This turned out to be quite long. Please bear with me.
As I’ve been quite active in the game for quite a few days now, I’ve thought of several things but can’t seem to merit them their own topic so I’m merging them all here (and since their quite related as well).
Problems:
Population density is so low due to the fact that players’ are able to create settlements vastly larger than it can be occupied. I don’t think the fact that it’s still in EA plays a big factor to this. If we have more players, we’ll just have more active settlements but still see few people. Plus the fact that the game is attracting more builders than wanderer (classic MMORPG style).
Few people stay in settlements since most of them are out mining, hunting, or exploring. Houses, currently, are only used as storage and crafting area or portal area which will only keep them there for a couple minutes.
Currently, there are very few coin sink with no reason to spend coins to warp due to abundance of portals. Tax helps but probably not enough. I’d like to believe most of us are banking a lot of money without the need to expend them?**
Millionaires don’t have fulfilling way to spend their coins.
I don’t have direct solutions to each of them but these are my ideas to solve them.
Ideas:
Make plots tradeable and probably lessen down the number of plots rewarded per level (put down the pitchforks!). What I’m thinking is we have to identify how many people are needed for example a 1000-plot settlement for it to feel alive. This will decide how many plots should a player have when they are, say, 3/4 to maximum level (arbitrary number). People who doesn’t care about plots can just happily sell their plots for coins and builders wanting to expand their territory will just happily buy theirs. This ensures that players can still build big (probably bigger with this system) and player who sold their plots will be made sure to stay on their humble home And millionaires can have their mansions on different planets.
Related to first idea. So what’s in it for low level player’s selling their plots? They could obviously buy more tools but I think to make it equally appealing to the plot buyer, there would be buff potions that can be bought on shops for faster resource gathering and faster exp gain. Havok’s idea of bait could be a good coin sink as well. Meat, tallows and bones and probably fibrous plants should be the ingredients for this so they at least have demands in the market.
Addition to number 2, cleanse points could be bought as well for additional coin sink. Price might be hard to balance unlike plot trading as the price will eventually be set by the market. Quite arguable though since millionaire can just play around with the skills and can be anything that they want. (Though in real life, they do have the capability to get anything they want unlike us )
Something more to do at home so people are seen more often. May it be:
A temporary buff for eating at a table
A temporary buff when going to Sanctum while at home/bed
A temporary buff when guild members meeting up on guild house before fighting a titan
Increasing a settlement’s prestige based on number of current players in it
Custom shop icon on compass if owner is in their shop. Lesser/or no tax well be imposed on each on that time. (they could just trade anyway to bypass the tax)
I understand there would be some loopholes on those ideas but I just wanted it to share with you as you may have more polished ideas. As always, I would like to know what the community thinks and would just like to start a discussion here
I can immediately see one issue with this, with the introduction of alts… just keep leveling up an alt and selling plots to your friends for cheap, then start again. Too easy to be abused I think. Personally I don’t like the idea of selling plots as a commodity and it’s been a hotly debated topic with regards to donating plots to a guild and what happens with them when someone leaves, is kicked from guild, deletes character etc. With the introduction of alts, I would say that guilds keeping hold of donated plots would also be a very big no-no!
I could get behind this, but it would have to not be a player to player transaction for it to be a coin sink. Maybe just have the ability to buy additional cleanse points for a large sum of coins from the central guild (same place your taxed coins go essentially)?
These I really like! I’m definitely in favour of interactable furniture and giving it purpose! For the 1st and 3rd suggestions, it would be awesome to have a guild table which provides an increased buff than just a standard household table.
Not so sure on the settlement prestige based on current players in it though - this could end up fluctuating quite rapidly.
We need infinite plots (like it is now) to keep the economy healthy. Since we can just keep on gathering things (infinity supply) limiting space (demand) would make everything worth nothing in a short span of time.
Tax completely balances the economy as it limits the amount of times 1 coin can be used. The current tax system rounds down so it diminishes if supply dwindles too low (which makes it autocorrecting to boot). More sinks simply reduces the coin level. At this point in time there is not enough coin so many things already trade at 1 coin value (which is bad). We actually need more coin or be able to trade items for less than 1 coin each if coin supply were to drop further.
Players *not spending coin just reduces total coin supply. This has no real negative impact on the economy (in fact, it causes price stability since it opens up speculation). It just means you’re doing manual labour when you could pay others for it
Whoops. Nice catch on the alt! I’m really just concerned though at how all settlements are ghost towns. The settlement is active as shops are kept stock and request basket budgets are refilled but still, there really isn’t enough people that can be seen.
What I’m actually thinking is a more basic system. Just similar to as how we spend coins when warping. Just a plain menu.
Agree, this idea is really not polished but is just an addition to add creativity to the list.
