The little arrow button there lets you change the target of your post. I use it all the time this forum really leads you to click on the “Reply” button attached to a post.
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The problem is that if I want to be able to do several things competently, I need about 3 maxed characters.
ForgeMinerGatherer, MobHunter, Crafter
That doesn’t even get into some of the more niche things that I may want to be able to do
This game also isn’t free to play. It’s a buy to play game.
LOL, that is a million furnaces
You have a point, 200hrs to 50 isn’t the end of the world.
What’s the end of the world is when you realize that 1600hrs is 2 years of playtime for a casual player, who never really exceeds 200hrs in any given game because newer, better games come out before they can invest such a hefty time into any single game. Sooooo what’s keeping anything but hardcore players around if there’s a 200hour grind to most things?
A lot of games player base are made up of casual players
Now, I’m a hardcore gamer, I put like 500-600 hrs into this game over ~3 months and loved it most of the time, aside from annoying nerfs and major balance changes that knocked out a lot of interest from a lot of different players - which is why I usually play solo, but I did this time around find a few people, and we all agreed after several months of hardcore playing that this game can destroy your life from the time requirements to be any kind of competitive/feeling your progression
I love the game, but it’s definitely been in a rough spot from it’s balancing act over the last 7 months, and the biggest draw back is the slow mid-game. Right around level 30 it starts to get wayyy more difficult to level and you have to know how to use your skillpoints effectively
I have a lot going on in life now that this game would interfere with, but I hope to hop back in soon to explore some of these exoplanets and do some farming whenever that comes out
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You make a good point, many players don’t have the free time I do; disabled, homebound so not much to do in my life. Most of the time in so much pain the only way to deal with it is to get immersed into a game and this one has been a big help.
And it does slow down when you get to level 30 and seems to take forever to get levels. However, I do think than many players are too impatient, they want to have it all Now, not take time to enjoy the game. But, that can be hard to do when you have a family, job, commitments that leaves little time to play and the grind is horrible in this game in some areas.
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Removing XP entirely in favour of something else is an interesting idea, and I definitely agree that the game feels too slow at the moment. That being said, I’m not sure sure that replacing it with quests (especially dailies) is a much better solution.
Typically I have found that in games where quests are the only way to really progress, you can either do an unlimited number of repeatable quests (and so some players progress faster than the devs want, and others find them uninteresting and bland), or you are restricted to a ‘daily’ and ‘weekly’ subset. This in turn becomes the new ‘grind’ to make sure that you’ve done all your weeklies and dailies on cooldown.
Given that ‘grind’ is usually a player-constructed mindset, I’m not sure that a game can be built without it in some form or other.
I’d personally rather that the game had various pools of XP so you were rewarded for doing an activity that you like by getting better at the activity that you like (I believe part of the reason that we see as much XP grinding as we do is because you only need to find the single best way). However, I don’t think that would remove the concept of grind any more than anything else and would be a regression in terms of Boundless’ development, so is unlikely to happen.
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Hunting and mining with an aoe hammer.
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Suppose i should have put subscription free 
Just play the game. At least one of my alts levels every day without doing anything special… and its kinda fun.
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I went on a t7 hunt last night, starting with 20k xp, and leveled up during the hunt. It was great fun and the time flew past. Over 200k xp achieved in less than 2 hours.
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Well think of it like this. From a balancing perspective a quest reward is easier to fix than XP gain from an activity. People are already mining, cutting down trees, exploring, digging, building, crafting, hunting, etc. as it is. There will be more things to do in the future (farming) that I think benefit from rewarding the activities directly instead of just giving them XP. Cause what XP gain has done is bottlenecked people into wanting to gain level 50+ levels faster to get more cubits to get more plots through using a clever use of game mechanics. So why not just make the cubits a quest reward instead? Make it the same amount as you get from a level so everyone that does all kinds of activities in the game can have a more equal footing on getting the cubits they need to get skill pages, skill resets, plots, cosmetic stuff, etc. In addition to that it provides the opportunity for the developers to reward players with other things too, such as someone who does mostly mining gets rewarded with 100 soft coal after mining up 500 Titanium.
The devs have an irrational fear of players progressing too quickly in this game. Their main focus should be allowing players to have as much fun as possible and instead they are doing the opposite in some cases.
The grind is acquiring the materials you want in order to do whatever it is you want to do.
Naturally I think there would need to be a limit to how many quests you can do in a day but not so limited that players with more time on their hands can’t do more of them. It should at least attempt to cater to as many people as possible. So something like 25 quests out of a pool of 500 that could be generated for you is probably a good amount.
There will always be a grind to get large amounts of resources and blocks in the game. That’s just going to get even more emphasized as the game gets older and more content is put into it. That’s a byproduct of having a game just full of a lot of stuff. But that’s necessary to help strengthen the game’s economy because there really aren’t that many items in the game right now. We probably need three times what we have to really have an exciting economy.
But I do agree, I don’t see the developers getting rid of leveling ever and because of that they’re going to continue to see people create XP Farms that completely crush their leveling system and allow for players to power level friends, guild mates, and alts in record times. It’s why I don’t think this game needs a leveling system if people are going to be doing that to begin with, even though they earned the levels.
instead off power leveling to 50 become a king off a city at level 15
if ya like to play like a pro off coarse
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Let me preface this by saying I would very much enjoy a less grindy game. As someone who plays (in truth, ‘played’ is a more accurate verb) primarily solo, the amount of effort I have to put in compared to the amount of time I then get to do what I actually want is the current biggest turn off for me.
