Please define "Grind" and your game play challenge around it

To be perfectly honest I don’t see much of anything in Boundless as “grindy”.

There are times that things just aren’t agreeing with me but I do something else when things get like that.

About the only thing that I find grindy in the slightest is trying to clear plots to start builds.
That’s pretty bearable and not a big deal in my eyes though.

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Like someone else said above most of it I like to do (repairing coils never tho!) but there are moments which are affected by mood and energy when I think “ugh, I need to make persisting pies but I have no flour, no fortified butter nor fortified milk, no purified milk and no milk in buckets, arghh, I hate the grind, I wanted to do other things!”.

I also sometimes call it the ‘boundless effect’, I want to quickly turn on a craft of some diamond hammers and then need to compact them, refine them, have no leather not enough bonding agent then notice some of my machines need repairing, etc., etc., etc.

Most of the time I just do it (and then go to bed too late, eat too late, etc.!) with no issue but sometimes “meh”…

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Can i suggest what i learned when i was a salesperson in a shop with a badly managed storage?

Lets say pies.

when you reach 5 or 10 of your last stack, start slowly producing the mats/steps before the finished product. That way you can spread the grind over a rather Long period instead of compacting it into one big grind feast.

Thats how i fare with all my consumables and it lessens the tedious “i have to do x now else z wont happen”.

I am sure you thought About that but just bringing it up :slight_smile:

The only grind i know in my 3 week gameplay is essence. That sh… Just take ages why adv. Coils also cant reduce craft times. I care less about spark coasts. In order to craft somthing all you need is that magical power number.

Sorry, its sounds more like a complaining.

yes, that’s normally how I always do stuff, I also try to always have all the in-between steps ready, but there are moments that, due to outside reasons, I somehow didn’t do those steps at the moment I should have and think I will do it next time and then forget.
Have to say tho it’s usually not with pies that this feeling happens, it’s most often when I’m building and running out of bricks for instance. Even tho I have a tendency to over produce bricks when I decide to use a certain colour, it can happen still!

And as I said it’s also very mood/energy related… It comes and goes!

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Keeping it short and sweet, a grind to me is something that you feel you are obliged to do repeatedly (internal obligation to attain a status/ fulfill a requirement/ etc) when all you really want to do is not do it (at least not frequently).

Do i have a good example? YES! Mining spicy beans because factoring their real cost into the price of the beacon fuel will inflate the price so that it won’t sell anymore (or that it’d make people think i am a one greedy Oortian), keeping the shop stand empty is just not something that i do in my shop, and mining for them repeatedly is just boring (especially when you need a few hundreds and all you get is 1 piece every couple of plants). For now though, the beacon fuel shop stands can stay empty for some time until i recharge (lol).

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Getting emeralds and amethyst now that’s a grind…every other gem is ok to get but these…and it is a grind to get a full stack.

Grind is an activity that require repetitive activity with no real variation for an extended period of time in order to gain something in game. Mining is a grind (especially with non AOE tools) as you hit rock over and over again in order to gain enough resources to actually craft or build. If the entire time I have to play is only repetitive activities then it is uninteresting and grind.

I think it is interesting that I read about players that are watching videos and listening to music while doing certain things in Boundless like mining. If the activity is not engaging enough for you to want to focus your attention on it then does it belong in a game that is supposed to be fun?

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I would say yes, to some extend.
Grind is everything that has to be done to get to a stage that is more rewarding.

So in order to reap the rewards, you have to grind or in RL words, work for it.
In my opinion anyways.

It is a tricky one to explain, why I enjoy it so much… it is like an altered state of consciousness almost when I do this, is the best way to put it. Like a trance in a way. I’ve done it ever since childhood with Tetris, figured out really quick back then that I could throw CDs in the stereo system and go into this mindless state where I felt so much better. I’m prone to bouts of depression and anxiety, and when I go into this state, that all melts away, even more than when I’m lost in a good game that requires active thought and concentration. Possibly part of why I’m so addicted to Boundless, since it lets me alternate between doing that and things involving more active thought with both being equally rewarding.

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MMO players generally will refer to this as “AFK mining” or “AFK leveling” etc (this is not the same as botting). It’s quite common for people to multi-task when they are doing certain activities in an a game. If BL adds more levels & activities, you will probably hear about more people doing this.

When I work, I usually have the following tabs/apps open: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Google, Spotify, Notepad, Task Manager, Youtube, Premiere, & sometimes a couple of other things.

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Oh but it is engaging enough. With regards to passive play. I consider this a sustained engagement. This passive gaming trend goes way back and although passive, is still a valid form of entertainment in a culture full of multitaskers. Our brains are more conditioned to be stimulated by various medias streaming in at once. I think you will see this trend even moreso when VR is the standard.
I don’t think many consider this passive form of gaming a grind in a negative connotation. It is leisurely and relaxing but still yeilds long term results, much like fishing or crafting on many MMO titles. In fact, I would argue that this is a necessary dynamic that modern MMOs should imbed into their games.

