Wurm Online

Day Four DAW: Wurm Online #WurmOnline

stargrace March 28, 2013 1Comment

Another game that is incredibly near and dear to my heart is Wurm Online. A game that combines combat (if you feel like it) with an incredibly large crafting system, AND terraforming. I have such love for the developer team of this game that it is probably borderline stalking.

So my fourth (wait, four? Isn’t there only one for Glitch up there so far? Just hold on, I’ve got two more coming that I’m post-dating) Developer Appreciation Award goes out to the team at Wurm Online.

We’ve had a lot of awesome changes lately, and these are all thanks to the dev team. New graphics, new sounds, new options for terraforming. For the first time since I’ve started playing on Deliverance, we have bison. That’s a pretty big deal. Of course every time a change is implemented there’s a mob of angry gamers looking to rip a new one into those responsible, so I just wanted to say

THANK YOU

for making this game so amazing. Never in any game before have I seen such a robust crafting system. I’ve never had the ability to physically shape the land in an MMO to my specifications and some of the amazing stuff people have created over time is just that – amazing.

Spring is in the Air #WurmOnline

stargrace March 16, 2013 0Comment

Spring is in the air, and with it comes less time for gaming. So I decided to let go of one of my three deeds, and just keep two of them. I gave up the deed furthest away from my ‘home base’ – Les Reveurs. It was a great deed with a lot of fantastic spots to mine silver and gold, but honestly I’ve got enough on my plate when it comes to wurm online. Two deeds shall suffice.

I’ve been working on my Vynora priest throughout the day, making sure she gets her 5 prayers in (more if servers reset), and working on soul depth as well as other mundane tasks. Farming, animal husbandry, etc. I’ve managed to breed a few 5 trait horses, now I’m just waiting for them to grow up. I made the decision not to keep any horses that have less than 4 speed traits, so I went on a ‘glue’ spree and ended up with a lot of meat to work cooking as well as bits and bobs to work natural substance (the skill required to make dye).

I have a few new neighbours, at each deed. One I’m not too fond of because they decided to place their deed right up against mine, making for a very cramped feeling. It’s just a respect thing, to give your neighbours room to expand, unless you’ve talked to them before hand or they’re your RL friends who you can clobber.

The other neighbours I know very little about. They’ve settled at the base of my mountain deed, so I see them in my local fairly constantly. I do have quite a lot of space up top so I’m not too concerned about them ruining things, so long as I can still access the tunnel that lets me climb up to my place. I see them calling for guards a lot, so I expect they’re fairly new with minimal fight skills. I sent them a tell yesterday letting them know I live behind their deed, and welcoming them to the area in case they needed anything.

My characters have also since received their new affinities since my foray onto the Chaos server. Faralithe gave up her mining affinity to Stargrace (I killed my alt, in other words), and received short sword. A pretty useless affinity. Arysh gave up her hammer affinity (which was completely useless) to a PvPer and in turn received – meditation!

I couldn’t be more pleased. This makes perfect sense for a priest, and I’m looking forward to the extra gains as I level her up the path of love. Speaking of, Faralithe managed to answer her 4th question correctly today, so she has gained the refresh ability. Something very useful that even free to play players can take advantage of.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Smushed, and Everything Lost #WurmOnline

stargrace March 7, 2013 1Comment

Despite what some people may think, I do enjoy a good round of PvP in the various games I’m playing. I especially enjoyed them in WoW and GW2, but I’m certainly not limited to those two games. The one game where I’ve been trying to enjoy PvP and have simply not come to that conclusion yet, is Wurm Online.  There’s a few reasons why I’m not satisfied with PvP in this game but the number one reason is due to the complete hands off approach of combat itself.

That, is not what I wanted to write about though. What I wanted to write about is what do you do if you engage in PvP in a game where your death means you quite literally lose it all.  Wurm Online PvP means you leave your corpse behind afterward, and it can be looted. There are of course methods of making this as painless as possible. Don’t carry around expensive items when you may be ambushed. Be prepared from the start to lose everything that is on you. So when I went out at the beginning of the week to the Chaos server I should have kept these things in mind, and I didn’t.

