My Experiences

I've been playing this game off and on for a few years. At times I really enjoyed playing. When you've got a good group of people (usually you're in their village or you share a ventrilo server if you chat with them alot), the game can be very entertaining.

What drove me while playing this game? The concept that I could someday get better and eventually be good enough to participate in PvP. While I realize the majority of the Wurm Online population are on the "freedom isles" server (The permium no-PvP server), the wild server (premium PvP server) grabbed my interest.

I would spend hours upon hours grinding my skills up, in hopes that I could achieve similar body stats as those who have been playing long before me (body stats significantly influence PvP and take a WHILE to grind up).

It was only after months of grinding where I realized something: If you want to PvP in this game and your character did not exist "pre-fight fix" (a period in time when Rolf, the owner and only real coder of wurm, decided to nerf body stat gain), you've missed out on TONS of exploits and windows of oppertunities with which you could have driven your skills and body stats to GODLIKE levels.

The problem here is that in the game there are PvP gods. It's not because they're excellent strategists. It's because they exploited and abused bugs (which the owner of the game, Rolf, doesn't see as a problem). If you make a character now and grind as hard as you can for 12 hrs a day for 2 years, you would STILL not have body stats as high as these people. I'm not saying all pre-ff characters are bug abusing exploiters (even though their stats are pretty high aswell), but those who did will never be topped.

Now that I've summed up the problem with Wurm PvP (well sort of, I'd just like to add that "fighting" has little to no graphical display at all), lets get to the good part of the game: Crafting (including building) and exploring.

You can chose a plot of land in the forest, clear cut the area, and make your very own village. You can terraform this area to your liking and basically continue to improve your skills (I'd recommend doing this on freedom if thats all you're interested in)

If you are simply interested in pulling off amazing architectual feats just for the hell of it (like making 500 colossuses encircling the entire server), I suggest you try this game. It can be very fun so long as you keep your mind off of the horrid pvp system involved. You can go ahead and make your own village, meet new people, and leave your mark on the server and fellow players.

There is room for role-play in a game like this (even though the graphics aren't too good). The community is mostly against this, but im sure you could find a group of people who want to do something like that. You could also decide to devote your time to helping new people (like many others do).

The fighting animations might suck, but just try looking @ a coastline. The view can be breath-taking

The game needs a stat reset (like reseting all body stats and skills to lvl 1), more devs devoted to coding and testing their material before making it live, stricter penalties for "bug abusing" to accelerate skillgain, more fighting animations, and to be made into a stand-alone client (theres only so much you can do with java...this game really needs to be coded LIKE A GAME)

All in all:

Looking for PvP? Go elsewhere.

Looking for crafting/building/exploring? Try it out =p

Just make sure you ask for help right away (or join a village). Trust me, you'll need it.