agreed,FF14:arr you were able to make everything on one character and that economy worked just fine as not everyone was willing to put in that much effort to achieve endgame crafting (took ALOT of time and effort),you were rewarded for that effort that so many players weren’t willing to pour into it to reach that point,i pretty much was full time crafting except to help guildy’s with dungeons and raids and felt i was rewarded for my efforts.
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This guy right here knows what’s up.
To guide the progression like Terraria or something just doesn’t fit. You can buy any item if you save the coin. That throws a wrench in any planned progression. Keep it sandbox, let people determine their own limits and push them when they are ready.
Unfortunately, the hand-holding of other MMOs (and the lack of realization from a lot of players that Boundless is one) has neutered a lot of folks and they just don’t understand what a sandbox is supposed to be.
You build a castle with diamonds, I will fight wild monsters in the mud, that lady is going to dig to the bottom with copper, and that guy is going to set up a shop to sell us stuff so we can continue to do it all. Sandbox.
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It’ll all come down to the playerbase, and I think there’s a lot more people who want meaningful, non-grindy hamster wheel progression than a true sandbox here. Clearly, the devs can’t cater to both, or there wouldn’t be post after post here, discord, and the forums complainin’ about progression and the grind.
I don’t want to start a huge argument but I will offer an opinion for whatever it’s worth: I think the devs and several posts on this string have fallen into the same sort of trap right now: deciding how players should play this game. There’s a very significant difference between deciding how you think a game should be played vs deciding how others should play it. The devs seem to want us to play with their stuff their way, and some of the suggestions above are echoing that idea. People should be able to enjoy the game however they want. That doesn’t mean they get to grief anyone they come across, but it does mean that if they see a trick or technique that isn’t a cheat or an exploit, and calling bomb mining either of those is questionable at best, let players play. The devs nerfed bomb mining because it was a technique they hadn’t expected or planned for, but bomb mining doesn’t hurt anyone. It made a lot of folks “rich” in the game very quickly, but to be fair, they figured out how to do it, they worked together or worked like maniacs to get there first, and they “won” that race. So what? Doesn’t affect my game play. Doesn’t hurt the economy; quite the reverse. I can actually buy gems if I can earn enough coin. I won’t be able to do that if people can’t mine enough of them quickly enough to make them want to sell them at a reasonable price. It’s the same with progression. I jumped to Biitula as soon as I could and made that my home. I jumped to Serpensarindi as soon as I could too, but it took time to get the skills to go to the other T4 worlds. There’s already progression in the world, the scarcity of iron on the starter worlds is a prime perfectly acceptable example, but I want to choose how and when I go somewhere, not be locked into someone else’s idea of how I should get there.
This is all true, but where are those games now? FF11 died within a year I think? And had to be remade from the ground up to no longer support that. EQ1/2 and Lineage, along with other first mmos are all dead, with very little player base of dedicated players, but rarely any new people joining, and no progression and updates that draw in new people.
And while yes, in WoW your character can’t specialize in every profession, Professions aren’t the main point of the game, and you can’t level, and progress just by doing professions and not doing any combat at all.
This game promised that you could be a Gatherer and never need to craft. But you need an Alt to Craft for you, or a friend to do it for you. You can’t just be a Gatherer alone. You can’t even rely just on money, because no action in the game even Generates money. Doing specific quests do, which when done are gone, and you get 100c a day. So eventually you’ll run out of money to replace your tools and buy new items. It will take a few days, or weeks depending on how often or little you play, but eventually you’re forced to find a friend to share items with, or make an alt. you can’t do any job, alone. You need an alt, or another player.
No other successful, and still running game forces that on players, and those that did all died within a short time. So why are the Devs following in their footsteps?
You can make a lot of coins by selling shimmering orbs to crafters then use that coin to buy better tools from the crafters.
As I said, they were profitable when games cost less to develop because 500k players was enough, but as players wanted better graphics, cost increases, so the games were changed’to cater to casual players. Back in the day, they were extremely successful.
Because they are tryin’ to make it into a sandbox hybrid of interconnected economies. Can they pull it off? I dunno. Seems half the players think there’s not enough sandbox, and half of the players think there’s too much.
I’m in the middle, I want meaningful progression, and sandbox gameplay.
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I disagree with a lot of what you’ve said. I appreciate your tone and we certainly aren’t arguing, just offering differing points of view. I dunno how to quote in the forum so here we GO:
“People should be able to enjoy the game however they want.”
As long as it is fair to other players that might not be so far advanced. Read further.
“calling bomb mining either of those is questionable at best”
Bomb mining the way it was was absolutely an exploit. Key your skills in just right and you can game the mechanics that are supposed to prevent you from doing exactly what you are doing so that you can dodge the failsafe. That is an exploit. It is not exploiting a bug, but it is absolutely exploiting the developers’ totally human inability to foresee all possibilities. As I have said in other threads, leaving it the way it was kept the powerful players powerful, and the weak players weak. Buying your bomb mining gear from a powerful player who is making a profit from your inability to do it yourself ruins the economy in an instant.
This also addresses:
“Doesn’t hurt the economy; quite the reverse. I can actually buy gems if I can earn enough coin. I won’t be able to do that if people can’t mine enough of them quickly enough to make them want to sell them at a reasonable price.”
It does, as I just described. Also, they would have become a reasonable price at a reasonable time had this exploit not been discovered. They were intended to be difficult to achieve. The devs will release more content to expand the end game, but there was no intention for the current, limited end game to be so monopolized.
Thank you for reading my blog too.
