Boundless cannot get big with the current portal system

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The forum is full with ideas of how to make Boundless big. Make it F2P, advertise for it.

The problem is that the game has a 90 player limit per planet - and, as far as I know, that includes player that are on a different planet but have a portal to the other planet.

You probably don’t want to overpopulate the planets as nobody likes the “planet is full” message. Boundless had 1150 concurrent player on Steam during the free weekend: https://steamcharts.com/app/324510#All

Neglecting console player (which were vastly outnumbered during the free weekend) we can now calculate that the game spawned 50 planers for 1150 concurrent player - or 23 player per planet.

Let’s assume Boundless goes big and reaches maybe 10000 concurrent player. We’re now talking 500 planets. And while this sounds awesome it would require a portal network with at least 499 portals to connect them all.

But wait, something like TNT wouldn’t work because the single planet would always be full. (I think that’s the reason PS created the loop.) You would need at least 10 TNT-like portal networks to distribute the player between different hub-planets - and which ever network gets to popular gets destroyed by its own success. Player will flock to the “best” network just to start getting annoyed by the full planet.

These networks would consume vastly more Oort. Instead of having 1 network with 49 portals, we have now 10 with 499 portals. That’s 100 times the Oort for 10 times the player.

But the next problem is that every shop “must” connect to all 10 networks.

And while such a big universe would be awesome it couldn’t work because the number of planets scale linearly with the player base but the required amount of portals increases faster. If they really want to bring in a big amount of player, e.g. by going F2P, they must first increase the allowed number of player on a planet to something like 1000 or implement a new form of travel that doesn’t suffer from the same limitation.

Nearly every other MMORPG solves that problem with phasing but that can’t work in a game where everybody can change every block on a planet.

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if you want To make 1 network To work In your hypotethical world would be that you make branches For the network Where every Branch takes care of X amount of portals.

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If the player base grew big enough for that, you wouldn’t need to be in every network, just a local network. Think like how PS Biitula was structured. It’s a world-neighborhood hub.

You would then need a version of BUTT that lets you filter down to your world region, but if these world-neighborhood hubs were getting close to player cap in peak hours, that would probably mean that each neighborhood has more shops than the current entire public universe has.

I think the “just the world you are on” design of the knowledge tab implies this is the developers’ idea for how things would go as well.

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Exactly. It would change the whole landscape, people wouldn’t necessarily flock to the same place if there are 50k of us. We already have more localized hubs and whatnot, they just aren’t in use as much as they would be with a higher population.

Edit to add: I actually really want to see how this goes down. If the population blows up rapidly there will be a lot of scrambling to expand.

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I think I would die of happiness if that happened! :blush: There have been events and hunts where close to 100 players are online on the same world at the same time. I think James said it can get laggy due to all of the creatures that spawn at meteors. The player # limitation might stem from the AWS servers. Not sure.

If there were a much higher number of planets and portal networks, perhaps players would create specific galaxy system type portal hubs that connect to 2-20 planets. Then those hubs would network with other hubs? I think it would become nearly impossible for one hub entity to connect to all Known Worlds & Sovs at that point. (could be wrong) We have several hundred Sovereign planets and TMK no one has connected them all - I’d say TNT has done a great job at connecting a lot of them though.

It would be fun to go to different places to see what their economy is like, etc.

I do wish there were more ways to collect oort. Perhaps some systems could mine small veins of oort or harvest it from sky or ocean biomes. Maybe some systems could spawn with a fortress Titan/dungeon.

(Edited to word it better.)

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Boundless wasn’t designed with the concept of a single portal network. The assumptions from the main developers going in were that things would be much more isolated and there would be trading among regions and stuff. Not that you would travel from one side of the Universe to the other daily.

We as players decided to create centralized networks. Obviously the emergent game play of what we had now happened but there is still never was an expectation or requirement for a single network. I think we would see more specialized networks pop up if we had large groups of players. You’d probably find out that people wouldn’t want to run a huge network or would need to.

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I remember that the original idea from the backer video was that each person was going to host its own world and we would have to build portals to connect with other people’s planets.
So we all would be more isolated as you said, i kinda liked that idea but since I don’t have gamer friends IRL it would have been hard for me to find a community lol.

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The player on the other planet has to get the portal loaded to count as a player on said planet.

You are right about what you said, i think the planet/server are too small to be a big mmo. Imagine doing event/hunts and can’t go higher than 80 ish players. Even that you lock the planet down for other players.

Anyways we can’t really see how it would works, since planet would be added with the number of players playing. So it would be a big universe.

If it would be that big, one network would not work. Its way to much work for this at the current oort rates. It would need multiple networks then multiple economy etc.

I think sanctum would need to be reworked to be able to portal to the planet you wants or something since some would be locked by the max player limits.

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As other people have said think that as the player base grew as would homeworlds on top of that sovereigns would accommodate players also. Now how the game handles a world that’s full I’m unsure but I am sure that has been experienced at some point and someone can chime in.

