What turns you off playing Boundless?

Nope- sanctum will not put you in a plot you do not have permissions in. You will be warped to the edge of a plot (guards against accidental or deliberate plot traps)

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actually it’s the button in the beacon UI that says “strangers may/may not warp into this beacon”
I’ve been dropped into many many beacons in which i did not have permission. it’s a user choice.

back to topic as I don’t like discussions in threads like this but i strive for the correct information being out there :wink:

The biggest thing turning me off right now is all the duplicate colours. I thought someone said somewhere that there was an algorithm that when picking new planet colours it would check if there’s already the same colour/block that exists out there and would pick another one if there’s one too similar. (then figured maybe that was just for gleam after seeing duplicate rocks, but that theory went kaput as well.)
I also remember someone saying that if there are more than one block with the same colour then it will stack with others that are the same and if you collect a duplicate colour from another world you won’t get exotic points if it also exists on the planet you’re building on. I thought this was just a band-aid fix for the old pre-release worlds.
I was EXTREMELY disappointed when I saw not only the same colours but the same BLOCK AND COLOUR combination on several worlds.
I am totally okay with having the same colour of block on 3 different worlds, if one was sedimentary, another igneous and the other metamorphic. I am NOT okay with it when all the night azure is metamorphic.
and what’s with the LIGHTEST block ONLY spawning on tier 5 worlds?
That is just cruel.
We need white rocks! more variety!
and NO more duplicates please!
although the one exception is the gleam on Kada 1. that was a good decision, we needed a large source of near white gleam. (cool blue is the best colour for that too actually. I like it way more than the old cream gleam)

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20 posts were merged into an existing topic: Add back original color palette planets like old Universe

Death penalty is starting to suck as your get higher level. Come back from various farming to get killed by a stray cuttle while putting goods into a basket, taking a sip of tea, or blinking etc…

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I would argue that not being able to craft everything is what will give more purpose to trading, making friends and banding together. I think it’s a good thing.

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Just in case you’re anticipating a reply, that comment is 11 months old at this point :wink:

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I had a power cut yesterday 9am to 6 pm.
It turned me off.

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Oops. I done caught the dumb.

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All I claimed was they were light, which they are. And there are at least 2 reds that I am aware of Warm Cherry and Warm Red.

Also Alder has Cool Violet now very close to white.

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What puts you off playing boundless…when i spend lots of time building something in a middle of a lake then come back after hard days work (in rl…) to find a beacon and 2 portals right outside my workshop area.
Talk to people before doing this, please.
I love portal seekers and use your hubs all the time so if asked will bend over backwards to help with goods or allocate space for you, if asked.
Just please don’t plonk 2 portals right next to my main build…trying to keep a certain aesthetic :wink:
Did remove them pretty quick though so thank you for that.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Add back original color palette planets like old Universe

I am having a hard time moving past this myself. Anyone who says the penalty isn’t bad is not higher level. Maybe have to take up bag mining for a proclaimed:wink: 65k xp off one bags worth of bombs.

The other things don’t stop me from playing boundless. Bugs in the forge make me not forge until they are resolved. Only the xp death after 30 makes me turn the game off , out of all the bugs in the game that alone makes me walk away and go outside and see day light.

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The Only thing that turns me off is when : {ANALOGY} a restaurant gives you a menu but when you pick an item , it is unavailable {end analogy}.
I bought the Deluxe Digital Version and so did a few others. and none of us (acccording to Steam forums) got the extra features proposed there: not the cubits or the 10% lifetime bonus to your total beacon plot balance, nor the 30 days of Gleam Club membership.
Disappointing.
The rest is Good , I played 7 hours total game time already and I have no comlains on In-game features.

these kinds of things will always be taken care of as high priority. just be patient. :slight_smile: they are on top of it, and there has been more than a few cases of this.

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Wasting significant blocks of play time:

  • Running around on a planet for 3+ hours and finding exactly 1 plant for shimmering orb (despite atlas saying they’re all over the place).
  • Running around in caves (all vertical levels) for 2+ hours and finding 6 saltpeter fragments. (despite atlas saying they’re all over the pace)
  • Digging down to many far-and-wide gem hotspots on a planet to find all of them have been thoroughly cleared. (again thanks for nothing atlas)

SURFACE RESOURCE GENERATION - A BIG PROBLEM

It’s getting very old, and very frustrating very quickly. It’s not at all fun to spend an entire game-play session running around endlessly dodging OHKO mobs (or not and taking a massive xp gain hit). The above listed are only a few examples of cases where I set out for any resource in this game which just do not exist, particularly surface resources. The problem is, they are the norm.

