Do you like Grinding?

I was generalizing a bit there with the "random" comment, but I do think that there should be a higher percentage of better loot in chests, just not guaranteed.

 

To be honest I would not care if there was a junk weapon. I just want to see that sweet sweet chest for my hardwork .

 

So it would appear I cannot read sometimes. Derp.

Alrighty then. Carry on. Pretend nothing happened.

 

"Also, if you can, come and state your opinion again after the rebalance update." - from the OP.

I would like to see what people's opinions are on the matter now and in general of gaming.

A game like Paper Mario doesn't have grinding, yet it's an RPG and never stops you dead in your tracks because you don't have enough coins. Starbound is also an RPG, yet there are times when you are stopped dead in your tracks because for whatever ungodly reason you need pixels to craft items. Like seriously, are pixels like a universal glue or something?

 

Its alright, we cool.

 

Oddly enough I don't need to do much grinding for pixels. I find that raiding a penal colony gives 4-5K & circumnavigating a beta planet gives about 1K. I not into heavy decorating so pixels are not lacking.

 

I don't like grinding of any type.

I used to play a ton of MMOs. Most of them were grind heavy, usually for the sake of lengthening the game. I got more and more tired of anything related to grinding over time. Like ya said, grinding is tedious. It involves repeating the same content over and over again, and just leads to improving your character so you can grind on something else afterwards. I spend most of my time drawing now, so I want the moments I play video games to be fun and I can't afford to spend large amounts of time grinding.

However, obtaining pixels in Starbound doesn't feel like a grind to me yet. For one, it's pretty easy - wiping out towns/bases/colonies/whatever gave me plenty. I also run into new planets, monsters, and other content along the way, so it's interesting. It didn't take long, either. Instead of repeating content, I'm doing something different every time. This will definitely become a grind after I run out of new content, though - Random generation definitely keeps things interesting, but only for so long.

 

If I'm in the mood for it, I'll become the pixel grinding machine,

 

No, I dislike grinding. In my opinion it's god damn boring, and the early game of Starbound is chock full of grinding for pixels to the point of tedium, they need to significantly reduce the cost of early game items to fix this.

 

Depends. I like it being optional.

Something like Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, where while you could grind up the various quests and such, you could also just skip whatever you don't want to do.

While in starbound case its grind to advance. (Not that that hasn't been done right in other games case, but starbound pushes it a bit too far.)

 

I feel like those who are complaining about having to "grind" for pixels are sticking to one or two planets and just killing mobs to get them.
By searching for villages, prisons and dungeons you can make a very large amount of pixels in the relatively short amount of time that it takes to clear them. Not to mention the (meager) loot you get in such places. Though the loot for prisons and dungeons hasn't been optimized yet, from my understanding. Though I could be wrong about that.

 

I like grinding if there's always a way to make it both more faster and more challenging. That way I can always challenge myself to push myself in a more challenging area and get rewarded more that way.

 

It depends. Grinding is best used as a way to buffer experienced players from blowing through the game or gaining an unfair advantage over their peers, but it should never stop such players from enjoying the game. All in all I disagree with systems that penalize the player by taking away grinding items, as it reduces difficulty to "how long can you afford to spend playing this game" rather than "how proficient are you at this game."

As for Starbound in particular... I personally have never been short for Pixels in my small time playing, but I can see how it'd be frustrating to lose them all. I also haven't used any of the higher functions yet either - I've only used Pixels on Anvil items yet - so I can't say if there will be a difference there. The extent of my Pixel-hunting has been killing surface mobs, plus one small Glitch dungeon (which killed me several times, so I got less-than-average loot from it).

If I had to commit to a statement, I'd say that Pixels should never be the goal of exploration; if you can get enough Pixels for what you need by, say, exploring a planet's surface for most of a day, that would be optimal. And again, as far as I've played, that seems to be the case. May edit if my impressions differ later on.

 

I've gotten enough of everything I need by enjoying myself exploring and mining. Perhaps if the game feels grindy, it's really not for you TC.

