Are portal networks a commodity now?

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Everybody and their grandma has a portal network now. Ultima has a portal network. There’s also Skyway Portal Network, Portal Seekers Network, Chisel Town Portal Network…and I’m sure there’s alot more that I can’t think of.

Given the small playerbase and a finite number of planets, are PNs a commodity? Is there any way to really differentiate? I personally only use 2 of these networks because trying to use more while learning their system is overwhelming.

Let’s have a discussion about this meta.

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I think they most certainly are. I think one thing is that yes some portal networks offer pre-made portals, but sometimes you want to go above and beyond. I for one was really frustrated before they fixed the portal loading issue, and therefore really hated going through 3-4 portals just to get to what I’m doing, so I thought about opening larger portals just to cut down on going thru other servers.

Differentiating - I think someone suggested this earlier but using more signs to dictate what is going on. Like someone said it would be nice if shopping portal hubs put a general list of things or types of things a shop sells, in order to speed up the process for buyers

I think wayfinding and navigation are the most important parts of a portal network tbh, just like in real life roads and stuff :stuck_out_tongue:

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Sorry but I had to…

2lrmeh

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I’m in the base that would love to see portal hubs dismembered and discouraged in their current forms. It’s a meta that grew outside of early access.

People make this huge argument that PS4 players would have said it was too hard and we were given such a blessing but I absolutely disagree. If there weren’t these constant portal networks than each planets resource would be more valuable. Rock colors would be valuable. Tree colors would. Gleam would be much more valuable for its various colors.

As it stands warps rarely get used now as a result so one of the intended money sinks don’t get used but now you have portal hubs generating stupid amounts of coin with no real sink for it any longer. The tax is so minimal especially compared to warping where a good exploration could cost you 30-40k.

I think the portal hub meta is a detriment to the game but I don’t see it changing any time soon in the future so I continue to use it so I don’t put myself at a financial disadvantage.

I tell you what I’d really love to see, is warp augments that come in tiers so they let you warp further than portals. I think doing that would at least give a reason to start using warp totems regularly. Perhaps the potentially discussed temporary planets could only be accessed by these hypothetical long range warp totems.

edit: this isnt exactly in the same vein of the is a ‘portal hub a commodity’ discussion but I appreciate the fact you referred to it as a meta and thats why I chose to discuss the meta from my viewpoint.

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I personally see PN as a business in real life? As in lots may pop up, but its only the ones that are “good enough” stay around (due to how much it costs to maintain them). So I think more is better, as that results in competition and ‘forcing’ the portal networks to become better and better to compete with each other.

How does a PN network get ‘better’? Asthetic, ease of use, having portals in the right location - my opinions. So if we were to time travel 1 year in the future, theoretically, there will only be a handful of portal networks and they will all be pretty good :slight_smile: (not saying some aren’t good already :wink: )

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I feel everyone thinks that footfall is the end all be all. I hate portal networks. I use them because they are there. If these didnt exist the longevity of this game would be much much longer in my opinion. Why even have a warp totem its not needed unless a nee planet spawns. And then really just give it 30mins and PS will have it up and goin in no time. All around its kinda a cheat in my book but whateves no way around it.

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I use warps all the time. Can’t speak for other people on that.

Rocks and trunk aren’t valuable cause you can find them everywhere. Some colors people like more than others. That’s just the way it is and why some sell and some don’t. There’s a demand for that color and material.

As the player population grows there will be more portal hubs. A lot of them will most likely cap out cause the upkeep in oortshards will just keep going up because of it. I don’t really seem them any different than a highway in real life and cities around a country are the different worlds you can visit.

They might make a lot of coin but a lot of those folks who run those portal hubs and openly and publicly said they just put that coin right back into the hub. Whether you believe them is up to you but I do know a lot of people would get upset if the portal hubs went away. Besides, the idea behind a single location with multiple portals is working as intended since the developers want that to be a thing that multiple people have to work together as a team to maintain. Portals hubs are actually something the developers have encouraged. So… :thinking:

I think the perceived grind in the game would go up a lot if we didn’t have portal hubs. We all have seen posts about that topic.

It is what it is. :man_shrugging:

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Yep and that is why I stick with Portal Seekers :-p They have a map, shop portal guidelines, and they build geometrically so you can get around faster using smaller spaces. I get so frustrated every time some shop I need to visit forces me to go through one of the other networks.

