Nerfing AoE would be great for other games! Because people would just play them instead.
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Itās true that if you want to maximize your fun value per unit of time that you should move from game to game and play just their juciest content.
But in this thread we are (now, I guess) talking about how to make Boundless sustainable and maximizing its fun is only part of the conversation. In a long-lived social system we must also consider fairness to be as fundamental as individualsā fun and the one sometimes comes at the expense of the other. Citizenship is all about accepting personal limitations for the greater good. On the other end of the spectrum would be individualism. Individualism is the flavor of modern western society so it makes sense that we are defaulting to that.
If you care only about personal fun then why not propose 4x4, 5x5, etc hammers; or infinity gauntlets that gather half the resources on the planet for you? Those sound very fun. But they arenāt very fair. I think the same applies to 3x3 but itās just a theory.
This thread started with hard data trying to show that AOE is the strongest stat in the game. There is probably room to shave its effects down while still maintaining that title. The net effect is that we make the game more fair without altering the stat hierarchy.
The ātake my ball and go homeā types who continually threaten to leave at any sign of balance change must remember their role as citizens in a living game. We need their side of the story (whatās fun for them) so that we can keep as much of it as possible when proposing changes. āI will quitā is far less helpful than āI require AOE to find gems but agree the backpacks full of rock and incidental alloy I bring home is a little ridiculous.ā
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^^^ patiently waiting for my plasma beam gun
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To demonstrate what I mean by smoothing out the curve here is a visual example of what it could look like by altering the existing values.
In this fictional version of the game the AOE caps out at 3-4x the power of unforged mundane tools vs the 6-8x we currently have.
Hereās what I changed as well as a comparison to reality
fictional AOE boon:
Tier 1: Random Adj, -40% dmg
Tier 2: 1x2, -35% dmg
Tier 3: 1x3, -50% dmg
Tier 4: 2x2, -40% dmg
Tier 5: 2x3, -70% dmg
The progression is changed so that at the lowest level you canāt rely on the AOE to tunnel but it does improve your DPS.
From there the AOE size scales more slowly and only caps out at 2x3 but ensures that you can always use the effect to dig optimal tunnels and maximize visibility of surrounding blocks.
I tune the damage debuff a little more aggressively to lower the steepness.
Iām not fully satisfied with this progression because you lose the visibility of 3x3 which players love and DPS calculations are not as precise as āhits to breakā so the damage debuff values likely need to be tuned better.
But it does show how you can keep the sense of progression while reducing the overall impact of the boon.
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I donāt think thatās true. āGather half the planetā is not fun, unless you only care about accumulating resource as quickly as possible. I think they nailed the effort:return and fun ratio with 3x3 being available but not consistently to everyone.
For the majority of time I played EA there was no 3x3, 1x3 was the max I could get, so Iāve played with a more limited toolset. I still donāt feel 3x3 is overpowered. Comparing it to the other things you cite feels like apples/oranges.
I could make sense of it perhaps by comparing 0 Agility walking to a grapple-specced explorer with max movement skills. When I do, I donāt feel the extra efficiency you worked for is unfair. Same for 3x3 AOE.
As others have said, thereād be a bigger mid-game wall without them. I donāt think it should be balanced/removed as a boon but if it was considered thereād need to be some other viable path to efficient mining.
I canāt even imagine having to smash all the rocks I want for building with a 1x1 hammer. 
Iād just give up.
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I donāt disagree with your data or results, AoE hammers are head and shoulders above everything else. And anybody without them is at a disadvantage in every sense of the word. But I would have to call this one working as intended.
Gather a ton of stuff to craft one, spend a ton of skill points to be able to craft one, build a ton of machinery to have the capability of making oneā¦ from the ground up youāre talking what, 100 hours from lvl 1 to being able to craft an AoE hammer if you start naked and receive zero help from others? Big effort, big prizes.
This game has already been balanced to a bloody pulp in its first months, please no more.
