I think that the biggest issue that has not been addressed is that almost all of these nerfs affect the new player base. All the older players cashed in on the bomb mining, forging, etc before the nerfs and can just fall back on their endless stockpiles.
The new players are getting frustrated and leaving. It doesn’t help that when they vent on the forums they get sanctimonious veteran players like Shadesmar (by far the most toxic person here) talking down to them.
3 Likes
I don’t mean imediantly as in ‘As soon as I’m done hitting this block, a second one will spawn’, but more of taking Farming from other MMOs.
In other MMOs, Mobs will spawn very quickly to grind for exp, within minutes usually. But even bosses have a short timer, 1-2 hours.
But here’s the difference between Boundless and those games. I believe it was stated somewhere Regen takes 4 hours. HOWEVER there were 2 complications to it. First, it would count down from 4 hours, but STOPS whenever a player enters an area. In other words around big towns or areas people frequent alot, which will be happening alot with a large number of players. And only restarts when everyone leaves the area again.
So the ‘4 Hours’ is the Minimum time, if no one visits the area. But everytime someone spends say an hour or two+ farming the area, trying to find resources. The time they get spent there, pausing the timer, gets added on. Especially if while he’s there, or a few minutes after he leaves, another player comes into the same area to try farming again for 1-2 hours.
So a timer, even a short 1-2 hour one, can take many hours if people keep popping in and checking the area and hanging out there, isn’t going to work so well. This has already effected people looking for gems, since there are very few planets they are on.
But then there is the other condition. You see, even when the timer DOES run out, it doesn’t replace everything instantly either, but instead it regens it slowly. Again, pausing whenever another player enters the area.
From what I understand, normal blocks. Soil, Peat, and Rocks all respawn instantly, maybe the plants too. I don’t know. But resources, such as Gems, Copper, Fossils and such, they take a lot longer to very slowly populate the area.
Someone on the Forums mentioned that the Devs had said somewhere, I think on the Discord, that they had 5 MILLION blocks queue’d to be regen’d, but still haven’t because people keep visiting the areas and stopping the resources from spawning back in. <— That’s a problem, one we’ve already experienced with the people complaining about finding no gems at times, even when looking for hours.
This is a failure of game design, not in of itself, but in how the Dev’s try to fix it. You see, the issue is that the ‘Solution’ to this issue from the Devs, is needing new planets. However, we don’t have enough population to actually populate those planets. They don’t want to go the route of most Space MMOs like Eve, Elite: Dangerous, or No Man’s Sky where population is scattered to the winds, you very rarely see people, and most planets never get seen or visited.
The problem is that while we don’t have the population of players to ‘Populate’ the planet, aka not many people are living on the planets. People aren’t going there to LIVE on the planet, but to FARM the planet for resources. A LOT of people are, arround the clock, at all times of the day.
Because of how Regen works right this very second, it can’t respawn enough to support the number of players constantly farming the higher level worlds for those resources. But the game doesn’t have a high enough population to warrent adding in new planets to compensate for spreading the resources around so people are in the area less so they can regen.
See a connection? The game won’t expand, unless there is enough people living on the planets. But for the resources to spawn, there can’t be people in the area on the planet. It’s a contradiction. That is made worse, but the fact that people don’t have to LIVE on the planet, to FARM the planet.
Very few people actually live on the lvl 4+ worlds, but everyone goes there to farm them for their resources. But the people don’t live there, so it doesn’t expand, but there are people farming around the clock so resources can’t respawn fast enough.
That is the issue I’m bringing up when I said ‘Resources don’t imediantly respawn.’. I mean, looking at the example of other MMOs I brought up earlier with Mobs and Bosses, their timer is constant, it doesn’t matter if a player is nearby or not, as soon as the timer hits 0, the boss spawns right then and there on the spot.
Now I know you can’t do that with Boundless, if a player is underground, he will be trapped and killed.
However, they can keep the timer being paused with players area, but tweak it a little so that as soon as no one is in the area anymore, it instantly respawns ALL the resources. Not just the blocks, but the gems, copper, trees, plants, coal, and so on.
The balance, is how long the timer is. If it’s too long, every day at a set time like Janna mentioned,
He already brought up the issue. People in different timezones, or outside obligations like School, Work, and so on get punished.
But if it’s too fast, such as 10 minutes, or even just an hour, people can farm the area very quickly, repeatedly.
They have to pick a time, long enough that 1 person can just farm it repeatedly by themselves. But it can’t be so long, that it becomes first come, first serve, and punishes most the players except the lucky few who get there first.
In an MMO, it’s more simple, because it doesn’t matter if you kill 300 goats, because within 10 minutes, they won’t give any xp and you have to leave to keep progressing. You can’t just keep killing the goat over and over and over a million times to progress. Same with bosses. Any loot they give, you’ll outlevel within 10 minutes. And the loot you can’t out level, the loot that actually matter, are instanced to YOU, with a timer specifically for YOU.
