What turns you off playing Boundless?

So, the point about settlement A eating settlemnent B, is honestly moot to me because it happens in real life. To give you a real life example. I used to live in Cushing, Oklahoma. Back in the early 2000’s, two nearby smaller towns named Yale, Oklahoma and Drumright, Oklahoma got together and had a town meeting about Cushing’s explosive growth, because they calculated it out and within 5-10 years Cushing’s city limits would have expanded out and encompassed theirs. But, that’s what happens. Settlements merge and become cities, cities merge and become metropolis. An easy fix for that would be for the devs to expand the amount of reserved area that’s claimed by a beacon, then include a one plot wide grace area before another beacons reserved area can start. However, that would swallow up massive amounts of land, and would further push the desire for a shorter beacon time. To give you another example. Osiris: New Dawn is another game in development that opened up public servers. The game exploded, and all the land that was useful for habitation was quickly taken up by inactive settlements. Their solution was a wear timer of all man-made structures of around 10 days, and it worked. The players that are devoted to the game are still around keeping their stuff repaired and the 1-5 day players that played the game once or twice and quit lost their stuff. If Boundless isn’t going to open the table for talks about private servers, then they need to cater to the devoted players that are here playing the game on a damn near daily basis.

Also, the two beacons that I mentioned in my earlier post. They are both literally holes in the ground with beacons and stone furnaces. I scouted that area out for any sign of permanent settlements and found nothing. No player made structures, no evidence of clear deforestation…nothing to suggest that there was any one living there. It wasn’t until I started trying to plot those areas that I came across the reserved area of their beacon. If I knew that they weren’t afk I’d be more than happy to help them develop their plots, but there isn’t a way for me to find out.

1 Like

I appreciate that settlement merging happens in real life regardless of how many examples you give but this isn’t real life and I personally would like the option of being able to opt in or out of being part of someone else’s build. I agree that abandoned plots can be a pain when they get in your way but at least you know they won’t be around for ever. I still totally disagree with dropping the beacon time limit. I’ve been playing Boundless for over 600 hours and I know at some point I will probably give it a little break for any multitude of reasons. It would be too easy to briefly forget to top up one of my beacons before 10 days and them to lose everything. I work full time and it’s not every day I can log on as I do have other commitments as well. Just because I might want to have or need a small break from Boundless doesn’t mean I won’t want to come back to it but if everything is gone and I have to start from scratch then of course I’ll just walk away and put my time and effort into something else. I do agree though, as I said before, that it would be good if there was some way of contacting beacon owners to find out if they intend to use said beacons or if they can be removed.

2 Likes

I would like to change the name of this post to what keeps turning me on to playing Boundless.

There are many, many issues that I have seen talked about as I have been browsing posts, I see that there is a common theme: Everyone here is thinking the same thing.

The good news here is that the community has common sense, and are a good bunch of dudes / dudettes. I haven’t seen any truly toxic trolly posts, and if I open that door with this post then I’m glad I found you out now (You know who you are). So, without further ado, and random comments about what is making me fall in love with this game again, let me tell you why I keep coming back even when I’m frustrated as hell.

Repetitive textures are the most annoying thing to me. In voxel based games, I see a lot of the same color. Minecraft taught me that texture blending and approximation was just something that people don’t really want to talk about. But, I do. Here’s the thing, blending is the only real way I can see to make these worlds living, the way I want to see. Let me give you an example.

Example 1 This is how textures are normally handled.
Example 2 This is how I propose it to be handled.
Example-Animation

Cause, well, I like things to be pretty.

But this, this is honestly the reason why I keep coming back, because I can suggest, propose, and this game has potential. I always think about the problems I’m facing, and every time I read about many others thinking and working to find solutions them. So. This is a labor of love, so to speak.

5 Likes

Unfortunately that would quite simply be infeasible.

If each texture can spread 3 meters away, then think what happens when you have a complex chiseled mess of 5x5x5 set of blocks where every block has a different texture… apart from the absolute nightmare of computing how each of those textures on each face would spread to each of the other faces (and the computation cost of that, texture blending is already not super-fast and has a resonable cost on meshing in the game and is backed up by a huge amount of insanely complex data to enable blending to work across all the combinations of slope shapes (and we already just plain say “no” to bevel/square chiselled blocks for blending)), it would also mean that each triangle in the mesh could end up with over 30 texture indices and weights being encoded so the meshes would be about 10x bigger in data, and then the rendering cost would be insane to have to multiply the cost of the voxel shaders another magnitude for sampling the 4 actual textures that exist for each “texture” and mixing them all together.

