What would make you build/play more

I had a little go at a level 2 meteor on my own last night just to see what it would drop. As it was just a level 2 it was pretty easy but apart from meat, bone and tallow from the animals the actual meteorite just gave 3 oort stones which I could of got from just 1 or 2 road runners in a fraction of the time. I’m sure it’s not the case but It just feels as though single players are slowly but surely being discouraged from playing and everything is being geared towards group activities.

Crafting recipes that don’t take a month to collect the items to mass craft…

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What are you trying to mass craft that takes over a month to gather the materials for?

Use atlases. Cheap, reusable, and effective. Nothing in game takes longer than 3 or 4 hours at most to gather enough for a mass batch.

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Better storage. I think that there should be a “pallet” storage system, where different, non-material, blocks are stored together. This is natural blocks like trees, foliage, rocks, and foliage. It would allow us to avoid the weird storage issue where two blocks look near identical but don’t stack, and give a UI that could allow for people to search or pick different colors easier. I feel like it would just make building better, and I know that someone like @Liveey would appreciate having something like a swatch picker for her huge builds.

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Start from scratch (material-wise) and craft me a set of Advanced Extractor Power Coils in four hours.

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I could collect the required materails for an advanced power core, no problem. But not i could not craft it because of progression. Progression is an important game play aspect, remember? It’s the journey that makes the destination worth the effort.

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You were talking about mass crafting. :wink:

Only a Sith deals in absolutes, Havok. Not every mass craft recipe materials can be gathered in three or four hours.

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I would prefer to start from scratch and sniff.

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I think one of the things not fully realized by much of the playerbase with this latest update is the fact that it now adds a lot more depth to the development of a character. Now we actually have things to work towards, instead of just being able to have more instant-like gratification. I know prior to the update I was able to get a character to level 40+ inside of a week and have whatever materials I needed at hand. Now, with these new recipes; new resources; and the new allocation of these resources it definitely has changed the feasibility of acquiring components.

I would argue, however, that the only items in this new update that are a bit more difficult to obtain are certain gem types and fibrous leaves ( I won’t touch Shadow Orbs, because I have a feeling that drop rate will change dramatically once new biomes/planet designs are introduced in the future).

If you find that a resource is taking a long time to collect I would encourage you to reach out to the playerbase for advice. I think the only universal items that people will have trouble with are fibrous leaves (even though this has been greatly improved!) and any gem resources that are on planets that are lower than tier 3 (just because the drop rates are proportionately lower, as well).

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Fair’nuff, but I think we all agree that progression in crafting is a good thing… if everything could be mass crafted so easily (and 4 hours is as much an exaggerated example as a month) then the game would not be worth playing.

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I try to mass craft everything, so trying to cook a mass crafted food, will take me a month to get seeds… they drop inconsistently.

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What worlds are you trying to get seeds from?

Just last night I dug out a few patches of land in Anoobis on Septerfon and came away with ~200 seeds. It took me around 30-45 minutes.

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Vulpto, munteen, solum

Love the idea, but I’d like to flip it over; the larger the city, the smaller the effect of your building becomes… Using the hospital example, having a larger population per hospital / school / police station etc reduces its effectiveness.

My reasoning is twofold; it opens the market for more of the same structures in a large city (reduces monopoly chance) and incentivises people to build these in small cities too instead of the whole universe flocking to one hub (no offence aquatopia :wink: )

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whaaaat none taken lol
theres a moment when an area has full status and when people leave the same amount is ready to replace them
like aqua shopping
thats why i started districts and second market

Best to dig out only the longest grass i have found, then you get much better drops…

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I think this rings true with my impression of the game as it’s developed. For me there’s been a definite shift from Boundless being a game that is solo friendly to one that has become solo tolerant, which I find a little sad. On the flip side, it’s worth noting that this feeling doesn’t mean that anything has changed in Boundless or it’s intent. As more features have been implemented, there are obviously going to have been more things introduced that are designed for both groups and solo players, and you notice more things that are group-focused when there are more things to notice.

I think what would make me play more would (I know, this viewpoint is getting old from me and doesn’t need further discussion, we’ve done that to death already) would be me being able to get what I wanted out of the game playing a single character, and not splitting time over three alts to get essentially the same results. I feel that when suggesting that something is negative, it’s always worth providing solutions. As such, more acceptable solutions that fall in line with Boundless seems to want to be might be to:

  • Limit skills enough that you can’t cover all the possible masteries with a pre-planned roster of alts. If you want to force people to be reliant on others or to make it so they can’t do it all, actually enforce it. what we have now isn’t great.
  • Make some skills lock out other skills. Be able to make advanced (and above) tools OR weapons. Advanced food OR brews. It’ll let you do the basics of everything, but make people pick specialties and be more unique. If people don’t end up unique, that’s an issue with balance, not availability.
  • I know this is a step almost full circle in development ethos, but make it so that you can only advance skills in actions you’re actually doing. The idea that I can become a master at [insert time consuming / less rewarding activity] by spending time doing [insert efficient activity] devalues any effort put into more time consuming/less fun activities (I don’t mention specifics because I know different people like different things).

