do that instead.

[Thurgarn 9]

As a new player (just started in december) I don't really find the "grind" off-putting, and I also don't specifically grind skills. I do projects, and plan my projects based upon what my skills allow me to do. For instance, I've put off building a house until I have the masonry and access to clay to build a stone ground floor. Instead, I've been building low stone walls where I want them, and built a wooden boathouse for storage and boat-building. If I don't end up with enough masonry from building the stuff I want to build, I'll see what else could give me masonry skill and plan some more projects to do so.

I actually rather like the slow progression, I take the game at a more meandering pace and that is part of the feel of it that I enjoy.

[Archaegeo 136]

I am of the Squirrel family of players, so yes, I do not grind and am enjoying the game a lot

Again, this thread was started to discuss the need to grind to get to a high level in skills.

Grinding for grind's sake is never a good design philosophy