However, I remain skeptical that replacing XP with quests would really improve matters. Whatever daily quest limit you set, that will become the activity ‘goal’. This may not seem less grindy, may force you to participate in a variety of games styles you don’t enjoy to continue (granted, grinding the single most efficient method of XP gain is usually activity you come to detest pretty quickly), and most importantly could be a higher activity threshold than people are used to, and lead to burn-out much more quickly. I don’t really believe that a game company should be responsible for their players making sensible decisions when it comes to goals and what is realistically achievable, but I do believe it’s something to consider when making design decisions.
I can’t really comment on this. Logically (to me, at least), letting people progress more quickly ultimately means more plots, which has the knock on effect of more land claimed, which means more planets required to sustain the same number of people, and so potentially higher maintenance costs per player. I don’t know enough about the financial state of the game to really judge where the right tipping point for this is.
Although I whole-heartedly agree, ‘Fun’ should be the number on priority when making any game. It’s just a matter of balancing one person’s idea of fun with another’s. Some people find PvP and ganking fun, but I’d find it immensely frustrating. The same could be said about preferred rates of progress between the more creative sandbox proponents and the MMO players. Hell, maybe that even means accepting that the Sandbox MMO hybrid just doesn’t work and leads to compromises that make very few people actually happy.
Because I don’t want to just dismiss your idea and am interested to see how it could develop, I do have a couple of questions about how you think it might work:
If we remove XP (and by extention, levels), how do we can skills points? If they are a reward for quest completion, would there be a way that you can choose you (provisional) 25 quests per day, so that if you really like one activity and not others, you wouldn’t have to wade through a bunch of auto-selected quests you hate?
- If you can’t pick them, are we saying that people just have to suck it up and learn to enjoy more of the game?
- If you can pick them, wouldn’t that just lead to the same ‘find the most efficient selection of quests to do and repeat’ type of experience that we’re seeing now with looking for a powerlevelling technique?
On a more general level, how do you see it working?
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Complete a quest, get skill points as part of the base reward. Same for coin; Cubits probably would need to be adjusted in their reward value to make up for the fact that you’re probably going to get more from doing quests than you would with the current system.
They should be “pickable”. If someone doesn’t want to do mining quests, they should be forced to do them because they make up 20% of their daily quests. That’s just absurd for them not to be able to do that. I do think, however, filtering out quests you don’t want to do is one way of doing that. I think you can do that in Hearthstone but I haven’t logged into that game in years to really remember.
The rewards, outside of skill points, should vary depending on the activity. If mining is 80% more effective at acquiring large amounts of materials to craft with, sell, etc. then I would balance that out by first not making them the basis around where the entire rewards of the system formulate from. I would use digging or lumberjacking or even building as a basis for that. Those I would argue yield the worst results in leveling up, although digging is superior now cause of Peaty Soil and Earth Yams.
Just for making an example, if a quest asks you to collect 300 Ancient Trunk of any color, then it would reward you 500 coins, 1 skill point, and let’s just say 75 Cubits. This could be the base reward for doing that quest. On top of getting that, you’re able to pick between an assortment of stuff that could be or not randomly selected for you. So it could be a cosmetic item, it could be a stack of some resource or material, or it could even me a stack of a tool of a tier level based on where you finished the quest.
So to compare this with a miner, the rewards for getting 300 soft coal could be something like 100 coins, 1 skill point, and 25 cubits. Reasoning for it being so much lower is because it’s easier to blow through miner blocks than it is for cutting down trees or gathering surface materials or not running out of building materials while building or even hunting creatures or meteors with very little to zero down time between spots. Mining, you can just rip through a world pretty quickly compared to all of those things. So the rewards should be less to balance it out with other activities.
I don’t want the devs to take this as “nerf XP gain to everything miners do” cause I think people would quit if they did that.
That’s kind of how I see it working. I think if players were given more power on how they could play the game then they would have more fun. There’s probably some flaws in my idea but to me it sounds a heck of a lot better than trying to balance XP farms in the game because some people want extra plots so they can build more and enjoy the building aspect of the game. Instead, that got punished and people just went to the next best XP Farm; which is compacting Peaty Soil and cooking Earth Yams, aka - digging.
I think you deserve every single level you earned here, how long must that have taken for you to set up AND farm all those yams 
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That was patched last update. There is now an amount of time you must wait before you get exp for breaking/placing a block in the same location. Not certain on the amount of time, but it definitely isn’t a viable way to power level anymore.
(If you were wondering if it still worked)
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And this would be ok if certain aspects of the game weren’t entirely locked behind level walls. Centraforging takes a certain number of levels, hunting, mining, etc. Literally every aspect of the game requires pretty high levels to do anything even halfway efficiently that makes it hard for a newer player to get involved with a lot of it.
Though, hopefully the new exp change helps out a lot with all of this! Exploring and gathering seem to actually be options now!
I just farm and build. I still level quite fast, i am always farming something. Clay,sand,silty,ash,mud,peaty,rocks and level a couple times during this.
You can level to 50 doing nothing but exploring, without teaching pies.