 

I can't say I'm a huge fan of it, to be honest. I agree that certain items should require a degree of challenge to find, however when I'm digging for hours just to find a few pieces of a specifically rare type of ore, though, I don't really find that fun. I just find it to be boring and tedious. It takes away from time I could spend actually exploring/fighting bosses/doing other things.

 

I didn't have much problems with pixels, the only times I ran low on pixels were when I kept getting one shotted or instantly dying from falls that shouldn't have killed me. This was especially true when they lowered the pixel loss rate (which Tiy says they're gonna bring back up once they implement the pixel compression mechanic, which will let you bank your pixels for a cost). Once all of the illogical deaths are gone and balance is a lot better, I'm sure pixels won't be that big of a deal.

I do like a bit of a grind as long as it isn't overly tedious, and if its very rewarding.

A few things that would get rid of tedious portions of the game while adding substance to other portions:

1) Fixed ore distribution (I know they're working on this). If we're gonna have to constantly be doing digging, the ore should be plentiful enough to find when we actually need it. Example: Platinum should spawn as often as gold when we need it.

2) More rewards for going into caves. The rewards for going down below mostly suck. I've found plenty chests, but the items inside are usually worthless to me (like copper bars when I'm rolling in Steel). If I need to spend 30% - 50% of the game in a place that's unrewarding, the amount of boredom and tediousness exponentially increases. This doesn't have to mean getting tons of tech or placing hundreds of chests, just, I want to go into caves for more than just finding tiny pockets of the ore I need.

3) Armor should be good on its own. Because of the weird attempt at progression, many times I find myself sitting on tons of a materials for making a certain set...except for the previous armor. This is okay in theory, since then we won't just be able to skip massive amounts of content. With that said, if the armor that I have to use to upgrade was actually far worse than some of the previous tiers, that creates a sense of useless grind. For example, here's the progression as it is now (Note this is just from me looking at human armor, don't know if its different for other races):
Copper 3 - Iron 5 -> Silver 10 -> Gold 13 (I'm pretty sure Gold use to be 10 armor as well) -> Steel 15 -> Platinum 13???? -> Titanium 25 -> Durasteel 30
Platinum is entirely responsible for making my experience from Steel to Titanium absolutely dreadful, and hopefully they fix that.

4) Dungeons should always have good loot. I've had way too many experiences where I've ran through an entire dungeon, spending hours getting one shotted, and then, I find absolutely no item of interest inside of there. As fun as it is to die constantly to deadly female prisoners, there should've been some kind of reward for sticking through it other than the crappy weapons the prisoners dropped. They could make Race-based Legendaries spawn in a locked up chest (that you only get if you clear out a whole dungeon), or something along those lines. Anything to make the dying and walking and everything worth it.

5) Dropped weapons should get more awesome in a shorter amount of time. Throughout all of my progression through 1-30, all of the weapons that were dropped felt the same. Big normal looking sword with fire, big normal looking axe that shoots out a wave, tiny sword with a dagger, etc. And that's okay, but very suddenly around level 30 everything starts to just be awesome all around. It should trickle in before exploding, so you kind of get more of a sense of real progression.

6) Pickaxes should get bigger upgrades in mining speed. Its not very encouraging when a Diamond pickaxe that you worked a bunch of hours for still takes a while to mine through something as simple as Cobblestone. The tediousness of the grind is somewhat lessened by the 3x3 area, but planets and caves are still massive so the speed should scale accordingly. So, yeah, speed and maybe even mining size should be increased after Gold or Platinum.

7) Make the Matter Manipulator relevant throughout the game. Many people agree that it sucks to go straight from a sci-fi laser to only pickaxes, including me. Something like BithTools (x) is a pretty awesome implementation, making the Matter Manipulator take more resources to upgrade than just making a pickaxe while also increasing the speed + mining area is something I hope the devs implement (since they're already implementing the ideas of some mods into the game, surely this wouldn't be something complicated).

