Of cats(devs) and mice(players) - which changes displease you?

my big concern is the devs love for long #@!! timers i could see the farming update being a big flop if say you had to wait 8Hr’s for your dye plant to “grow”

I am betting you will wait days for your plants to reach full maturity. You might be able to harvest early for a very reduced yield, but I am thinking days not hours. Also maintaining the crops. We did get a pic of a spitter watering can. Might need to water plants to either keep them alive or to make them grow faster.

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and i think that may drive people away it was not so bad during early access but each update has been getting worse and worse it was someting i even sayed back when i loved the game “boundless is a game you play on the side while playing a better more engaging game”

i guess this can also get added to the “what changes displease me” thing but the fact that say i plant some corps or set things to craft and the timer is so long that there is nothing else viable to do other then logging off and playing a different game just seems like a huge flaw

it was kind of what drove me to another MMO when i was still semi playing i would set things to mass craft log off and be like “ok what now” i then started playing WoW free mode to fill that mmo gap boundless was leaveing next thing i know the money i was giveing to the devs for GC is now going to a WoW sub

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If we can bring water and make a pond and it not disappear as we use it for irrigation that would make it okay, but if I have to go and water plants every day for three, four or more days I can’t see me doing much farming.

And I want more than dyes, I would like to see new food items that don’t require so many steps and so long for them to cook.

I guess in time we will find out. Crossing fingers and toes we get food also.

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This is I believe the problem. I have no doubt this game would do very well if it wasn’t for those barriers.

The biggest thing I hear driving players away is the excessive mat requirements and the recipe complexity.

When I talk about this game to others who haven’t played it I get the response of “yeah, I looked at that, but I don’t like how the characters look” and I’ve mentioned it to quite a few ppl.
So they don’t bother even trying.

I keep saying humans are a vain bunch of creatures, but it is indeed important.

But I think the mats and recipes are the more pressing issue.

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If I were to guess, I think farming plants will have to be watered once every game day for about 40 game days, which will translate to (how long is a game day? One real world hour?) water once every hour for 40 hours. Good guess?

The pond thing I loved with the ever compared Minecraft. Easy and casual and a viable and real farming technique.

Not possible with all plants as waterlogging roots is a thing.

Some of my favorite games are the Harvest Moon series, Story of Seasons, and Stardew Valley.
Those crops get watered every day. Stardew Valley made it easier by adding a sprinkler.
They reach maturity, harvest, repeat as needed. Certain crops which I love reach maturity, then continue to put out more produce every x days. Like tomatoes or berries. Things similar to carrots obviously can’t continually produce crops without having to replant.

Obviously these games don’t keep the timer going when you close out, so I feel there should be some grace period between waterings in Boundless.

I give my real plants coffee grounds to keep them happy. c_c

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They must be really healthy! :joy:

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Had to cut back the pothos plant in the laundry room. It was taking over and I feared it would soon become sentient.

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Yeah agreed, thats a huge part of creating interactive content. Its great seeing people look at things ive built, but outside of portals amd shop stands, thats literally all they can do, look at it (maybe slides, not really a game changer). Even something as simple as a path that lights up from pressure plates when someome runs over them would be cool. Anything that someone else can really interact with and does something with other player input.

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Not sure where Aenea’s post is in the stack but YES programmable block / logic blocks would be amazing. Just amazing. $50 to the dev who gets that feature added to the list hehe.

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Boundless needs note blocks too… play a merry little tune as you stroll through town. Or just let Fortnite out do you lol.

Not getting a major buff is not a punishment. I have played 99% of my time in boundless without any buffs (even after the update since I am rarely aligned to one guild long enough for the buffs to reset). Not having them has little measurable impact on my game-play (mostly solo player, occasionally playing with my wife or tagging along on a hunt for loot). My wife and I formed a guild and can fuel the minor buffs without issue (we choose not too all the time due to busy weeks in RL). The minor buffs serve us just fine, nice little boosts to our gameplay but honestly the impact is still small when we don’t have them.

edit, I posted before I finished reading the discussion, so feel free to ignore my thoughts.

Man I know how that conversation went, lol

My friend, after I mention Boundless: “Oh, is that the game where your character is a monster?” “A rock monster thingy.” “Is there customization?” “Just that?” “So you have to be a naked rock monster.” “Eh.”

My friend, upon seeing me running around gathering shadow orbs for marble: “Why are you grabbing so many mushrooms?” “What is the recipe like?” “ALL those steps?? to make 50 blocks only??” under her breath “what the ■■■■”

…Well, I can’t say that was unexpected tbh.


Uh, anyway to the topic… I kinda feel like Boundless is in a situation where the devs have created a hydra (centraforge) and everything from that point on, balance-wise, has sort of gotten out of hand.

The hydra is destroying the city (dev’s intended game balance). On one side, the devs are trying to cut off its heads (bomb mining nerf, stone exp nerf- both these things were primarily pushed to OP levels by centraforge). On the other side, a vocal group of people are cheering for Bitey because screw that city, the taxes were too high!! Bitey is letting us make our own better city now!!

