Append permanent personal property to the game

Suggestions
1

One of the things I’ve always had personal irritation with is that I have to set a reminder to myself every month to refuel my beacon. If players were given something like the ability to build in their sanctum or something that is private (by default), not clientside, and most importantly permanent it’d be a huge relief to me.

It feels like I have a love-hate relationship with this game. I like this game and I don’t want to lose my progress, but I’m not always motivated to actually play the game. It’s a chore to have to remember to log in every month to make sure I don’t lose hours upon hours of work simply because I didn’t show up one day. Over the past 6 months or so I’ve literally just logged in for 5 minutes to refuel my beacon, and then I drop the game.

I understand that the way out of this is to build a large city with several community members, but if you’re going to argue that, I’m afraid you’re just missing the point. Effectively every other online sandbox out there has persistent worlds. I don’t understand why Boundless sees it fit to not do this, with the possible exception of limited world size, from which I may just suggest adding more entry-level worlds and create free portals between these level 1 worlds since there’s no resource benefits from jumping between these worlds.

Could something be done to assist with this little dilemma? Thanks.

4 Likes
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The worlds still use servers which still cost money. But there is the creative worlds that are coming in the next update(at least it seems like the next update as it’s on testing atm) you’ll be solo at the start. But there was talks of being able to have friends join your world as well. As it’s all pc side I haven’t really paid attention to it since I’m on ps4.

1 Like
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When I first started I had your same concern but I haven’t given it a thought in a long time for two reasons:

  1. You can make 4 month fuel
  2. You can fuel all your beacons for 6 months for only 24.99 (Gleam Club)

Given how you basically drown in cubits and I can’t see myself ever having to actually buy any I am more than happy to toss them gleam club money to help them out and ensure the game continues.

8 Likes
4

I know what you mean! I barely play myself but don’t want to lose stuff.

But in alpha when I started to play 2 or 3 years ago. Beacons where permanent. Like everything else that is permanent. Your char / inventory is permanent. But buildings being permanent is a pain in the back.

What you noticed where they building who’s were abandoned be the player since the person didn’t seem to play anymore was for ever going to stand there. This also includes new players who did the tutorial…and left.

This caused into alot of beautiful places being ruined be abandoned beacons. Causing ghost cities and spacing problems.like in cities.

Image you being a city builder and someone join you. Plots 2 plots to build a tiny house but doesn’t… Those plots are permanent in your way!

But an inventory space in sanctum sounds fun!

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It would be great, but it’d also be a nightmare to manage. I believe the Sanctum is on the client side, so would be very open to cheating and then bringing any cheated materials back onto the main servers.

If they were going to explore this route, it would probably work better if they made an instanced ‘home’ area that was persistent for each player, but still provided by the main server.

Depending on the price of point and size of them, private planets (which would have to follow server rules and as such could be connected to the main universe) could fulfil this need. Even more so if they could expand on the idea of private servers and give you really tiny (non-wrapping) worlds of 16x16 plots (just an example as a cheap alternative.

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Can’t imagine a private planet being cheaper than gleam club. Besides, if the rental planet is going to be connected to the public worlds we have now it probably will follow the same rules for beacons/plotting which includes having to fuel your beacons I suppose…

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Been playing over a year, now and am still active but am beginning to try and come to terms with what comes next. I won’t stay active forever. I’m not leaving the game anytime soon, at least not permanently but how long can I justify $50 per year for Gleam Club if my playtime decreases and eventually stops for extended periods? What was it all for if I let it die?

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8

I guess that depends on where the cost comes from on maintaining a world. If it’s primarily from storing all the block data etc, a suitably small world should be able to be cheap enough to run to make it a worthwhile alternative. If that’s a minor cost compared with keeping it up and available and accessible, then you’d definitely be right.

But you are right, there would have to be an additional exception to make that sort of world plotted differently, which in turn may be trying to crowbar a solution in where it just wont fit… I’m not convinced either way.

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The idea about a matrix style storage James floated sounded very cool imo.

