Maybe it’ll be this way but it’s my hope that a hunting overhaul would do more than just add variety. I’d like to see it become a challenge requiring strategy - much the same as you’d see a party gearing up for a raid in other mmo’s. I think that added strategy in the form of skills and classes, mobs, battlefields, environments, could make hunting just as much of what keeps people playing as building.
I don’t like the idea of people focusing on one or two professions just to fund their building… rather, I’d like to see each profession as being self-sustaining and allow each player to focus on doing that if that’s all they want to do.
Edit: by self sustaining I don’t mean fully independent of other professions
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I know your pain.
I don’t like Mining, Hunting, Gathering without Shovel-Epic, maintaining a Shop.
If you are a flowerpicker like i am and just want to decorate/build, you are less than a stepchild. 
If i would not have some Ultima Roads for Footfall, i would just get the daily+Level Coins by System.
And these some roads don’t make me rich aswell, since i spend most of them back to Ultima.
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I’ll see you both in creative mode 
Honestly in the end, creative mode will be the best boundless. We will have the coolest cities ever!
IMO boundless is the most unfair to builders of all the professions. You make no coin or oort, only spend it. And you get XP, but less than mining, and probably less than hunting. Boundless would be way more fun for more people if it rewarded all professions equally.
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I am curious how you do something like this in Boundless (I do not disagree that if possible, it might keep more players hunting). Since the developers seem to be removing what small RPG parts of Boundless ever existing through skill sets and some of the other changes made, how do classes work in a game that does not have classes? Mobs are mobs and while they can new mobs, the game is not a FPS so I would doubt mobs will ever get the AI that opponents do in other games focused on battle. I do think that introducing environments like dungeons would add to the game. But unless they churn out a constant string of these, they become rote and we have guides in the forums on how to solve the dungeons. I would argue the only way around this would be to provide a set of tools to users and let the users create dungeons or at least parts of dungeons. Might give the builders something else to do that contributes to the game. Put them on exos so they are only around for a while. .
I personally don’t support adding more activities to gather oort. Making hunting more diverse and fun? yes.
Portals are not a requirement of the game. You can play without them. I played my first 4 months without a single portal. I instead used warp blocks to get around and used Portal Networks. As a player I didn’t open my own portal until I had a large amount of Oort.
Portals should be cool things that connects spaces that are being used. Having 8 portals that aren’t being used by anyone but yourself or your one other friend sometimes feels like it is not the intention of the system.
The system has Oort gathered from hunts, rare material, to keep portals down.
More Oort doesn’t make the game better, so I would rather them spend time on other activities.
Just my 2c. I would of course support any changes the dev’s actually made…but if asked, I think hunting for Oort is fine.
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Hunting won’t become more diverse and fun for at least 12 months.
If we assume this is true, do you still think there should be no changes or rebalances to portals/oort?
Hunting sub-classes then. Group-appointed roles within an encounter. The bones of this are there, with players forced to choose between damage/protection epics, focus/rage epics, revive timer epics, etc. Just expand upon those, I’d think.
I personally feel like it is balanced.
If you are running a network or a lot of portals and don’t want to hunt/buy oort…then the same group is going to just complain or find problem with the next option. “Why is Oort only on Exo planets to Mine”, “Why is the seed drop X when it should be Y for Oort plants”.
Because the desire is not to have to put in more time to keep the portals they feel entitled to keep. However, portals are meant to be difficult to maintain, require upkeep…hunting/buying…and if you aren’t down to do that, close your portals…or limit them.
You don’t become trapped. You can warp, use other portals, group up with people to share.
Add oort to mining/farming and large active guilds will have millions…and players that want 8 portals who only play sometimes will say Oort is hard to get still.
I don’t feel like it solves anything. The problem everyone has with Oort is a part of the design and solution…it is meant to bottleneck portal creation. At least, it seems it to me.
Again, if they change things…cool beans! But if asked my personal opinion, I hope they do not.
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OK then kind of like a suggestion made by someone in my guild. No matter what changes might happen in the skill tree in the future, create sets of skills for battle/hunting that make a player specialize as a healer, melee fighter, distance fighter, or whatever other “classes/roles” might be needed for specific types of encounters. You might be able to play any role by switching skill sets, but a healer cannot also be a melee fighter and vice versa.
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Yes, I think that’d help a lot. More than new mobs and weapons would alone.
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Yessssssssss, please. I’ve wanted this for years. Skills that are role beneficial that warrant people to specialize voluntarily for big hunt parties. Some people can take healer skills, some fighter skills, some tanky skills, and others that are not yet defined.