For this mouse, personally, I think the building game could be a lot easier and the mmorpgame could be a lot tougher. As in, rebalance building/gathering flows to be more in-line with other voxel sandboxes and then implement more rpg elements like the titans, dungeons, quests, etc. with combat/exploration having a much steeper vertical progression. So the updates I liked were the exoworlds being nontrivial to travel to, and so on. And the updates I disliked were the ones that rebalanced building toward being even more time-consuming and complex than it already is.

Either way…I’m still here. And will continue to hope for a renaissance, I suppose.

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I like the hydra vs difficulty analogy. Most people like for their games to be “challenging,” not “hard.” People want parts of the game to require skill, and feel worth accomplishing - remember the first time you killed Bowzer in Mario Bros? That’s a lot more fun than harvesting 2,000 wax yams… The crowd that likes their video game to be a 2nd full time job is ultra-small.

Also, if your game is to the point where it’s worth botting there is something fundamentally wrong with your game. Games should be fun to play, not fun to bot.

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my self i dont even mind it i used to play eve online all the time and that game really is a full time job the thing is tho its like working at a lego store(eve online) vs working at walmart (boundless) if the game had atlest fun gameplay elements or a haif decent audio/visual style it would not be so bad but my self i had to spend a good hour or so just going into the boundless folder and ripping out most of the “sound effect” files and toneing down alot of the god ray and lighting effects so they would not hurt my eyes on some worlds so when i was done i was playing a slighty better looking version of minecraft with spotify runing for sound lol

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I’m still rooting for Bitey. Bitey is my friend. Strangely though, I think Bitey was entirely intentional. It makes boundless a bit different from other voxels.

I think the real issue isn’t even Bitey but the reason behind why people are rooting for Bitey. Think of how much help a Hydra would be in building a city if it was working as intended.

World of Warcraft was my 2nd full time job back in the day, it was fun for a while.

One thing that kills me about Boundless though -the devs could literally say tomorrow, “We have removed the ability to break dirt with a hammer from the game. We did it because… balance.” and you’d get a significant crowd cheering, “Hooray! Way to go, Devs! Good job!”

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this its way i dont really comment on test/release builds anymore cuz unless its someting huge like “the warp opening skill is now only gained at level 40+” you are considered toxic and need to give them a brake cuz they are a “indie” company

i think what people need to understand is there are different flavors of toxicity you dont have to say things like “uninstall the game idiot” or “this update is garbage anyone who likes it is trash” to be toxic i have seen some threads that would for sure turn away alot of potential new players

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It’s disgusting to agree with this but there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying here.

Centraforge didn’t even get proper testing with a large enough group of players before the game was released. After all, it was released 1 month before the game’s launch and practically was the beginning of the head start for the game’s release.

A good example of taking a recipe and making into something that’s stupidly complex from what it was for absolutely no reason are the Brick Mix recipes. It takes Mud and Ash from what it use to be. It’s irrelevant that you get more bricks in a furnace compared to before that change because you have to acquire twice as many different ingredients.

Ash and Mud should have been used in brand new crafting recipes rather than being added to existing ones but the bullcrap excuse that was used was it was for balance. These kinds of decisions are being made that have drained the game of players slowly. Ash could have been left alone and if they knew they were going to do a farming update, then just leave the block alone for the time being. If people asked about it, then they could have said it’s a recipe for a new piece of content being released. That content being farming for some sort of fertilizer you can use on crops.

Mud could have had all kinds of various block designs made for it so people could build earthened structures that actually had some sort of texture or design to them. Kind of like an early building material in place of rock or wood. Plus there’s examples of stuff in real life that are made out of mud, such as buildings made in Iran or the middle east and a lot of them look pretty freaking cool too!

But instead, we got a change where ash and mud were added to the brick mixture recipes because of “balance”. Same thing was for Wax. It was added to decorative rock and wood recipes for absolutely no reason.

The problem I’ve been having with the developers is how they make these really bizarre changes to the game and call it balance changes. It makes me feel like they’ve lost touch with how people are playing the game and no amount of data on a screen is going to really outline the reasoning behind why players are doing what they’re doing.

The XP Farms with crafting tables and stone crafting wasn’t done for any other reason besides getting more plots and leveling alts. It took a player a while to progress to that point. Most likely it meant they already were end game anyways. But nerfing the XP gain of stone crafting in half was for “balance”. On top of that Teaching Pies are pretty garbage and not worth crafting outside of getting rid of XP Death Penalty after a Hunt. Now we have a new XP farm with Peaty Soil and Earth Yams. The solution was one of two choices: don’t nerf XP gain or get rid of leveling in place of something else that would reward players better. They decided to nerf leveling.

Out of all of the decisions they’ve made in the name of balancing this game, they got rid of bomb mining. It was the single biggest contributing factor of the drop in players of the game. Lack of content was another. One of the things that I thought was nice about bomb mining was how it would allow you to get your resources that you wanted but didn’t have the clutter of rock drops filling the inventory with junk.

All I’ve seen them do is make the game more time consuming to get stuff done. A lot of the balance issues in the game are centered around multiple things that interact with one another. Centraforge is part of the problem, lack of content is another, recipe changes is one, removal of certain resource block gathering methods is another, and the overall seemingly wrong focus on things that aren’t problems by the developers are trends.

But I could very well be 100% wrong on everything here. I just don’t think keeping a blindfold on like some of the people on this forum do is helping at all.

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