I never said they are not, however the this new sentiment of “test the systems not the balance” is a departure since every patch I have been a part of they have taken balance concerns into consideration right along with bug testing, the rock xp compromise comes to mind. This was in reference to you stating that this should not be their primary concern, but in a full release MMO this very much should be their main concern. Loss of players can kill boundless so every patch that could cause that outcome should be addressed in respects to that. The population of the game is not exactly booming, I have seen private WOW servers with populations greater that Boundless. Ironically, these servers never introduce new content and just refine and make existing content better over the course of years and actually grow their populations. Additionally, Boundless is much more server intensive than pretty much any MMO out there and as such the need for concurrent players and spending is actually more important than for a game like WoW.
Lots of people are testing the systems right along with commenting on the balance.
Yeah we are so many steps away from my original post that things get muddled. I was originally talking about a productive way to read the complaints about the seed drop rate from farming. So when I am talking about how farming isn’t fun, I’m not saying that no one finds farming fun. I’m saying that the people who are complaining about the drop rate of seeds aren’t finding it fun.
I like to keep in mind there are different people, that find gathering fun! The gathering part of this patch is a great buff to them. We just need the tools to offload the gathering part from farmer-specific players, to the people that like gathering.
I think people are taking James’ statements way too literal and not understanding the context or what he was trying to communicate. Balance is obviously still of concern but didn’t have priority over system. Once the system was finalized then balance would be considered… but as we see in production - balance can change so people shouldn’t assume that testing balance is final balance… especially since even production balance isn’t always final.
Yes I completely get the argument and your view point. A lot of what you say makes sense and can come to pass. But, I think we have clearly proved that your view point is a POSSIBLE outcome and not the ONLY outcome. People could easily say the game will grow because the sneaky way of leveraging bomb mining to cheat natural regeneration processes went away and those people that liked natural game mechanics will come back. It just isn’t worth running around in circles stating the same points… the game will grow or lose people for a variety of reasons.
This isn’t Boundless. Irrelevant to the discussion. But if you want to include it then it really shuts down any discussion about not changing the game because WOW did not at all have private servers or a large part of features and game play you have now. People went and left based on the game changes yet it is still here in a variety of formats.
So you have the full architectural design and knowledge around Boundless? No you don’t. So please don’t bring irrelevant discussion points in. That line of discussion has nothing to do with whether regen farming stays or goes… that only has to deal with people that want THEIR stuff versus the larger game play that everyone plays.
Yeah… and it is amazing that in the end both things are being addressed. So clearly the statement James made about system over balance was a philosophy statement more than forced implementation on testing.
Yeah now I understand… Yeah they don’t find it fun… then there are those that do find the seed rate fun and see it as a good challenge or a good way to balance the system of “stuff in” versus “stuff out”. Unfortunately that really is becoming the argument we face versus whether the design is ok… we see people fighting for something they like because it is of personal gain or value to them versus others that just see the larger game play or how the new thing is cool to them.
It is a new stance on the dev teams part which is a departure over what they have previously done and if that trend continues can lead down a poor path for an MMO.
Running 50 worlds over running 1 server, ever with virtual servers etc it is more expensive to maintain that a traditional MMO. I am curious why they went with such a large number of worlds over the 12 of EA, perhaps they were hoping for a greater playerbase.
Wow did and does have private servers that were and are run by 3rd parties. This is relevant because both are MMO’s and many of Boundless’s systems are built around being an MMO and thus you can learn from what other games are doing in the MMO space. There is an idea that for an MMO to prosper you must always be changing things and addig new content constantly but that is demonstrably false.
In general, once players leave a game they do not return, you will get some but not many. Also you say sneaky but another term would be clever. Game devs often assume they are smarter and more clever than their playerbase. You should not punish your clever players as they are your best allies.
its in larage part due to the system when the devs run say a free to play weekend and the system sees it needs to add lets say 5 new worlds cuz of that it will do it but the system right now des not remove them so its possable to have 90 worlds with only 50 people playing the game
This is an effect of not getting the balance right before live =D. Imagine them trying to remove worlds to cut down on the server costs now, there would be an outrage for sure XD.
I don’t want to nit pick but we need to in this case:
It is a new stance that YOU and others became aware of. You have no proof and there is no evidence that as of last week the dev team coded the program and operated in a different way. They just didn’t wake up one day and say, “oh lets only test systems and not balance”.
There is no proof for this so can we please stop brining it up.
Who told you this? They are incorrect because 50 worlds are not running on 1 server. Also these arguments around cost and everything has nothing to do with removing regen farming.
They look at other games and do research. When they priced Cubits they did extensive research. So are you saying that you think the devs do no research and don’t take any time to evaluate other games and what happened with them before they make decisions in this game? Did someone tell you that these devs don’t know what they are doing or never do anything but just release code haphazardly?
Actually I would define it as an exploit and cheat because it goes against the original game play mechanic of how you get and find resources. At many levels it completely breaks game play and should have never been allowed to the extent it has gone.
You should punish players that take advantage of things to go around normal game play by removing the things they are doing and putting systems that are more in alignment to how the game was meant to be played.
They had a number from 50-80 which was an intentional decision. They knew the cost and scale that would happen. It was focused on a variety of factors and balance across the whole system of the game. So they did have the balance right in their perspective.
Previous change of rock xp to zero, community tests and wants a compromise on the balance change. Balance change is set to the compromise. This is pretty different to “test systems not balance”.
Never said they are running on 1 server, likely running on 10 ish with multiple worlds being run as virtual servers on one machine. The fact that they have to run more than 1 machine us why Boundless is more expensive than a traditional MMO.
My response is to you when you said that my bringing up other games in the MMO space is irrelevant.
Short of players modifying game files or actually cheating you should not “punish” players. Like I said the clever players are your best allies in game development, they do things like create tools that calculate damage from all tools/boons. they fill in the holes in the explanations that your systems lack ingame ect. Punishing players for using effects ingame that you as a dev team did not find/left ingame for a prolonged period of time is silly and vindictive and does nothing but cost you players. In your rationale meteors which resulted from payers finding a way to spawn creatures in large amounts, regen bombs and the minter are all examples of players being naughty and those players should have been banned and those systems never developed.
best part this is 100% fine there are mods out there that let you see metors landing plus there level a good zone or 2 away or ones that remove grass so you can surface gather 100 times easyer
Like i said do not edit my post, even in a Quote as it is misleading. Would it have been hard to just disagree with me? People reading your post may not see my original post or notice the bold face where you changed my text and assume it was what I said.
Exactly for the reason people asked for it in the first place when we talked about it - regen areas in the world that cannot because of too much traffic. We had no way in towns to regen because there was too much traffic and the regen counters could not kick off… So the bombs were created for that. The “oh i could use this to regen an area I just mined out so i don’t have to move farther or go find more” was an unintended result.
For some it wasn’t seen as an issue… but for others it was seen as an issue and we cautioned where it would take the game - in a not good direction. We see the compounding of that problem now - low level players getting access to resources they were never meant to get unless they paid for it from a shop, foot fall traps, easy gathering of resources that are hard to come by, people seeing it as a get part of the game, etc.
At the end of the day is a part of the game now. Actions have consequences and going back to remake the game will just drive off people who like the game and as we have seen we do not have vast numbers of players entering the game. Again this is why each choice should be very carefully considered and all the feedback possible should be gathered and appreciated.