31 days

Honestly, with that kind of attitude, I think you should just leave. We don’t need that kind of drama queen negative nancy stuff around here.
giphy

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If I’m not mistaken, James decided to not renew the contract, but I also understand that the general view is “would SE have even wanted to renew”. Personally, couldn’t give a poop, lets see what the future has in store for us :slight_smile:

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think he talking bout the square enix rep prob

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For me personally I don’t care if we get an update or news. I do hope we get an update and news to stop the exodus of players though.

@HOST I understand the game is fine the way it is for you and me, but the problem is it isn’t for a lot of others. While I do love you as a player if it’s just you and me and 5 others playing because there are no more players due to no updates and others feeling abandoned it won’t be too much fun and will lose the whole reason I stick around to begin with, the community.

Yea I am pretty sure he is referencing @philelliott here. I don’t remember Phil expressing frustrations on the forums, but a lot has been said over the past year. From what I read James cancelled their contract with SE and we can speculate on the reasoning for that, but pretty sure IIRC no reason was mentioned.

As for the doom and gloom, it will always be there going forward from some people as this no communication thing for nearly a year has created this feeling in a good amount of people including myself. I however will still play the game as I enjoy it, but I’m not blind.

I’ll await “the news” and if it comes it comes, but if it doesn’t come sooner than later another exodus will occur sadly.

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Pretty sure he’s talking about Phil Elliott. I don’t want to tag his forum account for this thread but it’s that full name.

He popped into a couple of threads the last few months, and I think he actually responded to paka’s OP on the publisher change before James posted anything, or something like that.

Frankly I just got off work and I’m not ready to dig into boundless forum search :rofl:

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TBH I just think Larian will be the new publisher.

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Boundless 249: “Waiting for Godot” Special Collector’s Edition

Coming Soon:tm:

i really wouldnt worry about it too much, the costs of gleam club versus from players like my self that dont play but still have a guild and the guild still uses plots i own will pay for a lot of servers.

Then the price of the sovereign worlds, for 40/month i can run a pretty nice minecraft server in almost any data center in any part of the world, this isnt minecraft but minecraft is java and java uses a lot of ram and throws all of that on one single core of a cpu. Boundless is c++ and runs pretty smoothly compared to what minecraft needs to run the same with just 6 players on a tiny world.

So i’m fairly confident that as long as house keeping is being done to clean up non paying customers, that the sovereign world servers pay for themselves.

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I truly hope that is the case, that what they’re getting between GC and rentals can sustain the shared server costs. :slight_smile: :+1: Since we know from Phil the cost for the public servers is “low thousands” it might well be enough, especially as now the player count is much smaller and a I would think likely more hardcore, more of us paying for GC and rentals. But it is still my #1 worry that I hope we get some more clarification on… as I mentioned, even if there is nothing really big coming or it is way off before implementation, I’m happy enough if the game keeps running as it is!

Aw c’mon people I’ve been basking in the warm glow for the last 26 days. Don’t harsh my mellow.

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I believe their financial data is available to anyone willing to do the work to dig it up. :wink:

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Yep, but would need real recent info I think to get a feel for if the numbers are lining up… just checked out of curiosity, there was an update today, address change to the same as Larian’s so guess they don’t have the office in Guildford any longer.

I suppose even if they are making enough to cover it, there is the question too of, with all they have on their plates, if they still consider it worth the labor that needs to go into it? Although it would be more short-term labor (which could be leading to the delay) in the long-term I could see where they’d view it as a more sustainable future if they moved it to only private and single player. They have to balance how much work they can put into something that - even if it is paying for itself now - can’t be turning much of a profit, vs. projects that have greater prospects.

More than anything it is the way the communication died that is giving me a bad feeling here still… I want to hope and believe, but experience with other games and logic both tell me that you don’t go like THAT on your player base if you really have some good plans in the works… they’re all dead quiet on Boundless online now too, no excitement over it, no interest on the board in cool things we’re doing… I REALLY am trying to stay :pray: here but I’ll only have some settlement here when James elaborates on the news I admit.

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I played online games where there were no forums and absolutely no line of communication from the devs at all other then patch notes on their website.

And in my book devs shouldn’t be interacting with the playerbase anyway unless they want to, they should be focused on Dev work, There should be a PR type person or Community manager for this, But I don’t think we had one of them since @Steggs101 left.

So I kind of have to disagree that he is the “worst”, thou he could absolutely do better considering there is no PR person.

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That sounds great, but what if reality is much more nebulous?

Greetings!

While we’re not ready to share the news with you just yet, everything is progressing. We’re just wrapping up a few loose ends. Due to the nature of what we’re working on, we aren’t able to get a good estimate on when this will be done, but we believe that you can measure the time in ‘weeks’ rather than ‘months’. In the mean time, please relax and enjoy the game. We’ll be with you shortly :).

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Then say that.

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I mean to be fair this and the occasional press release is really most of what I’ve seen.

Sometimes also layered through a regional “studio” or “publisher” who’s not even incorporated on the same continent as the actual development team or IP owners.