I was on a boat, two characters. One had armor and tools, the second had just armor. I spotted another boat headed straight towards me in the distance, and I turned around to try to avoid them. Aboard their boat were 3 players total, and one of them a priest which meant long range attacks (spells) started flying early. I had no defense against these. My characters have high pve skills, good fighting (70+) and were wearing 70+ ql chain armor, but that was nothing to the three who were fighting me. I attempted to fight back when they were within range, but that didn’t work out and before I knew it I was staring at the death screen. Lost all my armor, and my tools. Thank goodness I left the drake armor at home as well as other sets of tools (although I did lose my best stuff).

I was furious. Combat is done in such a way that if you are out numbered even by players who are weaker than you, there is a good chance you will die. I wasn’t expecting boat combat (nor the fact that they were priests and would be casting from boat as you can’t enchant from a boat so why can you cast other spells) etc. It was annoying and I was angry at myself for even being out at all with my good gear and tools. For that, I had no one to blame but myself.

So what do you do in this situation? You find yourself now stranded on a pvp server, no gear, no tools. Do you give up and decide not to play any more? Honestly that’s what I felt like doing. I may enjoy PvP but I do not enjoy losing items I’ve paid for or created myself (not to mention there is affinity loss as well as skills). I spent the next 10 hours trying to get back home to my server of Deliverance. Thankfully a friend lent me a row boat and I was able to sail one character along the coast to pick up another character. Then I went home. I started counting the tools I had left at home and put together a meager set. Nothing as impressive as the ones I had lost, but tools to get me by.

I logged off there for the day frustrated, annoyed, and angry. Those feelings died down through the night because I absolutely love Wurm Online. I’m just not too keen on that aspect of it. I even still enjoy PvP. I’ll just have to be wiser if I partake in it in the future. So losing all of my armor and tools was not the end all be all of my time in game. I’ll rebuild. I’ll gather new tools and new armor. I’ll learn some tactics, and plan things out better. Honestly I wasn’t expecting to get jumped like that, where I was. Yet another mistake to learn from.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Hedge Mazes and Gazebos – Oh My #WurmOnline

stargrace February 21, 2013 0Comment

I’ve been spending some time working on my deed Mystic Cove, that’s the coastal deed on Deliverance. I tore down a bunch of horse pens that I had in the back after deciding that I didn’t want to breed a lot of animals there (I do horse breeding at Cirque instead) and took down an old wooden well I had, and placed this fancy new fountain. Then I created an arched 1×1 building over it, and ta-da, gazebo. I attached some torch lamps to the corners to light it up, and then proceeded to pave the surrounding area with a nice cobble path (in the screen shot above, it’s still dirt). I made a nice winding path around the gazebo and out the back gate, planted a willow bush and a few rose bushes, and I still have hopes of some time adding a small hedge maze in the area. The problem is hedges need 5 sprouts of the same tree per hedge, so that’s a lot of harvesting sprouts. I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

In other news, I also finished the shipyard building that was on my dock. This was my first multi story project, and while it looks like nothing more than a square building 4 floors high with a 1×1 stone building on the very top surrounded by castle walls, I’m still quite pleased with it. Moumix has been busy with real life so there have been no ships built there in quite some time, but when I get the urge at least there’s a nice area completed.

I’ve recently taken my 3rd character Faralithe over to the Independence server to “deed sit” for a friend who has been whisked away due to real life. She’s repairing bits and bobs that need looking after, while he’s getting ready to move. The deed is lovely and it’s a nice change of scenery when I spend most of my time these days on Deliverance.

My next project is to collect the materials required to build a guard tower at Cirque, there’s a lot of wild animals that come visit up there, and Arysh doesn’t have the mighty 70 fight skill that Stargrace has, although she does have a very nice rare steel weapon. My masonry is about to hit 60 which is pretty nice, although not quite as useful as some other skills it does help to be able to improve forges, ovens, and stone altars to 70.