What turns you off playing Boundless?

[MadManMoon]

I appreciate that this is a work around, and not a fix ( #itil ) however this has basically save my bacon more often than not:

Longer chat message visibility mod.

@Kokuma

Chat is very often hard to read, and there’s no option to keep the chatbox up to fix that.

[Kokuma]

Appreciate the suggestion, but i’ve looked at that mod before and it wasn’t what I wanted. My problem is with all the colors of chat and the blocks at the background, it’s hard to read chat quite often. I want to have the actual chatbox (the whole chat UI when you’re typing in something) to stay open at all times, so I can have the chatbox background a set color making chat easier to read. Will prob help your issue as well, since it’ll just keep the last few messages stuck there.

[MadManMoon]

This is the kind of thing that I talk about when I speak (generally, about all games) about having zero multi-monitor support.

I know that a lot of PC gamers have a shitty old monitor somewhere, and quite often (in any type of game that I can think of) a second screen for a mini-map, chat (incl. audio/video), inventory … whatever … would be amazing.

[tarranth]

@epoling

Fourth, another thing I have never heard anybody ask for in this type of game is “grapples”. This relates back to the first point in a way. You wouldn’t need grapples without the horrible world design and you couldn’t do the awful world design without grapples. They go hand in hand. Grapples are great if you have good hand-eye coordination and are young. I am at a point in life where I have to stop and aim carefully to get over a ridge. Often when the cliff is too high I have to just say forget it and skip meeting up with the hunt on top, finding the region on top or whatever else. Limiting parts of the game to only those who can use this tool well is not a way to increase the player base which should be a goal of the devs.

I happen to love grapples and it’s what keeps me playing. I just turned 43 and I don’t have any problems using them. May I recommend a forged diamond or emerald grapple with maxed longevity and your skill maxed? It makes a heap of difference.
They’re the main point I make to new players about this game over minecraft…

[molav]

I’m having trouble getting back into boundless for multiple reasons. I really like playing, but there are just things missing in my opinion and that makes it a little daunting or depressing.

1. Farming right now is daunting for me. I enjoy it, but I really dont want to spend all my free time sowing and reaping crops, but I also want a fully stocked paint shop because it’s fun to see all the colors. I wish there was some type of helper you could craft and fuel that would automate the cutting of crops, sowing, and fertilizing them. That way I could do more managing stock of seeds, fueling workers, and managing my shop with its stock.

2. I wish fertilizer mattered, it’s just so time consuming when it doesnt even last the crops whole life. It stops if it fails to grow to next level.

3. I wish there was a way to populate my plots with creatures and npcs to give them life, whether they just patrol like guards, or do activities like farm/fill machines/or populate rooms so they are not just empty rooms. It would be nice if you could equip these npcs with gear to look like soldiers or scientists or farmers or anything. Just life in general, areas just feel so vacuous and empty.

4. I wish there was way more life to the universe. Meaning astronomical bodies. Binary stars, pulsars, black holes, or actual solar systems. Something to liven up space and the night sky. Make planets rotate around a star, they can still appear in the sky but some sort of order would be facinating.

5. There is no real action in the game. We have meteor hunts but they are basically the same for all planets. They just get harder based on tier and element. Which is okay, but after years of playing I’m just looking for ways to make combat interesting and fun again. Whether that’s new species, other hostile sentient species, out of control robots, or something cooler that I cant think of. It would be nice to have real combat strategies for scenarios where people come together to overcome. Not just meteors that are basically unchanged from when the game launched.

6. More resources/products. There are only so many resources and products in the game with meshes. It would be nice to have more variety. A lot of shops are similar. A lot of shops sell the same stuff. And there are malls the size of planets that cant maintain stock due to one reason the other. It just makes things feel less populated. Not that I’m faulting anyone, just it kinda feels empty when I do get on and I rarely see anyone and shops are sold out.

7. It would be nice to be able to have pets and breed them for different qualities. Whether based on stats, or whether resistances, or just for zoos/ranching. They could be for looks, they could be for builds, they could be for fighting, or riding.

8. There is not much reason to go to peoples’ builds because there isn’t really anything to interact with except shop stands and request baskets. There isn’t any moveable parts or interesting lore people have been able to make due to the lack of moving blocks or automation. Hidden doors, traps, books, paper, items that are interactable, light switches. You cant make intriguing stories on your plots without the right mechanics to do so. And that only happens if the devs put the time into it.

