Honestly I like the pie being for a set amount of xp personally. I’ll give a few reasons. When you consume a pie currently you are locked in for a set amount of time. 30 minutes base. That means you are technically wasting any time that you aren’t doing maximum xp gain per second while having the buff. The second bit is that it doesn’t actively do anything about death penalty. You can have both up at the same time but the death penalty will still be there if you don’t Do enough xp gaining while the pie (any xp food really) is active. So the punishment feels persistent while the buff/reward feels fleeting. Third is because once you find an xp heavy activity you can begin gaming the system. Learning the exact combos to make maximum xp per second from each pie and grow far more rapidly using this buildup.
I would like to see xp food be double xp across the board, but for a set amount of xp.
2000, 10000, 50000, 100000. Something along those scales. So you can get some xp food and just food your death debuff away. It still takes the xp from you but you can counter it by being prepared etc. And this closes any insane amounts of bonus xp earned by gaming. But still means you can get bonus xp equal to half a level at 50+ which is alot. On top of that It would be interesting to see the buff stack to a top limit. About to do alot of xp gaining? Eat 2 or 3 pies to gain a big backlog. This enables you to still rapidly xp up but at a greater cost so lowers the amount of times you can do this etc. But those are just ideas… And I’m on cold medicine so not sure how sensible I am atm
Loving the discussion and idea though. Interesting stuff.
I mean the manner of explaining the pies is now equivalent to death penalty. One is a negative fixed amount tied to your xp earn rate and the other is a positive.
Please give ppl the benefit of the doubt, text is a difficult medium to communicate intention. And I will do the same for you.
Please don’t add to the grind. We need to attract more players, and this only increases the grind. I help noobs get gems and show them how to level processing the rock, then using it to build to gain xp that way as well. Using that rock to process gems adds to the grind. I’m onboard for new types of gem blocks from using rock… but stop nerfing!!
Currently pies do that without your nerf. Death penalty removes. pies add. Your proposal doesn’t change that. You spun it as an upside. I’m pointing out that there is no upside except in one extreme edge case.
Edit after reading your original post:
You asked for feed back. Feedback that disagrees with you is not a personal attack.
You’re thinking of it only mathematically. There is an advantage to having only one game mechanic.
Death penalty halves your xp for 10,000 xp.
Teaching pies give you double xp for 30 minutes.
vs
Death penalty halves your xp for 10,000 xp.
Teaching pies double your xp for 10,000 xp.
This system is simpler for players to understand because they can see the mirror behavior between the two concepts. Even if they work mathematically the same it is often an upside to have concepts simplified like this. The idea here is reducing cognitive load on the player.
You don’t have to agree with that, but at least then you’re actually addressing the point I made and not making one up about my ego.
That being said, if exp pies were like a 100,000xp gas tank, similar to a reverse Death Penalty I would not consider that to be a nerf. It would make pies more useful.
But only if it didn’t “waste” a food buff slot.
Buffs that don’t directly make your character more powerful should stack regardless of where they came from.
Nobody is gonna see me mining and say, “No fair! He hits rocks so much harder with that exp buff!”
You’re mechanic doesn’t simplify things for players. It has the opposite effect. It complicates things in more than one way.
Currently all foods work the same. They offer an effect over a time period. You are proposing increasing congnitive load on players by taking a system with uniform behavior and changing it so some items work one way and some work the other way.
You want to unite two disparate mechanics while muddying identical mechanics.
Also your proposed mechanics increases cognative load because it’s confusing. Does the food effect end after I’ve generated x/2 xp because it’s been doubled to x or after I’ve earned x xp and doubled it to 2x xp. It’s much more cognative load to explain that in a tool tip than to explain 30 minutes.
If you want to nerf xp gain then simply tell us why you feel players earn xp too fast. A much simpler solution is to just reduce xp across the board by a factor. That would be the way to do it with the least cognative load to players.
