Profile - philelliott - Boundless Community ← Square Enix
philelliott:
“Right now our focus is on the monthly costs, to see if there’s a way the game can be self-sustaining.”
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Thank you!
Look I get I’m annoying by being negative/pessimistic about Boundless’ future.
But like @Kal-El mentioned, I think it’s just as problematic when you encounter the other half of the community who tries to force positivity and optimism on others, acting as if we’re forcing them to read our negativity/pessimism, as if we’re forcing them to click on the obviously negative/pessimistic thread (yeah, you think I chose to write in the thread that already had a nice garbage sent for no reason? No : I knew better than going to write my concerns about BG3 in an overly positive thread!).
The thing is that it all works both ways. The difference is that one side refuses to see that they’re being just as obnoxious.
They’d rather censor/hide/choke-out/devalue negativity/pessimism and pretend that the game, it just works fine, as if bringing new players in the game (in its current state) will magically fix everything.
Spoiler warning : it won’t, and the game isn’t fine. The in-game economy is suffering, everybody knows it, and it’s a huge issue in an MMO. Sure won’t affect you if you play the game like a solo experience, but it goes against the concept of an MMO.
Some of you may think you don’t need updates, that with or without updates, you will get bored of it eventually, but that’s ignoring that everybody doesn’t work like that. An MMO doesn’t just need players to survive. It does need updates, it does need all of its promised features, and even more importantly, it needs a dev-team’s presence in the forum. Period. It’s all connected, man.
And then the cherry on top is players like me being blamed by the some on the other side because some people they don’t know and never interacted with supposedly judged the state of the game from the forum and decided to refund their copy of the game.
Oh yeah, that’s definitely our fault, not the game’s or the devs.
You would’ve told me “my friends refunded their copy of the game because you were an a-hole to them in-game”, I would’ve said “Oh, really? Damn, sorry mate”, except that’s unlikely to happen because when I was around in-game, I was quite nice to visitors, and I was handing out forged tools to new players when I could.
SO, in the mean time, you wanna be positive/optimistic? Take a page from @bucfanpaka’s book. She knows how it’s done. Everyone can have a nice relaxing chat with her without being choked by pink slime gushing from every pore of her skin.
Peace among worlds!
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I will not disagree it is somewhat based on perspective as to if features are missing or not. However if a player is basing this on the developer created trailers and website, then in both cases there are features that are missing. If you did not see these or use them to make your decision then you very well might be happy with the state of the game. If you played since early access, I personally find it disheartening that all the artwork for items that were intended to be added to the game, will likely never be introduced or best case could still be multiple years away. I know due to my backer package giving me access to additional information, that there were planned changes to the workshop machinery that I personally was looking forward to and the entire forum had already seen the artwork for these new machines. I think I deserve the right to be disappointed and to express that as much as a player that might be happy with the game.
It might be perspective or maybe more accurately why you bought the game but it does not make the people that bring these things up wrong or deserving of ridicule by some members of the community. This is not aimed at you in particular but there are some players that seem to over react to these posts and seem to go to great lengths to engage in behavior that in earlier days would have resulted in their posts being removed. Now they get as nasty and personal as they want with the apparent goal of getting the thread locked or hidden. That is my perspective after following the forums for over 4 years.
Do we need to see the same things repeated over and over again in the forums? Maybe not. As someone that has pretty much stayed out of it until recently it is tiring to see the same players saying the game is dead every day or so. However i find it is just as tiring to see the continuing thank the develop threads that seem to pop up every do often. The development team likely had some hard decisions to make. If the game is not as successful as they had hoped and not covering costs, it has to be hard to watch your team leave or make a decision to migrate your team to a new company to work on someone else’s game. They made the decisions people have to make to support themselves and their families. While I can respect the decision, I do not think their is any good reason to continue to thank the developers. We have already thanked them in tangible ways in buying the game, gleam club and cubits. In some cases players spent thousands of dollars for backer packages to support the developers vision. I think the thank you threads are just a way of being passive aggressive in reaction to other threads.
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From the first trailers in 2014, you could tell the dev-team were bitting far more than they could ever chew. I mean come on, not only did they promise many times the Titans, the Hunter, the Ground-basher or whatever, they also promised more than a dozen alternate playable races, wearable clothing, etc.
The alternate races thing already smelled like something that would never happen.
And of course, let’s not forget the TON of concept-arts done by Minyi. Those were what was making me dream.
This entire thread is where it is right now (in the forum’s unofficial trash bin) entirely because of that. Before that other guy came to play “let’s pretend I’m a moderator”, we were having a fairly decent conversation. But noooo, he had to act like we were forcing him to read our messages. Truth is, had he said nothing and just thought “y’know what, that thread is just not for me”, it would’ve been fine.
I’ve said it many times before, this forum may not be the most toxic I’ve ever seen, but all the ‘rules’ meant to enforce ‘civil discussion’ like the Flagging feature ONLY serve to do the exact opposite and create an oppressing ambiance. How many times have I seen people use it to hide things they don’t like, but aren’t qualifying to be flagged in the first place?..
It’s the same as the “no naming” rule, which in part is what allowed some REALLY nasty players (yeah, you think I’M a nasty troll? oh boy, you guys should’ve been around when Kras’ was enjoying thinking he was master of the universe, I’m a grey sheep compared to him) to stay around and be ACTUAL trolls both on the forum and in-game.
Definitely something I thought many times, but wasn’t as good as you to put into proper words.
It’s usually what I mean when I talk of people being ‘overly positive’.