The smaller the more intimate, with Boundless having demonstrated one of the most socially active dev teams I’ve ever encountered. Especially at the beginning (for me) as I came at the release, and quickly growing a closely knit pre-release community led to some of the usual friction that causes those small dev teams to tighten up.

People talk about big numbers here but with “40k - 50k active players” the entire pre-Larian dev team might not be enough staff just for active support. The time to hang out on the forums and engage with “investor” class players would be mostly a fond memory for the OG team.

Even if James was enjoying his engagement with the community, would the CEO of that (remember he’s not really a developer or a community manager in the “job description” sense" ) size of an organization have time to do that as anything but a hobby?

With tens of thousands of users you get tens of thousands of man-hours devoted to analyzing every word, phrase, sentence etc… for content, style, semantics, whatever I hope you see what I’m saying - it’s EXHAUSTING.

If one or two of those thousands of players takes it upon themselves to be aggressively miserable, it can definitely echo into something pretty nasty. It’s no longer a fun hobby, that’s for sure. More and more petty stuff takes the focus.

Next thing you know channels are closed and it needs to be made clear that the actual developers of the game are neither required nor really encouraged to participate in community channels. Especially during any personal time. That’s for support staff, and official (highly constrained) community management staff.

Speaking of which:

Was leah here longer or steggs? I think he was gone before or around the time I started, so I actually have no idea how much time he put in.

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I’m with both of you, @Dhusk and @Trundamere here, on various points.

On one hand, yep, for sure there are devs/teams that just don’t communicate at all. Had it been like that all along here, I wouldn’t be so worried - it is the change, going from so passionate and interested in the community and it’s feedback in the days of early development and in the 1-2 years after release to people literally begging for things to be answered.

There absolutely needed to be someone dedicated to community management handling us all along though, as mistakes were made for sure before the silence. And I really need to soften this - I feel bad for James on this front. He took a lot on himself. It appears from my reading that Turbulenz was founded as a more behind-the-scenes tech company intended to handle systems and not people. And they are clearly tech geniuses… there is no question to me that James and some of the other devs I’ve seen post are flat-out brilliant in that work. But people/communication skills are a different thing… not saying harder/easier, just different. And tricky! Especially with an MMO community, going from coding stuff to dealing with all an MMO entails. I consider my own skills to be much more people-skills than anything tech, and even then I’ve managed to offend people here on at least three occasions I can recall with things I said that went over wrong! :flushed: Getting intent across online can be tough, then throw in language and cultural differences.

So I COULD see where, mistakenly IMO, maybe James just figured that going full Ostrich is the best route, less said the best, focus on just the game. He did catch some heck from things here for sure. TBH I was guilty of some bashing myself, I argued with Aenea once - her in favor and me against - the way in which coming info was leaked out to some people (not paid backers, that is totally understandable, just to certain regular players). Aenea was friends with James and much like him in personality by her own admission… she completely saw why he did that and agreed with it, to test the waters with people who knew the tech stuff before refining and official reveals. I’d argue back to her that to people who are less tech and more emotional, it came across as favoritism and when we heard the scoops from other players it could appear like we weren’t important/liked enough to be told while an inner clique of favorites was. Also, there was something said to me early on, on Twitter before Leah took that over, that came across (with other things I saw I thought backing me up) to me as, in a way that could be taken as a joke but I thought wasn’t, telling me to shut up and go away when I tried to promote their game. Once again, Aenea saw it like a humor attempt gone bad, I, being more sensitive, didn’t, and had I not been so in love with the game and community at that point I would have been out the door right then (I’m prideful, so never said anything then and acted like it was a joke myself in my reply to them). I’m only bringing these points up because looking back on it all, they were I’m sure doing the best they could but ended up stepping on toes and a point might have come where it just was like, ok, no more, we’ll stick to what we do best.

So I guess, thinking on all this then, perhaps that the communication has had issues all along could be seen as a sign of hope perhaps… that James just figures he isn’t the type to handle this, the other staff is too busy (himself included, to try to worry much with it), so decided on a route that to him is logical but to many of us comes across in bad or troubling ways.

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I am not sure who was here longer, as far as I recall on the forums Steggs was active 1st then after Steggs left sometime afterwords then Leah became active on the forums

Also

Leah had “producer” in her title, so i never really considered her as a true “community manager”, even thou she acted like one or took up the role of such at times. Her job responsibilities extended way outside of such things as far as I know, which in turn means she is often busy with other duties.

Steggs on the other hand I think dealt mostly just with Support and was more akin to being an “community manager” since I think he had less other job responsibilities and could focus more on PR stuff, However I very well could be wrong about both of them, since most of this is speculation based off of what I recall observing.

It is simply my opinion that a true “community manager” gets to focus mostly on Community related aspects, support and maybe GM/Moderation without having to juggle many other Job titles from trying to do the job of 3 or more people. None of this is intended to discredit either person

I have a feeling that “some people” will take what I just said as offensive or disrespectful even thou it isn’t designed to be, but so be it. People shouldn’t be forced into overworking.

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image

:joy:

:warning: trigger warning :warning:

isn’t it more than 26 days now?

ooooh noooo!

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