9. The slowing down of updates. I haven’t played in a while, but since I’ve been gone, nothing has really changed. No new gameplay items or processes to peak interest. It just feels like boundless isn’t getting love anymore. It might be, but I’m just not seeing it. I know they worked on planets which was huge, and they are working on private servers now. But the game itself, the core of it, hasn’t been updated for a while.

This is just me talking guys, I’m not upset. Just wish I could get back into boundless. Having trouble with the points above.

[Rydralain]

I agree with all of your points, and I would absolutely love NPC-based automation. I’m not burnt out on Boundless yet, but I can see it on the horizon. Your suggestions and feeback are where I will be soon (though I’m going to slow down play soon because I need some action that hunts doesn’t provide)

@molav

You cant make intriguing stories on your plots without the right mechanics to do so. And that only happens if the devs put the time into it.

Have you been to my build: The Wizard's Tower Ruins? I used signs to build a little bit of a narrative. It was… not easy, and having to use signs to build a narrative like that is both very difficult and immersion breaking for the user. I want to build experiences, not just static structures.

[MadManMoon]

So, about this one:

@molav

There is not much reason to go to peoples’ builds because there isn’t really anything to interact with except shop stands and request baskets. There isn’t any moveable parts or interesting lore people have been able to make due to the lack of moving blocks or automation. Hidden doors, traps, books, paper, items that are interactable, light switches. You cant make intriguing stories on your plots without the right mechanics to do so. And that only happens if the devs put the time into it.

See, that’s just one person … and if you didn’t interact with this wonderful community, you might never have found it.

@Rydralain

Have you been to my build: The Wizard’s Tower Ruins? I used signs to build a little bit of a narrative. It was… not easy, and having to use signs to build a narrative like that is both very difficult and immersion breaking for the user. I want to build experiences, not just static structures.

@Ovis has been making interactive stuff for a while, now … and I’m building some things that do the same based on some of his ideas, and some of my own. I’m sure we’re not alone!

If you build it … well … they might not come because they’re disillusioned … but still … you’ll have built it.

Not saying this to argue with you, I’m sure you’re good … but if you ever wanna come back in, shoot me a DM on here and we can go find some stuff to do.

[molav]

@Rydralain

Have you been to my build: The Wizard’s Tower Ruins?

I have not yet, but I will take a look for it the next time I jump onto boundless. I had so many ideas for my planetarium and observatories, but without movable parts and parchment or paper that people can read and interact with, it makes setting up a planetary museum hard to lay out with signs. I’d like to put facts and info about planets but it takes so much room. That was my original ideas anyways.

@MadManMoon

@Ovis has been making interactive stuff for a while, now … and I’m building some things that do the same based on some of his ideas

Yeah ovis is awesome with his creations, and when I did play more intensively I did play with people on hunts and community events like gleambow. I was meaning more in the day to day passing or chating with strangers on boundless just because it’s fun. A lot of physical areas feel empty. The community itself is great and I have spent time with people for sure. I think I was just trying to explain the overall feel of the environment for planets, not so much individual events.

I didn’t mean that people didn’t have cool and interesting builds. Just that there is a missing element without those game mechanics.

I’m sure I’ll get back into it eventually.

[RobZadouch]

I wasn’t going to respond to this, but you guys have hit real close to home on some of my feelings…I started playing Minecraft with my kids when they were very young. They are adults now, and I in turn am old, lol. Boundless hit very nostalgic feelings, while also hitting entirely new notes. I appreciate that it has many things MC does not, but agree that things like npc’s and “redstone” type circuitry (which have been around in MC for over a decade) would improve the experience by leaps and bounds

[DKPuncherello]

I used to play Minecraft tekkit on a private server with my tf2 clan. Hm that was… 2011? It was a good year.

[tarranth]

I bought Minecraft last November to have something else to play and experiment with.

[Morkaen]

I believe it was removed from the in-game menu as it breached some T&C’s with Steam

[N7JH]

I think that’s one of the main reasons discord exists; it’s an optional secondary scren for MANY games. Having a built in second screen would limit people who cannot use it, especially those on PS4. Also, when BUTT was working and other information sites, those were pretty much secondary screen things. Instead of needing to pop up the knowledge tab every time you want to see how to craft X or Y, just look it up on the Boundless Info site. Honestly that kind of addition would only slow down progress that could be made in other areas which also requiring people to run 2 monitors.

Now if they pulled off some sort of multibox support, I’d be interested in the two screen idea, but as it stands there are so many things you could run on 2-5+ screens as it is I don’t see why they should/would put more time/people/money into something as such. - release titans, more monsters/combat features. Maybe some gear; they need to review the Oort Online handguide post that’s on here and try to fill in what is missing off of that.

