It becomes nonsense, it’s demotivating to read people who settle their accounts in public. You have all the imaginable ways to do it otherwise!!!
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You’re not wrong. I’m not denying it, or minimizing it.
For a long time I participated in “the dialogue”. Then it got nastier and nastier, but it was futile, and I left it alone. Stepped back and watched people who paid to “have their say” take out their issues on the devs, and as a result the community. Just basically mourned the game while some people were, as a said before, apparently “feeding on the despair”.
That time is past. If it takes a good push to get things moving in a more positive direction, I’m game.
A full swing isn’t instant though. It’s been a long time and honestly I think even some good people need to break some bad habits. For me, that includes being part of a self-destructive community, or sitting back while people wreck the things that brought us together.
People are used to just spewing into a void here. It’s no longer a void. Let’s get a handle on the spewing.
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I can’t articulate it this well because I might have brain damage, who knows, but yes this.
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Man you’ve sometimes been hard to read. It’s true. Personally I’ve seen your perseverance and tempered my thoughts. Some people more or less.
When prompted directly, you definitely came up with a little more clarity, and some meaningful input. Clearly someone didn’t appreciate your style, but I doubt I’m the only one who appreciated the sentiment.
It’s been a while, but the forum is littered with my ranting, as well. Sometimes a person can get on a roll and go overboard but if you never speak out, there’s no way to be heard. And sometimes the hardest discussions bring the best things to light.
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I’m hoping for substantially more cosmetics in the future, and though I’ve always thought it’s really cool that we can buy them with earned cubits I would absolutely be fine with the compromise of cosmetics going cash-only.
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I’m going to put this here for discussion, from a thread that got locked.
What do you guys think about tokenizing world fuels, so that they’re tradable in game. This is a proven model, it helps shut down “gold farmers” and captures that revenue for the studio.
People who want to pay cash for random in-game purposes get coin, and people who can’t afford or commit to the $10/month get to maintain planets if they’re putting in the playtime.
Tokenization would be a solid fix for that. We would have market prices (ideally) and the transaction would be as safe for the players as any other in-game trade is. Something to think about, I guess, while we wait for the new dev team.
To be clear this is not a suggestion that people start trying to sell world fuel by codes, which is explicitly forbidden by policy and apparently, verbally by James. In the current model there’s not any channel to control the interaction, or stop scammers. Just because James isn’t running the game doesn’t mean that published policy has changed!
I wouldn’t expect any policy-level change on this either, until such time as there’s a dev team in place, to make the necessary changes to the game.
Somebody would have to give up their value first, and then just hope the other person comes through. History shows that works out poorly much of the time.
As a long term idea though, it seems like a good way to capture a good portion, if not all, of any “black market” money floating around out there.
Also not a new idea. Just something that came up a little too late for Wonderstruck.
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the space between our work and it’s product, alienation, atomisation… hmmm i’ve heard this somewhere 
I flagged that post as not all the profanity was blocked when I had viewed it.
This game forum is meant for ages of 7 and above and so family friendly…if this has changed then it’s up to @Tiggs etc to convey that and change the CoC.
There are plenty of places on the Internet where people can be an edgelord…maybe a voxel building gaming forum shouldn’t be one of these
A flagged post can also be edited and it will be un-flagged, though if it is flagged once more it will sent for a moderation review.
fyi I am an adult and have no issue with profanity, in the right context (used to run an off-licence and also can swear like a champ playing call of duty 
)
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In a snap I was agreeable to this. Abuse of the flagging system has been bad here. Enough to desensitize me to it. I mean, on seeing a post flagged, I don’t even bother trying to figure out why. I honestly wasn’t sure if the profanity was the reason for the flagging, or the content. Due to things like obvious flagging a lot of the time to quiet someone or just for saying something unpopular. it’s gotten to the point that most of us just ignore that and move on.
I noticed this morning some uncensored profanity elsewhere too, ironically moments after reading this post. The profanity filter has always been pretty wonky here. In my background and environment such language is pretty normal, I probably honestly wouldn’t have noticed at all if not for all the little black boxes. Doesn’t matter though.
With that in mind, thanks for taking a moment to clarify. Rules are rules, and it’s wholly appropriate use of the system. If people were using it like that the whole time then someone who got flagged might concern themselves with cleaning up their posts, or wondering what’s actually wrong with them instead of everyone just ignoring it with a shrug because of a history of noise and abuse.
