I satarted doing this on my own, when i created my first alt it was a crafter. First thing he did was process a lot of materials, including stone, that I had been hoarding as I learned how to play and level up my main.
OK my crafter out leveled my main like, immediately. I didn’t even know we had XP buffs at that point. My reaction to this? Made a miner alt a couple weeks ahead of schedule =D Duh! No need to level up my crafter so it was mining time and since then my crafter has always had the most/highest levels and XP gain of any character.
When I moved and built a larger workshop, and after i found out what ‘coils’ were, I put in 20-ish tables and 6 refineries. It quickly became clear that the refiners were a bottleneck so the first and last rebuild of that workshop included 18 refiners.
I wasn’t breaking anything down to numbers. I wasn’t trying to game the system. I have more plots than I have building ideas right now. But apparently I’ve been a dirty exploiter from day 1. I mean, for <some deity’s> sake this sudden uproar and outcry about how this has been an ‘exploit’ all along coming now from the development team as well has certainly put me on a sharp edge regarding this entire ecosystem.
Nobody is being hurt here, except maybe the devs. And some of the same people (I’m sorry but …) who get upset that others who put in more time, attention, or effort have more than them in the game.
Why would there be any need for this? Who is being hurt by it? I mean honestly:
This is literally weeks of planning, tens of hours of work just to set up. Hours of clicking the queues. It requires a large ‘investment’ in plots to set up as well as the coin and time spent on the tools and the logistics.
Why would you not want to reward this player’s dedication to their end goal, and success in a huge logistical challenge?
I can only think of one reason that this would be a problem.
No? I’m at a total loss then as to why you wold find this to be a negative or exploitative behavior.
The player envy and other negative emotions that seem to have whipped this up into a sort of frenzy, and it seems very few people were aware of a participated in the discussion here in the last few weeks regarding the number of players who would like to see stone crafting times reduced, and stated repeatedly that they would be willing to sacrifice some XP to do it.
Somehow there’s no mention of this conversation which was in a thread that went to hundreds of posts. Just a bunch of sudden, frequently hypocritical, hype and anger on the forums. “I did it just to prove it’s wrong” type of rhetoric. People are presenting random data points with little to no context
This is the path that quickly devolve the whole thing into the mess that’s on display (again) in some of these threads.
I mean, this mess is a social issue, and boundless is full of mechanisms that enforce social play. And right now, yes wholly my obviously debatable opinion, the community here is not healthy. Many won’t care to spend too much time on a community where they are challenged regularly for their right to have an opinion, rather than their actual input or opinion.
I know this post will seem borderline or completely off topic to some and I apologize for that but it’s straight on topic of “how this came to be a giant problem” because in my opinion, and taking james’ word that this is not a decision driven by over-production of cubits, the largest problem here is not a problem with rebalancing the experience curve.
The discussion of “the current meta” vs ‘exploit’ will continue and the root cause may be contention over this:
This needs to either be thoroughly discussed until the players understand that this normal RPG mechanic is not encouraged here, and/or why. If this is a fundamental philosphy of game development here there could be very productive conversation. And this could be targeted.
Otherwise, we’re going to have this same conversation here in a few days, weeks, or whatever whatever when the “new meta” is developed. You can cut it off because many players will know from day 1 that they aren’t interested in a game where participating in all aspects of the game is actively discouraged.
Any of reworking the skill trees, splitting with attributes vs. skills, expanding single character development potential, and many other ideas I would never conceive of can be brought to bear on the issue without the fruitless runaround and generation of bad feelings that is happening by addressing the symptoms of this one at a time, ‘exploit’ after ‘explot’ over many months or years of endless hard feelings all around.
The game requires alts to experience even a medium portion of the full range of game play. But the current alting vs skill sheets option set are both limited in different ways. The end of the matter, though, for me and many others is that being required to replay the first 50 - 80 hours of game play at a “natural” new player pace even 4-6 times to have enough skill sheets and skill points to ‘grind’ efficiently and still leave room for experimentation or growth is not an acceptable requirement.
To be fair there are certainly a host of stereotypes applicable to what’s happening with boundless right now. It’s a turning point in the evolution of the product.
Anyways I’m afraid to even scroll up and see how long this has gotten. I appreciate that this is breaking out into some cooler and more focused discussions right now but I do feel like the whole thing is, really, a short term distraction from some very critical issues.