Dear Developers,
I'm 25 hours into the game and I play this with 3 other friends. So far I love it. Right now I'm at the 3rd stage of the game (swamp) and the game falls apart for me. It gets more and more grindy and it starts to get unbearable. We started to cheat valueable ressources. Please. Dont'get mad and hear me out!
The game starts to get a grind at this point and it's a bad one. The fact that you can't teleport with refined metal bars makes this too time expensive. I know that this is not supposed to be a hard game, but you don't respect my time as a gamer as well. You also promote less fun gameplay by this gamedesign. You want me to have little bases that cost tromendous ressources. I can't afford to decorate the bases, because I need metals for my gear.
It doesn't write stories. Imaginge this: Me and my friends build a boat. We sail to a coast near to a swamp. We make abase to protect our ship. We go to the swamp. We conquer it. We build a smelter. We get our ores. We build a portal. Now we can always come back for mor. We sail back. We enjoy our new possibilies. Remember: We still need to invest a lot of time for the precious iron already.
Now imagine the current story: We build a wagon. We painfully carry it to the swamp for the metals. We carry painfully slow the wagon back to our base (or to our barely build, ugly second base). It's clunky. It's slow. It takes so much time. I dare to say that this is the lesser fun of a story.
-> Your gameplay should guide me to great stories. Not to grinding.
Some things are just too much and I think a good step would be, if you could teleport with your refined metals. It probably would be still a grind for enough sutler cores, but it's a good step into the right direction. Things don't get too much better with friends, since all of them need most of the best gear, so you can do the boss together.
Also biomes should have at least one dungeon ore precious ressource in it. Otherwise it's really a bad feeling, finally finding a swamp after searching forever and than there is no dungeon in it. That really sucks.
Valheim is no MMO. It's no game as a service. It doesn't need to take forever. A hard game is fine. A game that wastes your time with grinding is not.
I wish you the best. Valheim still has so many great aspects to love. I see an even brigther future for this game.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/s4xp0b/valheim_and_grinding_please_respect_our_time_as/