Good point! We could probably get into the weeds over this a little more because I don’t think it’s a difficult concept to convey in a tooltip, but I agree the devs would have to be okay with making food that doesn’t work on a timer which is not ideal unless they’ve already been sitting on ideas that will head in that direction anyway. The tooltip change itself would be something like: XP gain is increased by 100% until you earn a bonus of 10,000 XP
vs what we have now: XP gain is increased by 100% for 30 minutes
I don’t really care how fast players earn XP, I do care that cubits are awarded during every level up and in Boundless you can level up by going afk with the most common material in the game. One player posted an image of them queuing up enough rocks to earn over $40 in cubits and they are currently buying a million rocks to do it again. I am worried about uncapped cubit gain like this for two reasons.
If there’s a way to circumvent real money spending players will do it. It doesn’t even matter how painful the technique is, and this one isn’t any more painful than an idle game. So I’m worried about the game’s financial success as this technique spreads. Especially if the devs were expecting to make money from cubits. Right now they are putting outfits in the store presumably to make money but really these things could just say “Craft for 100,000 rocks”. Would you rather pay $12 or go grab 100k rocks by accident when mining gems? Or buy them from players at a few rocks per coin?
One of the things you can buy with the cubits is another character which undermines the skill point system.
One thing to remember in making the game more complicated. It is aimed at ages from 7 up. You need to have a game that does not require complex spreadsheets in order to progress. Not saying that most seven year olds could not out play me in most games, but i think more complex can limit the attractiveness of a game to various audiences.
Your proposal has the opposite effect of what you intend. You agree that it has the opposite effect then persist anyways. This is why I say you’re bad at game design.
If your problem is cubits then address that. Instead you propose nerfing everything everyone does. Another reason that I feel you’re bad at game design.
Yes, yes it is. And it would have been better indeed from the beginning like this.
Not so sure I am gonna like a change like that now. My income in-game comes from pies and brews, teaching pies are already a pain to make with the 576 sweet beans for a masscraft in the recipe, if they become less useful for people who do have coins I might sell less. Sure I might sell a few more to people who have a heck of a lot of coin to burn but I have no way to tell if this would be good or bad for my income and usage of the things myelf. If they work less long perhaps the number of beans needed might need to be changed as well.
Thing is tho, that all the other brew and pie buffs do work with 10/20/30/40 minute buffs and Teaching Pies would be the only ones that are not with your proposal.
Therefor it might actually be a good idea to change the death penalty to a timer instead of a certain amount of XP, if what we want is uniformity.
But since you suggested it as a solution for the rock+pie XP method (which I still don’t see as a problem!) that change wouldn’t touch any of that.
In fact, people with lots of coin/mats/time will just buy/make more pies and still do the same thing but it becomes more grindy and more annoying for them to do so.
It would also become more grindy and annoying for players who just want to level their only char that’s still level 10…
Yes, I do get that, I got that way earlier in the thread too
Like I said then I’m not willing to spend more money on the game at this point in time since I’ve already spend 100’s of euros on it and I can’t really afford to do such things at the moment.
So nerfing the XP gain to get cubits so I can get more plots so I can build what I want would severely change how I feel about the game.
So, what about the following:
plots are not being bought wih cubits, instead when you level up you gain 10 extra plots AND a certain amount of cubits (probably less than is the case now or change prices of the other items)
the devs should add way, way, way more cosmetic items that can be bought with cubits. There’s plenty of evidence that if they do this the right way that it can make them good money!
while we’re at it there also might be a change needed in the skill point reset items and having to buy new character slots with cubits. I’m not a fan of either.
As for point 3, in the beginning I spend most of my cubits on skill reset points because I only had a single character with 1 skillset. Even when I had several specialised alts I still had to use my cubits most of the time for this. Even now I still sometimes need to change 1 or 2 skills around a day.
I’ve always felt that if I had more actual real life money I could’ve used this even more efficiently so I felt this was what most people these days call ‘pay to win’.
This is why I don’t enjoy working with you. Who in real life would you tell they are bad at their day job? Do you think that’s a productive way to collaborate with people?
