Players claiming hundreds (or more) of plots to block access to Diamonds

Community Support
143

If the Whales are being abusive to the players, the players will leave. If no one else is playing the game, the Whales will leave. There needs to be balance. Whales need to have fun, in a way that isn’t abusive to players, so players won’t leave. This is why MMOs now only sell Cosmetic stuff, and those that are ‘Pay to Win’ die very very quickly.

Edit: And yes, right now with this kinda stuff going on, I will declare that Plots are 100% Pay to Win. Especially if a Deluxe or Backer who get even more Plots when they buy than normal people. Because new planets COULD be made, we’ve A, haven’t seen that happen yet, and B, as far as I know it’s based on POPULATION, and not on RESOURCES PEOPLE CAN ACCESS.

This is why there are still only a very few T5 and T6 worlds. Cause it has next to no population. A portal hub or two, but not very many people actually LIVING there daily. People only pop in once a day, mine for a few hours, than leave. Or see it’s all gone or plotted, then leave.

That gives the planet low population, and the plotted diamonds can still be accessed by those that plotted them, so they aren’t running out. So even if every bit of Diamond got plotted around, people are still mining it, even if only a select few, and even more of a reason for people to not live there. So no new planets.

The Devs would have to manually spawn a new planet, and the same thing could happen there, then again, and again, and again, till we’re No Man’s Sky, with lots of empty planets and rarely ever seeing more than 1 person every week.

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nah you wont quit. You will still be here.

same with the wierd pony dude, you will complain and cry… say you will quit but nah you will still play. I call your bluff

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145

I think the most annoying part about this is gonna be running into the large plotted off areas accidentally after you’ve already dug to the required elevation. But one way to avoid this is to hit the plot viewer button before you dig. Thats why i think these blocked off areas shouldnt show up on the atlas at all.

The amount of people willing to spend that much money on plots to block off resources wont be that big, and if it ever does get that big a new planet will be spawned by then.

This just shows people you need to start settling on these t5+ planet surfaces so the land below is reserved. Plop down in the middle of hotspots and people will be less likely to claim these underground mines

146

I’m gonna pitch back in to this as well.

I would like people to look at this issue from the following perspectives, as this is how I see it.

A kid (your kid) has saved pocket money to spend the £30 or or whatever on this game, just to find that a very small number of people (likely adults) with disposable cash have blocked off a significant percentage of an essential (going by the game set up) resource.

Are we saying that is an OK thing to do? I’m all for a bit of competition, but that is very skewed.

Or another way:

You saved for years to go a special holiday to a beautiful tropical island, that is advertised as having magnificent beaches and views, you have seen the pictures. But when you arrive some ‘entrepreneur’ has built a 10 foot wall 100m inland from the beaches 75% of the way around the island and won’t let you in.

Is that the kind of attitude we want to support?

@james I would really like some input from the devs on this issue, as I think there is a significant amount of people playing that, if this is the attitude that’s being promoted, then would not wish to invest as much, if any more, time playing.

Which would suck, as for the most part I really enjoy Boundless, but I can’t stick with something that promotes this type of thinking.

PS, as an interim ‘fix’ not allowing the bottom 2 plot levels of a planet to be plotted maybe a good compromise.

Apologise for the length of this post.

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148

I get what youre saying but it comes back to economy and thats what they base this game around. It’s kind of like people controlling resource rich land in real life as well. If that land is unowned anyone could gather oil. But once someone actually claims that land its theirs and they can gather it freely.

You really don’t need to buy cubits to do this. I havent bought cubits and i got ~400 plots, maybe more across 4 characters and probably enough cubits to buy more plots. Thats enough to reserve a mine myself, a small one, but its possible. But with those 400 plots i can reserve a 400 plot area on the surface and they wont be able to build a mine below me

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Its legal in the game, but i feel its very selfish to do such thing.
Just make others harder to gather gems.

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150

call whatever you want it is easy to see you don’t want them to stop you from doing this garbage that you are doing!

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Just a preface y’all, keep it civil and don’t attack each other. If I see any more name calling and flaming I’ll lock the thread. Temp bans could follow.

And honestly, it’s nothing to add additional blast worlds to the universe. A lot of people are investing tons of plots to lock down resources who may be quite dissapointed when their investment is undermined by new blast worlds going live.

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152

There is something you and everyone else in this thread is forgetting. Boundless doesn’t have millions of players, or hundreds of thousands, or tens of thousands, or thousands. The game has barely hundreds of people playing. So low number of players, and this is ALREADY an Issue.

What about when the game gets popular? What about when the game finally markets itself? What about when a Big Update happens and draws in thousands and hundreds of thousands of players? 1 whale, 10 whales, even few dozen whales that exist right now isn’t an issue. But what about thousands of people that can happily drop half their paycheck each month on Plots, over new players, or mid level players that can’t even reach max level?

Especially when Regen still hasn’t even been fixed, as far as I know, and still have many millions of resource blocks waiting to regen. On top of players containing where they respawn. At what point does it have to reach, before a new planet spawns? The game servers already crash a lot on some planets, and most planets can’t even hold 100 people at once. Will the game be stable if a flood of whales show up and suddenly having dozens of planets spawning within days?

What about when the game finally gets a population boost of a couple hundred thousand players? Will the server be able to handle going from 42 planets, to about 2500+ planets?