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Not intending to put words in their mouth but I think the OP was more suggesting that there is an exponential increase to benefit from the AOE vs other boons, at the moment. It is effectively a durability/speed/dps increase in a single boon, which is nice, of course; but itās peculiar that in a way itās the only boon to give you several benefits at the same time in this manner, I think.
I played in EA too; perhaps not as much as you and others, sure, but 200h is still a considerable amount of time to spend on an a given activity.
Personally, I didnāt completely mind the system of finding a specific gem to get a specific AOE shape, but I donāt feel that 3x1 or even 2x1 are underpowered even now. But they certainly arenāt attractive a lot of the time, compared to 3x3; at least with the way people selling forged tools go about getting their stats I suppose.
What I mean is that Iām quite happy to get those 3x1 or 2x1 when Iām forging myself now, and I really am not gonna bother aiming for any higher personally; I mostly only buy 3x3s because thatās what I usually see for sale and because when I have to save up coin for buying a hammer Iām weighing the benefit for how much more Iām paying for something like a 2x1 hammer for 13k and a 3x3 hammer for 16k, and this is as an example - after all, why would I buy the 2x1 in this case when I can save up a bit more?
However, I do understand where youāre coming from and yes I do agree there would be a bigger mid-game wall without AOE tools.
In addition like, @Krollbar mentions, I do agree with both you and them that we probably donāt need āyet anotherā re-balance of something like this. But, I do appreciate @a13o efforts in making this analysis and the points within the OP.
Edit: Oh, and I might add that I do use unforged gem and even iron hammers quite often still, though not as much for higher tier mining. 
Sometimes with speed brews but very often without any buffs. I do this because Iām a bit stingy and like to conserve my use of my best tools.
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Lots of good points there. I too conserve hammers if Iām not gem mining. With the forge fail rate Iāve had over time (hopefully not so much in future with decon resins) Iāve been using other AOE types for various tasks.
Like I said I think the thing is the relative availability to the average player. I donāt know about others but my coin has been spent and I can make just about enough for my own needs with a bit left over.
I reflect on the cumulative effort to get there when I think about it too. It feels nice to be rewarded with an occasionally more easy-going mining experience after all the work getting the character, machines, resources, etc. to required levels.
Absolutely agreed. They have uses. Iām just not sure 3x3 is that overpowered either. A bit shocking at first perhaps in comparison to prior experience. If I have big building projects in mind though I see big numbers ahead and am glad of some help. 
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Wanted to add visibility stats to this thread. This is the number of new blocks revealed with each hammer swing, assuming youāre using the tool to dig a straight tunnel.
1x2: reveals 8 new blocks (2 behind, 6 to the sides)
3x1: reveals 11 new blocks (3 behind, 8 to the sides)
Cross: reveals 13 new blocks (5 behind, 8 to the sides)
3x3: reveals 21 new blocks (9 behind, 12 to the sides)
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So you want AoE nerfed? Dont think many ppl will continue mining and will even quit the game. And every person less will hurt the economy.
You can think the other way round too: not nerf the higher-end AOE but buff the lower end AOE to bring the rest closer to the 3x3 in terms of efficiency.
I donāt know exactly what the OP wants to suggest with the data (since data can be used to suggest so much) but if the growth looks like this now, whatās it going to look like with blink/rift/dark tools? This is power creep territory, and personally I am interested in not seeing the game develop a power creep problem that means that at the lowest end you see the high end and give up because itās that much slower. Which I feel to some extent happens now if youāre solo/not reliant on economy - but thatās a gameplay choice, of course.
And consider the following: block and creature health already grow in a non-linear fashion. But they grow in specific amount increases as the data suggests (see below), one might thinkā¦ Yes, this is true, but that growth in raw health does not account for the growth in block/creature armour, those little shields that show under the hp bars. Thatās what makes the increase non-linear right now.
For reference, this is the data we have for raw block health (to my knowledge):
The values do grow fairly linearly and the trend shown is the dashed line.
