Give more plots to player without a 3x3 hammer.
For a start, only reserve free plots at the time you plot a plot. If something nearby is plotted, it should never ever get reserved when it’s freed.
It’s unacceptable that builds start to reserve plots that got freed up automatically without human interaction.
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Throwing out a bunch of ideas here because I’m always up for crazy ideas. And cause this is an interesting (& important) problem…with the caveat that I haven’t personally experienced all of these issues, haven’t thought any of these ideas through very hard, and may not know what I’m talking about. 
But in the hope that even ridiculous ideas can spark good ones, here goes. I’m gonna divide them up by the problems they’re trying to solve:
Problem: beacon/plot/reserve mechanics are confusing
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Provide clear and explicit directions/warnings about plot mechanics, inside the game itself. The tutorial by itself isn’t enough, especially for people who leave the game and return. And they shouldn’t have to resort to out-of-game forums etc for something so important and basic.
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Every beacon control, whether yours or someone else’s, should have an option like “tell me more about beacons” that can open a page in the Knowledge with a clear explanation of the whole system
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Sanctum dude could be able to answer questions & tell you where to find info (how does this work again, how many plots do I have, how do I see when my beacon expires, what happens to my stuff then, etc)
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Explain how regen works, including timescale and bombs
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Tutorial planet as suggested above, with no permanent builds allowed
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Don’t limit people to staying on that planet, but as suggested above, have a set of “how to build” quests that are required before they can use plots, or that have a strong reward (e.g. 100 plots) as an incentive…or both, idk
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Provide optional prefab houses with some built-in storage space for new players to use. Maybe make them a bit broken down, so the tutorial can teach them how to plot a space and rebuild
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Tutorial-planet beacons only last a week (or other appropriate timescale)
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Every time you enter your tutorial-planet beacon you get a popup with “Warning! This beacon will evict you in X days!” and “Click here for directons to a permanent place/building instructions”
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Problem: it’s hard to find a space & plan a build, especially when new
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Give new players a way to survey and tour the universe
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Sanctum dude should be able to show you a known-universe map, with blinksec distances, planet tiers, and server regions
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Maybe sanctum dude has a “telescope” that you can use to see a planet map & toggle build mode highlights
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At any time, a player can ask the game for location suggestions, based on a handful of criteria - planet level & type, density of nearby builds/settlements, maybe terrain flatness or some such. The game would give them a handful of location tokens to warp there, with warps being free while under some threshold (level/hours of playtime/number of plots used/etc). So a player could say “give me 5 places on EU T1-T3 with flat land far from my neighbors” and be directed to some suitable regions to check out.
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A way to frontload plot acquisition for new players Make an optional “questline” that a new player can complete, with the reward being a substantial number of plots (50? 100? idk). Objectives like ask for location suggestions, visit n planets, visit a capital city etc.
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A way to plan builds
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An easy ingame (not debug menu) way to see how many plots you’ll need to cover a certain area. Maybe mark a set of locations as a fence, then use atlas/sanctum to see the birdseye view and a count of how many plots you need to cover that (2d) space.
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Maybe some way to get a onetime “loan” of plots from sanctum dude, to use as suggested above with the “development beacon”. Development plots expire after some set time (1-2 weeks?). The loan can’t be refuelled, you have to plot them if you want to keep them.
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Problem: unwanted neighbors
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I like the zoning-type ideas suggested earlier.
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Maybe all “settlements” should be a conscious choice on the part of the founder? So Majorvex can say from the start “this beacon is intended to be a densely populated area with many different owners, focused on shopping” and have some granular control over how plots, buffers, transfers, footfall etc work - and have the settlement categories follow some commerce-themed name hierarchy (Kiosk, Trading Post, Shopping Center, Supermall, idk)
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Some degree of zoning can be suggested by the terrain: smallish islands or mountains far apart are hermit-y by nature, and grid-shaped ruins already suggest cities. T6 planets are full of that kind of thing. Maybe we need more of those high-tier landform types on the low-tier worlds?