I mean, just look at the numbers. If each planet is meant to only hold 100 players, (Which planets actually can’t right now, 80 is the max I think), then just for 100,000 daily players, there would need to be, at the very least with 100 people on each planet, 1,000 planets, and players wouldn’t be able to move around or switch planets since they were all full. To cut the population in half across all planets, you’d need double that, to 2,000 planets with 50 people on each.

And with those numbers, there are a high chance of many groups, guilds, or whales controlling all the resources on each of those planets, spawning in even more planets on top of it all.

Could the server hold that many planets, and players? And all the Plots, Machines, shops, Loot Drops, Regen, monsters, meteors, and everything else all running at the same time?

Edit: My point is, if it’s already running into issues on the smallest scale possible, why do you think it won’t be an issue when you scale it up?

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A greater following will simply have to be accompanied by more servers. More worlds. The universe is designed to scale with its base. If whale players buy up 10 worlds, 30 more worlds can pop up no problem.

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154

I dont see a problem with a bunch of people dropping thousands of dollars into the game. That only helps the game imo. And by the time the game gets that huge private servers will likely be implemented and people will branch off to those

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155

Guys, isn’t there a chisel quirk that can turn another gem into diamonds…?

I hope the whales buy all our current planets and then we get 500 more!

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156

Well put.

The devs will and do allow it. It makes them more money. That makes their input on the matter a bit biased.

This is a community issue. No matter what the devs say. Just be aware, that some players that run across a cubed out resource while they are looking for said resource will feel like you are causing them grief. That you are griefing them. That you are a griefer.

Edit: Changed “every player” to “some players”

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Then it appears we need more diamond planets. Simple as that. I don’t know how bad the issue is as I am not mining diamond currently.

A smarter solution is random planets that appear for awhile then disappear, this would create rushes but remove any longterm stagnation

An even smarter solution, a collection of planets that cannot be plotted at all, save perhaps a single gateway into them.

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158

Having a 10x10 plot diamond area blocked off isn’t that much of an issue, when nearly a third of the planet has diamonds. I have no problems getting a few hundred diamonds an hour with the planet destroyed as it is.

Buying plots is becoming less of an issue as time passes, since players naturally have more the longer they play. I have earned over 4.5k right now and have the cubits saved to have over 5k. I bought 160 when they became available and used them to help secure a couple of my friend’s building sites. Now, I have over 2k unused plots.

There are a lot of people with far more time spent and better backer perks than me in this game. So your “whales” aren’t really a concern to some of us. And if they used their plots to make community mines, they could even make the game a better place.

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Untrue, I’ve come across cubed out resources and did not feel I was being griefed. Never once did the thought of “Hey, this person is griefing me” enter my mind.

I picked a different direction and continued my search. Overall it had zero impact on my enjoyment of the game or my ability to find the resource I was looking for. It just took me a bit longer to get what i was mining for.

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160

point taken. edited to “some players”

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161

Hundreds of plots is nothing.
I will start to worry when someone claim few thousands at diamond spawn altitude.

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Its impossible to do on serp, beacons are everywhere, so they cant close up areas without surrounding peoples beacons.

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  1. I see very little difference between a player plotting a mountain to build a base versus plotting a mountain to reserve the gems inside. Both restrict other players from accessing to the blocks + resources within the beacon.

  2. I’ve just explored a location on Serpensarindi that contains many plots underground and I was easily able to get inside the plots. (So it’s not even currently limiting access.)

  3. They’ve plotted a tiny fraction of the world. There are many many other locations that contain gems ores on the planet. They’re a long way from monopolising the resource.

  4. The issue with the red gleam was that it was only found in a tiny number of locations on the world. This was never deliberate, but rather a side effect of a particular biome only appearing very infrequently. So in this case it was possible to monopolise a resource / block. The point of learning was that we needed to make sure future worlds couldn’t be easily monopolised. (Red gleam was part of a prefab that was instanced rarely, but the graves with the yellow gleam were very common.)

  5. We (the developers) need to make sure that everyone can continue to find resources.

  6. But there is an argument that there is an economy in the game and we should leave the economy to work. If a resource is scarce its price goes up. If a resource is monopolised its price goes up. But if demand contracts then the price falls. We have already seen this in other resources.

    For example, what will happen to the price of the spooky seeds once the event completes? There is zero supply at this point. The price will gradually increase. Should we instantly spawn more spooky seeds when new players complain that they can’t afford them or find them? Or is this a benefit for the players who collected the seeds during the event?

  7. Assuming that there remains many other locations that can be mined for resources, then I see no problem with a player claiming a portion of the world for mining (or building). If we were ever to get to the point where a resource was somehow unavailable, when by design it was supposed to be available, unlike the Spooky seeds, then we would introduce a new world. This is already part of the design and implementation. New worlds are generated based on concurrent population, beacon coverage, and some other heuristics.

  8. There are many many plotting pattens that could be considered antisocial:

    • attempting to plot the entire world at the top of the world.
    • attempting to plot the entire world at sea level.
    • attempting to build a wall across an entire world.
    • attempting to block access to a particular resource.
    • etc

    Should the game ban all of these? They seem to be extremely challenging to even realise.

Now - that all said…

IMO this is unexplored territory. We can’t predict exactly what players will do, will enjoy, will hate. It’s a universal shared voxel sandbox MMO with many autonomous entities running around and interacting. We tried to put in systems (beacons, regen, redistribution, etc) to keep the game fair. I’m sure we’ll need to keep iterating as we learn more about what players do in the game and how they push its boundaries.

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