You think that game design is telling other people their ideas are bad. That’s not game design, that’s being a forum warrior. Game design is a collaborative effort to find the best ideas. Pointing out flaws in proposals is only a step in the process. The primary value of disagreement is to further hone the constraints in search of a solution. Your posts are regularly devoid of solutions; they focus instead on belittling others. I can put up with you not carrying your creative weight because we are just internet people on a forum but I won’t stand for being called names by someone who has no idea what they’re talking about.
I can tell you that your attitude is very actively scanned for during game design interviews and people who exhibit it are quickly removed from the process. It takes a lot of guts to speak up about an idea. Design problems start with a blank page so somehow you must figure out where to draw the lines and add the color. If you have teammates who shut down lines drawn by others but never add their own that isn’t valuable in the long term. Finding problems is the easy part. Finding workable solutions can be nearly impossible at times (as this topic shows.) Everyone becomes afraid to pitch ideas because they don’t want to deal with the negative nancy in the room.
Now to address your point, I’ve come at this problem from a few different angles. First I tried suggesting the most direct thing - replace cubits earned from level ups with plots. People didn’t like that. So I moved on to the skill point system and its interplay with alts. Players didn’t want changes there either. Okay, next I tried attacking how the players are getting the level ups. The AoE boon was the first place I looked but players don’t like changes to that system. And then on to the ideas in this thread. You have to realize that players like getting lots of everything for free. But players also want the developers to get paid so they can stay in business and support the game. We may be in a situation where those two things are at odds. The devs are playing their financials close to their chest as they should. But this thread and its information is here regardless, in case there is a problem, so they can respond more quickly and in a way which benefits the most players.
You think this is bad game design but you’re wrong. We are all learning more about the nature of the problem (or lack thereof) specifically because there are people in this thread who are not afraid to stick their neck out and have bad ideas. Even when people like you are around to belittle their contributions and call them names.
I think your position is worthwhile and expressed by others in this thread but I do want to say that this part here was exactly the point of the nerf! Players using pies to increase their gains through normal play are largely unaffected. They are present as they earn xp to eat more pies. But the people logging out and coming back to millions of rock+pie XP can no longer do it! The friction added is hopefully enough to bring that method of earning XP in line with all the other existing methods. Vs making it by and far the best xp-to-effort ratio in the game.
And that is the problem, adding friction will add friction to my ability to get the plots I want for my builds which in turn will make sure I like the game less which in the end makes sure I abandon the game and the devs lost a paying customer.
I haven’t seen your proposal in this thread for changing the way you gain plots but I feel that decoupling plots from cubits is the way to go. I won’t have much interest at all in using this XP method for cubits if that happens other than perhaps wanting another dedicated alt and thus solely for the XP. And I feel that is also something that is rather silly in how it works. They can add a token to gain an X amount of XP on an alt or somesuch or just straight up make it a certain level without XP and cubit gain.
sigh Part of my Christmas gift was cubits for this game. I will not admit how much, but a guilty amount that I’ve almost completely spent. But, hey, tattoos. =3
I do like the idea of xp buffs being set at an x amount. I live with elderly and handicapped ppl and sometimes they need help NOW, not after my buff ends. I’d prob budget buff foods in more if this changed. Timed buffs always make me feel like I’m wasting it if I’m not constantly in action and I tend to stress.
On the flip, I still stand by my opinion death pen should be timed, but at a large debuff pen for that duration.
Ok, suppose rock mining/crafting was lined up for the nerf bat. Two things need to happen for that to go over well.
An ACTUALLY GOOD way to earn exp. Repeatable. Worth your time. Maybe even fun. Quests for 50k-500k exp if completed? With more intricate or difficult quests netting huge rewards.
One-click 30 stack crafting.
Then I’d be OK with rock crafting nerfbalance. Don’t just shoot it and leave it to bleed out.
Personally though my vote is just leave rock xp the way it is. Provides incentive to not just toss rock to the curb for some. Also, builders love the current price of refined stone. Nerf rocks, you’ll inadvertently only hurt the builders.