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I have stated before that I think current portal mechanics are unbalanced and unfinished.
One of the things I loved from the first day was warping away to your chosen destination or having personal portal to anywhere.
Right now it’s too expensive to maintain and have your own portals, at least to someone not having that much hours to put in the game.
While I am for grind, and having some stuff that you have to choose between, not being jack of all trades etc, this is one aspect that I think greatly diminishes what gameplay would be if it wasn’t so.
Yeah, yeah, I know everyone has his own pet peeve, this one is mine. Currently to travel I go to one of the hubs, usually warp to there, than pass through several portals, than warp to another final location since it’s not beside hub. So much overhead, so much effort, not much fun, not at all.
I’d love to see some combo of warps and portals, like using oort shards to open warps, why do you have to pay heavy coin for traveling on your own? Why portals run on oort shards and warps on coins? How does that align with each other?
Why do I pay for possibility of warping 20-40 people when I just want to warp alone (when you are opening warp it says “xx citizens”) and it costs like a lot of coins to open anything but smallest hop.
I am very, very unhappy with current portal implementation.
Before I discovered portal hubs, one of my most exciting moments was to open a portal to another planet, go there collect resources and warp back, it was an adventure on which you go well prepared.

I gotta admit, I’m not a native English speaker and title of topic confuses me a bit? While OP claims that portal networks are commodity it also claims that everyone and his grandma has one, not sure if these two align?

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with the current coin generation system without PN’s i think people would be building alot more “mud huts” the coin you get for feats is next to nothing and footfall would be all but dead so i think we would see alot more people saveing coin to warp to gem or high tier resource worlds and useing whatever building mats are there

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EDIT: This was supposed to be a reply to the thread not u specifically MoriOni, sorry

Popular networks get too big and confusing, so people create smaller networks that portal only to exactly where they want, then they become popular and grow too big and the cycle repeats.

People don’t know how to make money, so they setup a portal hub/network to try and get some free coin. Then it dies (or at least stops growing) as they realize it doesn’t generate much profit at all and takes a lot of time to maintain.

I think most people use a combination of hubs, networks, and random other people’s portals to find fast routes to the places they want to go. Most major/popular networks simply provide a backbone/fallback for when people quit or shortcut portals are closed. There will always be a few major networks around, and there will always be many smaller networks showing up and disappearing again. People will constantly be finding new routes to the places they like.

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I think without portal networks, there would be close to no coin exchange and the economy would be dead.

Without them there is no centralized location for shopping for items or locating anything of worth for trade.

Also, the coin generation without a hub would be next to nothing as well, eventually everyone would probably run out of coin due to warping costs except for the daily/weekly income.

Early on I was incredibly discouraged by the coin mechanics, because I was quickly realizing it would take a ton of coins to visit other planets on a regular basis.

The hubs opened my eyes to possibilities and made it to where I wanted to keep playing.

If I had no way to gen coin in any real way, but it costs coin to warp, and a lot for longer jumps, then I dont know if I’d be playing right now, because I would have given up after not understanding how to make regular coin to travel.

Without a hub does anyone really think we’d have even the foot traffic we currently have in our shops? Not sure anyone would visit my place without a portal hub, I mean who could find it among the other random locations in the oort cosmos?

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And here I thought I was the only one who has been yearning for this. I’d like to share a story:

Back in August, a guild by the name of Portal Seekers had built the first portal network within a matter of a week.It connected all of the existing planets and that became the foundation to which all newly released planets became available to us when the game went public in September. They effectively built a superhighway of sorts

It accelerated the access to resources by 100x. Some think this is a great thing. I think it hurt the game…at least in the short run. Maybe in the long run but no one really knows. It caused major balancing issues which has now taken up the time of the game developers.

A total noob could access higher tier planets within a couple of weeks if he knew what he was doing. I know of multiple players who have done this. I have a difficult time believing that the devs intended this. I imagine the higher tier resources and planets was meant to be something that would take months to accomplish. And the major roadblock was having your own portal. Because this would all take a while, it would give the devs time to understand how players were interacting as they sifted through the internal data and make appropriate adjustments. Instead, they’ve had to re-prioritize. So many balancing issues arose due to the superhighway that was built for us.