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I always listen to something while playing Boundless, WoW, or some sandbox games, personally.

Like, depending on my mood, I’ll listen to electro-swing when I’m feeling energetic, or relaxing music from video-games (like some themes from Witcher 3, like the one from Ard Skellig), or some sad musics when I’m feeling nostalgic. Or sometimes I just need some background chatter, so I’ll put Game Grumps compilations. As I write, I’m listening to one of those. :stuck_out_tongue:

What i’m saying is that I don’t see it as a way to make the grind more beareable, but to complement my mood.

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I personally love listening to music while playing Boundless.
It has nothing to do with not being engaged and more to due with it providing a focal point for me for when I am doing some tasks.

I’ll listen to all kinds of metal while mining and if I’m building I tend to go for more electronic music.

It relaxes me and let’s me just float away into the ether so to speak and get things done.

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We should have a thread where we share the musics we listen to depending on mood/activities on Boundless. :laughing:

< waits 5 minutes >

Ok, ok, I’ll do it.

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Wow… I greatly appreciate all the answers and people being willing to honestly share where they are. I think this area of grind is something we have to work on for sure in a way to lessen it… or at least be given back some of the developer perspective on why they think it is critical to Boundless.

Some of what was said is basically the same but how the point was approached and the selection of words I think really will be helpful in rounding things out. I’m really happy to see the responses…

If anyone else hasn’t shared their views of “grind” or specifically “boundless grind” then please do…

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I’ve played almost every major (and even some very minor) mmos. Grind is nothing new to me.

I have spent upwards of $1300 in Black Desert Online trying to avoid grind with “convenience” items. (You literally don’t get auto loot without a pet).

So as someone who fancies themselves as both able to deal with grind and knows it when they see it, this is what I see in boundless:

  1. Fueling portals is time-consuming. There should be a mechanism to connect a “network” of portals to a fuel source and command block. Maybe through an “interface” block. The guy behind Minecraft’s Applied Energistics mod had a bunch of great ideas about block interconnections and their configurations.
  2. Fueling beacons is time-consuming. Same problem as above.
  3. Forging anything makes me want to take a melon baller to my eyeballs. It’s not the RNG. I’d rather just slap the materials in the system, push a button, and have it spit out a tool and I push either “deconstruct”, “set”, or “keep”.
  4. Moving plots and beacons between players is the worst. My wife and I did that last night and it was the worst. The worst. It would be super if we could just have a tab that says “TRANSFER OWENERSHIP TO WHICH PERSON WITH FULL PERMISSIONS”. You click and it’s done.
  5. searching for items from any shop stand is impossible. It’s a galatic flea market and no one has anything you want. I proposed this in another thread, but we need a block that searches, once it finds you can warp directly to the item it found for a moderate resource cost.

I have other ideas but those are general improvement. These are the worst grind elements as someone who is on their 4th or 5th skill page. I do recall the trudge from 20-40 was especially brutal until I started doing group hunts.

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Uh… I don’t think this means what you think it means. AFK very specifically means AWAY FROM KEYBOARD. This is absolutely botting. If someone says they are AFK Mining or AFK Leveling, that means they aren’t actually sitting down at the computer at the time they are doing it. Some games have built in scripting that allow for this to be done legitimately, but in other games this absolutely means botting.

  1. Agreed
  2. Agreed
  3. I rather enjoy forging, I just wish there was a little bit more control involved and less RNG. But perhaps a mechanic that would allow you to “Save” a forge so you can replicate an identical forge again later could be interesting. Then the goal would be to capture a perfect forge and save it, so forging would still be exciting, but you could get rid of the grindy parts by allowing players to replicate past successes (save should consume all materials so there is a cost to saving, but allows for unlimited reproduction of that process later). We could even take this a step further and have it calculate out the exact material costs so forgers could compare recipes and better determine the true cost of crafting and best approaches to crafting without having to be excel warriors.
  4. Agreed, there really should be a beacon transfer option.
  5. Agreed, but to simplify things, it would be great if it just used the normal in-game tracking feature and simply placed a waypoint on the nearest desired loot you searched for. That should give you what you want and make development significantly easier since all of the mechanics already exist in the game.

I know what it means “literally”. However, it’s a term that everyone uses in the big MMOs to refer to a mind-numbing task that they are going to do for hours while they watch YT or do something else…with all windows open simultaneously.
Botting is completely different & will get you an insta-ban in most games. <-- usually a script of some sort to speed up a process or to run while you aren’t there (literally AFK).

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