I just have to say…in case the devs are watching…please don’t make it harder!!!
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I do also wanna clarify I’m not advocating for it to be harder necessarily. I’m just saying in my own personal experience as a new player, I feel a little dirty being able to easily aquire forged lucent gear. This is supposed to be end game gear. I can gather beans for 1 hour or less. And buy a pair of forged blink grapples if I wanted to. This isn’t saying I want the game to be harder, but just that some of this end game equipment Actually shouldn’t be as easy as it is to get. I wish there were things that were super rare and legendary. Things that not everyone can have. I feel like i shouldn’t already have end game gear after a couple weeks of playing.
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a plug?
10 chars
A plug and most of all a correction of the OP that it nowhere for sale!
‘shameless plug’ has a very negative meaning BTW…
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I disagree with a lot of that, sadly. Our philosophies and play style so I won’t argue anything regarding my personal experience. The malls being out of pies and brews once and my trouble finding a proper hammer - that I like, which is very hard - are my own problem.
As I mentioned in another comment, I built this idea around alleviating grind. Forget about the economy for a moment and imagine you’re on your own. Wouldn’t it be nice to get 100 teaching pies out of the whopping 476 (I think) sweet beans rather than 50? Mass crafts are just arbitrary round quantities that make sense either way. The devs have been doing an awesome job balancing mat values which continue to evolve with every couple updates.
This would just be another rebalancing to ease up on the daily grind for everyone, from new players getting more glue from their sap and bones to old players getting more hammers out of the diamonds they need to make the hammers.
And while demand for base mats would immediately decrease and bring their value down, I see the pros outweighing that con. For one, new players born into this system wouldn’t know the difference and would naturally take a different path while benefiting from the new production quantities of the early game craftables. They’ll have more of what they need to establish themselves and won’t feel as overwhelmed and quit the game before even experiencing all the great endgame perks.
Also, as I do firmly believe this and the many other reverberating effects would increase player retention by shortening the dull daily routines, the player base will gradually increase. That is what would ultimately cause the boost to the economy. You may buy all 100 of someone’s speed brews others will still get the same amount they always do, leaving more for the next guy. With more players we also get more active shops and increased demand. Supply will increase to meet demand, so demand for base mats will increase as well.
If you don’t consider what will change from current circumstances but instead think of the game having always been this way, what’s wrong with these quantities? If mat rarity becomes unbalanced, one or two updates later it’s fixed. I also recall James mentioning after the glass update that there could eventually be a mat cost overhaul- this is just another way to go about it.
With this idea building blocks will be cheaper. While production would yield the same output, the mats required for higher level blocks, like the bonding agents, would be included in what production is doubled so we’d be able to make more.
I’ve supported a lot of ideas for unique-ish or legendary items. To me the game’s greatest strength as an mmo is our unique builds. No other mmo has houses/mansions/castles/towers that only one player in the world owns. I think if they used that as inspiration for unique or semi-unique weapons, tools, and even consumables it would be one of the biggest game changers yet.
This all revolves around the age-old:
But if everything is easy, there’s no challenge.
Some people like this, some people don’t 
This is, as you rightly pointed out, not something we’ll ever agree upon. I like the balance in boundless. It feels like an achievement if i build something big. The same effort would feel less like an achievement to me if everything were much easier to get.
There’s an ever-growing battle within this game, of the people who prefer to go more the creative way, and people who like the survival aspect that’s accompanied by the grind. These people will never agree with eachother, because either route cancels out the other. We have to leave it up to the devs for them to decide if they stay the current course or change to a more creative game.
What you find dull routine, others might find a draw By changing the game to be more creative, you’ll surely gain more creative players, but you’ll lose the people who want to play the game for it’s challenge.
That’s not how an economy works 
More people in an economy doesn’t boost it. Assuming the same type of people join, the economy will still have the same supply and demand ratio’s.
This will essentially take gathering out of the economy. You’re talking about being overwhelmed as being a problem. Gathering is as simple as it gets. It’s far less overwhelming than all the crafting, the skills required, the machines, power and spark, etc. Sounds like this would have the exact opposite effect.
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I mean that’s kind of exactly how economies work. When there’s an influx of new paying customers, the established sellers can put in more work to try to meet demand but due to the law of diminishing returns (the increased work eating into their other tasks- opportunity cost), it’s more beneficial to society for new markets to rise.
New players selling base mats compete and drive prices down which can make it more economical for a high level player to buy and spend the time they would have been gathering on more profitable ventures. Or just enjoy more free time.
I think the fundamental disconnect comes from the idea you have that grinding in the game is not enjoyable.
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But new players won’t be new paying customers for a while. They will have to earn that money first by… You guessed it, selling things.
Literally everything you’re mentioning here is bad for new players
Lower base mat prices, as mentioned, cuts off a source of money for new players.
Anyway, if you don’t actually address all the arguments but just pick and choose 1, there’s no point in having an argument here.
576 actually, sigh…
Yes I would like that a lot. Tho I would like it more if we could farm them instead, or as well…
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I think the game is too Grundy too. I meant grindy but Grundy is funnier, thanks autocorrect.
Anyway, I wouldn’t change too many things at once. Try a few small changes and see how they play out first. Changing 20 inputs to a mathematical system (ie an economy) at the same time is a recipe for disaster.
My main suggestion would be to buff gatherers and farmers and explorers first. Miners and crafters already have it pretty good. And I don’t think any new players are crafting pies anyway.
I would start by increasing drop rates for things that come from gathering (beans etc), increase XP for gathering, and increase XP for farming and exploring. As-is, the game basically says “yeah you CAN do anything you want, but if you’re not mining and crafting, you’re doing it wrong, as demonstrated by the lack of XP”.
