Is it possible using the boundless api to track the total number of sales in game as well as total coin spent daily/weekly etc?
I was wondering as i thought it might be nice to have a graph/stats for daily/weekly/monthly sales to see the overall health of the community based economy. Could be something to point to for people who are saying the game is dead etc if you can show them the economy isn’t dead. Or help people see it is dead, which I don’t think it is…
Good question Im out and about, but it may be possible to track but IIRC there is nothing straightforward that exposes that sort of data.
I’m pretty sure the API data just tells you current levels of each good per beacon. I’m not sure you can safely infer the volume of sales vs the volume of items removed by owners?
This was exactly what I was questioning.
I think if you are trying to determine if the game is dead or not you may be able to just look at shop activity and calculate how much it has increased over time. That might be the only way I see to determine anything. I am not sure if this includes/excludes someone removing/adding things to their own shop.
I can tell you my shop sees regular activity and it’s hardly ever full and is in the back of DK Mall currently.
Also, I think shop activity is probably an overall bad barometer for gauging how busy/active the game is as some just hoard items and never use shops or sell to request baskets etc.
Short answer is no. It is almost certainly not possible. The API does provide any data about sales through a shop stand/request basket.
Longer answer is that while there is no way to track direct sales in a basket, there is that there is an undocumented “shop activity” property returned for each request basket/shop stand that could accomplish the goal you are trying to do. You could combine that with the stock in each given shop to calculate throughput on a shop. But the issue is that shop activity is undocumented and it is not very well know exactly how it works.
The total over all population has dropped over the last 4 months
Where is that data pulled from?
Would seem the population has been pretty close to the same numbers all year.
Xyberviri has a program that they wrote that polls the actual number of users on each public planet periodically to get that data - though it’s hard to read at times, it’s unquestionably the most reliable active player data we have available.
If you use a piece of paper on your screen to find a median along the middle of the ranges, you will see that it’s a general trend down.
If you believe the Steam charts numbers, we have lost 50% of daily active users over the last 3-4 months.
In an interesting contrast, both forum survey responses for my world Chromis as well as Chromis footfall value have remained steady over the last 3 months or so. That doesn’t mean much, but it’s interesting.
The trend down is normal especially considering the loss of some big community members, lack of updates etc, but I have noticed quite a few new people which probably balances the trend some.
Oddly, though it is interesting looking at the stats. Must have had big Twitch streamer play a few times and this game isn’t really streamer friendly from a content perspective. I see where twice the game had about 4500 Twitch viewers. I also find it concerning that max players ever was about 1200.
Seems like a marketing failure and one that could probably be rectified fairly easy. You would think you could get Square Enix involved more unless the game really isn’t on their radar anymore. I also saw the game in 2 Humble Bundles?
Interesting to say the least.
I mean, if you are asking my opinion, there are two huge bounce points in the game - the opening tutorial, and the titanium -> gem -> AOE/forged tool jumps. Because those two points will strip the game of so many potential players, it’s just not ready for a marketing push.
Also, there isn’t any kind of endgame outside of “I build cool thing” or “I make big moneys”. That means long-term retention of players isn’t there yet, either.
The coming single player option is also a step toward marketability, as that is pretty standard for similar games as well.
Interesting graph. Peak was around release. Another peak in 2019 then from then on it’s pretty steady. You can see the downward trend there around Jan of this year. Notice the B and C which are Humble Bundle which included Boundless in them and the slight uptick after each one. Failure on the marketing of the game and a failure on player retention.
Minecraft has zero opening tutorials… it also has a huge opening feeling of how long will it take me to grind to get enough of said “resource” to actually make something etc. While I have totally agreed with you mentioning the need for an opening tutorial I don’t feel that is the big loss of potential players, but I do think it accounts for quite a few.
Single player may make it marketable to an extent, but it’s also a huge step away from what the game was designed to be and that being an MMO.
On the contrary, Minecraft has more tutorials than any other game. Because Minecraft is a fluke, it didn’t need tutorials - it’s viral nature means that the wiki, yt videos, etc all cover that very well.
Also, these days, the achievement system acts as a guide for getting through the different parts of Minecraft. It gives hints at what can be done, and crafting benches tell you what you can make. It’s an integrated tutorial rather than an explicit one.
Single player was in the original design of the game from the start. I keep seeing this said, but it is verifiably incorrect.
IMO, a good game in a Humble Bundle tends to take off, and an MMO not retaining many players after that is a huge red flag about player retention.
The tutorial may not be the main cause, but hopefully the What turns you off playing Boundless? thread has given insight on the most fixable reasons.
I’m not meaning to just disagree with you, btw. I respect your opinions, and just have different ones. 
I like respectful discussions and welcome the disagreement as I am still a fairly new player.
I guess for me and I’ll quote a movie here… “I am only average intelligence …some say I am even slightly below”
I figured the game out and while I am still figuring some things here and there, overall it is much like any other sandbox game out there. While there is a larger learning curve than most games of the genre, I know if my 8yr old can figure out with very little help it can’t be that bad.
I did not mean to insinuate that single player was never planned, I was more stating with the game in it’s current state and how I saw it marketed and moreover how players mention it to others, it just felt more like an MMO with no single player.
I will say the “Turn Off” thread is interesting, but what would be more interesting was if this thread had been created shortly after launch and see how it trended and changed over the past 2-3 years.
We are completely off topic here, but good talk Always enjoy your input and insight.
You can poll the data from the game server list, this only includes public servers and is the same number you see when you look though a open portal https://ds.playboundless.com:8902/list-gameservers
I query the list and just add up the population across every public planet and pipe that out to a csv file.
Sorry for the issues with reading it Im not a webguy so this is just something i hacked together one night. The player populations per planet are however also tracked on boundlexx, but it requires you to know which planets existed at that moment and the query each planet for its population during that data point.
https://api.boundlexx.app/api/v2/#/Timeseries/statsWorldPoll
Im using a older version of charts.js and im pretty positive the moment i put any effort into updating it Angellus will update boundlexx to include a population graph which will probably be 100% better than what i can knock out.
So im kinda just eh it works and it collects the data even though its sort of hacky. I keep saying ill do some updating or fixing at some point but i figured its not worth putting any more effort into it.
No worries - it’s still the best data. It’s not like anyone is paying you to build fancy charts.
kinda sort of but not really…
if you look at the sales volume for any specific item like oort you can kind of get an idea of how much movement is occurring.
You would need to watch a specific basket to see what the turn over is but you wont be able to infer anything other than the movement of stuff.
That is not indication of sales value. Just prices. You can assume that fluctuations of prices are due to an increase/decrease in demand/sales, but it is not always the case. Correlation does not means causation.
Gleam is a good example of this:
You can see on the far on the left side the average buy price of gleam dropped like a rock. That could be indicative of a great decrease of buy volume, but in this case it has no relation at all. It was because of Sovereign worlds flooding the market with gleam of all colors. You cannot accurately determine market throughput based completely on the current APIs.
Glad I started this discussion, its been an interesting read, thanks everyone 