You wouldn’t be able to add to it manually, just by letting the beacon expire, but to me it sounds like it would be a nice solution.

3 Likes
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I’m not trying to be rude here. I’ll try to be as simple as possible in explaining. These are paid servers that contain players who play daily. That is open for anyone who can. I’m one of them. I earn my stay by paying and or playing with responsibility. The last thing we want is for others to take up space and not participate in the game. Literally you log in just to fuel and log out. Ok now I know this really is not a issue about space right now. Perhaps if we had 10k active players it would be. But there are things that can be done about that. Like adding worlds and one that is still in testing , rental planets. I still don’t know those details. I really think there are many factors, like including intent about what the devs want. Gleamclub is a great money maker for them I would assume. It’s like a dlc everyday 6 months just to keep your build. I’m open for change but then again I have my land. I have coin and end game knowledge. So I’m not worried who floods the planets…

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11

It’d be fine if it was actually only for keeping your builds in the world, but currently it’s a subscription you’re very much encouraged to get if you want to secure your assets in the game. If in a traditional MMO your character’s bank and gear was reset every time you didn’t do a daily quest once every 3-4 months, and the game asked you to pay a subscription to make the time limit go away, that would drive players away.

I ranted more about this in here :smiley:

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12

My goal isn’t really to get a freebie so much as it is to just have a way to take a true break from the game. @Mayumichi’s and @Kelmat’s points are spot on - Why should I have to pay money or worry about time just to ensure I don’t lose progress in my game, moreso where other games offer a solution to this out of the box for free? I paid for this game - call me entitled if you really want to, but I at least expect to get the one thing I can get for free in other games.

A personal serverside sanctum would be far better than a permanent beacon, and I have strong preference to the serverside sanctum. I don’t particularly enjoy the idea of a permanent beacon for the reasons several users have done a great job of explaining beforehand: Abandoned property would absolutely plague this game.

I was going to try to avoid bringing up this game again, given that almost all of my previous posts have brought it up in some way, but SkySaga’s personal island system is the ideal model for this. It’s your own thing, you could choose to make it private, friends-only, or public, and your home island was your base of operations too. It was always there ready for you.

I also saw some implications of worries pertaining to server cost, and I must say that the worries stemming from that should be completely void. I know this claim is going to drive some readers insane so if you're gonna try to prove me wrong or whatever it might be, open up this details tag.

Given the game’s current available mechanics, these personal properties would have almost no performance footprint, would take considerably less storage space than a full world assuming their space is more limited (I’m talking <10MB per world, and that’s a generous estimate), and would virtually be free to maintain for inactive players.

Performance footprint
The only worlds that would need to be simulated are live worlds where players are currently doing things. If a player is not in their world, it doesn’t need to be simulated. One immediate thing I may see is something like farmland or other plants that must grow, and you don’t need to simulate these plants to grow them. It’s as easy as setting a value in the plant that says “I grow X% per Y increment of time. Player logged off at Z timestamp.” and when the player rejoins their world, it just calculates how much time it’s been and updates it all when they get there. It’s nothing new and is something games have made use of for a very long time. It’s how Minecraft makes sure your plants grow when you’re 50,000 blocks away and in another dimension.

World Size
Data compression is nothing new. Assuming worlds have limited space – that is, more limited than full planets (I’m thinking in the ballpark of 8k blocks on all axis), they could be mashed down to incredibly small size, even moreso if procgen is used rather than simply relying on the player to build it all since some players may make use of natural structures for their aesthetic and foundation.

"Free if players are inactive"
This one is relatively simple to understand, but if a player is not in their world, it doesn’t need to be loaded into memory, it doesn’t need to be simulated, and in many cases it doesn’t even need to be ready to load (can be archived). All that matters is that the data is somewhere, even if it means in archive. “Free” is a loose term, you can argue that what relatively imperceptible amount of space a player’s world takes is space they could be using for something else, but a large scale corporation like this shouldn’t have to worry about approx. 10MB when they have petabytes worth of storage in datacenters.

