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:
- make goals
- want to progress on those goals
- set out multiple times to achieve said goals
- 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.