When I saw the trailer below for Boundless several years ago, I was enthralled. It captured my imagination because it conveyed a sense of exploration of new worlds. And as I read through some of the big picture elements to the game, it felt like the establishment of a portal would be an event unto itself. That it would take a while to get. And once you set foot onto a new world, there was a great sense of enthusiasm as you started exploring the planet. That was how I felt when I started on Phemnorium and everything felt new to me as a noob. The hillsides, the desert, and the creatures. It just all felt right. And then I accidentally stumbled upon a portal in the city of Blacklight which led to the PS Hub Network.

And so nowadays, I think the feeling for many players albeit accidentally is, “Can someone point me to Cephonix Merica because I need to farm sweetbeans for an hour.” Exploration is treated as more of a destination than a journey unto itself.

I would personally love to see this all disbanded but I also know that some other group of players would simply take over the reins of a portal hub. Ultimately, I hope that the devs have learned from the first few months and are implementing mechanics that would make the next round of exploration (t7+ worlds) alot more enjoyable and extend the longevity of the game.

And btw, I’m not trying to bash Portal Seekers because they’ve done a great job and I think Simoyd and company has been more of a benefit than a hinderance to the community. I do their public hunts when I can. It’s certainly possible that if PS didn’t do it back in August, someone else would’ve. Or not. Who knows…

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They are definitely a commodity that hedges against the general player base having to farm oort or coin for themselves if they don’t want to or presently cannot.

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I think a large chunk of the player base would simply quit if they had to spend weeks or months just to get to a new planet.

It would be horrible trying to get anywhere, shopping would be a total nightmare. Coin generation would be non existant, how am I supposed to generate income to travel if no one is making money to visit my shop?

Edit: If the answer is “use portals”, then it’s not really any different to now :smiley:

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You think hubs hurt something but you don’t know… but you imply causation. Can you roughly quantify and state specifically how a portal anyone can create or use has affected balance?

Mind you, portal hubs existed long before the game was released, devs made portals more expensive to maintain, so I think they had an idea of what was coming.

edit: I’ve seen your work with the gold tools balancing posts, so I’m asking seriously if you can put more thought into this statement. :slight_smile: I can’t imagine how many players are out there who would hate having to farm coin to warp out AND back for just gathering sweet beans or similar

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Totally agree that most players are missing something here. The steps required to progress to the high tier planets naturally are completely skipped by almost everyone. Remember that you need power coils to actually make portal blocks! You also need power coils to make titanium tools, and you need components to make machines! So many steps you can just skip by using portals and/or the economy system.

That being said I’m not sure there really exists a solution. It was an exciting and unique experience but short from having regular wipes, I’m not sure how people can experience this. I think any wipes would be bad.

Ultima hub had their thing going around the same time as PS, and we’ve already seen a dozen other networks pop up at this point. It’s the mechanics, not specific people that are the issue.

If they were to add a very large number of planets, or increase the portal fuel cost drastically I feel like there would always be one or more groups willing to organize getting connected to everything.

I’m not sure there’s any way to change this without drastically changing how the game works and how portals work.

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I just want to see portals implemented in a more temporary fashion. I don’t think they should be able to be extended so long term as they are right now. Like @deenw I definitely feel this is a meta that potentially hurt the game in the short term, and maybe even more in the long term but we wont know that until we get long term.

It’s a Pandora box situation. We’ve opened the portal network and we can’t put that back in the box. As others have said there could be silly backlash if there were something done about that. I think that future planet generation could take that in to account so as not to mess up existing networks/hubs but also give a reason/use for warping and the idea of expanding on warp augments to be longer range the higher tier they go. Heck maybe some of those augments could reduce the amount of coin needed to warp. I’ve got a lot of idea how to tool over the warp/travel experience. I guess one day I should just sit down and take the time to flesh it out.

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Yeah, pretty much what you said. The only way I see this changing is adding personal portals that would be much cheaper to maintain, but only owner can use them. I don’t have anything against portal hubs, I just miss the option to have my own thing that accommodates my own specific needs.

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I see threads like this as an insult to those of us who run these hubs. Lately people are acting like running a hub means we are the devil. What gives? Help people out and they begin treating you like trash for being helpful. If you don’t like portal hubs then don’t use them and spend all your coin doing warps.

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