I don’t even call its a grind now.
Its time wasting.
I will suggest most people to build / hunt first until the alpha beta end.
You most definelty upped the grind, and damn well meant to. The recipes tell us your intent clearly. You doubled and tripled the mat requirements on many recipes. You could have made recipes more complex but reduced the amounts to offset the complexity, but you didn’t. You just added the the additional requirements in and multiplied the input mats. Congrats you made the game even less fun to play. Players are understandably leaving because of it.
Every time to up the grind you drive away more builders and attract stat whores, and at the very core of what mmo is it all still revolvers around being a voxel building game. Drive away the builders and there won’t be nice stuff to look at.
The idea was put forward to use crappy materials instead in voice last night. Which lead to the coining of the phrase. “Boundless build what you can not what you want.”
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To continue off of @Karko 's point , how do I build THIS?
I’m talking about plot requirements… and the number of blocks needed just to make these blocks… and the Spark… and the tools I use along the way… and the food I’ll most certainly have to eat…
How many man-hours is something on this scale SUPPOSED to be? Because I feel like it’s completely out of reach unless I devote the next year of my life to mining coal, and… I’m not ready to do that.
And this is what most people settle for:
You guys have taken what is and should be an extraordinary building system, and basically kneecapped it by making it impossible for all but THE most dedicated players to build anything truly special within the span of one lifetime.
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While this is a valid point, to some extent, what do you think would be a reasonable timeframe for a single person working alone and acquiring and crafting all the materials by themselves, to build the city in your picture?
Two hours? A day? A month?
Edit: Moreover, do you really expect the majority of players to even want to build something of that scale by themselves?
I’m asking non-sarcastically. It’s hard to tell tone on the internet. 
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Probably a couple months of play time, if I had materials coming in (at least with relative ease). Once you get used to the idiosyncrasies of placing and chiseling blocks, the act of building is actually pretty smooth. Everyone used to ask about my old build on Epsilo and think that it must’ve taken forever to build, but my answer was usually, “3 hours of gathering, 1 hour of building.”
… It’s that other part that kills it. If I got one block of building material for every block I acquired out of the game world, it might add another month to this. As it stands, though, that’s nowhere near how the math works out in the end.
You may scoff at these numbers; other people may scoff at these numbers… But I know what I’ve seen.
To your point about what people actually want to build, as opposed to what they wind up building… I don’t think we’ll ever see that now, because there are so many constraints that none of us will ever have the freedom to just go anywhere our minds take us. What I CAN tell you is, if you were around back when I arrived in 2015, and people still had UNLIMITED blocks… even the most mediocre builds looked truly epic by today’s standards. That’s the only insight I can offer into other people’s intentions - I know that when they did have more freedom, they behaved quite differently from how they do now.
Edit: Another question comes to mind, from what you said:
Even if those players were in the minority… why would we necessarily want to stop them?
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Well, I believe you, people had the same reaction about my first proper build. I’ve had the game for a while, but I only really started playing a couple months before the wipe, not counting several attempts where I gave up in frustration because of network issues, until they smoothed out some of the issues for less-than-ideal internet plans.
The build I’m talking about, my little house on Elopor just prior to the wipe, took about 4 or 5 days, mostly spent gathering clay for bricks.
I don’t think it would be THAT much worse now. Maybe another day added, tops. Of course, plots felt a bit easier to get back then, so that might slow things down a bit further, but other than that… I legitimately don’t think it’s all that bad.
Now, that’s a medium sized build at best (400 plots or so), and your first picture was more of a megaproject. I honestly think that the developers envision that sort of thing as being more of a community effort than something that anyone can achieve easily by themselves. If everyone could build their own cities, all cities would feel empty.
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If everyone wants to build a cozy little town where everyone has their own cottage… let them.
If everyone wants to build a giant city that no one lives in… let them.
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I don’t think anyone is stopping them.
It’s just not, you know, easy.
I’m pretty sure once the rented planets are introduced, solo megaprojects will become more common (and probably easier).
That’s the argument right now… Plenty of us aren’t being stopped, per se, but we definitely feel like we’re being hindered beyond what we can tolerate. I happen to be one of those people.
“Not easy” to me feels like an understatement… It feels closer to “OMG IMPOSSIBLE NO EFFING WAY!!!1”.
This is my challenge to everyone who tells me that it’s not as difficult as I think… Give me half of your total plots, and give me half of what you net from gathering. Because if you don’t really care about that, then you could do the community and your planet’s landscape an incredible favor by passing that bounty on to someone who does care.
You are correct nothing is stopping a player from making a city like we were shown, it might take 2 years to gather everything , craft it and build it. But the expectation set when your promotional videos show these builds is not that they will be this time consuming. Maybe they should show what the average person can build in a month or so instead of these massive builds Show the small square builds and the starter homes that many players are in after a month of playing the game and not the collaberations of groups.