I know some changes have been made recently, and I can at least find fibrous more frequently. The truth of the matter is it’s not good enough and it will not last. These changes also hardly impacted the surface resource problem at all.

The root issue is players don’t want to spend a whole play session (or 2 or 3 or all of them as can be the case in Boundless) not finding ‘x’ item and in fact not finding anything else in that time. People like me who value their free time to unwind and play a game outside of the daily grind, will:

  1. make goals
  2. want to progress on those goals
  3. set out multiple times to achieve said goals
  4. quickly drop this game after being constantly frustrated with nothing done toward their goals after countless hours of effort.
    (I won’t do this last one because I see great potential in this game but your average player will)

Think of this way; you go to work all week, you work your tail off and get rewarded with your $0 paycheck. What will you do? You will drop that job immediately and find a new job. This analogy isn’t perfect, but it drives home the point I’m making.

Okay so I acknowledge the issue is nothing new and it doesn’t seem to be going away. The mentality seems to be to tackle the problem by some form of upscaling the current system (add planets, adjust respawn algorithms to try and simulate a dynamic system, smaller chunk size). These are band-aid fixes (and some are one way scaling) and are not a very sustainable approach especially as player base fluctuates.

A FEW IDEAS

Let’s talk outside the box solutions for a bit, and I encourage the developers to imagine their software as a less rigid system and stop trying to fix something that is inherently broken as it is today-- as a developer I believe that creative potential is limitless with code if you’re willing to consider more ways to deliver.

A practical solution to server constraint is to offload to the client. This is a basic principle and can be applied to this problem in a hybrid sense. Consider something to the effect of the server generating surface resources specifically for the client based on some algorithm that incorporates distance explored. Obviously the server must be the control here for abuse reasons, but this should be* easy to scale in real time with minimal resources (*some assumptions made).

Another idea is NPCs, aerial drones, or a machine where you trade something in exchange for them entering into a venture to fetch you a small amount of a resource over a period of time limited by some daily or weekly allowances. In fact, maybe they can also bring back random items from a specific category to send them out to get. This would augment the current system.

Yes, the second one is a tactic used by subscription MMOs to get people to log in daily and maintain their subscription. However, the reward principle makes it a very successful tactic, particularly for casual players who don’t mind making progress toward a goal over a protracted time-frame. The key is they are making some progress instead of none. It’s little effort and thus provides little reward. That’s way better than very high effort and zero reward.

The third idea I’m not going to give specifics for, but it would involve some form of instanced content providing resources as a reward. This one is obviously quite a bit more complex, but the trade off is you can come of with some really neat things and provide another source of resources that guarantees some reward for effort.

These are just spitball ideas, maybe some of them have been proposed or considered but the point is the system for surface resource regeneration is not working. It will never be manageable and never be truly dynamic enough to scale up or down as player numbers fluctuate. What’s worse is that you are allowing it to be player driven by having player presence influence it.

VOLUME AND SURFACE AREA ARE DIFFERENT

I think the ore and gems work decently/better after the latest changes, which is great. Why is that? It’s simply “volume” vs “surface area” with “foot traffic” factored in and rarity/demand.

Honestly if you really think hard about it, the player influence is the major problem with the current regen system and the sole reason it isn’t working without adding more planets (this is a one-way scale solution… pretty dangerous). If I can traverse a very large percentage of the planet myself in a reasonable amount of time, that means each planet can support an alarmingly low number of players (with respect to surface resources).

How many planets do you have to add to get the equivalent in surface area that you have in volume on a single planet. More than 1 that’s for sure.

It’s so easy to influence a very large surface area on foot in a short amount of time, and a lot more people do it (regardless if they are looking for surface resources or not). Still the fact remains, it’s very likely in 4 hours that at least 1 other person was either looking for a specific surface resource (or simply walked past) where you are now to get somewhere. This likelihood is immensely compounded if the item is one in high demand.

Just wait until groups of people figure out they can own/grief whole item markets just by systematically walking around a planet or 2. Scary enough for you?

