Meat eaters attack bisons

[Ayes 3,715]

but we are not out to make it unnecessarily punishing on you deeded territory.

Just enough to keep you on your toes and make for an exiting challenge.

 

Your statement here reminds me distinctly of when Rolf added the tunneling ability to certain cave dwelling aggro's in order to add some "spice" to the game. The end result was that they destroyed countless mine tile floors by digging them down into bizarre angles that even newbies or griefers could not accomplish. Some of this damage remains to this day in more remote Independence mines. This change in aggro ai was gradually toned down until it was completely removed due to other players continually pointing out its negative impact upon players being able to enjoy the game and retain the mines in the careful state that they had initially constructed them. In many cases it was left up to them to repair this damage as well.

 

I notice you also state "we are not out to make it unnecessarily punishing on you deeded territory". This implies to me that outside of deed tiles the developers believe that anything goes and unnecessary punishments may be employed. Most players spend at least some of their time outside of their protected (mostly, sort of) deed tiles. There are many paths to wander and lands to tend with care outside of ones deed tiles. Even ones surrounding perimeter can be beautified, which enhances the game appearance for all players. To open these areas up to punishing effects which disturb the delicate balance the game maintains is not the best policy, seems to me.

 

Then of course there are those new players and even long term premium players who enjoy the game to a great extent without deeds at all. Perhaps it is just a poor choice of phrasing on your part to imply that more punishing effects will be applied to them outside of the safety of deeded tiles. To populate these lands with aggressive mobs that will seek to make the lives of anyone who steps off of a deed tile a tip toe challenging experience wherein new ways are dreamed up to make it less likely that they or their treasured animals will be unlikely to survive the encounter, is not the best way to enhance their game experience, I would advise.

 

Why not make a new server as large as Independence where aggressive mobs will not be present upon it at all. Then those players who wish to have nothing to do with them or their so called challenging effects can live out their lives peacefully without their intrusion to disrupt their enjoyment of other pursuits. Leave these players free of these "punishments". Allow all those who wish to travel back and forth to this server to do so. I for one would leave my deed on Independence that I placed shortly after my arrival there, disbanding it and removing all houses that I have upon that server, thankfully never to return there again.

 

This non-aggro server however must have all the same game mechanics as the other PvE servers and not be "punished" in some subtle fashion with negative strings attached to it. Only aggressive mobs would be excluded from it. If this server were created you would at the least eliminate the objectments to aggressive mob changes such as these, since those players who want not part of them will have this as an alternative option. It seems quite odd to me that there is some looming fear overshadowing the creation of a server such as this when yet the other servers will still remain for the development team to create further aggro mob challenges for those so disposed to their impacts.

 

If this non-aggro server were created many like myself would have little concern about the aggro ai instituted upon the others; but perhaps this would disrupt the mass punishment effect that I had become so well acquainted with in my youth. In this respect I can comprehend the desire to inflict misery upon others collectively, although I would never condone this focus of a purpose to encourage a response of pressure upon those who would resist it. A bit more subtle that what happens within Wurm in this regard but the underlying effect is similar. So why not create a server free from these aggressive mob disruptions and observe the results. My guess is that it will become quite a popular alternative to this blanket aggro mob so called "challenging" game play. This popularity is then what I suppose might be what the subtle fear of it is all about.

 

Safe Travels

=Ayes=

[silentninja 14]

Seems like alot of people have alot of problems with real world situations being brought into a game. I stay up late with a gun at my house waiting for coyotes to come. Its more realistic don't play a sim if you dont like realism.

[Audrel 2,223]

Seems like alot of people have alot of problems with real world situations being brought into a game. I stay up late with a gun at my house waiting for coyotes to come. Its more realistic don't play a sim if you dont like realism.

 

Why yes, very true. My car also drives 2 tiles away from where it appears to be. :-P

[Tathar 48]

Hello everyone, I have read your feedback and brought it up with team. We are making further adjustments to the ai.

Mainly the supposed troll overdrive on bashing in on deeded houses, enclosures and agro on hitched animals.

We have yet to confirm the cases but we are currently looking at the mechanics to see what should be tweaked.

 

The aim is to create a more living environment where you will find more natural interaction between mobs.

Which I hardly believe that anyone wont find exiting. Well, there is always someone

This is supposed to be a Wild and exiting game, but we are not out to make it unnecessarily punishing on you deeded territory.

Just enough to keep you on your toes and make for an exiting challenge.

Thanks for looking into this.  My concerns extend to owned/hitched animals off-deed too, though.  If I'm traveling along a highway to get to a market, I really don't want to have to worry about my cart animals getting attacked by a spider looking for lunch.  Given how many spiders there are around here, it's an inevitability under current AI should I decide to venture out on my cart.  

 

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with just going back to the days when spiders and unicorns were friends.  Realistic AI isn't one of Wurm's strong points, and it doesn't have to be, especially when it's a feature that would largely go unnoticed and unappreciated by players.  Considering that prey animals don't currently outnumber predators, there isn't really any good way to make them fight.  You'll just have predictable outcomes and a lot more server resources used on things players won't see because the battles end too quickly.  Reverting the change now would provide ample time to try again with a more acceptable realistic AI, too.  