With all the things I’ve said over the last week, I’d be remiss not to point that out. We need some rules to interoperate, and that’s part of the whole reason that I started going on at all.
I went back and read the post. Unfiltered profanity. The same that the system has failed to flag on another thread this morning. it seems to find b-a-l-l anywhere but can’t find that? 
I also want to add that if no one will claim the flag or explain their reason for it - then when a mod reviews the post they also have to guess and may or may not realize the problem. I literally didn’t notice it on my first read through, or on a skim after the flagging. With a reason given (even in PM if necessary - not all offenses are so minor) they can also adjust the system that should be filtering the text.
Too much trashy behavior is being normalized, and not just here. Thanks for taking a moment to speak out. I’ve been doing more of that myself and while this is a small thing, we have to start somewhere.
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I’d go as far as saying that the need for scaling back is already a sign of failure - meaning the game should have a stable income that can compensate player fluctuation. But of course there’s technical ways of mitigating the problem. Like combining multiple planets to one server instance when there’s lower player numbers and moving them to separate instances again, when play numbers increase.
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I’d say that’s a bit harsh. Even with regular updates. The player base will go up and down. It’s just the universe would have to do the same. Perhaps Biitula could crash into Beckon and they’d both explode. I wouldn’t be against that. Lol. I kid.
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I really didn’t mean it in harsh way. I just think that if Boundless is to become a success, it needs to have a solid player base and solid income and thus no need for scaling back.
Or let me put it this way: I don’t think Boundless can be financially successful if the player base fluctuates so much that the universe would need to adapt to it. But then again, I don’t have any actual numbers to back that up.
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To some extent, sovs are an answer. Definitely only “some extent” though.
I posted a couple weeks ago about some public creatives. With a few of those there could be an entirely creative universe running parallel to the main because transport and other things are considerably easier on that side.
I think there will always be trust and/or commitment issues with sovereigns though. It’s a risk to build on someone’s planet. You can fuel it if they vanish, but they can randomly kick you off any time. If they don’t want the world or specifically want to delete it - that’s going to lead to drama. Then of course building on your own world means an ongoing financial commitment.
As for creatives, I feel like along with the people who really wanted private planets, we’ve lost many of them along the way. Some of those were the same players. Some people would like them for hacking at but in the model that exists, it’s still got connectivity requirements and that was a mixed bag. There’s been a fair amount of upset expressed about that I think it’s clear that more people were expecting to be able to have a standalone.
All of that OFC is just processing what I’ve read here and elsewhere, and my thoughts.
The gleam club piece is key. People have committed to years in advance, and it’s not (again my opinion) good to change the terms of that. ** VERY** worst case there, it might lead to some real problems. An activity requirement, specifically, is why many people purchase that. They could however split that out into different packages, which I’ve already advocated for.
Blueprinting could help, if they can do it - but with or without gleam club there’s a matter of a very small number of active beacons on a mostly dead world.
I don’t know how I feel about that. All things wax and wane. We’ve never had real player numbers to speculate on, except that one time that james just randomly stated a figure of some MAU (3k at the time).
Afair amount of this problem goes away, if Monumental can or will move the game to some private infrastructure. Things could be cheaper (and probably more stable) than AWS. But with the global nature of the game, moving everything to a single data center would be another kind of risk.
I have to agree, this is one of the hardest questions, at least from an outside perspective, I’m aware of. Perhaps a new “type” of planet, that has as tatus based on activity levels from the get. Again Blueprinting would help here but building on that planet would be an agreement that if activity gets below certain levels, everything gets reclaimed and packed up.
More data would be great, but I doubt if anyone has the interest or the time to dig that stuff up and make it public for users to speculate on.
Is there any public world which doesn’t have at least one GC beacon?
Less than 10?
Beacons but not built?
Traffic stats for mid to high level planets would be deceiving due to the travel constraints, but average hours played per player/planet would be cool to know. With some well known sovs out there, perhaps some of the (perm) high tier worlds are nothing but “bus stops” right now.
I think about this occasionally. Right now though, I don’t even have any “solid” suggestions - even ignoring whatever constraints the devs will have on direction.
It’s a puzzle.
