What did I say? Seems what I said is true... Boundless not a good game - at least for now

[james]

Thanks for your feedback and it’s good to hear that you’ve been playing the game as a family group.

@blastronaut

About this time we became a dependent on the forum, wiki, and YouTube to get information on how to keep progressing.

The aim of the Knowledge and Objectives is to make sure that the game can be played fully without resorting to a wiki. (Yeah - you’re all allow to laugh at this point.)

The Objectives are supposed to guide you through “everything the game has to offer”. Likewise the Knowledge is supposed to guide you through “everything that can be crafted”.

One issue that I would like to resolve is that the Objectives and Knowledge gradually unlock their contents based on what you’ve already done. The idea is to not overwhelm new players and put bread crumbs down in front of them. The problem is that if you decide yourself that you want to create a portal and this Objective is still hidden from you - then you’re left going to external resources for the information.

My solution here is to give players a toggle filter on both the Objectives and Knowledge of: “Show Learned / Discovered / Unlocked” and “Show all”. This would allow players to expose everything once they’re ready and find the items they’re looking for.

We’re going to add this as part of the new filters and icon view layouts shown here:

Let's take a page from modded Minecraft: NotEnoughItems Boundless GUI suggestion

Morning, thanks for the suggestions. Here’s what we have planned (WIP) … Text Filtering Text Filtering (type ‘cr’ and it will remove any recipes without ‘cr’ in the name) on recipe lists (and also Friends, Locations, Knowledge etc) Grid View You can select between the list we currently have, a grouped grid and a compressed grid view of recipe lists and knowledge screen. [image] You can see here Text Filtering on the right of the filtering bar and Filter / View options on the left Knowled…

@blastronaut

Also it’s true that the early npcs bite a bit hard

I’d like to balance the Lvl 1 Wildstock to only require 3 / 4 whacks with the totem - as it’s very common for a new player to simply give things a whack to see what happens.

Additionally, I think they should only charge once. The big surprise is that they charge, you dodge it, you turn around to whack them - and you get a wildstock in the face.

@blastronaut

early crafting times are a hassle

The next update does contain a smoothing of these timers.

@james

Readjusted the Crafting times of some start game items to better improve the flow for new users as part of our recent ongoing improvements to the start of the game and to bring them in line with similar objects. For example, Earthyams should now be a lot faster to cook, closer to the time of cooking a starberry.

• Copper Bars: Was 40 seconds, now 30 seconds
• Glass: Was 60 seconds, now 30 seconds
• Glue: Was 40 seconds, now 20 seconds
• Beacon Control: Was 40 seconds, now 30 seconds
• Stone Furnace Base: Was 20 seconds, now 15 seconds
• Stone Furnace Crucible: Was 20 seconds, now 15 seconds
• Atlas: Was 60 seconds, now 30 seconds
• Stone Tools and Weapons: Were 30 seconds, now 10 seconds
• Storage Block: Was 60 seconds, now 40 seconds
• Storage Shelf: Was 60 seconds, now 40 seconds
• Cooked Earthyam: Was 60 seconds, now 25 seconds
• Cooked Waxy Earthyam: Was 60 seconds, now 25 seconds
• Cooked Exotic Earthyam: Was 60 seconds, now 25 seconds
• Cooked Meat: Was 120 seconds, now 60 seconds
• Cooked Prime Meat: Was 120 seconds, now 60 seconds
• Cooked Lean Meat: Was 120 seconds, now 60 seconds
• NOTE: These are some quick improvements to the early game crafting times. We’re still reviewing the feedback about crafting times in general.

@blastronaut

I believe a more direct answer would be to use ideas from elsewhere and add a free play tier to add activity to the game.

The free play option should tax all their transactions at 50% and add 5c fee to all their transactions, not allow trading by any method, slower xp gain after level 20, less cubits per level to limit plotting, limit beacon fuel to 2 weeks, no footfall, and no receiving coin from guilds. These should all be the cost of not buying the game. These restrictions are not just to encourage free players to buy the game but also to stop abuse of these accounts. This should allow them to spend enough time in the game to decide if they want to invest.

I think it’s interesting to think about this - but the advantage of the free weekend was that players experience the game without any additional restrictions or handicaps. It’s possible that there is a sub-account path - but then players would be experiencing a different version. Ideally (I think) you want players to explore the game without being second class citizens.

Thanks for the comments.

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@anon42939288

I mildly surprised that they thought that one patch was good enough to open the doors for a free weekend. For something like this i would think it would take at least 5 patchs aimed at fixing the NPE and the UI before it should be considered opening a free weekend

same most of the negative reviews that we got during the free weekend showed that the one NPE patch was not where near enough

We only learned about the possibility of a free weekend a few weeks before it happened. We did the best we could with the time we had.