BOTTOM LINE

The regen for surface resources is very broken and does not scale the same as in rock resources. This is going to cause a lot of people to walk away, I promise. Whatsmore is it makes this game caged-in from such great potential. There needs to be another/better option to get these resources.

MAIN POINTS (TLDR)

  • Gathering reward for effort is grossly unacceptable for a game with a major theme that is gathering. Effort => Reward is a serious turn off in this game for today’s gamers. This is most noticeable with surface resources.
  • Spending a lot of time to make ZERO progress is among the worst things you can do to your player base and contradicts the game’s title.
  • A player-driven resource generation system is ineffective. I call it player-driven because yes a small group of organized players can 100% directly control if surface resources spawn or not in this game.
  • The answer might be to focus in on the player experience instead of the flaws of world generation which can never work @100 efficiency.
  • There are many other game mechanics that can be introduced that can reward resources in a more guaranteed fashion.
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Some resources could be available on lower tier worlds. Why not make shimmering orbs and such spawn on rugged worlds (in smaller amounts) and then scale up with world tier progression.

I hit this moment that I could make titanium tools if not shimmering orbs shortage. Total bottleneck.

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Well nothing turned me off playing boundless till now but recently , gathering surface resources such as beans , fragments , lamela , orbs , leaves and etc has started to become really frustrating. How can it be harder to find basic resources than to find diamonds and titanium ? It does not make sense. Maybe you can make some way of farming. For example we can plant beans and after a day or two , harvest them to get even more beans or something like that. Not to mention the XP system that also turns me off lately. I am level 34 now and I need lots of skills to endure in higher tier planets but I cannot level up easily. It feels like this game is a game that u need to spend all your time on it instead of playing it among other games. I hate that. I prefer to play 1-2 hours a day but with this current grinding it seems impossible to accomplish much.

Grinding has started to feel like Warframe lately. Hard to find basic resources , Hard to level up , Lots of time consumption.

However I am not trying to offend anyone or anything about the game :slight_smile: I love the game and recommended the game in steam reviews. Just wanted to answer the topic question : P <3

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The resource regen is a pain but it was brought to light recently that the surface resources being taken wont start world regeneration, there has to be block changes in the chunk they were located in, so when collecting resources in your favourite areas if you break the block below the resource its more likely to regen later. Not ideal but iv found its been helping .

I was in the same situation as you recently with the levels and was honestly on the verge of leaving the game because of it, but I decided Id at least give a go at alt characters (particularly hated the thought of doing this) before I go, So I made an alt for just crafting and spec’d my main to be a hunter/miner and have to say it worked out soo well, my hunter/miner is lvl 34 and I have to say he’s hard as nails, I use him on the tier 6 planets for mining and killing (except meteors) and its very manageable and fun, and the alt quickly level’d up to 19 by ust crafting what I needed and can now make almost everything. Its worth trying out alts and making specific builds instead of a all round character.

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I know , I have alt characters. It is helpful but not completely. you still can’t have all the skills needed for being an efficient gatherer or miner. The other biggest thing about alt character is that , I don’t feel comfortable with it. I mean , there must be 1 character representing 1 player in a game. A character that you nourish and make it better and stronger . One character to have a bond with . I never liked having alt characters in any game. I don’t like it in this one either. They said it is an option because many players love them. OK . But what about the ones that don’t ? I like having different skill sets in the same character. However it’s just useless now because after level 30 , leveling up is a heavy grind. How am I going to pass level 50 to have extra skill sets with only 1-2 hours of playing for fun in game ? There is also an XP penalty that does not decrease as time passes . Other XP methods are also nerfed. For having more and more characters you need cubits which can be bought in the shop that might give some players the wrong idea of “Pay To Win” .

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I will agree with you my preference for a lot of the same reasons would be to have one character and just have other skill sets. With the way xp is earned, it would take too long to get to level 150 to have a fully spec’d out character. I feel forced to use alts in order to do the things I want to be able to do myself.

The longer I feel stuck in the level 30’s (and I have not even gotten to level 40), the more bored I get with the game. But I cannot do the things I want until I get the skills. It is a chicken and egg situation. I need the skills to go to the planet to get the resources to make the tools that will let me be more effective at getting xp to get the skills I needed in the first place.

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