What turns you off playing Boundless?

Nothing! My wife and I love the game! Can’t wait to see more and more content added, and hopefully some more advertising to get some more people in the door!

7 Likes

"Unplayable Connection"

"Check Your Connection"

yeah, checked…it’s fine and all my other games work perfectly. :wink:

4 Likes

@james

Or:
“Game Server offline”

and then 2 seconds later it still loads.

Also funsies is the timout connection error. I need to look away and back to a portal in order to let it retry.

Why is the game telling players that a server is offline while that most certainly is not the case?
Why is the game showing me a timeout connecting to server while it simply could do a retry which I now have to force manually?

Changing this behaviour, even tho the underlying reasons for showing these messages hasn’t been resolved, and not show this to players might give a much more positive feeling about the game (or at least a less negative one!).

2 Likes

At the moment as I’ve stated a few times already is mining for material (ore, components, etc) instead of the old system where you went into a cave or searched off a mountain with your grapples. I found it was more adventurous this way. Diving into a hole in the floor, deeper and deeper into the caverns, minding your every step as not to slide and fall into lava. Hoppers made me freeze up sometimes with their scary sounds. Now we have the atlas and instead of it being adventurous and fun as it was before, it became menial and dreadfully boring. First this too was an enjoyable part of the game but not anymore. Been digging for over an hour for some silver and only found 10… Jesus. I get that things get more rare at higher tier planets but I strongly suspect the eternal craft and mining drag that’s painfully slow in the beginning will turn off many new players.

A solution might be that it becomes more interactive to dig for ore via some kind of tracking device or whatever.

peep- peep- peep- peep-- peep---- peep-----------

You get the idea.

Edit: Don’t want to be a whiny ■■■■ but I do want to be honest. I like the game.

4 Likes

Not enough structured content. I like that the economy and worlds are player determined, but there needs to be some structured activities. I often find myself saying “what am i supposed to be doing right now”. And the answer always requires a lot of thought, planning, or creativity. It would be nice to have some events we could just jump into without a lot of thought.

My suggestion is co-op raids. Maybe build some “levels” like a big castle, a dungeon, etc, that people have to work as a team of 4-8 to complete. It would encourage teamwork, and would give the game more replay-ability.

4 Likes
  • no working economy whatsoever. Im not even going to start, the whole income/spending concept is flawed, if there was one to begin with.

  • boring pointless grind… This game should be about building and creativity. Im not really into spending my free time collecting resources for ages to build a few minutes. It was great in closed alpa/beta. Its a pain now.

  • crafting simply isnt fun. It feels like the devs artificially blew up the recipes/ingredients to creat some sort of need to grind. The sudden change to need wax for the t2 stone? Constant moving the carrot on a stick.No matter which game, the developers never learn. If you want the playerbase to stay… make the game interesting. If i want pointless grinding i have several asian MMOs at hand that can do it better.

  • Footfall… The whole concept is flawed. Instead of carving out your own little place on a nice spot, you are pretty much forced to build in a city, watching the annoying chat.

  • Performance… simply painfu. I work in IT. I tried to helpt to pin it down. All i ever got was the “Our side is fine, must be you” cliche reply. It is not my side. It is your Server/client architecture and the way you handle connections. But hey, by now you are down to such a small playerbase that its probably fixed.

  • the features that never arrived… Own planets could have fixed so many problems with people being fed up about the plot system. Sadly, by the time this feature will hit release (if it ever will) the customers who would have wanted it will be long gone. I know i am.

7 Likes

The game has had nothing keeping me here ever since they removed shadows, dulled the colors down, and made gleam just a regular slightly glowing block. Back in my day this game was beautiful, but now it just looks bleak. I could just play minecraft with shaders, mods, and have a better experience.

#makegleamgreatagain

4 Likes

http://boundlesscrafting.com/crafting/emerald-heavy-hammer

This is extreme .
(Especially this part http://boundlesscrafting.com/crafting/enriched-bonding-agent)

I get bored/discouraged just looking at the inane amount of mats I need to get so that I can craft one “end-game tool” that will disappear after a certain amount of use(pro-tip: the fix is not implementing anvils or something to repair it - it’s simplifying the recipe). The recipes in EA were perfect, they really were. Enough for it to feel like an accomplishment but not too little either. To be fully honest, last time I played this game was in July I believe. I returned a week or three ago and playing the game now I feel the game went backwards instead of forward and this saddens me. I do not want to see it fail, but IT IS failing. The game got unnecessarily overly complicated. There’s only one thing that has any business to be complicated and that’s forging.

