There was another post recently regarding the prices of oort and how the prices are only inflating. One of the suggestions to remedy this issue was to add auto fueling of portals to GC. Personally I am against this due to it having an effect on the economy since oort would then plummet in price, thus making hunting less valuable, which in turn effects a whole slew of professions. This got me thinking about GC and how to change it.
First, I think GC shouldn’t auto fuel beacons anymore. Like oort, having auto fueling for beacons hurts the economy. People would be able to sell beacon fuel and thus add another profession. Just think of how much fuel is spared among all the small beacons due to GC membership. I’d also like to mention that I am a GC member, so this would be effecting me as well.
So to make it more worthy of subscription, I think there could be a couple things that could be added, none of which should impact the economy. First, would be all of your build times are decreased by a percentage. Being able to pump out materials doesn’t really give you an economic advantage since you’re still bound by how many resources you own. All this is doing is saving your time.
Second, would be to reduce the cooldown between skill page switches to maybe half the time for members. While I’ve never really had to use this feature ever, I can see points where it could be useful to be able to switch more often.
Any other ideas would be helpful. Ideally GC should be convenient but not have an impact on the economy.
I’m a GC member and I think it would be nice if it included one or more large portals
I think the devs said larger portals cost them less so they prefer them, but it costs us more so we use numerous small portals.
I am a busy person irl & I would have lost the mall (or parts of it) several times by now and probably quit if my beacons weren’t auto-fueled by my GC.
People do sell beacon fuel. We can’t keep the 4 week fuel stocked.
We have builder’s buffs and things to speed up building. If it included a special AOE builder tool, that might be beneficial. (What about all of the players that building isn’t a priority?)
I think if they added a vehicle or cosmetic item(s) to GC, that might appeal to more players (or potential players).
Just being pedantic but they said large portals cost them less than several small portals.
Small portals from a level 1 to a level 2 to a level 3 impact more servers than a larger portal straight from level 1 to level 3.
I think at most I could understand a free 1x2 so you can get from your build to a network hub somewhere. Still there would be a lot of complaints about this and I think, a very large economic impact to hunting. Some people do like the greater stuff but 10 foliage per month says basic beacon fuel is never going to be a big seller.
I’m not 100% sure though as I do know several people that fuel beacons rather than subscribe. But I suspect with a free portal involved more people would go to gleam club.
Having portals covered in GC was something I brought up but did mention there being a limit on how many so the oortstone economy wouldn’t take a huge hit since after the limit you would need to manually refuel.
Also there was an idea brought up about discounting the cost 10%-50% (can’t remember the number from last post) to help ease the “CHORE” in people collecting oort from hunts n such and let them focus more on projects.
I’m 100% on board with you and your reasoning until here:
Both of these suggestions have an immediate impact on the economy. Specifically, the market places value on the time invested in both gathering and processing materials to make an item. If you cut the time investment in half, you’re reducing your cost and improving your profit margins. Power coils are a good example of where the market puts value on time- why craft slowly with the minimum power requirements needed, when you can max your power and reduce crafting times dramatically with a one time investment into power coils?
Skill switching opens an entirely different set of problems. Let’s ask this question- if you can switch skill pages instantly as often as you like with no in between cool down, why even have limited skill pages at all? Having a cool down between skill page swaps serves the purpose of encouraging people to pick a specialized role in the community, and allowing everyone to do anything they need to at the same time causes homogeneity in the community. Why ask a person to hunt for you, a crafter, when you can just instantly become a hunter and do it yourself? By reducing the cooldowns between skill pages, you are edging closer to that homogeneous state and weakening the dependence on community, as well as gaining an economic advantage over non GC members who may be relying on other members of the community (either by trade or other arrangements) to produce advanced products.
I agree that GC should look to alternative offers to beacon fuel, but I dont agree with the suggestions you have put forth.
Also, since GC beacon fueling went live prior to the 1.0 launch, at least it has not damaged an existing market. The proposed changes would have a measurable impact on all existing markets.
GC is to auto fuel your beacon. For people that need time off, going on vacation, on active duty as well for people that still play. I don’t see this being changed for the simple fact that many people have invested money into GC for the simple reason it will keep there beacon from expiring. I would not enjoy having to worry about around 50 beacons randomly expiring and having to log in every day just to check. GC should stay with the benefit of auto fueling.
Agreed. The only reason I have gleam club is the auto fuel and I reckon many have it for that reason, too, for ALL the reasons you have mentioned. I suspect that a change to GC’s biggest perk would not go down too well. Am sure the economy doesn’t hinge on there being any beacon fuel to sell. Oort is the problem. Not beacon fuel!
Exactly. As well there are many people that have GC for several years. I have it for a year because i see the benefit of it to fuel my beacons. Instead of changing current content of the game. We need newly developed content. Then maybe those people that took off time from the game would actually come back.
