I havent looked much at crafting food personally. Im still trying to farm mats to get my centraforge going for lower end tools at least lol
Im just against limiting anything that would have a negative effect on lower/mid tier players. I see a lot of people’s camps that they started and you can tell they quit the game before even getting that deep into it. But thats a whole different conversation
I would like to see machine mechanics untouched in terms of crafting durations and xp gain base values. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with a higher level player dumping a bajillion rocks on a new player or their own alt.
If they are parking their alt in the sanctum, they’re spending more time on their main doing what they like to do, so I say let them have their fun. Nobody leveling in this way is bringing direct harm to my playstyle.
I disagree with “this method would make other people that would buy cubits for plots, not want to buy cubits for plots” stance. I bought the game, paid $40, really enjoyed the game and purchased $100 cubits within two weeks of playing, I probably will end up donating more since the game is great and I believe the game should get more money since they are continuing on it’s updates after I bought the game, it’s hard to find a game that keeps you entertained, with great updates and built brilliantly to keep you hooked on playing.
Please don’t nerf any aspect of this. As a not-end-game player it took an entire stack of silver hammers to get 10k rock, and it was a booooring grindfest to break them all. Probably an hour or so of gameplay. So that’s what, 10 hours for 100k stone??
Given the circumstances, if someone spends 10 hours grinding 100k stone and wants to eat teaching food for a boost while he crafts them into blocks, WHAT IS THE ACTUAL PROBLEM HERE???
Sorry to get emotional, but in this case the nerfs would simply be a solution in search of an imaginary problem that, best case scenario, less than 1% of all players will ever do anyway.
Blocks=Stored exp. It’s like hating your neighbor when your power goes out because he’s a doomsday prepper and has thousands of batteries in his basement. Just love your Boundless neighbors, however they play the game <3
Servers can run on donations indeed… But the point of the product is to profit. Most games shut down if they’re just breaking even because they would rather work on something new that would bring in more funds. The game isn’t sporting the best of populations… Each planet is basically a minecraft server with better graphics, meaning its costing them quite a bit more than most minecraft servers. Now multiply that by the total number of planets currently… As well as staff costs. Think about it this way. If each staff member is being paid even minimum wage per day, and average the working days to 40 hours a week… I see 21 employees on the website. Wonderstruck games is uk based I believe, and minimum wage there is £7.83, basically lets say $10.30 an hour. (Note I doubt they are being paid this little as I read they have mostly vet programmers and i’ve no idea what that pay rate might be, maybe 30 dollars or more an hour? But for simplicity sake lets use minimum wage.) so 21 x 10.30 x 40 = thats $8,652 just for employee cost per week if they were doing minimum wage. Not counting server costs or any other costs for that matter.
2 weeks that cost is $17,304. In 2 weeks your $140 helped pay for 0.81% of those wages. Steam says the average pop of players is 429 this month! If every single player was generous and donated 100 dollars at the same time as you, that would be $42,900! Which would be good! But… The likelyhood of that is small. Generally speaking, i’d say that number was 5-10% of the total pop, probably less, but lets say 10%. So round it up to 43. Thats $4,300 in 2 weeks. Rounding up again, that pays for about 25% of that $17,304 cost.
Now mind you again, these people likely are not being paid minimum wage, but decently higher. They really need to come up with nice looking incentives for spending money, otherwise the game will likely be doomed in the long run… Which usually begins with staff reduction, followed by lack of updates, followed by lots of silence, followed by “with heavy hearts we regret to inform you all that as of … the servers will be shutting down. It was a good run, and we had fond memories with all of you. On … A final event will take place before a black hole opens up swallowing all the worlds to end it in a dramatic and exciting way. Most shop items will be free from now till that day, and plots will be half off. We hope to see your creativity explode in the final days to come.”
To anyone that has been gaming for quite a while now, you are probably all to use to seeing such messages. I for one, am tired of seeing said messages. Games don’t have to ultimately end up that way. They shouldn’t be like tv series that last a few seasons and then end. Especially games that are designed with no end and ultimate freedom… It just need to be managed properly and achieve 3 things. 1. Sustainable Population. In and out. New players in, older players out. Circle of life. It gets dangerously difficult to keep this up if too many leave and not enough enter. This is the number one killer of games, population can make or break games, and is painfully hard to recover from over time so if its dipping already, whatever is causing the loss needs to be addressed first and fast. 2. New Content. This tends to cause dips in #1. Constant voicing, and updates keeps things fresh and fun. 3. Sustainable income. With 1 and 2, 3 should be fine… Sometimes its not though. I’ve seen fairly popular, populated, fun games die. This is because while they were making some money, it was deemed they were not making as much as they wanted, and thus the plug was pulled so they could focus on other games that were hitting the mark. Much like how Fortnite killed Paragon. Paragon was making some money, but fortnite was making them more. So they pulled Paragon and had them join team fortnite to push more content faster. (to understand just how crazy this is, they had already spent over $12 million on the assets for that game alone, and killed it off because it wasn’t making as much money as the other game. It was still profiting greatly.)
That aside, you also must think about the other players that don’t want to do this. Given the speed of the exp, it becomes a necessary part of the game that you MUST do if you want to keep up. That isn’t good. At all.
TL:DR The cubits gained from this little stunt seems to be too much and could hurt the game monetarily speaking, and force players to do it to keep up with others who are doing it as well.