5 Likes

The recipes in EA were perfect, they really were.

Thats whats so sad. They had it right at the start and then ruined it…

3 Likes

I wonder why they felt the need to change it? The game feels so unplayable now. Like it’s working against you.

-can’t cave mine anymore (boring 1x2 tunnel mining)
-overly complicated recipes (constantly halting progression and game play)
-strange new materials added as necessary into already existing tools/building blocks etc) (why even? why not add new mats but have you make NEW things with them at least if you really have to add them…))
-nice looking building blocks take stupid mats to craft having you to constantly halt building as to hunt for these meticulous mats
-portals requite oort --> hunting (I personally don’t like hunting or raiding n any game and portals are a fundamental part of the game)
-yellow line fatigue as you swing any tool (this is an ok idea but I feel it empties too quickly considering my line is never constantly full and mostly at 50-60% which is annoying when cutting wood/leaves or the worst of all 1x2 mining)
-extended machine set ups (this isn’t as bad but it takes up A LOT of space and so I need to create two separate bases. One for machines and an ugly building containing those and the other the build I actually want… which I still haven’t gotten to because of painfully slow progression.)

Things I do like:
-no more tool degradation after death
-killing atmosphere combated with a skill of T4 worlds and up (progression/high level feeling)
-the new door styles and variation (Really nicely done!)

6 Likes

-I believe it has been stated there were issues with the cave generation on 1.0 T1 planets. But the only way to replace those planets with updated ones would be to wipe everything people have built on them. Caves are there, just have to dig to find them.
-i think they intended for either group play, or to utilize the player economy to fill gaps. Both fair.
-examples? I’ve crafted a LOT and have not run into this, that I can recall.
This gets much easier as you progress. Then again, you can utilize the player economy to fill gaps. If there was no grind then this would just be a creative mode game, which isn’t what it strives to be.
-again, buy in the player economy what you don’t want to get yourself. That’s the whole point of it.
-gem tools with +Durability and Persisting food can last a looonnng time. I’ve been using my current grapples for weeks. It’s progression, you will get there.
-I build my workshops under my builds for this reason. Perhaps that would help you. Rather compact too, for housing 2 of each machine with coils. You are more than welcome to come draw inspiration from my design.

3 Likes

The issue is having coin to fill in the gaps. As I get no footfall, I can either spend a great deal of time grinding for items that I then have to search 40 planets for someone to buy or just grind for what I need myself. In either case the economy does not eliminate grind, you grind for what you sell or grind for what you want. I think the issue is not that the game needs some grind (it does in my opinion), my issue is the grind is too much. Even if I finally get enough coin to buy a 17K forged hammer it wears out so I get to grind again for enough materials to build and then also to get enough to sell or to make another forged hammer.

I am leveled enough that hearing that it is progression and it will get easier does not make me feel any better. with over 1400 hours in game, this should not be an issue.

5 Likes

With the changes we have had to major systems in the game (bomb mining, forging and now prestige) I keep having moments where I get really frustrated about a lot of work I had done and materials I had gathered were for nothing.

It feels like the game is still Early Access to me, which is totally ok, that just needs to be communicated better.

Adding new systems and features as the game grows is to be expected but these are things have been in the game for a while now so I feel they should of been sorted out before launch.

1 Like

Limit of building… can’t put more thank 5xx machine, powercoil etc in 16 x 16 x 256 range… If you can fix it, gonna be a better boundless world !

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I have found myself going from being incredibly excited to hop on and play after work to more or less just checking if my beacons are still fueled. There was never a moment where I just went “■■■■ this” and shut it off, more of a gradual accumulation of frustration. I’m listing these out to gather my thoughts, but these aren’t in any real order.

  1. The economy: I’m not going to say that it “doesn’t work” as people can buy and sell somewhat, but it works about as poorly as possible without not working at all, if that makes sense. Footfall is a novel system and I don’t dislike it inherently, but it doesn’t work as the only reliable income source. It forces people to behave in certain ways if they want to participate in the economic game which feels limiting in a game called “Boundless.” I think it’s a great way to pay people who run portal hubs, but there needs to be some way for other players to get coins that isn’t tied to the whims of the largest stores/the player economy in general.