It’s a complicated issue because we have to be happy for the devs if they’re now in a financially better situation… but it’s like they left us all in the Boundless hole with a sign saying “BRB 
” and whether they come back or not is almost turning into religion at this point, with the “let’s thank the devs” threads, like “yes brothers and sisters, the second coming of St James will happen soon!”.
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Just so it’s clear…
This portion of the thread was moved to the existing “BG3 news” off-topic post as it was discussing the state of a game not related to Boundless. Pure and simple.
Regardless of other people’s involvement in the thread, I was always watching the original thread this came from, as I get email notifications for certain topics and threads that are, let’s just say, more prone to going off on major tangents than normal.
With that out of the way, I wanted to add in my personal thoughts and response on the current deviated subject (i.e. not relating to the state of play on BG3)…
I’ve probably expressed my views a few times on the forums with regards to the in-limbo update pertaining to private universes (and swords/shields etc.), and you probably all know by now how much I want it to come to fruition. Honestly, I want it for partly selfish reasons (such as wanting to tweak crafting times and not currently being able to afford to pay for a sovereign world), but I also see the possibility in the potential it could open up with modding. Most gaming communities simply amaze me with their Boundless (pun intended) creativity and ability to make already good games even better with new mods etc. I still think opening up mods could be a financial lifeline for Boundless, especially if handled in a similar fashion to how MS have allowed certain verified MC mods to be sold via their app store, while taking a cut of the profits.
I find it funny (if not, good timing) that you use this phrasing…
… as it fits quite snugly with an kind-of-analogy I wanted to use 
.
The devs may have left the gaping hole (without any real signage at all to be fair), but it feels, to me at least, like the most disgruntled players in the community are intent on burying what’s left of Boundless in that hole. I guess what I am saying is… please put the shovel down, as as it feels like you’re only helping to burying the game faster.
I honestly don’t want to deceive new players into thinking that the game is all rosy and shiny and that everything is tickity-boo… it’s not. They should absolutely be made aware of the current situation. Which is, the core game is in place, as are many of the mechanics. The game is exceptionally playable as it currently stands with many, many hours of potential gameplay available. The only thing it doesn’t have are some of the original planned and advertised features and any visible plan, time and probably funding, to update the game further moving forward.
What I see with the constant clashes by both the happy and unhappy players on the forums, is that is is detrimental to the remaining community we have here and the potential uptake by new players for the game, that we all feel passionate about, to have any sort of continuation. Players can be made aware of the state of the game without any bashing and negativity.
Honestly I do wish we had more information as to what the state of play is, whether Boundless has any potential to be continued and/or whether future updates will be forthcoming.
Whilst I agree with much of what you have said here with regards to hard decisions by the developers, I don’t think the “Thank the developers threads” are passive aggressive, I see them as people genuinely enjoying the game as it is and seeking some sort of balance to the overall negativity of the longer-term players that haven’t seen planned functionality and gameplay come to fruition and have run out of things to keep them interested in playing.
Additionally, whilst we have some players spouting that ‘the happy players have rose-tinted glasses on and not everything is sunshine and rainbows’… this to me is a subjective view, by players that have somewhat(?) enjoyed the game thus far but want more (content? updates? just more I guess). I’m not sure what the opposite of the rose-tinted label is, maybe thorn-tinted, I dunno. 
It definitely is. I am happy that some of the development team have found their “dream job” out of this move, but at the same time the feeling is still there of “well, what about us?”
Ok, now that I have posted it, it looks like an essay… sorry about that!
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Fair enough. Though I’d say my glasses tend to become thornier the more I get people with the rose-tinted ones come at me like “chill, stop being negative, you’re preventing us from playing the game”.
Again, the original message I made about BG3 wasn’t overly negative or toxic. It was also quite nice to talk with people about something else than Boundless. But now, I don’t feel like going back to this BECAUSE I don’t want to have people coming back down on me like “no, you can’t be negative OR talk about something else than Boundless in here”.
So I’ll likely go back to wait in hiding and silently puke rainbows when seeing all the overly positive threads, hoping one day, the devs announce something actually positive.
Nice essay, though, Stretch. 
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Game gave me around 1k hours of (mostly) enjoyable gameplay… I think thats money Well spend.
Now its just a shadow from what it used to be… Im so stuck In Early access stuff cause it was the good old days so my time in boundless obviously is over
But if someone enjoys boundless as it is… Then so be it. But would i spend 40bucks For this game now… Hell no.
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As an obvious target for this comment, it seems worth elaborating on my viewpoint: Sure, you’re right, it is subjective. However, the arguments used to make those assertions are rarely as subjective as the responses to them. Most often when somebody points out that the game isn’t fine, they say it’s because of X feature, Y gameplay loop or Z developer decision or interaction and often go on to consider how they think it could be better. Sometimes, it’s even just a “the game’s not as good as it used to be”. There’s usually far more thought and scope for civil discussion than the “No, stop being so negative, it’s fine because I like it the way it is!” answers they tend to be faced with.
Maybe what exacerbates this is that it hasn’t always been an issue. I’m pretty sure that back in the EA days, even when people didn’t agree with where the game should go, people with completely opposing views still managed to have far more meaningful discussions than seems to happen now. I’m not saying that this is 100% the fault of one side here because there are a couple of people brandishing spades (following your analogy), but it’s definitely not a 50/50 split.
Honestly, I’d say this is far more more of a subjective viewpoint (given that there’s no knowing people’s true intention). Personally, I look at who posted the thread. There’s some people who do seem to genuinely just love the game, but there’s also some people who are definitely doing it as a passive aggressive dig at best, and at worst as a way to goad people into saying something negative so that they can carry on their whole “Woe is me, the forum is so negative and you’re all so awful” routine. But like you said, it’s all just subjective.
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