If you want some interesting information on marketing for online games watch this. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/bcousins/paying-to-win
In short theres a part on here that talks about “vp” and how the game was giving away far too much of it. There was vp floating around everywhere, and due to this there was never really an incentive for players to spend money on vp. They needed to dial it back so that players had more reason to actually make purchases of the currency, and I honestly feel thats where we are right now. At no time have I ever felt the need to buy cubits, and I am considered by many to be a “whale”. The type of person who spends alot on free games. This game doesn’t even nudge me to make purchases… I feel no incentive or need. You know what did get me to spend though? Digital deluxe I upgraded too, I was an adventurer backer. I did it simply for the golden fist. I know many who did it as well for the golden fist. Thats a good incentive, which you will learn from that video that special usables are a huge moneymaker.
No one wants to hear that. But it’s true.
The financial health of the game must be protected if you want the game to be around for a few more years.
So if you want super fast levelling and want the cubits that go with it, eventually more egregious purchases from the shop will be put in.
Tbh though, even IF they went to a pay to win extreme, attracted whales and didn’t ■■■■ off everyone else and kill the community in the process(super big if); I don’t think it’d be enough because of how small the population is.
Game needs strong advertising and possibly a sale on ps4 store. It’d cause other problems if it became really popular but a mass of players is needed.
I’ve put in 110£ (for plots early on, btw) and that’s all i’m prepared to spend on a game that wasn’t free to play, so that’s 1 that offers no further investment in future.
I suppose the overheads aren’t anywhere near as bad as a typical mmo though…Anyway i’m probably off topic now. Just, aggressively pursue more players, wonderstruck! There are far worse games with more players out there, bit of a shame.
Probably more players on PS4 than steam?
You would think that… But given that we can look at player population through portals? I can tell you the numbers really add up… The amount kinda scares me given the unknown costs and large team size.
Yeah but we are far away from other voxel games, look at Pixark, that game is amazing and it died in matter of days
But ultimately I agree with you my $140, is not much , even if the numbers you used all spent $140 times 400 = $56000, and the 400 avg at $40 = $16000, it’s just to bad really 
Yeah I hadn’t even heard of the game if it wasn’t for my ps4 friends. I imagine there’s a lot of people out there who are looking for a game like this but just miss it. I guess that’s the downside of being an indie dev? No publisher , so no PR cost, but also…no PR.
Get the community to sponsor me some mixer coils and I’ll be able to have teach pies out at 3k each…
#ShamelessPlug
Those two things aren’t always synonymous. Easy is fun for some people, but easy is boring for others. I’m not entirely hardcore - but I want a game to be challenging.
But you can make a challenging game, without making it very grindy.
Dark Souls series for example. Very challenging game, but not one that forces you to grind. You can literally beat each game with no armor and the weakest weapon, easily. Everything is flavored to the player, balanced, and designed to teach you how to beat the enemies and bosses till you can do it easily.
This game is just grinding, for the sake of grinding. There is no challenge except in how much time and work you put in and how very little reward you get for it.
And racing games are about just driving for the sake of driving. And flight sims are flying for the sake of flying. Fighting for the sake of fighting. Rotating puzzle pieces just to fit them together.
Different strokes for different folks. There are gamers, like myself, who love grinding (especially mining!). Why try to change the nature of the game? If you don’t find it fun, find a game that IS fun for YOU. I don’t play a lot of games because they don’t interest me. Grindy games interest me. Boundless IS THAT TYPE of game.
Creative mode exist in similar games for those who don’t want to grind (though I personally find it removes the value of the blocks).
Because the game was NOT meant to have grinding. Go read the reviews, go look at the trailers and game footage, go look at the Playstation and Steam store pages.
The game isn’t advertised about grinding, or being hard.
It’s advertised that you can do anything you want. Go anywhere, build anything, be a miner, builder, or crafting, and they make it all seem like it would be easy to do.
They don’t tell you that to make the tools to mine you’re going to have to explore and travel for hours for the resources. They don’t tell you that to make a decrative tavern you’re going to be spending hours gathering wood, stone, mud, ash, and soil for waxy worms, for many many hours, across multiple biomes and worlds, just to craft very little number of blocks to use.
They made the game look as easy as Minecraft to pick up, play, and progress. But instead jammed as much grinding as they possibly could into it, just cause it’s an MMO.
I don’t think GRIND is a technical term any game uses, LOL, just those who enjoy it. I knew what the game was when I preordered it. You CAN do anything, if you put in the time and effort.
Gamers today confuse me. Is everything supposed to be easy and accessible?
You consider this game hard? Yet mention Dark Souls. As with both games, just takes time and effort to advance. You don’t get immediate access to all the content in Dark Souls either. You have to earn it.
Edit: spell check made it all quite funny.
Agreed. Across the gaming leisure industry, by devs and players alike, the two are conflated. Grind =/= challenge, and vice versa.
Lol, I guess you didn’t read what I said, nor actually played Dark Souls for long. Dark Souls is only hard when you’ve never played a dark souls like, action game before. But the game TEACHES you how to get better. And as soon as you know how to block, how to roll, and where to go, the game is easy.
Dark Souls 1, 2, and even the old Demons Souls game can be played in many different ways, going in many different directions, and access to any content, in any order you wish. It’s only in Dark Souls 3, with put in gates to force you down a linier path with very few optional areas, and only 2 single branching paths, which you have to do both of them anyways.
But take Dark Souls 1 for example. You CAN go through and kill every single boss in the whole game. However, only 8 of the many many bosses in the game are actually MANDATORY, and you can skip and go around all the others if you know the layout of the game. If you know your way around, the game is super easy, and you don’t even need any weapons, armor, or leveling up to beat the game.
But Boundless? The grind is the same, for every player, across all levels. In fact, it’s actually WORSE if your not leveled up with enough skill points in the right skills.
Knowing Boundless, knowing all the tricks, the right skills, and knowing what items to use, doesn’t change the grind. The grind is always the same. No wait, that’s not true. The grind is always worse as time goes on, as they make the game more grindy as time progresses.