It is a small, intelligent, visionary community. I guess I’m lucky enough to have started with 2 (then 3 more) goofball friends who weren’t good at building, and we met up with 3 others who made kinda strange stuff, so I knew from day 1 that I would have no chance of making a sprawling city that looked exactly how I wanted. So it was easy for me to adapt because I also am not really bothered by builds that others have hated. I prefer seeing more player icons and more chatting and don’t really care what they’re building. Hence my stance on the matter.
I also hate that I’m here arguing with people I respect. It certainly would be a lot easier to make my case in person rather than on the internet. Pretty much most of my prior internet interactions with people I don’t know was scrolling through comments on songs I liked on youtube and fighting people who posted negative comments
The existing planets are a limited resource and not everybody wants to build in a predefined square or likes these rectangular roads. What some call pre-planning a city is, in my opinion, just a major who wants to force his will on others how big and where they can build in their city.
The problem is that the people with the most plots are also the ones using the most cheesy techniques to amplify the amount of land they can make unusable for others. Take a look at Xa Frant. There’s one settlement all around the planet. I’m sure there is no malice and it’s fun for them, but for people who don’t want to build next to or in a planet wide settlement, that’s one of 50 planets down. And others are the same.
For everyone who thinks all of his builds on a single planet must be connected to a single city, there is one who thinks these prestige links connecting the different cities are dumb. None is correct. But we should find a balance by not making it so cheap to create these links that it’s just “the normal thing to do”.
If you start with Boundless you’re quite short on plots. But in the endgame we all get way to many plots. Just smashing gleam with an XP pie and speed brew for an hour should reward you with about 6 level ups, that’s 60 plots, more if you have deluxe or a founder multiplier.
What the update tries to do is some damage control by removing the amplification technique that was often abused to cheaply “push others” away from what we consider to be “our land”.
Well I can give you a brief history of Xafrant and why we all came together in the first place if you want me to.
We were all in our nice lil compact area cities when I had a neighbor who I was friendly with and helped on many occasions (stopped building even to let him even get Viceroy achievement because I didnt care) Then I noticed him camping a building burner in my city (friend of mines who left game) I kind of realized that day he was not on the up n up. Suddenly almost overnight he had almost built around me in a C pattern backing me up to the Host settlement. Then I see this clown on a youtube channel talking about “This guys so stupid he doesnt realize Im gonna take over his planet,” talking about me. Well now it was confirmed he was a snake taking advantage of my kindness. I then asked HOST for his much needed help before I was totally snuffed out. I didnt have a lot of plots then and if not for HOST I would have been cut off completely. He came in buffered me with A ROAD and saved me from being caged.then I eventually plotted the road he built the other guy left planet and still to this day claims victimhood.
So no the roads were not FUN, or something I even wanted to build actually at all, BUT when building my road I found some nice places I wanted to further place projects in that may not have inspired me had i not had to build a road plus it set an easy path for ppl to build hunting platforms that did in fact sprout up after that (which I dont really care for but its needed for the community so who am I to be offended, it helps ppl.)
So as I said in my past posts roads while I never was a fan at first became a necessity for my survival and only having had to build one did I see the positivity for roads and how many folks I saw hunting and using them.
I hope this clears up the whole “Corporate take over” mindset it was none of that it was about survival and pulling together as a community to fight off a clearly hostile takeover from one bad apple. thx for reading.
I agree this change will be good, I’m fine with them implementing this new compactness system. I love this game, and the devs are only trying to make it fair for all who play it, and stop the snake plotting. I’m totally fine with it, thank you devs.
What about the part not related to trolling but the part James mentioned to reduce sprawl? Since trolling is only part of the problem what is your suggestion to remove the sprawl? Use a GM where players complain, like they do now, that some players are treated differently than other players?
After reflecting on this system off and on for a few weeks now the core of this issue is “The Great Adjustment” that is looming over Boundless. Part of playing an MMO is understanding and accepting that from time to time adjustments will happen and sometimes you benefit and sometimes you are penalized. The nerf bat is a well known well established thing in this space but it’s a required thing in these types of games. There is no realistic way that developers can foresee how their systems will be used and sometimes it results in unintended usage that needs to be addressed.
Will this mean some people will quit? It’s not possible to satisfy everyone.
Do you think they envisioned massive roads connecting settlements? Sure. Did they envision those roads being used to block people from expanding and as a tool to troll? Pretty safe to say no. So here we are, something has to change. At the end of the day they simply adjusted the formula to calculate prestige to incentivize particular behaviors which is again a super common approach in MMOs.
Will this solve everything? Absolutely not nerfs are just something that comes as part of the MMO experience.
Is there any info on the current state of this release? Is the compactness going to delay it for much longer? I’m mainly interested in stress testing the BUTT performance, there’s way more planets in the live universe compared to my test environment with a large quantity of orders, it’ll require quite a lot of processing and database writes just keeping the data up to date.
I’m wondering if my current server will have enough overhead to also serve the data without choking in the process. I’d like to know if I should start optimizing everything I can or paying for more horsepower, the live version is running on an atom based server so it’s an order of magnitude slower than my test environment
It would be great if there was some sort of vague progress bar that was randomly updated by a dev that gave some indication of the progress of testing!