A pickaxe shouldn't be vastly favorable to laser mining in a game about space, though I don't believe in cutting it out entirely. In balance, they could make pickaxes usable with one hand so you can dual wield it with other stuff (maybe even another pickaxe?).

8) More storage space in chests. 16 slots in every single type of storage container is not a lot when you can easily fill up your entire inventory on a couple of planet visits. 16 slots in a small crate, 32 slots in a regular chest, 48 slots in a large crate, 64 slots in a large chest sounds reasonable and would allow effective storage on your ship when you're unable to upgrade.

9) Ability to set your beam down point. Vehicles will be put in eventually, but for now it takes a lot of fun out of the game when you die and have to walk across an entire planet's surface just to go back to a place you're frequenting (like a cave or dungeon). I can think of two different ways to make a decent system for this:
A) Have a 40-90 minute cool down on setting your beam down point. This would prevent spamming it every 5 feet as a "just in case" measure while making it also something viable early on in the game. Only issue is there might have to be some extra UI thrown around that might be confusing to some.
Craftable beacon/teleporter pad. This item should take up quite a bit of middle-ish materials, kinda like crafting a distress beacon. That way its something to work for as well as being a physical reminder of where you're able to land. You also should be able to place as many as you want, but only one could be considered "active." This would let people with the resources to do so to use them as checkpoints (maybe even with bases around the teleporter pads for safety) or spam them for aesthetics. Balance-wise, obviously it shouldn't be usable at a certain depth (because I think that if you die in a cave you should have to work for it to go back). At the higher tiers, maybe make it so you can select different ones while in orbit.

9) A planetary map would be fantastic. Right now, its hard to tell how big a planet is, how much you've travelled across it, where you've been in caves, whether or not you've looped around, etc. You should be able to chart out where you've been, indicated by an expandable minimap. (yes, kinda like Terraria, but in a more high techy looking fashion).

10) You should be able to scan a planet for indication of its resources/amount of dungeons/presence of "intelligent life." This could be done by having to expend a considerable amount of fuel once you've reached the planet (because why can a ship spot an infinite amount of planets but not scan the place itself when it reaches there? We can somewhat tell what a planet could be composed of light years away already).

Or! In a more unique and awesome fashion, maybe you'd have to set up scanners across individual points on the planet (with lasers shooting into the sky + an animated ground thump to indicate the scanning). The amount could vary depending on the planet's size and anatomy, and it'd cost resources to craft the beacons too. Obviously it wouldn't be useful for the surface, but it'd be a nice way to see what you can find in the caves below (and maybe even the asteroids in orbit?). Plus it'd be an incentive to go across the entire surface anyways. Bonus points if you'd have to fight a few waves of enemies while the scanner sends information, then a mini-boss when the last one finishes.

The latter could seem grindy/tedious, but it'd be optional and a lot more fun than just blindly going into the planet only to find out the ore distribution/amount of underground structures is disappointing.

11) Pixels shouldn't be used in crafting items when you have to get all the other materials anyways. Pixels should be reserved for buying, selling, and printing. It would make sense if you could print out scanned materials for a cost (another tediousness remover/rewarder), or the crafting benches were high tech, but right now there's just a big disparity in logic. A wood table isn't going to use the magic material, its a wood table.

12) QUICK SORT BUTTON. At some point, my inventory was always a mess and I got really tired of trying to organize it. You get far more items than you would in other games of this genre, so we should be able to organize according to a bunch of different variables.

Okay, that's all I can do for now. Obviously its a beta, many features could be (and are) in the works right now, just I think there should also be a bit of cool complexity in the wake of overly grinding.

 

This is what I'm thinking. I've found having to use pixels to craft items that are required for progression is silly.

 

This guy is ridiculous. He believes that games = grinding. I would really conciser taking a step back from videogames for a while and go do something in real life.

 

Wrong guy you replied to?

 

Depends. Does it FEEL like grinding?