 

There were a few other good suggestions for tweaks though, such as rebalancing predators vs. prey so that prey outnumber predators and travel in groups, limiting predatory engagements to when the predator is starving, and giving the prey animals a legitimate chance of winning the fight or chasing the predator off.  But these are things that absolutely would need to happen after extensive testing and player input.  

[Pingpong 1,070]

I'm all for wurm being exciting and fun, the fact that hitched animals now being lunch for mobs being an unnoted "ninja nerf" is the most concerning aspect of this to me. I don't mind devs experimenting on the test server (read not indi). And why do carnivores not attack each other when we have 10x more spiders then anything else? To say "we're implementing realism" in a game where I'm chasing pink unicorns with enchanted weapons is laughable at best.

[Derp 310]

Seems like alot of people have alot of problems with real world situations being brought into a game. I stay up late with a gun at my house waiting for coyotes to come. Its more realistic don't play a sim if you dont like realism.

[rixk 830]

Has this change come into the game at the expense of animal movement rates(frequency).. currently I am having hard time to keep my piggies fed as they dont move as much as they used to. New features are fun, but when they come at the expense of some other aspect, it isn't that fun any more.

[As_I_Decay 1,592]

Has this change come into the game at the expense of animal movement rates(frequency).. currently I am having hard time to keep my piggies fed as they dont move as much as they used to. New features are fun, but when they come at the expense of some other aspect, it isn't that fun any more.

[NeeNee 855]

Why yes, very true. My car also drives 2 tiles away from where it appears to be. :-P

When a deer appears in the middle of a city here, no one is concerned because we know that the 8 million wolves that live nearby will finish it off before it gets hit by a car.

[rixk 830]

Yeah, pathing is still broken where horses and cattle don't move. Pathing was always broke though, hence why we have always had the animals cluster to one corner of a large pen.

It worked okayish until recently, when I did spread the meals across the pen, that way the piggies were wandering around and got enough food to get all fed. But only few days ago I noticed, that there has been a lot of leftovers in the pen(whereas before they ate all the meals).. it means, either the piggies eat less, or they don't move around enough. As I have heard more talk about animals not moving, I go with that.

[griper 537]

This feature might need some patch love but I like the idea that critters interact.

[silakka 2,360]

This could of been a good first subject on ingame poll.

But maybe we finally get some Slow, Greenish etc. deer/dog spawners around, since there will be a lot less of the regular ones.

Edited April 2, 2014 by silakka

[Lily 90]

I really did think that news item had an April Fools hidden in it. I simply didn't believe that the devs could think it a good idea to make the few and far between non-agro creatures even rarer. I've never even seen a bison on Deli nor seen a deer for years.

 

"Realism" my arse. We're talking about giant flaming arachnids and unicorns here!

 

Does Rolf have any horse breeding chums on IRC by any chance? Prices will be going up if our mounts are going to be preyed on as we walk down the road.

[Jeixi 146]

I can't even go hunting now in my cart out of fear that something will kill one of my horses... This patch has pretty much killed the game for me. D:

[Aeris 3,764]

Gotta love how the aggressive creatures are killing off pretty everything that is feasible for newbies to kill to gain fs. ;o

[Jeixi 146]

Gotta love how the aggressive creatures are killing off pretty everything that is feasible for newbies to kill to gain fs. ;o

 

It's not just newbies. I have 70 FS, but thanks to this update my hunting days are over. I wear steel plate armor. Without horses pulling my cart I'm just too slow. Risking the death of my horses on a trip could mean walking for hours. How am I to grind my fight skill up if I can't even go hunting? Without a cart a hunting trip is pointless because I can't even carry all the meat I acquire. Having to stay within walking distance of my deed is boring. I guess I could go shark hunting, but I've already killed four, and they've lost their luster. This update has broken the game for me. 

[Noizhead 622]

I am left wondering if the mass predation on livestock and other prey animals is a result of the system correcting itself.  After all, we have servers full of meat eaters who have stood around and starved for years, and they all learned how to feed themselves at the same time--it is no surprise that large numbers of hungry mobs all marched on remote and unsuspecting settlements.  It's possible that the massacre will abate once their bellies are full, or they've been killed in pursuit of food.

A more graceful rollout of this system may have involved first resetting the predators on every server to their default food and nutrition values, to avoid such an outbreak of violence.

It also occurs to me that tower guards might be a good addition to the "prey" list.  With hungry predators attacking tower guards, they would either die and respawn elsewhere as a new mob that isn't hungry, or they'd kill the guard, munch on the corpse and wouldn't be hungry for a while.  With time, this would not recreate the old circumstance of towers wiping the server clean of mobs, because carnivores shouldn't all be hungry at the same time. Towers would also not be constantly guardless, as a troll (or other strong creature) would snack on just one guard and ignore the others, allowing plenty of time for the guard to respawn.

In any case, I would withhold judgement to wait and see how the system plays out.  It wasn't too long ago that people screamed bloody murder when their boats and BSBs suddenly took large amounts of damage due to a bugfix (that made items take damage they should have already accrued); once the dust settled, things were fine.  The same may be true of carnivores finally hunting for food.