If this was a single player game or hosted on private servers there wouldn’t be an issue. But with MMO development, balancing playing styles is very different and while we’re playing in a sandbox, the sand isn’t always easy to get. Personally I enjoy the challenge, it makes even looking at huge builds feel all the more impressive. I could definitely understand how people might not like it, although I’m not sure if the game would be better if it were easier.
The game WAS easier, and it WAS better. That’s why people are upset.
Well, my long term house project will take 2400 plots or so by my estimation, once I get that done you can have the rest. 
I mentioned this on a different topic, but I think the developers are still finding the balance between the two extremes, the ‘creative mode’ type of game (where there’s very little gameplay involved and the game ends up being a sort of voxel based 3d modelling program rather than a game, which is not very financially viable, and the ‘hardcore mode’ extreme where you have to fight 500 waves of enemies to get a piece of wood, and everyone gets bored and leaves because it’s just impossible to do anything.
We’re still nowhere near either extreme, but the balance between the two may still need some tweaking to get to a level where the majority of players are comfortable with it.
If I had a plot for every time I got this excuse, I wouldn’t be asking for help. Not exaggerating. No one actually wants to give me 500 free plots and 20 smart stacks of bricks and, given the genuine difficulty in acquiring said plots/bricks, I can’t say I blame you or any one of them. We didn’t create this scarcity - it was inflicted upon us.
And I can’t tell you what would’ve been the best financial move overall, but I can speak for myself subjectively. That’s all we’ve been doing and all we really can do, but at least I can tell you how I behaved…
I’ve played Warframe on and off for almost 3 years now, and spent just under $300 over the initial cost of… nothing. (1049 hours)
I’ve played EVE Online for about the same amount of time, and spent a little over $200 beyond the cost of a starter package. (727 hours)
I’ve got 687 hours in Boundless, and I’ve spent… $0, since buying it in Early Access. The money is sitting in my wallet right now, but I think that the Gleam Club is a poor value, and I think the Cubits are overpriced.
I think the challenge is in actually creating the build and in the use of materials. The grind to make the materials does nothing to impress me. A building made exclusively out of gem blocks might be the most difficult in order to actually have the materials to build it, but that does not make it impressive or even pretty to me. I have seen some builds made out of rock, stone and timber that are very impressive. Much more than a gleam tower that is the capital of one planet, huge does not mean impressive.
I will have to disagree on your last point, I think it would make the game better to see more of the impressive builds and not fewer. I think it will also be better for the game if those builds happen in the public universe and we do not loose the people that want to build to a rented private universe. I will agree they should not be easy. but they should not be overly time consuming (measured in years not months). If they require years then I am probably out of the public universe and onto a rented one with whomever wants to go with me when they are offered.
I understand your frustration, and @Kal-El’s, but dialogues about how to get the balance back to such a point where it’s not skewed towards the ‘too difficult to be fun’ side would be more productive with suggestions within the current model for the game, because to be honest, ‘make it creative mode’ will just not happen at this point.
That’s why I asked what a reasonable timeframe would be to build a megaproject single-handedly in your opinion.
You said ‘a couple months of play time’ and by your estimation, at this point it would take a year. That, I think, is useful information for the developers to balance things better, rather than ‘let everyone have infinite free blocks’, which I just don’t see happening to be honest (and it would probably alienate a good portion of the players that enjoys playing with the economy side of things).
Another productive suggestion (made by several people), ‘instead of adding more materials to craft existing blocks, give us new blocks to craft with the unused materials’.
Now, creative mode-like unlimited building, outside of private worlds, I honestly don’t see how it could happen at this point.
Edit: And I personally would be bored with it, but I can only speak for myself. 
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And I’m telling you in all sincerity that I used to get by pretty well without unlimited blocks… but then they moved the goalposts on us…
Then I grumbled a little, but I adjusted to the new “normal”… and then it changed again.
This dialogue has been going on for a long time, and the end result has been a slow, steady march away from what I and other people have wanted for a very long time. I’m honestly done with productive dialogue - I’m just breaking stuff and hurling insults on my way out the door.
Goodbye Ingvar. Hope you find the game you are looking for.
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Me too. We’ll see how that goes.
I agree with your point and have made it myself. . add recipes and quit adding items to the existing ones. If they had not done that, I would have no problems (other than the introduced bugs) with the 199 release. If they think they need to tweak the number of bricks made in a batch, then tweak it, but I would have preferred they not add something else to the recipe. If they wanted another use for waxy earthyams create an alternative recipe for something that people are using that maybe has a high selling price to better balance the economy.
The thought that they might want to continue to change the recipes, adding things we might have been discarding like mud, I find very disheartening. Do I have to now save everything? If we all do that their metrics will say x is in abundant supply so we need to use it in a recipe. It creates a weird feedback loop.