Add "buy devs coffee" and "buy devs pizza" to the shop

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59

And yet, I’m never gonna be able to convince anyone to pay 40€ to play Boundless, at least not until it has all its promised features. Like, the friend with whom I build on Raxxa, I bought him his copy of the game, because he would never have spent that amount of money for an un-finished game which takes years to release the things they promised (let’s be honest, we’re still waiting on a loooong list of things).

Look at how CV does it. It’s F2P, sure, but it also offers a GleamClub-like Pro Account bundle thing which is quite similar, but only 20€. Then there’s the store with the many cosmetic items for your character and the many blocksets. Last time I played, months ago, the game wasn’t well optimized on the most popular public servers, but they’re working on it (and on the free private world each player gets, the experience is smooth as a baby’s bottom). I wouldn’t say it has a ‘diminished experience’ because of the F2P model.
Another big difference is that the devs of CV didn’t made promises they’d take years to achieve. Their playerbase isn’t waiting on them to release anything they promised.

So I still think that Boundless could end-up in a better situation if it went F2P with a steadier stream of things added to the store, or if it also did something like the Pro-account of CV. Like, you can play for free and have all the fun you want on a T1 / T2 world, but you can’t cross portals beyond that until you pay the special account. Some variation of that model, I’d be fine with.

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60

I value everyone’s opinion on what we should or should not do for boundless in the future but when you add that you’re at the point of jumping ship that pretty much turns me off to the rest of whatever you’re saying. The peoples opinion that I value the most of the ones that are in it for the duration for better or worse. These are the people that have not only invested their money and their time but also their heart to this game which means they stick by boundless and not just go to a quote unquote Greener pasture…

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61

Why do people expect game developers to work for free? Just pay for the entertainment or don’t :woman_shrugging:
And free to play games aren’t any better… they just shove a billion incentives to make micro transactions down your throat.

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62

Idk @krasniy, we better start listening to the disgruntled people as well. Not just the lifers.

And here is why:

Sept 2018 - avg pc players 354.6

Sept 2019 - avg pc players 95.7 {this is after lots of new content}

Personally, I would love to know where those 250 people went and why they quit.

63

My opinion is the game may have been pushed to release before the Developers truly intended…

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64

could be. I would be interested in what those 250 had to say. It does not seem that new content has brought them back. There was a one month bump after the farming, but then right back to pre-farming numbers. The october 19’ number is going to be about 86. How many more months can we keep losing players?

more data:

steam chart peak PC players Sept. 2018 - 832

steam chart peak PC players Sept. 2019 - 173

IMO, we would probably get more valuable information and a possible solution from the people who left or are thinking about leaving than the ones who are going to stick by ‘for better or worse’

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65

To Wonderstruck’s credit, they do have a “what turns you off playing Boundless”, so they’re listening.
And I wouldn’t call myself a disgruntled player either… yet. I give it 10 more months to convince me I should keep spending more time and money on it. I’m sure a lot more growth is coming.

But the truth is, no game lasts forever. I do not expect Boundless to stay live eternally.
I believe a game which allows its playerbase to produce content via mods allows itself to live longer.
Look at fre@king Skyrim, that thing’s still alive, despite being a solo RPG riddled with bugs, despite the bad press Bethesda is getting lately because of Fallout 76.
Why? Because of modding.

Even CV has been taking advantage of the Steam Workshop feature with its blueprint system. When/if Wonderstruck adds something similar to the blueprints, it’s gonna be a huge game-changer. Then with Rental worlds, people would be able to truly have fun. They’d be able to copy stuff from public worlds to their own. It would make building large structures with repetitive patterns so much easier… as long as it’s not something tied to a bunch of forge trait. XD

I’ve already had to deal with several people lacking the basic courtesy to talk to their future neighbors before deciding to build a few meters from their plots, and basically wrecking their hard work because they have a very very different style. If I can move my build on Raxxa to a rental world, I’d gladly pay a monthly fee (if not too expensive) to keep it all around. Though I’d be curious to know the specifics, like how can people visit rental worlds, would beacon/portal fuel still be needed?

Anyway, until they add this, if I happen to get my hands on a game with better building, more character customization, less grinding & maintenance chores, modding, some actual Lore quests & dungeons, fun mini-games, really varied biomes (and not just recolors of the same blocks), some fun enemies with clever AI (with actual reactions to their surroundings), and if all promises are kept, I’ll gladly switch there, and I’d be dumb not to.
Haven’t been this excited about a game in the last 10 years as I’m excited about Hytale. ^^

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66

Don’t say that loudly or the complainers will hear you and come. Dont dare them :joy:.