What would make me build more would be if building felt more like play, and less like work. For me, the reason that it feels like work is that for all the time I spend doing what I want to do in the game, I spend just as much time faffing around making sure I can carry on doing it. I want to build something: I must either buy or collect materials.

Collection (under the assumption my character is able to both build and gather sufficiently): I need materials - This will take time, along with Tools and brew/food. Tools and Energy maintenance will also take materials which in turn need gathering.
Buying: Anything I spend here I am unlikely to see again. Maybe I’ll get some footfall if I were to jam it onto the side capitol, but that’s not really where I want to be building. Given that, it’s money that I will have had to spend separate periods of time grinding for.

Suggestions that could make building feel more rewarding/less like work:

  • Structures with purpose - Localised buffs to health regen or negative status effect removal, atmosphere protection, walk/run speed, jump height (cool for obstacle courses), food halls for hunger restoration, Bedrooms/Inns for bonus XP, Specialist crafting halls for reduced craft time. Warding against wandering hostiles. The list really could go on and on.
  • Chisels not having durability. There are plenty of other resource sinks in the game, and advanced chisel usages are locked behind skills anyway. That, and half the time you spend chiselling, you’re doing it ‘to see’ if it looks better, worse, or about the same.
  • [insert more] - I’ve just realised the time and have work early tomorrow.
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I understand what you’re saying about limiting and locking out skills to make players specialise so that they are forced to only have unique abilities but for me I guess that will be the point that I actually stop playing.
My main alt is mostly used for exploring and mining which means it needs a skill set geared around hammers, grapples, tool durability, light glow, inventory space etc for the mining part and slingbow, health regeneration, no death penalty, grapples still etc for the exploration part but also to be able to defend itself when attacked while mining … now if I’m forced to choose one or the other then there’s little point in choosing the miner because without the other half of skills it will just die all the time when getting to and from mining exploration sites as well as mods that now spawn in the caves … Some might say that this then presents an opportunity for co op play where you need a hunter to accompany you on your mining expedition to protect you … so now I have to go and find someone anytime I want to go mining … that will definitely be the time I say goodbye …
I used to play Destiny but because huge parts of the game were locked away behind group raids that only wanted high level players in their groups you soon realise how repetitive and boring it becomes when you can’t break through that barrier.
The biggest aspect of this game that I enjoy is that I can do everything to some degree by myself so I don’t have to rely on others … if that’s taken away then it becomes just like all the other games.

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Oh, I entirely agree with you at all in terms of ‘do-it-all’ vs ‘be limited to encourage co-operation’. My point was that one of the reasons I don’t play more is because of the way skill distribution & characters work. Time for a barely relevant food based analogy.

To me, the current implementation feels like someone said “We hear that some of you like tuna sandwiches, and some of you like jam sandwiches. We want to satisfy as many people as possible, so have this tuna & jam sandwich compromise”. Obviously I can’t rule out the idea that some people may actually prefer the monstrosity that is a sweet and savoury fish sandwich, but equally can’t help but feel that most of the people who’d rather have a tuna sandwich would still be happier with a jam sandwich than the mashup.

I’d prefer do it all on one character. But I’ve been told numerous times that it’s terrible and would ruin the game. The only reason that ever stood up to the slightest logical scrutiny was combat balance, and you ‘could’ just limit skills spent across combat trees at any one time to solve it. Beyond that, every single reason suggested as to why it’s bad is also something that the current system fails to prevent or protect against, it just makes it more of a faffy logistics puzzle. That being the case and having (begrudgingly) accepted this, my suggestion are my way of saying “Fine, I get it, you don’t want me to have a tuna sandwich. I’d enjoy playing more if my sandwich was just jam than this though”.

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We have a update coming that allows players to do exactly this. We’ll also retain Alts for players who genuinely want to play as an alternative character.

I ultimately concluded that once we supported alts that allow players to access all skills across different characters, then there is little different to accessing all skills from a single character.

We’re also planning a review and reworking of the skill system itself. This includes the process of enabling skills (which is a real pain when re-skilling a character, hard to plan, every step is permanent) and the skill trees themselves.

(Why aren’t we doing this already!! Well we’re rebalancing the crafting trees, preparing the initial release of the forge, working on the animation and prediction system, reworking the block and world palette system, adding an optional profanity filter and other stuff.)

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