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What if we had different kinds of planets or regions, some of them pre-zoned with settlement criteria? So on a “nature preserve” planet there can only be n different plot owners per region, on an “urban hub” you must put your beacon within n plots of m other players, etc.
Problem: how to balance overcomplexity vs emergent gameplay
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I guess the end goal is that “easy to play, hard to master” idea, no? But as long as the complexity is optional, I think there’s room for both ends of the spectrum…
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All fancy beacon-zoning schemes should be opt-in
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All systems should have clear in-game references and instructions, with numerical mechanics where appropriate
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All players should have tools to see easily where they’re building, what they need to accomplish their plan, and who else is nearby
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Leadership of a zoned settlement should belong to ONE person from the start, who then has the power to transfer/share privileges as they see fit. Leadership of this kind of settlement should never be annexable. Word-of-mouth seems to travel quickly when power is abused, so maybe it’s enough that members can leave at will? I know almost nothing about dense cities/malls so I’ll leave it there.
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Maybe we need some way that players can “petition” for some particular kind of planet? So we could make some announcement “we need an AUS lush T4”, post it around the worlds ingame, and if it acquires some critical mass of player signatures then, idk, it weights the world-adding algorithm appropriately?
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Problem: how to minimize conflict
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Provide an easy way for someone to move their build (blueprint or similar), so that they don’t lose what work they’ve already put in
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Either remove aggressive mechanics (hostile takeovers etc) entirely or limit them to selected planets.
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Provide some alternative outlet for competitiveness. Maybe have some kind of temporary tower-defense-pvp planet? Or a team capture-the-flag where you have 1 week to build a castle around your flag, then 1 week to defend/try and capture other flags?
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Reward the behavior you want to see.
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A +rep system that gets the recipient a shiny name badge or some such? Periodic “good citizen” nominations with some cosmetic reward?
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Gain some small buff if you /wave at somebody not on your friendslist/guild
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Notify somebody who places a beacon of who their nearest neighbors would be, and notify any beacon owner when somebody builds within n plots of them
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Have some “welcome to the neighborhood” objective: if two players with nearby builds each visit the other’s place and leave some sort of message by interacting with it, they both get some coin or footfall buff or, idk, reduced falling damage within the beacon or something.
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I think that’s enough for now lol
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This was shared via PM to me. I hope they will not be mad if I post this so @James can see. I am not sure if I personally agree with the solution and I need more thought around it. But, if I take a step back I think it does really solve many issues of conflict and land ownership:
NOTE: The below is NOT my suggestion. It was from someone else.
The 2 quick solutions:
- a limit to the plot area you can control. 100x100 is all anyone needs on a public world. Plot and build up if you need mass. (That is being ridiculously generous. 30x30 is much more realistic. Especially with 9 alts available.)
- Push all development into the promised rental worlds and/or private servers. You founders can get your unlimited building potential, and new players will be able to learn in peace. When they are comfortable and want to build massive things, they can pay for their own worlds, too. (But they won’t want to because they bought the game already.)
As for the persons Limited land ownership on public worlds that horse has been out of the barn for a long time. There is no way they could force that change on the current worlds.
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That’s why I suggested the ‘claim’ only persists while there are other plots within range that could legitimately hold on to a claim.
If you were to plot a 10 x 10 space right next to a build you have made, unplotting that space would leave you with a claim over the 2 x 10 space right next to your build.
I certainly wasn’t intending that it hold a memory of who should be able to plot there, simply just keeping a record of the last person to plot there and leave the reservation in their name, IF they could legitimately have a reservation claim on that plot.
It does mean you’d still have to be careful unplotting things en-masse, but it’s the best compromise I could think of.
So would the public planets then become the MMO space, with limited building lots, and F2P?
Lots of current players have more than 30x30 worth of plots…will they be compensated in some way for their losses?