67

@AvaDancer still has a point. So yeah, keep dismissing people who ‘complain’. See where that leads. :wink:

If you were indeed thinking of people like me when mentionning complainers, the fact of the matter is that beyond complaining, I’m also a whale.
Whale
No, not an actual whale. A whale in the sense that I’m also a sucker who spends a lot of money on my video-game hobby. Waaaaaay much more than I should. After some quick maths, I’d say I’ve spent at least 450 or 500€ on this game in about a year (daaamn T_T ).

The synergy between the beacon fuel and the Gleam Club is more targeted at… < groans > …people like me who don’t wanna risk loosing their stuff to world-regen because they forget once to re-fuel. And when you’ve seen my build, you understand why I’d rather not accidentally miss a re-fuelling deadline.

Same goes with plots. There’s a lot of grinding/farming involved to get more plots to keep building. So there’s a store to buy cubits, to then buy plots (and cosmetic items).

THE POINT IS, it makes me cringe a bit when I see @Havok40k say that the updates the devs put out are “free”.
None of it is free. It’s all cleverly designed to hit a minority of players, that’s all.
The game has been officially released waaaay before reaching most of its promises. The updates related to them are not ‘free’, they’re cumulatively paid for by those who bought the game and those who actually often spend money on the store.

All of that put aside, I also did say above that I’d gladly pay for coffee/pizza to the devs if there was an option. My only warning is that even if there’s no direct gameplay effect, there will be some who would say something along the lines of “that’s asking a bit much from their playerbase” or “that’s greedy”.
Not only would I understand them, but I also think the devs are clever enough to have thought of that too.
So they might never add such a feature.
But if you find a way to send them more donations on your own without them setting up such a feature, that could work too. You can also buy stuff on the store. Might not mean coffees, beers or pizzas for them, but that’s still a win-win.

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68

I could use some pizza too ya know

69

I didnt comment on what Ava said and i didnt explicitly mention anyone - you did :joy:. It was just a joke.

70

thank you, that is what I was trying to say. Those who are unhappy are the biggest assets to glean information from. Too often they are dismissed, and sometimes very rudely. Not that long ago a well liked member here told a dissatisfied player to quit. The Steam avg. pc player numbers have dropped 72% in one year and a superfan tells a player to quit? That is crazy.

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71

And @RedY3 said exactly what I was expecting him to say, with the classical “oh you think I was talking about you? But I didn’t say your name!”. Still made that “too many people complain” remark, as if that was a bad / illegitimate thing to do.
Yeah, it was a joke. Suuuuure. Ha-ha, funny joke.

In the past, I’ve already made a thread about it : Complaining vs Praising

To tie things up with what I said above about whales :whale: I know that some big spenders aren’t really playing the game anymore. That shouldn’t be dismissed by a “ugh, complainers”!

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72

I don’t think this is possible. I kind of treat someone quitting a video game a lot like someone quits going to a restaurant or store. They just do without giving you feedback and it’s pretty difficult to get feedback from those people without invading their privacy (email or snail mail or even a phone call).

Also, the developers need to not be afraid of changing their game so that it brings in as many players as possible even if it upsets the current players playing. All of us could very well not be the actual player base 1 or 2 years from now because Wonderstruck makes the business decision to grow their customer base behind their largest product and with the greatest amount of upside.

In all honesty, if they had a demo, set of tutorial worlds, and slashed the price tag at least minimum 50%, they will start bringing in more people. It’s an expensive game for something that lacks a tremendous amount of features. Right now it’s just a glorified building game and any other game that lets you build a base or factory or workshop or massive complex structures is going to be a lot more attractive of a product and most likely at a cheaper price point.

Personally the fact there isn’t any replayable end game that keeps getting the bar pushed out like you see in pretty much every other MMO is most likely the underlining reason why I am not even playing much at all anymore. None of my friends want to play this over priced and feature lacking game when they have a plethora of other games that offer similar or more entertaining experiences.

There’s other issues too I have with the game but I think these are some of the biggest ones.

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73

That is a fair point. But how about those who voice their dissatisfaction on this forum and are dismissed?

there are barely any current players playing. So don’t bring in as many players as possible because it might upset the meager two or three hundred current players? I love the game as is, but is this sustainable?