[Belrindor 663]

If this non-aggro server were created many like myself would have little concern about the aggro ai instituted upon the others; but perhaps this would disrupt the mass punishment effect that I had become so well acquainted with in my youth. In this respect I can comprehend the desire to inflict misery upon others collectively, although I would never condone this focus of a purpose to encourage a response of pressure upon those who would resist it. A bit more subtle that what happens within Wurm in this regard but the underlying effect is similar. So why not create a server free from these aggressive mob disruptions and observe the results. My guess is that it will become quite a popular alternative to this blanket aggro mob so called "challenging" game play. This popularity is then what I suppose might be what the subtle fear of it is all about.

 

 

Such a server would become populated extremely quickly by folks like us who don't want any part of the ever changing ninja grief du jour.

 

It would also very quickly become the largest populated server. This, methinks, is where the fear resides. More people on one server = more money = more 'pull'. I think that perhaps they fear that if this takes off as we all know it would, that their playstyle and ghost servers would receive very little attention.

[Trepper 78]

Hello everyone, I have read your feedback and brought it up with team. We are making further adjustments to the ai.

Mainly the supposed troll overdrive on bashing in on deeded houses, enclosures and agro on hitched animals.

We have yet to confirm the cases but we are currently looking at the mechanics to see what should be tweaked.

 

The aim is to create a more living environment where you will find more natural interaction between mobs.

Which I hardly believe that anyone wont find exiting. Well, there is always someone

This is supposed to be a Wild and exiting game, but we are not out to make it unnecessarily punishing on you deeded territory.

Just enough to keep you on your toes and make for an exiting challenge.

First thank you for letting us know you are listening.  But the simple fact that you never thought any one wich a cart and bison would have a problem going anyplace shows an extream lack of thought on the mater.  If its all that hard to see what could happen then simply ask us we will help.  And please do not treat as if we are the winny few (there is always someone) to try and cover a lack of thought on your part on how your changes can bleed over into other aspects of the game.  I logged in at server up and made a beeline for the part of my off deed enclosure where I store extra criters to give new players, as I knew in 10 sec what would happen and at that time I swaped out my bisons as I also saw the potential problem with them hitched to the wagon.  I find it very hard to believe you didnt see that comeing as I got in in a mater of 5 min after hearing the change.  We arent winny you are not thinking out the full game mechanics and that scares the crud out of me, as much greater harm could easily be done to this other wise good game.

Edited April 2, 2014 by Trepper

[Trepper 78]

also people they dont attack horses or bulls jut bison, cow and deer it seems so far.  Bison have no more use then to riase for parts and meat now as carts and wagons will need to be moved by bulls and horses at this point less they to become pray

[Depends 220]

It also occurs to me that tower guards might be a good addition to the "prey" list.  With hungry predators attacking tower guards, they would either die and respawn elsewhere as a new mob that isn't hungry, or they'd kill the guard, munch on the corpse and wouldn't be hungry for a while.  With time, this would not recreate the old circumstance of towers wiping the server clean of mobs, because carnivores shouldn't all be hungry at the same time. Towers would also not be constantly guardless, as a troll (or other strong creature) would snack on just one guard and ignore the others, allowing plenty of time for the guard to respawn.

[Jeixi 146]

If hungry animals get to eat guards then hungry guards should get to eat players. Fair is fair, everyone should get to eat something.

[Badgirl 115]

It also occurs to me that tower guards might be a good addition to the "prey" list.  With hungry predators attacking tower guards, they would either die and respawn elsewhere as a new mob that isn't hungry, or they'd kill the guard, munch on the corpse and wouldn't be hungry for a while.  With time, this would not recreate the old circumstance of towers wiping the server clean of mobs, because carnivores shouldn't all be hungry at the same time. Towers would also not be constantly guardless, as a troll (or other strong creature) would snack on just one guard and ignore the others, allowing plenty of time for the guard to respawn.

 

 

[Object 281]

Gotta love how the aggressive creatures are killing off pretty everything that is feasible for newbies to kill to gain fs. ;o

Edited April 3, 2014 by Object

[Audrel 2,223]

The change is livable. It's able to be adapted to. My entire beef was no warning. You had 6 minutes for a "maint" restart. In the past, that pretty much meant pull off somewhere reasonably safe. In this one, it wasn't so reasonably safe to be anywhere but inside a fence or a house if you had "prey" animals with you. A few people logged in to find their bison had logged back in quite a bit before they did and were dead or dying. Adapting is fine. We adapted to deadbeat guards. We will adapt to this. In the future, just warn us with more than 6 minutes and maybe an orange message saying something about finding a refuge. You don't have to give details. Just tell us to get off the roads. It would be nice to have 24 hours on a change like this but 30 minutes would be very much welcomed with a warning. Chances are if you have been logged out a while, you are in a safe place. Stuck on a road with mobs nearby that were no threat when you were kicked off but a big threat now and losing your team and having a cart too heavy to pull is a bit harsh.

I can see the adventure to it. Just warn us.