  2. Also the economy: Related to the above point, the physical nature of the economy is just not fun for me. I know from reading the forums that there are people that love spending hours running through 1000 portals looking for the guy selling what they want for 1c cheaper than market price: that isn’t me. About 30 minutes of shopping and I just get bored and either buy the thing in front of me or go home and log off. I personally think there should either be a universal auction house or at least planetary auction houses, but some way for a shopper to know who is selling what/who is buying what at what prices feels needed. Fixing footfall doesn’t matter if the task of shopping is so odious that people don’t want to do it.

  3. Botched Patches: I joined about a week after the “release” of Boundless, so one of my first experiences with patches was the patch where they just forgot to tell us they nerfed bomb mining. And then undocumented recipe changes in the next patch. And of course the guild update right now. These feel like unforced errors. I know dev work is hard and I don’t expect every patch to be perfect, but I also expect there to not be bedlam after a new one goes live.

  4. “Released” status: This is not close to a finished game. I highly suspect that the devs wouldn’t have “released” the game when they did were there not a figurative gun to their heads, but there was and they did. A released game just has higher expectations, especially one with a $40 price tag on it, and this really feels like it’s super early access still. I can only imagine what it was like years ago.

  5. The “Grind”: I put grind in quotes because it’s progressable, it just stopped being fun at some point. Recipes take a ton of stuff, so it feels like I go out mining/farming/hunting for days of my play time in order to do 5 minutes of the thing I like (crafting tools to sell/use/forge).

  6. Forging: Please speed this up. I can live with the opaque RNG, the nature of the system that makes forging diamond tools exactly the same as forging iron ones, nerfing mats over and over, all that is fine. Just make the sliders faster.

  7. 3x3 is Silly: The cat is out of the bag on this one, so the entire game needs to be balanced about this now (as we see with the arbitrary 500 endeavor/week cap that had to be placed on guilds). Every system in the game, for forever, has to account for 3x3 mining if that system even tangentially touches EXP or underground materials (144 of each refined gem for mass crafts of guild machine power coils, anyone?). Mining is a thing I LOVE to do in these games (I was almost strictly a miner in Runescape for 4 years), and 3x3 for sure makes it easier. I don’t think it makes it more fun, though.

  8. Lack of Content: Where are the props? Other than holiday stuff, there is a table and a chair. Cool. Where are beds, fences, book shelves, posters/paintings/maps, vending machines, w/e. I could build the nicest looking house in the universe and it would have to sit empty. Where are titans/boss combats? Fishing? I know farming is coming SoonTM, so that is something at least.

Sorry if this is a jumble, just putting thoughts to keyboard. I have a ton of respect for the devs for the work they are doing. Assuming it stays up and running, I do believe there is a good game in here 1-2 years from now. For me, I just crafted a bunch of greater beacon fuel so I’m not going to quit for good, but I don’t see myself playing a ton more either until something changes.

12 Likes

With all due respect, I hate this idea. The best thing about the Boundless market is that nothing has a set price and that tenacity will yield you better deals. If getting an extra 10% off isn’t worth the search, then don’t search. That’s the point.

You introduce any sort of central market or database into the game and prices will stabilize across everyone’s shop and then start to rise. That’s boring.

Finding a good deal is a treat. It’s one of the things that keeps me coming back.

3 Likes

Blooming snow !!! &*^% :slight_smile:

1 Like

I would argue that the beautiful thing about Boundless is that a player that is smart and willing to put in the effort could create such a thing in-game. Create a central market and negotiate with the major market players to come up with a generally accepted list of reasonable prices… all in-game.

I’d argue that’s a full time job. If people enjoy that type of gameplay that’s fine. I don’t disagree with any style a person chooses to play but for the longevity and health of the game it’s not a good way to look at it. The current population shows as much.

3 Likes

I can respect this and I understand why it’s fun for you. I should clarify, with the psychical nature of stands, often times the issue isn’t finding the best deal, it’s finding the item at all. This isn’t an easy problem to fix, neither of us are “wrong” we just like different stuff.