Well, 50 planets is a lot. I think the problem has never been an absolute space requirement. Even in the heyday of Krasniy the devs were saying Biitula wasn’t at the original threshold for auto-expansion. It’s hard to keep people packed together though, and there’s always someone who won’t “play nice”.
Changes to the portaling system would help if the public universe was bottlenecking traffic. It’s clear that the current system is a compromise between reality and “immersivity” and a key balance point. Even just dropping the extra blinksec between a sov and it’s parent planet would help and cause probably little change to the overall balance of that.
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Keying back in on this, a tool to “cut and paste” regions together including player built structures would be pretty cool. I can’t imagine the dev work required though to partially generate a world blending/joining regions cut from other planets. Then we’ve also got the way the default color schemes work. That’s an interesting thought - but it sounds like a (technically) pretty hard path.
That’s also the sort of thing that could be wildly hard or easy with no way to even guess as a player/observer. It’s fun to guess, but useful advice or solid solutions there would depend on info that’s not really available to us.
I like what you’re saying about new planets being spawned being different.
Perhaps the 50 planets we have are permanent as I think the operation cost of the game as it is are quite manageable atm.
And all new planets have a chance to disappear if traffic on the planet is very low. How many hours in a month people are active on it. If it’s below a threshold and the universe is at a lower population then certain planets would be up for termination. Lowest activity planets go first.
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I mean in the end it’s as simple as the fact that the player base needs to cover AT LEAST the infrastructure AND development costs of the game for it to be viable to continue running. So it needs to get to a stable income stream. I guess I’m really just not open to the idea that planets disappear because James promised a permanent world and I like that. It’s probably also harder to get people to long term commit to something, if their work could disappear at any second because some numbers for their chosen planet looked bad (even with blueprints). But I’m quite confident that there can be technical solutions to the hardware requirements. 50 planets seen as 50 dedicated servers / instances may be too much for certain player numbers, but from a simple disk space requirement it shouldn’t be too much to keep around forever. I’m fairly certain they already got a system in place that can distribute worlds over servers for sovereigns, because I cannot imagine them having a dedicated instance (even cloud based) for each planet.
I really only meant the underlying hardware needed to “run” the worlds because that is what costs money. The planet data / region data itself is probably not large enough to be a problem.
Ofc that wouldn’t solve the fact that when player numbers are low, too many planets may feel too empty for some. But then we are at the point where it becomes increasingly difficult to continue paying a team of developers again
edit: So I guess it needs to stabilize is what I’m saying. It needs to get to a point where new planets spawning becomes a very very rare event. And the need for scaling back becomes non existent.
I have read through all the posts and have some comments I would like to make.
As someone that has spent a great deal of money supporting the game in early access and once it went live, I will likely be willing to continue to spend money on the game (depending on the direction Monumental takes). I have been willing to rent planets and buy gleam club. I have purchased cubits to exchange for plots. The one thing I do not see myself purchasing on a regular or semi-regular basis is cosmetics. If a purchase does not offer some benefit in game (like a rental planet or gleam club), then I will not be spending any money on it. Hopefully Monumental will find a way to monetize the game in a way that can support running the MMO and in addition providing enough additional funding they can support ongoing development. I also hope that the way is more than offering a different colored hat each month.
I do think it is a bit distressing to read comments from players that want to play in an MMO with a public universe of over 50 planets and think that their initial purchase should give them full access to anything in that universe essentially forever without them ever needing to put in any additional funds. I do understand that not everyone has the free cashflow to pay for rental planets and gleam club. But to then turn around and say it is P2W for these to be offered or that every rented planet should be open to all players to do as they wish is just confusing to me. You want to play a game that has ongoing costs, you do not want to pay for those ongoing costs, but you do not want the players that are essentially paying for the universe you are using to exist to get any sort of benefit for the money they are spending??? I will never understand this position.
I could make an argument it is unfair to allow a player to play the game for 3000+ hours a year since I do not have that amount of time to dedicate to the game. In the end, the game will need a way to encourage players to be willing to spend a great deal of time playing the game and in spending money on the game to keep it running, Both types of players offer something to the community.