3 Likes
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Am sure the devs are working on something to help with this…

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I’ve had gleamclub consistently for over a year. I do sometimes waver on the game content and if the value is in maintaining gleamclub or just let it burn until there is a substantial amount of content in the game and just start over. It’s also made me wonder if a cheaper tier of gleamclub that simply just kept refueling your beacon might appeal to a larger amount of players and help with long term retention.

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These topics pop up (understandably) at least once a month and every time so much time is wasted on not actually understanding the reasons the system is implemented the way it is.

The core to being able to find a solution for this issue, is understanding the “why”. Until we can agree that we understand why the system is the way it is, it is a pointless waste of time arguing about a solution.

The reason we have non-permanent beacons, is because the permanent worlds have finite space. You could argue the planets are too small, or we have too few of them. But even if you increase both 10-fold, it doesn’t change the fact that we will still only have finite space available.

If builds were to be permanent, every world would slowly fill up. Once filled up, people will migrate to other planets and you’re left with a ghost planet nobody plays on. If you think dead malls now are bad, imagine if all beacons are permanent. Now imagine this being applied not just to a mall, but to entire planets. These now dead planets will still have to be hosted and supported by wonderstruck. Over time this will amount to a big permanent cost for pretty much nothing.

I hope i’ve been clear enough to explain why we don’t have permanent beacons. There’s no arguing with these reasons, as they are facts. This is where we stand. Now that we understand the reason for non-permanent beacons, we can try and come up with a solution for the problems people are having.

I’ve hear a “personal sanctum” idea before and while it seems like a good idea, there’s 2 issues with this (and i believe both have already been mentioned):

  1. This personal sanctum has the same issue as the worlds. It has to be stored server-side. So it will take up space. Every single player who ever starts this game will have to have their sanctum stored. Another permanent cost that will only ever increase.
  2. Client-side storing is not possible, as it opens it up to very easy manipulation. There’s no way this would ever work.

Really the only solution i see for this, within the current system, is private planets. Having the owner have a setting that allows for permanent beacon fuel.

If the only goal is to just keep your materials, then the solution james/mayu offered might be good. I also don’t believe that beacon scavenging is a big enough thing in-game to be a big loss. Probably far outweighs the amount of people that would return if they knew that at least their materials aren’t lost!

1 Like
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Just to be clear, I’m not advocating anything specifically with my earlier post. I am merely feeling that the end, whenever that comes, is much more likely to be permanent for me based on the options we have today. I have gleam club now and will surely keep it past the day I take a break. I can justify $50/yr since I’m not buying many new games while playing Boundless. I can only justify it for so long when I eventually stop, though. I really think this is a great game and would absolutely love a way for my builds to be preserved without polluting the world or short of that a way to bring them back.

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One thing that gets suggested frequently are blueprints. I personally think if I could make or buy a beacon’s worth of a build, it would greatly offset my reluctance to start over. Especially if before I left I could store a trove of goods or they somehow automatically went to storage.
Storing a data file of my things must cost far less computing resources than my build if kept in the world.

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I like the way the system works now. Your personal character storage (your backpack) is permanent. Everything else requires effort (Gleam club or a few minutes every 4 months). Maybe they can have annual storage fees like U-Hual storage that stores stuff but not plots / locations on worlds.

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I would love to have a personal storage for my machines and coils spark links gens etc and have no limit to how many i can store in there but make it so they become non tradeable(so it cant be exploited) after being stored so you cant sell them or trade them with others, like shared account storage so that if I want to take a break i dont have to feel like a slave to the game, thats where I am at now permanent hiatus until I see some solid changes to the way in which some things work in-game and some more dev interaction with us.

20

Takes a little work but you can always manually tear everything down.
Decide what you really want to keep and sell the rest.

Don’t know who did it but there have been several that have done this.
Sell all their materials or just a big price for their entire build.

Understand what is being said in this topic. But that way you can eliminate the fueling schedule if you don’t have GC.