Increasing drop rates for gatherers and XP for exploring and farming should help everyone.
I also personally am opposed to guild buffs for crafting. It puts new players at EVEN MORE of a disadvantage. They can’t charge as low prices as established players. To avoid “nerfing” as a fix, I would suggest just giving everyone the equivalent of the level 3 spark buff and level 3 bonus consumables, thus leveling the playing field.
See how these changes go, then consider going further.
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I absolutely agree with all of this. I love mining and both mining and crafting can be OP for XP. But i also enjoy gathering and farming. Farming XP I don’t care too much about… but gathering… It’s such a huge part of the game and so necessary for so many things. The drop rates need to be increased, that’s a given. Considering how little you can collect in an hour… so to offset how much effort gathering takes, with an actual desire to spend an hour + doing it… at least an XP boost or some other incentive would be awesome.
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Just throwing my 2 cents in here.
(Even mentioned or not)
The thing is supply and demand. Thats the whole problem and its a community made problem.
Most of the day by day demand in most cases can’t be Crafted and put in shops because of a way to low supply.
Result of to many other shops buying the same mats.
Causing the “big” shops to go up in buy in prices to get the supply they need.
That results again in going up in price for the output as they need to cover the cost.
I had an exchange shop and trying to keep prices to low caused basically the reverse.
Trying to supply as mush by my self as i could as there where almost no (highly needed) mats coming in. Only ending up in always coin filled baskets and empty shop stands. Adding to that expanding with more “themed” shops. Kind of like @AeneaGames New Layden (back then) and Nova Golda has on trung (there are probably more with the same concept). Resulted also in almost always being empty.
My idea was making a profit of about 5-10 coin. Keeping up with buy in prices of most places adding 5-10 coin (as a max) after tax on sell price.
But low profit is very unreliable for big shops as some periods one type of mats keeps coming in and switches to a stop for a longer period. Causing empty stands afterwards. To combat that problem profit has to be more than just a few coin to keep the good rolling baskets filled for as long as they keep being supplied at a very good pace.
That said cutting craft prices doesn’t solve the “cost” problem in my eyes. Only thing that might solve it are more crafting possibilities for mats that are very cheap and easy to obtain and have no other function dan being placed down, minted, thrown away, sold or fill up storage space. Resulting in prices going up for those items to. And in a way helping “newbies” to get coin for most things they do.
Just how i see it. The supply has to be expanded. So that “useless” items get a demand.
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Sweet ideas. All for less of a grind. Not saying its bad. Just would be nice to be a touch less.
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Depends on what you define as easy versus so grindy and boring it drives players away from the game. I will agree that if we had 10,000 players a month instead of the few thousand James mentioned then there would be no basis for the argument that the game is too grindy. The number of players asking for a creative mode in order to escape from the grind also speaks somewhat to this problem. There are players that want creative to get colors that are not available or do not want to spend anytime doing anything but building so not all the demand for creative is due to grind.
And if that would mean more players for the game (cannot be positive it would but it might) then is that what is best for the long term survival of the game? The game has been grinding for almost two years now and I could argue has gotten more grindy not less as recipes were made more complex and more and more items require the forge and all the work it takes to get those ingredients. Since launch, the game has never been able to sustain the player increases it gets occasionally from things like the free weekend, farming, and now we seem to be losing players that started from the Humble Bumble sale. It seems the only reason that the numbers have not gone down any further is the gleambow event. But even then, Steam has not gotten more than 200 players since May 10th if I am reading the data points correctly. So maybe it is time to figure out if the changes the OP suggested would be better for the game and not necessarily better for the players already playing.
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I would not make changes until we have the store finders running for APIs type BUTT.
In my experience, there is a lot of supply and demand in the market, but they don’t connect with each other. Most of the supply that is below the market price is found in isolated and solitary beacons that you have to look for.
When BUTT, most of my income consisted of that, carring supply to demand and making a good profit.
Since it stopped working and we are waiting for the official API, I have not played a merchant role again, for example.
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You missed my point The point of that sentence is to say that whatever you make easier, makes it less challenging. Different people play this game for different reasons. Changing the game in either way will never please both camps, you’ll have losses with both changes.
Those are completely arbitrary numbers. You’re saying any game that has more than 10k players isn’t grindy. Why 10k? Where are you getting these numbers from? What makes 10k the marker for a game that’s grindy or not? Let’s not get into silly games of making up numbers and gate-keeping.
This i completely agree with. I have no problem with a creative mode. It would solve the issue for both sides. The grinders get what the grinders want, the creatives get what the creatives want. Getting a creative mode is a million times better a solution than arbitrarily increasing output.
I feel like there is a typo in here, so i may mis-understand, but you’re essentially saying, let’s try this solution because it might work? Sure, but it might also not work and drive people away. You want to make decisions for the game that benefit most if not all the playerbase. Not just half of them. Neither of us have any data to even guess how many people would benefit from these changes and how many won’t. Not even a poll would fix that, as there’s a vast majority of players who don’t visit here.
I’m not sure where you get your numbers from (would love to have a look), but i’m assuming that’s steam only, with very limited statistics. Neither of us have the full picture. It’s in the nature of MMO’s to have swingy playerbases. People come and go, they leave, return, new players join, old players quit. From my personal experience, i had a few builds in the top 20 prestige on 3 separate planets when i first started playing. I haven’t built there for ages, and now they’re much further down the charts. Meaning lots of people have built and have active beacons on those planets.
I also know that the aussie servers have had many more players since i started, and the TNT hub has had more open portals and more people coming through than ever.
However, this is anecdotal evidence. Neither of us have accurate enough data to see what’s really going on. Speculating on this is pointless.
Oh wow, that is so many beans
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