The current size of the Boundless universe was largely driven by the free player weekend on Steam where we had over 1000 simultaneous Steam players which was in February 2019. Just like at launch, there were issues with planets being so full of players that other players could not reach them. Unfortunately, the new players did not seem to stick around and we ended up with more planets than needed (and the cost of running those planets) and a bunch of empty builds that we had to wait for the beacons to die before they went away. I do think this and other items do show how bad the NPE is and I am personally glad that Monumental also sees this and will focus on this once they get a team in place. The population is never going to grow into the existing universe unless we can get and retain new players at a much higher rate than it does now.
Edit:
I must also agree with the statement made that Monumental needs to do what is best for the ongoing survival and development of the game and not necessarily for the existing players. There are unfortunately, not enough of us to pay for the running of the game and ongoing development. Hopefully Monumental will find a way to draw in and keep new players and encourage players to stay with the game and spend money on an ongoing basis to support the game. I have no idea what that will be like, but I at least acknowledge the possibility that it might not be a game I want to play. That is just the reality given the current situation. Monumental finds a way to make Boundless profitable or it shuts down.
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There is no planet that has a dedicated server instance, I’m positive. Maybe there’s a regional situation right now somewhere but currently AFAIK, all servers are supporting multiple planets. The server data is available but I don’t know if there’s a compiled list right now of which planets are grouped.
As far as disk space requirements, the planets are pretty big. I’m not (yet) inspired to start collating data from the forums here but I think that Luca or Ross may have posted some info on this. It’s multiple gigabytes, before anyone starts editing. Traffic, actual cycle consumption is another issue and that can fluctuate wildly.
A half dozen people can lock up an entire planet. A dozen can do it easily. I’ve seen one player make at least an entire region inaccessible. The portals will try and open but if you’re near them it may take a few minutes or a pause in their activity to allow it to open.
Yeah, I’ve never seen this as a “real” problem. It’s a perception issue, and publishing real numbers would address it for most, IMO.
It is hard to get real numbers. We have steam numbers
Boundless - Steam Charts
And these numbers are total players (PS and Steam) on non-exo planets
These are point in time and do not give us any sense of unique players in a month or even over a given day.
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Man at this point, that’s putting in some work 
For sure this is key. Here we have other people saying that’s the only thing they’re likely to spend money on (the colored hats) so at least it’s clear that there are players interested in a wide and varying set of options.
I’m for separating gleam club into at least two packages. There are IMO plenty of people that would happily pay for the current functional perks. And I guess there’s a market for a package that includes strictly beacon maintenance perhaps with some additional plot and beacon related perks.
Cash for portals, always hotly contested. But look if we have gleam club that gets you “gleaming” with cosmetic and decorative perks, and another package that gets you the permanent beacon fuel, maybe a plot bonus, and a single portal for network attachment, other people are going to buy that, some will buy both.
I’m happy to pay for gleam club, when I’m really active. I’d be happier if there was a cost reduction to just retain builds when I’m less active. I personally think there’s room for change here.
This crappy attitude is one of the two main reason this conversation exists. The other being “it’s a sandbox so I should be able to do absolutely whatever I want”. The way this game is built, throwing that particular buzzword at it was obviously a huge mistake. It’s proved out very poorly, and where we are right now in terms of who has stayed the obvious disdain for creative building doesn’t help.
They should have gone with “open world”. It took me a couple of years to even understand the problem here, but it’s very real. People want to flex with “sandbox play” in the actual persistent MMO verse and it just hasn’t panned out.
This is so key, and with the summary of issues here, the (intended) thrust of the conversation.
To date this conversation always goes very poorly. It generates a ton of negativity and grandstanding with very little productivity. I understand people had high hopes. People in general also tend to approach an existing situation with the idea that it’s perpetual, or that key points shouldn’t be changed. This creates an awful “all or nothing” scenario, and look where we are now.
IMO anyone who actively argues against this point is pure noise. And there you go. With no idea what direction Monumental has in mind some of our talk may be wasted speculation. But just taking every opportunity to harp on any mention of ways to support the game is pointless and suppresses useful conversation.
If you’re never going to pay - honestly - sit back and take what comes your way. There are others who will support the game for you but not necessarily to your liking. Personally thoughts and opinions are all welcome but just actively dragging everybody through the mud over it is wrong.
EDIT: The filter alerted me to my use of a word. Probably Y7 acceptable for TV purposes, too. I changed it to “harp”.