I mean, you obviously didn’t study stats with any rigor if you think this is a random sample. I don’t think this conversation needs to continue.
Idk what this means but it sounds like my kind of party
2 Likes
random just means u have a lack of pattern present. Is there some kind of filter that would keep players unhappy with the grind outside the forum? if so, the forum requirement would act selective then and only then
this is normal and happens to all games, as i stated in another topic, i can tell you a very succesfull game with a levelspan from 1 to 30 where are more accounts with level 1-5 then with level 5-30.
sure there could be done something to keep more ppl in, but at all this is a normal behavior.
Asked and answered why this poll isn’t random.
Edit: Might I direct you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)#Population_definition for more information on how effect samples for polling are made.
Indeed, my point is that Boundless is actually performing very well compared to other well known games, based on the data available.
1 Like
dude the people in the forum are random selection of the whole population by the closest definition of the term. Voluntary Participation in the poll might have an influence on the representativeness of this poll, so u cant win a court case just with this poll, but i doubt that people mostly participated in those 2 polls because they have a strong interest in a specific outcome… for me its representative enough to call some people out on the ■■■■ they were claiming
And, again, just so long as your claim is it is a representative selection of the forum, and that you understand that it is likely not a representative selection of the population of boundless then you are fine. I agree that some claims being made about the tenor of this forum are questionable, but we really can’t extrapolate that to the full population without a much more scientific poll (which, Devs, if you have the ability, would be something that might be helpful).
Get back on topic please guys, this isn’t a thread about whether polls are useful or not.
@Biv I will speak to a designer here and see if I can get someone to pop in.
4 Likes
Hello. Here are some thoughts:
There are two main reasons for the recipe changes we’ve made. Firstly it’s to make sure that all the items in the game have enough of a use and therefore a decent value. We don’t think it’s satisfying or fun to collect things in the game, but those things be worthless. Secondly it’s to ensure balance between different parts of the game and ensuring that everything is in equilibrium.
It is certainly not the intention to make the game harder or more “grindy”. We are currently focusing on how to reduce the mid-game slowness and I’ll post again about that next week. I do have sympathy with the argument that overall the recipe changes feel more negative than positive; however, we have made positive changes too, but they often get overlooked. For example large reductions in the costs to make brews, and the doubling of the durability of bombs to name two.
There are elements of chance throughout the game, as there are in most RPGs. Chance, and the ability to manage it, add interest to a mechanic and mean that players have to understand the system and actually “play” the game while forging. If the system was completely deterministic then you would read a wiki page something like “how to make an high level AoE hammer”, follow the steps exactly, and the result would be identical to everyone else’s result from the same guide. In my opinion that would be less interesting as you are following a series of pre-defined steps never having to think or adapt, and also would make a much narrower set of results.
In the broader world of games it can be very satisfying to play a pure strategy game, e.g. chess, but for it to fully work you need the interactions of an opponent to create the interesting situations that arise. A pure strategy single player game is in fact a puzzle, and will not produce endless interesting interactions. Contrast that with something like Backgammon (in my opinion one of the finest games of any type) where the synergy between luck and strategy create a sublime mix where sometimes a rookie can win a game against a master, and exciting things can happen to turn a game on its head, but sit and play for any length of time and the better player will come out on top.
Shimmering Orbs are one of the rarest drops in the game, and are needed for all the top level Forging ingredients, but not the low and mid ones. The idea being you can Forge happily without them, but to create the best items in the game you will need to source Shimmering Orbs.
Spitter Eyes can drop from Strong, Mighty and Elite spitters, they shouldn’t be easy to find, but shouldn’t be too hard either. On average only 10% of the Spitter Eyes that are gathered are used, so they are around.
What we’ve tried to achieve with the new Compound recipes is to change people’s relationship to them. We’ve realised that we made a mistake in the initial recipes and by making Pure Compounds so much easier to make than the others we made them the default option, and the other Compounds are barely being used. We believe it would be better to have people start with the Imperfect and Unstable Compounds, and add in the Pure ones at a higher level. It felt to us that just staring with Pures made for a slightly dull experience. So the change we were looking to make was to make the other Compounds easier to make, and the Pure ones harder. I stand by that intention, and we have achieved that for the Imperfect and Unstables; however, I do appreciate that the addition of an extra ingredient to the Pure Compounds is a bit of a blow.
On a more general point, I think our error in this regard is that we didn’t discuss this idea on the forums before we went ahead, we didn’t explain what we were trying to achieve, and we didn’t wait for feedback. We are juggling between fixing bugs, balancing the game, responding to feedback, and working on future features, and we’ve been pushing changes in without first fully assessing their impact on the community. This was ok during early access where the community were expecting rapid change and moving goalposts, but not so good now we are fully live with players expecting a more stable experience. We are currently tweaking our development processes to ensure we communicate these changes ahead of time, and fold in feedback before we make the changes rather than afterwards.
Forging is a mid and late game mechanic. That does beg the question when does the early game become the mid game, but our intention is that some players come to it as an alternative to material progression, whilst others come to it once they have got through most of the material progression. I believe this is the case at the moment, although I’d welcome feedback on it.
17 Likes
Thank you, this is an excellent breakdown of the forge, and your insight is appreciated. I do have a few questions/comments, though.
-
Regarding pure boon compound being the original baseline, here you state that you made a mistake by making the pure boon the baseline, but the patch notes listed that as a bug fix. While it ultimately doesn’t matter why the change was made, this gives the impression of bad-faith dialog from your side.