I have heard this complaint before and am sure many others feel the same way. Personally, I am very happy with the game but do not think it is sustainable as is.

I have six or seven hundred hours in the game so it has been cheap for me.

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74

I think he was mostly referring to those who quit after explaining why on the forums (or on the “what turns you off playing Boundless” thread). Or those who may still hang around the forum but aren’t playing any more. Last I heard, @FireAngelDth fits that description. BTW: hey, bud. ;p

By demo, you mean like a set of worlds available to players for free without the retail price to try it out, get a taste? I like that! Those could be considered Tier 0 worlds. But wouldn’t they need some limits, like “no chat, no guilds”?
And the -50% price also sounds good.

Like, I’ve already mentioned how CV is a F2P game with the pro-account thingy. Even if their pro-account (20€) was a full retail price like Boundless, it would still be half the price of Boundless (40€), and both games have micro-transactions. Even Minecraft’s retail price is only 24€.
I think it’s fair to say that Boundless is comparatively a very expensive game.
So really, when you think about it, since Boundless requires you to fuel your beacons to keep your work around (which isn’t an issue on CV if you build on the private world you’re given even if you’re playing for free without pro-account, meaning your work will last as long as CV stays live), why is Boundless so much more expensive?
Uh.

But then again, CV isn’t necessarily in a great place either.
Their average player count was at 1100+ in february 2018, and it’s now down at 400+.
But I’m sure it will rise up when they release their block-painting update. Even I might end-up jumping back on my old world to see what has changed.

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75

I am one of those people. I stopped giving my feedback so openly because of all the blatant disagreement on everything I’ve brought up. So I just kind of gave up on giving constructive feedback.

I brought that up cause a lot of my work experience and background is in restaurants and food service (although now I work in a lumber yard that services contractors). Basically a lot of business owners fear about losing their existing business even though the potential to gain a larger customer base is pretty much worth the risk. They would rather maintain status quo and kill their business out of fear of doing something that’s going to upset 200 people cause they can’t see how it would satisfy thousands. Not trying to claim that the leadership behind Wonderstruck is doing this, but I’ve seen it way too many times to not think it’s a possibility.

In light of explaining that, I do want to say that I believe Wonderstruck is laser focused on bringing new content to the game and fixing bugs and glitches. They certainly aren’t sitting on their hands doing nothing or off on some beach drinking beers served to them by somebody that’s smoking hot. I just don’t see that being the reality. I kind of wish I was on a beach right now though. lol

That’s cause it isn’t. I don’t know how much investment money Square Enix put into the publishing deal and certainly don’t know what Wonderstruck’s base line costs are, but I do know that the game isn’t growing and the current players don’t have enough personal funds to keep the game going forever.

Hopefully something like dungeons get put into the game cause that could be the gateway to some end game content that players actually make. We also don’t have Titans and a plethora of other creatures that concept art was made for that’s buried in the forums. James even mentioned about getting us airships and that suggests vehicles in general (land, sea, and air).

We also don’t have a largest variety of weapons, tools, and gear items (gear being grapples). We don’t have wearable armor either which could very well revamp how we load out our characters for various activities, such as mining, hunting, building, etc.

I have 929 hours logged onto Steam. I’ve played all the way back when character models were 2 block high orange squares and when the game was called Oort Online. I’ve bought $200 USD worth of Cubits on top of $250 Wayfarer backer package. Not as much as others but I still consider the game at a price point of $40 for a new person way to expensive.

The price of a product isn’t about who currently has it. It’s about what will get it to move units of the product to bring in sales to grow the business. After all, this is part of the DNA of a business. Trying to go against that will fail 100% of the time.

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I can understand that. That has been my whole point in this entire discussion. Were you the one that was told to quit? Whoever it was, that really blew my mind.

77

Nobody told me anything. If someone told me to quit I’d tell them where to stick their suggestion. It isn’t their business or place to tell me what to do. I just got tired of having to explain my position or reasoning behind things over and over. So I just stopped entirely.

78

I get you, there, man. At one point, I’m gonna be super tired of being called a ‘complainer’ (or feeling like I’m targeted as one).

Also, I can confirm that I personally know half-a-dozen players who will come back in a heartbeat when/if rental worlds are added.

We all have some features we wanna see. Problem is, in which order will they be tackled?

I mean, I’m still flabbergasted about the fact we still don’t have ladders. Freaking ladders! That’s like such a base thing in a building game! o_o"
I’d be a little p*ssed-off if we get the Warper-Hunter creature before ladders.

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