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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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.
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.
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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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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 
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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.
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Am sure the devs are working on something to help with this…
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.
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):
- 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.
- 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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh I agree with that. As far as keeping your stuff! It could simply move to backup. Which shouldn’t cost much data other than the profile you already have anyway. I think they devs should put in a in game universal store. One we can visit and it be like a hub. Kinda like the lockers in borderlands. Our stuff can be stored there.
Perhaps having something like the Sanctuary where we spawn, where every character gets an area maybe 4x4x2 or something in size that even if you stop playing, is always safe for you, dont think it would take that much more data and it would be linked to your character,one of the biggest reasons I see people never coming back to this game is simply because they stopped playing for abit and lost everything they had.
The Data cost of this, if it remains small shouldn’t be very large, perhaps even link it to the sanctuary, so each sanctuary has another “portal” to your Sanctuary room, which u can move between and the sanctuary, allot of ways they could do it.
Your points are absolutely right and I have nothing to interject to aside from this, which I did cover under the quite lengthy section of going over server cost.
Effectively, assuming the world format stored on the servers is identical to the client format and can be compressed, a world can be stored within virtually no size whatsoever, and for a large corporation with datacenters dedicated to storage like this (hundreds if not thousands of terabytes of storage), the size I can estimate for a large private world (~5MB tops) is virtually imperceptible. I have no doubts that storage concerns would be present at all. I also go over simulation / computing concerns in that large section I wrote, so I won’t reiterate them here.
Here's some math to back up the space requirements.
For perspective, say they allocate a measly 1TB of storage to player sanctums, let’s make some numbers:
- 1000 active players who build there.
- There’s 1000 players who joined and haven’t touched the place.
- 500 of these active players have something no larger than the default sanctum, which according to the in-game data takes about 31KB. We’ll be generous and assume they got creative, and say the file takes 100KB.
- The remaining 500 players will, for the sake of showing this off, have massive builds with thousands of blocks. These world files will take 5MB, or 5000KB.
Now let’s do the math:
100KB for 500 players = 50MB of world space
5MB for 500 players = 2.5GB of world space
1000 inactive players with default 31kb sanctums = 31MB of world space
That’s a total of 2.581GB of world space. So even with 2000 players accounted for, we still have 997GB of space left to spare.
But let’s not stop there. Let’s go extreme. How many players with giant worlds (5MB in our example) would we need to take 1TB? We would need 200K players all with worlds containing thousands on thousands of blocks.
Now given that this company has the proper infrastructure of a game company this large, or petabytes worth of storage, hundreds of millions of players could all have multi-thousand block worlds and it’d still be a safe amount of data to have stored without worries of “Is this taking too much space?” coming up.
How large do you think the company is? I don’t know the details, but I think I read somewhere they have a total of like 17 employees.
They don’t have any infrastructure themselves, the game runs on aws, buying a petabyte of fast storage on aws doesn’t sound cheap. But I haven’t actually checked the prices. 2k players sounds also quite low. They also can’t really compress the data if it has to be accessed with low latency, on top of that I think aws cold storage had a delay of 30-60 seconds when retrieving the data so the cheap petabytes won’t work here.
I’m not saying that it’d be impossibly expensive, but there is a cost.
edit: Yup I don’t think glacier would do the job here
edit2: Don’t take this as an objection, we’re actually on the same side, here’s my post about storing the items and the storage concerns that came up
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Put everything under as few beacons as possible and use greater beacon fuel. I’m sure you can get a friend to help keep you fueled. I’d be happy to help.