7 Likes

Well, not entirely, I do agree with assessment of that situation and the impossible cost, but, I’ve thought on this a whole bunch, and think that it’s a pretty simple solution. If you establish texture hierarchy, then you could set interactions between key elements, such as grass and dirt and ice and glacial ice. Blending of two simple coverings (Grass, for example) would be rather simple to contain. I do like how you guys added several stages of grass, by repeatedly planting the seeds, and that is marvelous, but color blending between the different strains would really just make rolling hills… roll.

BTW, having a Dev respond to my post is exactly why I keep wanting to try and propose new things. So, thanks for reinforcing my argument as to why I keep playing your frustrating Alpha. :wink:

Why not check them two?:grin:

4 Likes

Trees should fall, when you cut their bottom blocks

7 Likes

Yeah. I spend so much energy trying to chop down a whole tree. The OCD in me can’t just leave part of the tree or leaves hanging in the middle of the open air. It just bothers me.

On another note, I find myself looking for a search box on the crafting machines every time I open them. Being able to filter them is nice and all but sometimes I just want to search for ONE thing.

Also, A friend just stopped playing due to the massive resource cost of crafting the end game items. As a rather new player, and one that’s extremely patient and all that, I’m still here, but it’s currently extremely frustrating when I realize that before this recent update I needed about another 10 gems to start crafting my first gem hammer, and now I need piles of resources just to get ready to craft one.

5 Likes

My family started playing Boundless just over a month ago, and were enjoying the game - all the possibilities, the creativity and ingenuity of the other players, variety of environs and different roles available to play. We’ve enjoyed setting up a little town, some of us exploring far and wide, some doing lots of building. We were excited about the patch this past Monday! Now that we’ve had a few days to absorb the changes and learn how we need to do things from this point on, myself and one of our kids don’t want to play anymore. :frowning:

We’re all still pretty low level (25, 26, 27 and 37), and things we could do before now feel practically impossible within a reachable amount of time (compact coal, silver/gold tools, etc). The changes are too great, and it’s frustrating having abilities taken away and knowing how hard it will be to get them back. The levelling system is slow, and skill pts come too slowly as well. There just isn’t momentum enough to get through the grind and feel the reward is worth it, and then keep going.

I’m also lost on the necessity of power, when there was spark already. I can envision it as an upgrade to spark, but right now it seems superfluous and needlessly costly, especially for low level characters.

Lastly, the stamina seems… unbalanced. I tried to chop down a tree last night, with max stamina, and was stopped, repeatedly, by low stamina levels. It wasn’t a big tree.

9 Likes

On the stamina, I wasn’t aware until another player told me. You have to eat a bit to build it up to max. When you put those points in, it doesn’t build up right away. If you’re in the sanctum it will refill, but outside in the world, you have to eat in order for it to refill correctly.

2 Likes

And then, just as you’re about to craft it, you realise how much better it’d be if you had a few more to Bulk craft…THEN you realise what you miss out on by not Mass crafting :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes

10 million types of food seems excessive.

(And skill point costs are still horrible.)

1 Like

Complexity. Back before the turn of the century if I saw a game that advertised “Control every aspect of a the society as it builds toward…” I just put it down because that’s not play, that’s work. I stopped playing The Sims because I already had something around the house that needed to be told when to eat, when to wash, and when to use the toilet–our toddler. I think with 188 out the game just exceeded my ability to track everything I need to do just to maintain the status quo in the game, much less progress.

5 Likes

Yeah, when I started really digging into what the coils were going to take, I just lost my will to live a little :slight_smile:

2 Likes

At the moment it’s not what turns me off playing Boundless it’s just not having enough free time to play Boundless … so if you can make me win the jackpot lottery so I don’t have to go to work then I will definitely be playing it a lot more :grin:

5 Likes

(Following up on my prior comment.)