Health data retrieved from: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xdktzlnyj2WOlcXAo2Ju--yf77ELcj5cD7l7iKRmjsQ/edit#gid=1660095036
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Problem with that sort of nerf is, is that it is going to be gosh darn hard to go back to slower ways of mining and it most certainly would not help me enjoy the game more.
Mining was boring when I couldnāt forge and didnāt have enough gems, if it had stayed boring I wouldāve accepted it, not sure if going back to that is something I can accept.
I feel they can do plenty of other things to try to balance it out but this is not one I would welcome and most certainly will lose interest since that is already sorta dwindling at the moment.
If they add new Lvl7/8 planets and the AoE hammers there become as slow there as regular iron hammers once were I can live with thatā¦
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I would support leaving the 3x3AOE alone and increasing the effectiveness of the lower tier tools to make a smoother curve. I think the divide is too large between the lower tools and the 3x3 forged tool. If you want to keep players interested, then I think improving the experience for the lower level players is better than nerfing the experience of the upper level players.
We seem to all get too twisted up with āend gameā when there really is no end game and we have yet to even see the higher tier planets. Without knowing how much effort it might take to gather on the higher tier planets, I think we should not be nerfing tools we might need in order to be effective.
I am also reading concerns about how the 3x3 AOE is affecting the economy. I think the economy is what the players make of it. I also think it is only one aspect of the game and should not be the determinant of how effective tools are. Keeping the game entertaining/fun for the larger percentage of players and in my opinion limiting the grind are more important than the developers trying to stimulate the current economy. I still read a lot about shops opening and people selling goods. Are the prices lower than when the game started? yes, but they are closer to the prices in EA. I think lower prices are good in general as it allows lower level players access to the market if they choose.
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There are still plenty of ways to balance AoE hammers without ārebalancing them,ā and Iām all for solutions like these.
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Add damage-shield protected blocks that cause damage or a debuff (or both) when you hit them. They could drop unique resources or have a special harvesting protocol such as you need Buff A, increased Resistance B, or Special Tool C (maybe only topaz hammers can damage the block without damaging youā¦ maybe hitting it with a hammer causes sparks/explosions but axes donātā¦) to harvest them.
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Better buffs for non-AoE toolsā¦ make tools that have a chance to self-repair each swing but that chance is decreased by the total number of blocks hit and if you hit more than 2 blocks there is a chance to take extra durability loss each swing with chance for catastrophic durability loss at the 9x mark.
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Brew effect that makes damage AoE; a different way to experience AoE.
Any other ideas for creative and interesting ways to tune AoE other than straight nerfs?
Dont change it at all, is best.
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Im gonna bring back the idea i made in a previous post on this. Leave aoe as it is up to this point in the game and only change how it works moving forward. Im basically at current āend gameā with enough rocks/gems to last me as long as i need. Nerfing how it is at this point would hurt new players more than players like me who are already at a comfortable point in the game.
What if all tiers of AoE were 3x3 but to get the effect to trigger you had to charge the hammer swing similar to charge shot? Higher tiers of AoE could improve the charge speed but never fully negate it.
This would break the link between AoE and action speed and largely fix the dps problem. The charge can follow its own rules for durability cost and energy per swing if need be, giving even more levers to balance them. It also gives the lower end access to the same AoE visibility immediately, with clear incentive to level up the effect.
As for my goal in this thread, my goal is to make Boundless an even better game than it already is. I presented data to start this discussion from a quantified argument rather than an emotional one
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why this silly ^#%$&# talk about nerfing this nerfing that, what is easy for some is harder for others. not everyone is experiencing the game at the same level!!! for godās sake people instead of all that nerf talk lets just enjoy the game shall we?
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What about the other way, all aoe tiers 3x3 and lessen the dmg debuff to that comes with it? 3x3 would be accessible to low lvl forgers.
Sorry but I only see that you want it nerfed for some reason. I dont rly want to hit blocks multiple times to break them and i want to do it fast.
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Charging hammer swings should be a thing!