-
You state here that spitter eyes “shouldn’t be easy to find” but the game lists them as common crafting ingredients. To make a real world comparison, that is like saying Porche’s are “common cars” if you only look at neighborhoods where the median income is $1M. Is there any intention to either add a rarity(s) below common (“Natural” for example) or have tiered rarities (so spiiters eyes might be “T5 common” while also being “T4 uncommon” and “T3 rare”, for example). In the current system spitter eyes share a rarity with Peaty Soil (among numerous other things), which makes the rarity system fairly useless for figuring out what I can and cannot reasonably get as a player.
-
I agree that a purely formulaic forge would be boring/prone to wiking. However, any system is going to have a wiki, just now the wiki page reads “these are the steps for the best chance at a 3x3 hammer” vs. “this is how you make a 3x3 hammer.” I don’t think it is in the long term best interested of any game company to make decisions where obfuscating information from the players is a driving factor.
3A) Last night I played around with some unstable/imperfect boon 2 compounds just to see how it they felt and was fairly disappointed with the results. While the defects I rolled didn’t seem to be too bad, the quirks are often times crippling. If your plan is for those to be the baseline that new people to the forge play with, on top of the complexity of the forge, it seems like there is about a 20-25% chance the a quirk rolled is functionally “This item doesn’t work,” and I never saw a “quirk” that felt beneficial. Considering that the items that can offset quirk and defect points are also higher level, I’m not sure exactly what the goal is here. I stand by my comments in another thread that the drawback of using lower tier compounds, with the recipes as they are now, is enough of a drawback without also adding on these outside failure states. If the “bad” points have to stay, though, could they somehow be cleaned up/rolled into 1 thing instead of 2 if both of them as is are negatives.
3B) I find it extra annoying that only the boon points are affected by efficiency. Just feels like an extra kick in the teeth on top of an already complex and punishing system.
- What in your mind are the lines between early, mid, and late game and are those lines levels or something more complex tied to tech level, how skills are allocated, etc.?
Thank you for your response, and I hope communication like this is forthcoming in the future.
Edit: Wasn’t expecting the formatting to do that. Sorry if the partial indents make this harder to read.
1 Like
I don’t think the RNG mechanic obscures information (except maybe for not having a list of possible boons/etc shown somewhere in game - but that’s a tangential issue/UX “bug”):
As people begin to understand forging, they learn how that game works. Guides can give you guidelines for which pastes to use, their order, etc. They’ll help you get started, and better understand the forging game.
But it’s also not purely formulaic—great forgers know when to use different compounds/catalysts/etc, and that requires knowing the forging game pretty well. There’s a skill to it, and subsequent reward.
I may not have been clear on my point, and I appoligise for that. I don’t think that having the forge be RNG is obfuscating in-and-of itself. The way the dev made the point it sounded to me like he was saying “We don’t want to have a system that players can figure out” which I believe is a bad premise.
I do think you are over-stating skill here, as all of that information can be recorded as “if you see this, do this” type of notes. I’m sure the very best of the very best would find a way to stand out, but that is so few people that I don’t think it really bares talking about.
Ah! I interpreted it more as “we don’t want a system that is immediately obvious, and want players to be able to learn mechanics, so that they can derive enjoyment from mastering it”
Hmm, that’s pretty true of most game mechanics for nearly every game out there
Sorry your thread got completely de-railed after specifically asking this to not turn into a debate thread
Rubix cubes come to mind, for me, here, not just for the above point but also for “the system shouldn’t be immediately obvious.” I agree, for the record, that players should be able to discover mechanics and learn/become better. However, at a certain complexity threshold (which is different for all people), that person is going to throw their hands up and look for a guide. For the cube, it might be to look for matching corners and what to do once you have them, here it would be compound order, what to do if you have X boon in the bar, when to remove bad points, etc. In both cases, the person looking up the guide is going to be worse at the thing than the person that wrote the guide, but unless they are racing (not sure what a forge race would look like, but could be a cool competition, maybe), the ends results will be the same/similar/within the same rough bounds.
Have you considered a two-tier power system as I’ve written about in the past where one can get more assured outcomes in exchanged for a cap on potential item power?
I think it’s possible to do both and please both camps.
1 Like
Definitely agree with most of what you say there
but I think you’re implying that this is a bad thing? Personally, I think that aspect of it is fine! We do want some amount of predictability in what we create from forging (to have stable shops, etc)
I don’t think it detracts from the challenge (and enjoyment) of forging …at least, it certainly doesn’t for me. For example, there are several aspects of forging that I find interesting (and rewarding):
-
Optimizing approaches to forging a particular type of item (for example take Merlin’s 3x3 aoe guide—I guarantee that took a fair bit of trial & error, and a lot of prior knowledge of the mechanics). There are a lot of interesting constraints to juggle.
-
While forging, understanding when to chance things, or not (and apply removal compounds, etc)
-
Using unstable/etc compounds on items I don’t care about getting perfect, and seeing what weird combinations I get
-
Looking for relatively unused boons and seeing what items they synergize with (for example, @Havok40k’s example of using gold items and forging for 100% crit rate)
2 Likes
I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I think it’s great. I just want Dev clarity on this, because my interpretation of his remark is that they think it is a bad thing.
1 Like
Today I saw Quirks that made all blocks like ice, defects that negated the boons, items that only add forged effects at a certain time of day. I believe it’d be better if I didn’t have to deal with that rubbish. Honestly I felt less miserable about a forging outcome the time I hit exactly 0 Stability to see if the item survived and it didn’t.
The quirks and defects suck. Pushing a progression path involving them early on means players get items that suck early on, making an already bad experience worse. “Oh, I got a stupid quirk that means this item is only good 50% of the time. Still, at least I didn’t get any of the boons I wanted either! I must come back for more of this after I’ve enjoyed eating all this delicious barbed wire!”
3 Likes