[Samski]

Lack of deeper MMO content:

Deeper RPG features

Another suggestion along the lines of others i have seen in the past, but I have some thoughts to add so thought id start a new conversation. One of the things I feel is lacking for me in boundless at the moment is a deeper RPG aspect and i had some thoughts on a simple quest system that could be interesting to some. The idea is that players would be able to create quests, these quests would require getting certain items, and taking these items to quest chests/bins. When you have the right item…

[N7JH]

What is turning me off right now… is seeing people quit and giving away all of their hard work. The fact that people have played and loved this game so much that they have hoarded incredible amounts of items, just to give it away instead of reclaiming it in case you eventually do add the content that was announced back in 2015-2018(?) really is heart breaking. These people played the living hell out of this game, and now their faith is gone to the point where they don’t even care to save what they built. It’s honestly soul crushing. It’s like when I quit WoW every few expansions, but I still have my characters, in case the game finally becomes what it once was/what it was to me, or how I’d like it to be… But instead I say “never again” and delete my characters or give them away, not even (attempting to sell)/selling the account.

EDIT: It’s like having a favorite toy that you play with so much that it wears down and breaks/you finally lose interest, but it’s something that was promised to get better/bigger and advance the more you use it… meanwhile your mom has been dusting it off, polishing it, using hot glue to keep it together, but never really adding anything substantial. Only minor “oh shiny” type of things.

[tarranth]

My first guild, one of the co-founders left me his place and all his stuff. I waited months to see if he would return before claiming it.
I miss having him around in game

[NerArth]

To be honest, I’m not planning on “quitting” the game or any such thing, I put a lot of effort into all the stuff I’ve accumulated in my play time, but I’m just not feeling a pull to play right now. To me, a lot of stuff still feels chore-like in-game (farming is a big one for me, despite the fact I find it generally appealing) and the new skill point limit per page will help relieve some of that when it arrives…

On the other hand, there’s also nobody pulling my attention to the game anymore. I don’t even know which of my few friends are still playing but while I’m not really in a massive need of a community feel to be playing, I do prefer doing things with others a lot of the time, especially hunts.

At the moment I’m only checking in on the game to fuel beacons every so often. Although I have a lot of stuff I’d like to be working on in-game with regards to builds, I would kind of rather wait for the way skill trees are going to work with the next patch and this seems to have killed my motivation to play until then. I also don’t like the XP changes but I’ll likely just live with them in the end.

I guess I’d be lying if I said I’m happy with the state of the game, I don’t think I am really, probably because it has felt like there have been fewer and fewer additions over time. And like I saw someone else mention recently, a lot of stuff just feels… lacking polish, and has a half-baked feel sometimes.

That’s not a stab at the devs, because I’d rather have more content overall than not, anyway! It’s just an open expression about how the game still feels at times, despite the fact I’ve been around with the game for a few years now.

Although compared to others I’m a relatively late backer of the game, it has been good to see all the changes that came out with sovereigns and even local hosting because these were things I was waiting to see for a long time.

I realise that my expectations for the game often don’t necessarily line up with what the developers have in mind, this has been made obvious several times before.

But especially over the last two years, I’ve been wondering why content releases have felt so slow. I feel like there has been no good answer to it and maybe there isn’t one. And I know others have expressed similar thoughts as well recently.

Although a long time between releases has been nothing new for quite a while now, it has probably contributed towards my disinterest in playing lately but I suppose it’s not the only reason, some of it has had nothing to do with the game itself too.

[Dhusk]

Basically this.

The list of people I’ve watched quit the game in the last several months and literally just let their stuff rot (myself included) is endless.

[Redlotus]

I am a fairly new player and the only thing that turns me off is hearing about how many people are leaving the game and the player base isn’t all the large at the moment. I am a really huge fan of the game and the past few months have been pretty great for me as I am new to the game and everything is … well new.

The community is great even with the limited amount of players, so if anything I am turned off by the amount of players currently playing. I am really pushing my friends to play it and also get more people involved in the game. I remain hopeful that the player base has leveled out and won’t drop anymore and I look forward to an update that brings new players in.

Lastly, the game completely went under my radar, that is why I never played. I never saw an advertisement for it, nothing on Steam … nothing. Not that it wasn’t there… it just never reached me so maybe if there was a bit more advertising on Steam and various other areas it would help some.