Roles in fighting are the reason people like top down RPGs so much. You can specialize and be awesome at something.
If boundless had this, plus equippable armor and weapon variations it would be so awesome.
I know boundless is centered around building, but it could be soooooooo much more and an actual community. Not just forums, but in game too.
If you create specialist skills for roles, which are not channeled meaning not mandatory, then people can build their own “warrior” however they like, but still limited to max skill points. So you can have a generalist, but he wont be good at anything in particular. Or you can invest heavily into a specific role and really go hard into a specific function in a hunt party.
This would create not only diversity for hunting.
But also forging, imagine people forging chest pieces and arm pieces and various weapons and leggings!!!
You would have new crafting fields and new items to gather for these new gears and weapons.
There is so much potential to this game if they would just allow deeper skill trees and encourage specialization.
This could still be a builders game, but it could also be an action game, it could be a store emulator game, it could be whatever. That is what is truly boundless. Not just about building. But a community of people doing different things and coming together in interesting ways.
You could have dungeon builders with creature nests. If you could build creature nests, just like bird boxes or mock dens for animals then they migrate in over time and boom you got a dungeon.
You could even have people help model the gear just like george made that skin. And then implement them in game. If dev approved.
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More challenging means less people will engage in it, because of lag, not being good enough or having no interest in staying focused after a day of work. Yes, some will like it but challenging content will always in every game have less people playing it.
This has only to possible ends.
If the Oort is comparable to meteorites, less people mean less Oort and the crises gets worse.
If the Oort is significantly higher then from meteorites we now have a tiny group of people who have an insane good way to farm coins, one which doesn’t have anything comparable for every other activity.
I don’t necessarily agree with this. The challenge, in this case, wouldn’t come from just an increase in difficulty but a requirement to specialize and added depth. Depth is what keeps people enjoying the grind in all the professions.
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I see building as the endgame? Like we do everything else to pay for our building.
Also how would the game pay builders without some one starting a drama about bots or prestige wars?
Only thing I can’t think of is an in-game mechanic to hire builders but seems like there is not a lot of people interested on using their time to build for others
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Have you seen Minecraft dungeons?
I also have been thinking that our skill tree needs a revamp and we need to get rid of the level cap. Most RPGs don’t have one and you can just keep getting better over time.
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Yeah! Dungeons and raid dungeons would be sweet.
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I think we may have strayed off-topic, lol. Sorry, @VSDalSheron
For a significant portion of the playerbase (mostly PS4), hunting is an unplayable lagfest and is therefore not fun. This lag, more than boredom, is why I don’t hunt. Lag shouldn’t be an in-game mechanic to make things difficult.
I think it’s unfair to put oort behind an “activity gate” where that activity is unplayable due to lag since launch.
What do I mean by unplayable? FPS drops, rubber banding, “unplayable lag” popups, and things not dying when you shoot them. When I go hunting, I can’t do a whole lot more than run around collecting loot. It’s better on PC but still not great. On the plus side, about 5% of the time when I “die” while hunting I get magically resurrected by the lag goddess.
I’ve long since resigned myself to buying 100% of my oort. I would rather the devs let us PS4 players turn down graphics settings so everyone can hunt (I can’t say for sure, but I am highly confident this would help). However, since they won’t do that, I think you should be able to get oort from ways other than hunting or buying it.
Does a change really affect me? Not really, I’m rich and can buy all the oort I need. But I’m trying to think how others would feel.
I am on ps4 and I don’t lag much on hunts, most of the time I can move around a pretty good, it’s rare when I have to stay in place because of lag, lag seems to mainly happen with all the people running around and creatures trying to spawn at the same, That’s is something that I have noticed,
I can be in a group of 30 players and lag is not that much.
There’s a lot of factors…how large the hunt group is, the time of day, your console/PC specs, quality of your internet, how close you are to the server you’re playing on, etc. I rarely have any issues while hunting (I have plenty of video of hunts). That’s not to say some users aren’t experiencing issues, but there are various reasons for that.
Anyone can freely collect oort from dormant meteors on T3+ planets. I used to do this to fuel my puny portals back when I had a store on Finata in Ultima. Oort technically isn’t gated. Players can also go mine, farm, etc…sell their wares to request baskets or on shop stands and buy oort if they really want to maintain a permanent portal.
I’m all for having additional ways to obtain oort though…I think you should have a rare chance to get some oort drops while mining, farming, etc.