I have gc just for the autofuel too. To be honest, we could remove autofuel from gc quite easily (if that is what we want) without impacting the GC experience by making a single change. If you have gc, make the player able to queue up fuel in their beacon up to the day gc ends. It has the same effect as autofuel except you have to fuel it at least once.
I don’t think it needs any changing at the moment but don’t mind discussions; just pointing out that you could have your beacon and fuel it
Honestly, if you remove the automatic beacon filling, I will stop paying GC, since just for a few shades of colors or to be able to write in colors or put emoticons, I would not pay absolutely anything, it is more I would like you to add the maintenance of portals in GC, so more people would become GC, if instead they remove the automatic beacon filling, many people, one of them I, would stop paying GC
Yea I’d say I would want a refund for the remainder of my GC if they got rid of the auto fueling. I only got it for that reason. And it would be the only reason I’d ever get /keep it. Wouldn’t care if we got 10 portals for free. No auto fuel no GC membership for me.
Alright, thanks for the idea but I am sooooo very against this it’s crazy!
I have a gazillion beacons all over the universe, no way in heck am I going to be refueling them manually.
Now, if there was a way, like if there was a ‘refueling machine’ that I can build, plop into my workshop admin area where I can then refuel ALL beacons by ONE SINGLE action then I’m ok with that. Could even be a new fuel of some kind.
Still, to be quite honest, it’s the main reason I have GC
Nice idea, but that will mean people with GC can fill their shop stands quicker than people without, they will have a leg up in the economy. Tho am sure people won’t see it this way, it is an advantage then…
Nah, this also is giving an advantage to people who then pay up and quite frankly this whole cool down thing with skill pages needs to be revised. If I’m in the same darn settlement as my main beacon is it just should not count. Am ok with the timer when off planet and all, but to run back one or more beacons to just be able to switch skill pages feels rather silly to me…
Let’s face it, oort is getting scarce at the moment and prices are going up.
The main reasons for this, as I see it, are:
changes in drop rates from T5 planets and above, especially on exo’s
it’s autumn, many new games are coming out, less people are playing but they still wanna keep their portals open for when they are done with the new shinies
many people I know who used to hunt often, a lot or at least rather regularly have stopped hunting completely
So 2) and 3) means way less people hunting, 1) means that the ones that still do get a tad less than they used to.
Well, 1) and 3) can be solved, 2) just always happens when some new game comes out, they will be back, Boundless is like an addiction you can’t completely shake. The drops might need a small tweak to get the oort drop rate back to it was, or heck make it even higher, or add more planets, like T2, where meteors can drop, etc. 3) can be solved by introducing new hunting mechanics, new monsters, Warp Wraith, Titans, but those will take a bit of time and we haven’t heard much about them lately (I so wish the dev team would communicate a tad more)
As for GC being able to fuel portals COMPLETELY: heck no!
But I am more than ok if GC gave us a percentage of the oort fuel for free, say 10%, stuff 100 in there and it adds 110, heck, or even 50%, drop 450 in there and it adds 900.
This means that hunting wouldn’t die down, it will mean oort price will go down tho. And as for me, I have Farm Hubs on all T5+ planets, would also love to open more of them on T4 and on T1 to T3 and of course also add more nice farm/mine spots to the existing ones. I also want to keep adding exo spotting platforms to all the Farm Hubs but all this costs me more and more oort so I’ve stopped adding anything that requires me to spend more on oort.
Edit for clarification: this means that if there is a GC discount I will open more smaller portals a T5+ planets and thus require about the same amount of it over time anyway. If others do that as well the price would not need to go down too much as demand might be the same.
Also, as for performance issues if I open more small portals, especially on T5+, that is a non issue so the performance is hit when many people on same planet are near portals that needs data to be loaded from the servers, T5+ planets are usually not all that busy to begin with.
I already closed down my old portal network and now work together with TNT on their network but the amount of oort I need is still more than I would like if I’m honest…
Here’s another idea tho to solve oort with complete in-game items.
What if we could add a block, a new type, some kind of little portal fueling device which then connects to another, bigger machine, which perhaps even needs coils, somewhere in the SAME SETTLEMENT. Let this connection be wireless. Using spark links or something similar would be cool too but since those are meshes and due to the 100 length limit that might not be the best idea. Now, this machine could be allowed to fuel all connected portals in the same settlement and might give a discount on oort usage depending on the number of (super) advanced power coils and perhaps other parameters.
@CoopTang
Woah woah woah. Slow down there fella.
If your a builder like me. The main reason for me having gleam club is filling beacon. And I have a lot of beacons. It’s a huge benefit.
As far as auto fueling portals. If you could set up a 3x5 group of shelf with an advanced lock(or a new asset) and set it to auto fuel portals as a gleam club feature. I’d be cool with that. Then you could have a centralized place for filling all portals in your own base. If you’re going on vacation or just not able to play for a few weeks. You could keep thing up and going.
It would be the drop that would fill the glass, maybe I would not play the game again, if they remove the automatic filling, also if it happened, they should return the money invested in gc