Sometimes, as the cliche’ goes, less is more. It’s not clear to me we need fifty-leven different recipes for cornbread, or 89 ingredients plus reflected sunlight from Alturnik to make pottery shelves. (I’m exaggerating for effect.) If I wanted to be an accountant or a warehouse manager, then I’d play Warehouse Manager Online or Final Accountancy XIV: It’s Really Final This Time, We Pinky-Swear.

And then there’s specializations. I don’t just want to be a miner, or just be a hunter, or just be a…whatever the other choice is. That actually isn’t very interesting in the long run, and I don’t want to have to run alts just to be able to have the playing experience I want. I also really don’t want to deal with the social co-op aspects because I shouldn’t have to depend on other players in order to have fun. People not keeping the shops stocked? Well, there goes the afternoon. People not showing up for digs, or builds, or hunts? Well, there goes the afternoon.

50+ years of experience at life (and 2+ years watching these forums) tells me that not all the cats want to be herded, much less be dependent upon each other for amusement at playtime.

I guess we have to try, though.

9 Likes

My personal opinion on the last update.

I think it’s just the way the game accommodates to different playstyles of players. The overloaded recipe of foods might not be what you wanted and seems excessive but for some who wants to be a cook, it introduces progression as a chef. Ignoring those extra recipes won’t hurt your playthrough as you’ll just have the same experience as we had prior to this update. These recipes are just add-ons that gives buffs to those willing to entangle themselves with this area.

As for the added ingredients to the existing item, I think it’s a change that will come eventually due to our limited drops prior to the design of their recipe. We need to make the upcoming drops be more valuable.

I do agree there needs some tweaking to be done though. More specifically, to the abundance of some resources like fibrous leaves and barks but that’s where we come into the equation. hehe.

7 Likes

So, this is just my two cents about the update. This is the first time I’ve had a game update that immediately nose-dived it into unplayability. I don’t wanna have to be reliant on other people to do things that in almost every other game is a basic ability. So, I skilled my main to be able to craft every item in the game. Now… he plays like a selective crippled asthmatic that for some reason can run really far and fast, but can only swing his hammer like 5 times before having to stop and take a breath. I’m having to level up my main to be my hunter gatherer, and I’m using him to construct my new workshop, and I’m stopping like every five minutes and asking myself why I’m playing this game, when I could be playing modded minecraft and get better gameplay for my time. Tinkers construct has better tools, there are a plethora of mods that have better machines, and I don’t have a janky half-assed skill tree preventing me from enjoying the game to it’s fullest.Add in the fact that 90% of my gaming network considered Boundless cancer even before the update… I Just don’t see myself playing this game for much longer.

4 Likes

Not to disregard your (or anyone else’s who shares it) feeling about the way Boundless makes you play.

Being able to craft everything is not basic ability, is it? It’s like saying that being able to get masters in engineering robotics chemistry and medicine in real life is a basic ability and everyone should be able to do all possible jobs and never get anything from others. If our real life is based on choices and roles within society where teamwork and cooperation are essential, why is it so hard to accept it in a game?

Back to Boundless.
If you really focus on basics like survival movement power and energy, you can move around pretty easy before lvl 25 and do hunting mining or whatever you want without feeling like a cripple.

Then you slowly build up higher tier crafting and whatnot. What you can’t craft yourself you buy. What else do you have coins for?

People complain about grind and balance etc because it makes sense to try to make this game better. However it’s a MMO game with survival elements and complaining about its core rule-set is like playing FIFA 2018 and complaining that you would rather play a basketball simulator.

3 Likes

Have you played any vanilla minecraft at all? 90-95% of the items in vanilla minecraft are craftable from the get go, and those that aren’t are locked behind easily surmountable walls such as needing iron/diamond level pick axe or killing x amount of mobs to get x amount of certain item. Then, you get into the higher tier modded minecraft packs that have harder restricts to get to the better stuff, but those are also generally bundled with lower difficulty packs that make the early and mid-game still fun. I don’t mind a challenge, but then you get into Boundless. Where step 1 to get something like compact coal, now includes 500 sub-steps to even make 1% of progress on the overall goal. This ‘game’ is starting to turn into a second job and that’s dumb.

1 Like