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I’m under the impression what’s goin’ to happen is when private servers release, all the sandbox people are gonna leave the main game, and all the hamster wheel people are gonna be left with a hybrid sandbox/survival that they then would rather jus’ be turned into a dedicated survival voxel game with meaningful hamster wheel progression I 'spose.
“You can’t just be a Gatherer alone. You can’t even rely just on money, because no action in the game even Generates money.”
Wrong, I make enough money to get by just with the FOOTFALL mechanic. That is your income. It incentivizes building… which is supposed to be a huge portion of this game. Also you can grind out goods and sell them… What in the world are you even basing this statement on?
You kinda prove my point. Reread what you and I said.
“You can’t just be a Gatherer alone.” and “I make enough money to get by just with the FOOTFALL mechanic. That is your income. It incentivizes building”
Builder is not Gatherer. Whats more, what if your a Gatherer in the middle of the wild, and not connected to or near a Settlement?
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I sincerely hope the dev team knows that their community is not large enough to support that… Common ground must be found but it certainly does seem difficult…
God bless the devs, and Godspeed, gentlemen.
Which do you prefer, @CreativeWorlds? The free stuff or the working for stuff? Just curious.
Then play a solo game, not an MMO?
Well, as I said above, I would be okay with the gem grind and hammers if I could 1-shot the Tier 5 planet rocks.
I like minin’ when I can keep movin’, but when I’m forced to hit a block 2-3 times, I get bored, because I’m movin’ like a snail.
I like caves too, and think that Serp should have lots more of those instead of solid mountains.
A full on creative mode would bore me, but I also get tired of survival games that make you eat every 10 minutes, then drink, an’ manage all kinds of stuff. I’d rather food last hours, like in real-life.
Not sure if I answered your question.
Ya you sound like you want common ground, and that is what we need.
I will say that MMO end game stuff is usually a grind for a reason… And gems are that right now.
That is the only way to keep people playing. What would you do when you have 5000 of every gem and power coil and forge item because they only take one hit to break and the mats were easy and you did it in a weekend? Etc.
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Well, like I said about hammers breakin’ rocks, it’s the speed of progress.
Tunnels, strip mining, it’s all very slow and borin’ if it takes 3 hits to break a rock.
but 1-hit to break a rock is faster, more excitin’, and cave mining is most excitin’
With bombs people got all gems they needed in no-time.
I think it’s possible for my idea to be compatible with sandbox, as you’d still be able’to take Swift Iron Hammers to T6, but if you wanted to 1-shot rocks, you could tech up to T4, then T5 first, so those who want a slower but meaningful progression could do so.
Faster is not necessarily good. What would you do with 5000 of everything and no reason to go do it again? You’d find another game. They can’t develop to that end. That makes no sense.
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Same thing happened in ARK. The official servers suck(ed). It feels like that’s the same route this game is going as far as fun and sandbox goes.
I do actually agree with the premise that too tight a control becomes a chokehold, but I interpreted this discussion a little differently.
“People should NOT go from T3 to T5.”
I don’t agree with this.
“People should NOT go from T3 to T5 because T4 has nothing to offer.”
I do agree with this.
Currently, people are kinda feeling forced to go to t5 with basic iron hammers and mining out 360 diamonds or whatever because silver and gold don’t feel like worthy upgrades, and there’s nothing else they feel they can do until they get diamonds for power for titanium…we need steps in between.
I am all for the progression curve to be fleshed out, especially in a more obvious way. I really do think that centraforging was a good t4 step that was just too weird and complicated for people to want to bother (thus making them give up before ever trying and pushing it off til “endgame”, whatever that meant), but now power requirements were added for level 2 stuff so idk about that. I think the proposed ideas here are great, especially since it’s more in line with the way people “Expect” to progress.
Side note. Setimu666, I’m not entirely sure how bomb mining kept strong players strong and weak players weak. No, really, they were a powerful springboard that let weak players catch up fast, and I now feel that the ladder has been pulled up behind the players who already got ahead. the people who have literally thousands of gems still have their gems, and weaker newcomers will have a very hard time catching up (when previously they could start making themselves some bombs to do so). I guess that will even out…with time.
I think you actually meant, it kept people who were unwilling to use bombs for whatever reason from getting “ahead” vs people who were willing to use bombs. Accessibility was never the core issue since bombs were never some inaccessible elite thing.
I genuinely don’t have any problems with bomb mining being nerfed, but I would really rather not misrepresent them that way.
Finally,
I really don’t buy the argument that because it’s an mmorpg it must necessarily include hundreds to thousands of hours of grind-based content for the sake of “slower is better” to prevent people from moving on to other games.
Pacing is a question of “how things feel”, and if, to a majority of players, the feeling that whacking rock for hours and hours and hours is BS, then no amount of “well it’s an mmorpg suck it up buttercup” is going to salvage things. This is a sliding scale, neither extreme end is good. We are currently in a weird place where it probably feels great up until gems, then it suddenly feels really bad.
A proposal to make that step less of a cliff and more of a curve is absolutely good in my books.
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Yeah I agree with that also.
As for bomb mining, it seems that the margin between it and hammer mining was enormous and not just unbalanced, with an order of magnitude difference. That is not something that can continue no matter how fun the mechanic was. But as for mining progression I agree there needs to be a step in between slowly hitting blocks one at a time with an iron hammer and then hitting the diamond wall before being able to make titanium tools. The problem lies in the modifiers to the tools, gold and silver hammers don’t seem optimal to use and it would be better to remove the traits altogether and just have a linear scaling up to the diamond wall.
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