Boundless doesn’t have instances, and all the resources are useful at all levels of the game, no matter what. So it’s much much more tricky to balance.
i simply didnt notice the changes in world generation: the timer resets only when u change something, not only when u walk through. 500 words for nothing
plus plant regeneration is buffed
So if I come along looking for gems and find none but find the iron seams that the previous miners left behind and think “I might as well take some of that with me” then that will reset the timer too since I now changed something…
thats how it works as i was understanding it
Here is what they said on regeneration.
So yes if you remove a block then the regen cycle starts again (4 hour timer). I think the real issue is if enough blocks are removed from a chunk (16x16 blocks so maybe a 3x3 hammer straight through which is 9x16 144 blocks) it can take over 24 hours for the blocks to regen then after that the resources regen.
But i wanted beef, and i wanted it well done. I would also like two pieces of bread on either side, and a slice of cheese sandwhiched betwix a bread and a beef
I’ll make sure I add the special sauce for you 
Those times are for decay of unbeaconed player-placed blocks, not regen.
No I am pretty certain those are the times for regen for the planet. It makes no distinction between player placed and player removed.
You are pretty much untouchable on t5 worlds with full stealth. So ya this game is about different skillsets/ alts. Thats why there are skill pages. You need to get different builds
DO NOT RESPOND UNLESS YOU ARE A DEV.
im a developer, not for wonderstruck/boundless, but im a dev.
nope
https://forum.playboundless.com/t/poll-is-the-grind-really-that-hard-for-builders
the player consens is that the grind is ok as it is (or was before the spitter ey update at least)
besides of that, i never wanted to start forging, felt like to much work, now its even more lol so i will never forge something 
or maybe with bought compounts, maybe
1 Like
Having a poll on the forums isn’t a very good representation of dislike for something in the game for a number of reasons. Including but not limited to:
- Not everyone in game goes on the forums
- People can change their mine later, but will almost never change their vote on a poll to match their new feelings.
- It’s heavily bias’d for a possitive outlook, cause the people that dislike the grind have probably already left. After 2 weeks, only 115 people voted. That’s not a lot of people, that’s a very very small sample size of an MMO which is meant to have several hundreds of thousands of players.
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- but its representative because its a pretty much random selection out of the entire population. the people in forum might be actually numerical in favor for ur side, because complaining about stuff is a reason to visit the forum… being happy with the game not necessarly
- do u really think people change their mind on the hardships of the grind only over the spitter eye change? unlikely
- people who already left the game, shouldnt be part of the future development of the game. This poll is in no way biased (biased for a positive outlook??? wth does this even mean. do u know what bias means?)
here the poll for the spitter eyes btw… this one shows this consistant 20% unhappy minority, too, that oppose either this specific change (an even smaller minority which leads to a small fluctiation in the numbers) or every change in general [Poll] Boon Compounds Requires Spitter Eye
stop claiming that every player perceives this game as too grindy. (not only u jiro)
What’s your evidence for this, exactly? Do you have game time and engagement stats for all players on PS4 and PC? If you do, they’re different to the numbers I’m seeing, which compared to many games shows a very high rate of engagement for those that play beyond a certain time.
If you’re simply talking about people that play for 20 minutes and then never come back, that’s entirely to be expected with a game like this, but if you have comprehensive research that suggests otherwise, please do share.
4 Likes
If you know anything about polling methodology, this is false. An online forum poll like this is always biased because it by definition isn’t a random sample of the population, it is a sample of the population of the forum which is going to lean is some direction (in this case, this forum leans heavier towards the “everything should be harder” camp) and cares enough to opt in to the poll. Not to actually bring political discussion into this, but the perfect example is asking the same poll questions on a liberal site vs. on a conservative one and getting wildly different results.
And while you obviously can’t include the voices of people that don’t play anymore, some consideration needs to be given for other opinion as not everyone uses these forums (120 poll responses on the one vs. ~800 average active players), and the devs do need to consider the people that pick the game up, play for 5-10 hours, and stop (specifically, why did they stop and how can we retain them/others like them).
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u dont get what “random” means. the barrier to enter the forum and participate in this poll is too low to make this a selective partition out of the population instead of an random one.
And stop claiming there are only 800 active players… there are a whole lot of players logging in with their console … i doubt they show in the steam charts
it is still a selective part of the population because only a select part of the population is willingly going to sign up for the forms, log into it and vote
for it to be random, you would have to at random, force/get random players to vote, over some time
2 Likes
I think that’s you. If you wanted a poll that actually showed what you (or anyone, really), is claiming, the devs would have to run it (or outsource to IPSOS or a similar group). With as small a population as this game has they could probably send it to everyone in game, but at the least they could actually take a random sample of all players in the game and get feedback that way. Any poll that participants opt into can’t be random.
there exist no poll where u get forced to participate . stop talking non-sense
it doesnt matter if the poll is representative or not, it still proves that the claim, everybody feels that this game is grindy, is a lie