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This was a regular problem for a while.

You just don’t go there. You hAve to find another route, and if that planet was your destination or home, see you later…

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You membah? I membah! :blueberries::grin: The good ol days…

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Hmm that seems like a really poorly designed and not-so-well thought out system. I mean I could understand why limits are set I mean you wouldn’t want 1000+ people on a planet. I guess it may have never been a huge issue, but you would think there would have been some plan in place to create a sub-system that was based on regions. I suppose it could get pretty laggy…

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So, the thing is, the system just flatly wasn’t designed for it. A portal network, I mean. It’s player-invented emergent gameplay and it definitely changes the way load is put on the system.

If we were all just using our private portals for access to frequently visited areas, and warping around for travel to new planets and longer distances, it wouldn’t matter so much.

In a system where we all traveled independently, warping around and even with some local or regional hubs, this wouldn’t be as likely to happen. I think you can warp almost twice as far as you can make a portal also, so if a planet did get crowded due to some event or something, you could probably find another route without too much trouble.

But anyways the network idea DID come about before the official release of the game, and I wasn’t here for that period so I’m not sure how all of that went down. By which I specifically mean the game didn’t seem well balanced to support that sort of grassroots travel in terms of ways to earn coins and etc… vs the cost of just getting around.

With the minter in place it would be fine, IMO. Although my vision is a little crowded by my thorough understanding of the game mechanics and meta we, as a community, have gone through. It might not be that easy to get going as a new player who just independently decided to buy the game. Aaaaaanyways …

The portal networks have been around since the official “Beginning” as it stands and it’s easy to see why they’re considered to be fundamental to the core game for most players. I still honestly know one holdout who refuses to use them most of the time, heh. He does what he likes, it’s been a long time since coin has constrained his activities as far as I know. It’s definitely possible, it’s just not as easy, and for most people, not as fun.

So yeah that’s a bit of a ramble, but the point is the system wasn’t designed to support these networks at all, so it’s no surprise it seems like it’s not thought out that way.

EDIT: I just skimmed over this again and I see that when I was editing part of this post I completely removed a couple of sentences about the networks actually creating the bottlenecks themselves. Not only do multiple networks often flow along the same paths for efficiency, but then people want to settle near the concentration points, as well.

Especially since the first two major networks both followed a “regional hub” sort of layout, this got pretty ingrained into people’s thoughts.

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I appreciate the info and the rambling… I suppose I was more meaning the constraints and limits per planet. I mean granted in the current state we probably won’t run into a full planet… but what happens if the game gained 10k players… how would they distribute themselves and what issues would arise from that? Full portal hubs and full planets?

That was more what I meant by a poorly designed system. The planet limitations seems to almost not be modular enough or flexible enough to adjust for a large influx of players.

EDIT: Minecraft is pretty similar to this as it has some player limits on servers kind of… as too many on one server can really start to lag the server especially on modded servers …

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Hah thanks for the kind words :stuck_out_tongue:

Right, you’re right (or OP or whoever) and I agree 100% our current arrangement is not linearly scalable.

I think before pushing towards that size it would do well for the devs to address it in one way or another. Some of us might be surprised in which way they push things though :rofl:

If they feel that portal networks have become essential evolution they could certainly just make a NPC portal network linking together all or subsets of the planets. This would discourage portal spam at least on those routes.

Or they could spread the planets out a bit and decrease conduit range. Maybe with a wee boost to warp distances for good measure. This might be good for fostering a sort of “vast, adventurous universe” feeling where you might just also run into other colonies or settlers. If you go looking for them.

I mean, a 500 planet core MMO universe, that’s pretty big. At the time when they dropped the planets for the big free weekend event, the devs noted that it was done manually, it wasn’t according to a programmatic ratio or anything. One of them did also come back and say in the discussion that no planet (even the highly contested Biitula back then) was near the threshold that would encourage a new world to auto-spawn.

At least we’ve seen that ~1500 worlds can all interoperate and stay alive. This place can get pretty big with the current systems. Especially with all the nay-saying around here lately, seeing them gear up for a similar rush of people would be pretty darn exciting.

But yes, definitely we’re going to have some traffic problems with that :crazy_face:

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lol no, i stop reading after i saw that nonsense…

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I agree, i don’t think f2p is a solution, nor should it be. Also, i believe the price tag can be a deterrent for some people who might live for chaos in free games. This community loves this game and wants the best for it, i would be disappointed to see f2p attracting the wrong people. Yes if its f2p some good people would have the chance to play it but the risk would be way to high for my personal liking for the others to join in and cause a bad time for people who just want to have some honest fun.

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I certainly don’t think there is enough monetization to cover things with F2P right now, at least. Periodic free weeks would probably be a good in-between. I find it hard to justify spending over $15 for a game if I’m not 100% sure I’m interested in playing it, and Boundless is very difficult to determine if it’s worth even $20 let alone $40 from just videos and googling.

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