From my understanding we already had a small feature where people could access a chest or items that were given to us in a previous problem. Like a storage from the devs or something… I forget the exact system or when it was used.
Please provide a feature in the beacon where players that are wishing to quit the game temporarily are able to remove the beacon immediately but all the items in that beacon is moved into a holding slot that can be access later on when they return from the game.
Keep the fuel beacon or lose all items function (the expired beacon game play). There are people, though, that might want to come back at a later point and know they want to quit for a while. So this feature ensures they will have something instead of losing everything.
Having the lose everything feature really creates a play or never play again scenario. This still keeps people active but at least offers an option for those that really want to quit for a while to at least keep their stuff. They still need to rebuild things and get new land when returning but at least they aren’t starting from scratch completely.
This also might help people that want to leave an area but at least allowing them to move a bit more quickly.
I dunno 16 week beacon fuel seems like a decent break. And it’s fairly simple to set a reminder on your phone to log in and put another 16 week fuel in
Desired length of breaks is going to vary between different people for sure though. A simple “set it and forget it” option until you come back would be great.
Personally, having to set a reminder to go fuel a bunch of beacons in a game I’m not currently playing just sounds frustrating.
There is also the option of putting everything in one beacon so its easier to fuel. However, if you are ready to take a break from the game you probably don’t want to spend the next who knows how many hours collecting everything you used to build and make storage for it to all go in so you can safely take your break. That would make me want to distance myself further from the game at that point.
Not if it took all of your items and put it in a temporary storage that goes away 7 days or so after you access it again.
That way the space used to build on will be open if new people want to use it but you can keep everything.
A week when you are wanting to actually play again wouldn’t be that bad to build a bunch of storage cubes to shove everything back into. They could even sell you a pack of storage cubes for a few backs only when you come back like that just to make it easier.
From another point of view, I would like this because people would be less likely to leave ghost towns behind that make the world feel empty.
It would be even better if it could blueprint the beacon and let you manually restore your build one block at time like creativerse does blueprints. That way the player could handle all the issues with how it effects the natural surroundings. This would also allow people to pick up and move their plots to new locations but the process of rebuilding would not be instantaneous.
Guess you’re better at going back to games than I am. If I were to take that long of a break from any game I wouldn’t go back at all. Take destiny 2 as an example. Been away from there for 4 months and at this point wont go back because of all the things I missed that I no longer can get. Plus trying to play catch up to my friends is no fun.
This game is a very different case because even the Devs have said that in a year the game will be more fleshed out and closer to what they really envision so it would be beneficial to allow the people who are into it at this point to come back to the game once there is actually more to do in it.
Look at anvil. They are all waiting for more content. But they also take the time to log in and fuel their beacons or have gc. But I guess that comes down to they know they will come back when there’s more content and they don’t see logging in for 2 min that bad. It’s pretty much the whole town that does that. And they are still capital of segi lol.
That is them though, everybody is different. Depending on how many beacons you have it will also take way more than 2 minutes. If they are on different planets it will take even longer because you probably won’t have your portals open to get around quickly. So what works for one person or group of people may not work for everyone.
Being able to free up the used land for other people to use is another part of this idea that I think is great and logging in and fueling beacons doesn’t solve that.
Logging in and remembering to fuel it all or paying for Gleam Club is great if you want to keep you stuff you built so you can come back to it.
There should just be another option for people that don’t want to have that stress of having to fuel everything constantly but want to come back once there is more “game”.
Remember this is for people that are looking to take a real break… not a partial break where their builds stay. That isn’t truly stepping away from the game.
Plus those that just fuel their beacons and don’t really play are causing a huge problem in the game with dead cities and unused plots. Allow people the ability to take what they have and put in long term storage… if they want to come back they still have to start basically over with a build and location as well as any game changes that happen. Their “stuff” is of no importance to us. Why make it harder…
I wouldn’t doubt it would have an impact. But then again there would be more people that would be coming back after a break because they had “stuff” and didn’t have to completely start from scratch. You could argue that would increase Gleam Club.
Plus there are plenty of people that might still not want to lose their builds so they will use Gleam Club. At this point I am only advocating keeping your “stuff” not land or builds.
I wouldn’t expect it to go away… people will still want to see. I’m not here to solve every problem with this solution. But the option to allow people to delete a build and save stuff hurts not one person in this game. All it does is give that person leaving a more likely possibility of coming back. And in the long run - players willing to come back is a benefit to all of us.
On FarmVille there was an issue where ppl who had left for a while tried to return, and logged in to a field of dead crops. They then lapsed again because their return impression was bad. By adding a feature to restore these prodigal players’ crops from dead to alive, the returning player retention shot up. It made a big difference.
There’s a lot of caveats when mapping this anecdote from a f2p single player game onto a premium mmo. But the core question being asked in this thread has a lot of merit. How to make a returning player’s impression a positive one? Telling them to go back in time and use beacon fuel correctly does not answer this question.
Edit: I should add that this was at a point in FarmVille’s life when just about every person on Facebook had played the game or was a conscientious objector. So the only place fresh players could come from was former players. I don’t think Boundless has that problem so I don’t think addressing this is a high priority atm.