Also, they said there would be 100s and 1000s of planets generated. We have not seen a new public planet in a long time. Why?
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I’d personally be fine with a per-planet limit, although I admit that’s because I really want the private planets implemented. I don’t know whether I’d be as pleased if I was planning on not paying anything more.
On the one hand, I have to accept that a limit would cause issues for others, and don’t know how those could be resolved. On the other hand, 100 x 100 is 10000 plots, which is quite a lot. Even when you consider that that represents an entirely flat build, and would shrink greatly if you wanted to add vertical space.
The biggest drawback I can see is that it could be seen as Boundless ‘Reducing the scope of the free can to push players to pay for servers’. I wouldn’t see it that way, but you can be sure some people would.
I don’t think there would be a way to properly achieve that. I guess they’d have to just keep existing larger spaces and simply not allow for claiming more. Then again, that brings with it its own set of problems if players know in advance and deliberately plot large swathes of land ‘because they can’.
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There better be. I’ve spent several hundred $$$ on plots/cubits
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Oh, I wasn’t suggesting there shouldn’t be. Just that I can’t think of a way to do it well. And that would have to be accounted for if we were to consider that as a viable route forward.
If this is a “quick” solution, then I must wonder why has there been no further information about them… It doesn’t really sound like they’ve been working on developing rental or private worlds at all, and to be honest at this point I was kind of assuming they’d dropped the idea!
If they really want to limit plotting on public worlds, then rented worlds would be required to exist, I think. But by the same token, what would the price point be like?
(Slightly ranty and pointless but didn't want to just delete what I typed...)
To be honest, when I started playing, which was before release, I started playing always thinking my builds wouldn’t be permanent, regardless of wipes and etc, and that I’d want to play on private worlds instead of either public or public-accessible rental worlds, in good part because I always wanted to tweak the balance with modding, as that was what was supposedly going to be possible for those locally hosted private worlds…
But in reality, I’ve grown pretty accustomed to playing with other people around and think I would likely get quite bored of the game if I had nobody else to play with.
Rental worlds could be ok for me if plotting in public worlds was to become limited – talk about “Bounded, the game” rather than “Boundless” – though as I say, if the price isn’t affordable, then I might lose interest in things…
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Well I edited the post to clarify that the suggestion was not mine and from someone else. But based on what they said, I would assume that is true.
From a design perspective for the game going forward after what we have seen play out this past year, it seems to be a smarter approach. But, the game is far in so I don’t see an easy path to achieving that type of change.
My view, though, has always been that no matter who of us is here now, the Developers need to focus on the game and its overall success. If we want it here for years to come and that ends up being the design change that needs to happen - then for their own jobs and the game they should. I know some people feel they bought something and it will never change… but sometimes change happens if it is that or death of the game.
I don’t have an exact answer but I would bet it is because we do not have the player base to justify it. Remember we had like 1500 people or something playing. Most went away. So we are technically running on a planet design to support that player base. I would assume that we only gain another planet once we push past that top line limit. So we need the hit the peak we had at release before we really grow. I know the planets run on beacon count but that might take into consideration “account” more than “each beacon.”
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I mean, if that’s all Boundless becomes is a person off on a planet doing whatever, without what we have now… I’ve got other games I can do this in with a ton of more blocks, events, things to do, etc…I don’t really see a point.
If rental planets are connected to public planets or something, maybe. I dunno.
If they’d just remove the oldest block reservation thing and the settlement/merging/hierarchy stuff that no one seems to like…
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I agree, but like with the buffer zones, I think that whatever large design decisions they decide to focus on have to be well thought through and properly discussed, even if it’s just internally with themselves; and not simply dropped on the game suddenly.
Rental planets, last I saw mention, are supposed to be connected to the public planets, whilst private planets would supposedly be completely disconnected from all public gameplay, and would instead be hosted on a player’s local machine, like a Minecraft server (as a basic example).
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Well the idea wasn’t mine but I just posted it.
They have been working on private planets in the background. There was a lot of “technology” that had to be put in place. That takes a lot of time… so slowly some of the things we have seen have helped move that private planet goal forward. The last major thing on the list was planet permissions the last time I asked. I’m not sure if they have worked on that at all, though. I really believe it is a feature they want but just need the right timing and situation to get it released.
I find myself many times pulled between the “Thoreau in the woods” wanting feel and the hang out with the gang feel. I want both but am not sure the design we have in place in this game really supports it well. That might really need to be revisioned to keep the game on a path to success. The current systems will not support thousands of people or free play without chaos it seems.
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Yes, just dropping unexpected Alpha-Beta type changes into a live game to see what would happen, without addressing concerns, without proper warning/consideration/cogitation will generally produce undesired results and bad PR.
The communication regarding this last update was very poor. Concerns went unanswered & were ignored. And now there are some bad consequences and ripple effects.
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They were discussed very deeply, though. James spent tons of time thinking about it and talking with the team. I think there is a perception in the community that doesn’t really understand the intertwined complexity and change one thing mess up another type situation they are in. Some systems are very complex and I know of at least one that had to be really reworked because if they released it - BOOM… (well less drama than boom).
They have to at some point pull a trigger and hope people will adapt somewhere… otherwise who knows when they can fix things. If a person goes down a hallway and locks all the doors as they pass by and never will let themselves take a step backward, what do they do when the hallway ends? Something has to change.
I am not saying we are here yet, but I think we see plenty of things that showcase the issue in a decent way. If we didn’t have that I don’t think we would be seeing slow release of content.
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Just wanted to drop in and say if they are still working on private worlds, be them the planets promised to backers or for rental planets, I think using the exo system for them might be a cool ‘feature’.
Meaning these specific planets rotate in and out of view of various planets throughout the year (similar to exos except exos are temporary 4 day one offs) this would let those funded planets be a constant in a universe but establishing a direct portal to them wouldn’t work as they come in and out of view of various planets.
this might not be possible given the current system setup but it would certainly be a neat function if the exo system could be expanded in such a direction.
Yes, they were thought about for a year or so as a “possible idea”.
Then they released it on the test server. Several players, who are very familiar with actually playing the game, raised concerns. Some very important ones were either not considered, not cared about, or simply ignored. No bueno.
They made things more complicated and complex than was necessary. They have been asked many times to simplify things, not pile onto them. You can only add so many band-aids before the whole thing falls apart.
A lot of large similar games have made mistakes. What do they do when the players start saying…'WHOA!! That isn’t working!!"? The studio usually puts out a PSA, tells them there will be some downtime, and they do a rollback. Sometimes it’s complicated, has to been done manually, and takes a little time.
(not @ you Xal) As long as you communicate and let people know what is going on, they can deal with it. If you hide things, people can only make assumptions and those can often be wrong. Communication goes a long way. Possibly also delegating out micro-management to other people around you, so you aren’t trying to do it all, start making irreversible mistakes, and becoming over-whelmed. Let other people around you help…you don’t have to try to do it all, all by yourself.
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I recently got the feeling, in a PM with James, that this has simply remained as their general approach to some decisions… If you want more details please PM me, but the summary of it was that I felt we don’t get enough communication.
And because it’s possible someone might get into semantics… 
The buffer zones weren’t unexpected in the technical sense, but their timing and implementation certainly were.
That’s fair enough, but still I must wonder, why was the update released so quickly? I honestly believed my thoughts of: “oh this is going to be another of those testing cycles that drags out” when I saw the testing notes.
Maybe there is a perception like that in the community, but most people I discuss the complex game mechanics with, usually do make points about a further number of things that would change if another given element was changed.
I do understand the complexity of the decision-making process in game design, but I think a big issue here is that, like some other people have mentioned in the past, there is no dedicated community manager for the game; and James does do a good job of that, but that is not supposed to be his main position, I don’t think.
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