Now that you mention it, it really sort of a problem for economy. Tools might be just fine since they break but blocks don’t (and I don’t think we want it to or probably just on higher tier planets like suggested before). This result though to ghost towns :\ . This might be my greatest concern for the moment for the game and I honestly think if nothing is change, it would be similar once 1.0 hits.
I’m glad a millionaire replied on my post as I’m curious about few things. What do you want to be able to spend your coins to? How should a feat such as yours should impact the player? What would inspire you more to earn more coins?At that level, any necessities can be obtain in just a snap of a hand (money aside, you literally have them all at your shop ) I’m thinking there should be luxuries enough to shaken that bank that’s why I thought of plots being tradeable.
I like the idea of plots being tradeable. They could give out less in total and allow us to trade them (but still reward them infinitely) to allow guilds to buy the space they want. It would open up many types of speculation too (buying/selling high value property).
As for cleanse points - I like the idea of being able to buy them indirectly too. They should cost mats (and thus time) to gather but the respec tokens can be tradeable. That makes it accessible without having it reduce the coin pool - and gives us something else to farm for too.
Believe it or not, I never have enough coin. There are so many different things to trade I just take everything I get to stock other/new stands. The more items they add, the better this will become! I restrict my expansion a lot to not run out of coin constantly.
As for ghost towns - this really is a big issue. A lot of the feeling comes from “flat” towns - removing the reserved plots will help compact things a bit. Adding in more functional structures and limits on portals/warps will help too (to force us to run through builds a bit). And the suggestion about cosmetic NPCs will really help the vast cities feel more alive.
Maybe adding dungeons will solve the ghost towns. Like real city’s are build near recourses and trading Post for now on we only have trading as an option witch is solved in the capitals mostly or at omniunos Shopsystem . So with dungeons there will be a use for smaller city’s and bring more live in the environment. Bosses should spawn every hour I guess with items dropped only by dungeon monster’s what are your thoughts?
Wow by dungeons I meant randomly generated but when you say design how about creating habitat like dungeon rooms so the game detect it’s a dungeon and will spawn monster’s in the dungeon rooms so you can choose witch monster will likely spawnt there by modeling the dungeon with rarer blocks plus crafted blocks from dungeon layaut there can spawn better mobs etc
I think their should be less abilities skills and more equipment options. Instead of a double jump a spring assist boots and instead of the flash like running a hoverboard, instead of environment resistance a suit you gotta wear. My two cents.
It’s quite hard to solve the ghost town problem without upsetting the builders of this game.Some more ideas to ponder about:
Lessen the plot rewards per level to probably 2 only. Then add an “increase plot” skill in builder’s skill tree.
Limit player’s active beacon to 1 or 2 only per settlement (one for home and one for shop) . Mayors/Guilds could have more since they also create other recreational areas like park, portal hub, etc. Just like how we only have 1 house in real life and the government is the one making the other things.
Functional structures would really take us far when tackling the ghost town problem. I’m just not sure how this plays with the devs plans. Post 1.0 content? Probably on the latter part as well since there are quite a lot of features queued up for this game. Here’s some more ideas for this:
Fountains - Negates last occurrence of durability loss due to death.
Watchtowers - Better scouting of surrounding areas for mobs. Make them appear on compass even if they are farther away or just simply add mob icons on the screen where they are located.
Functional Inns - For wanderers, this could be the place where they receive the buff of people with houses (eating at table, resting on bed, etc.)
Something feature to make shops not an AFK activity. Less or no tax if shopowner is present would be good.
I’m thinking some of them should only be available once a certain prestige value has been met.
I like this to happen once we have different races of characters where some skills are inherently available to them but for others, they have to have some sort of equipment (i.e. Cat race - runs faster; other races need to have skateboard to match their speed but of course they have their own perk as well)
I definitely agree with you that the ghost towns are a big problem right now. My personal favorite solution is functional structures – in the name of blatant self-promotion, here’s an old post with a bunch of ideas along those lines:
But, of course, that isn’t the only solution, or necessarily even the best one. My inner builder is shrieking in agony at the thought of fewer plots, but you could well be right that making them a tradeable commodity would help. I’d buy em!
The other…well, not a problem, but certainly a contributing factor, is that the mining/crafting/building aspect of the game is much more complete, at the moment, than anything else. Right now Boundless is a building game with MMORPG aspirations. If you aren’t at least somewhat interested in building/crafting, there isn’t much for you to do in the game – so it’s like having an IRL city populated entirely by architects. We don’t have anyone to inhabit the endless things we build.
I’m hoping this will change as the combat system gains complexity, and the game can attract and keep people who prefer fighting to building. But I don’t know what the devs have in mind, for 1.0 or afterwards!
i agree completely, especially when it comes to fewer plots given at level-up (shudders at thought), what is needed is more stuff to decorate a build and more functions other then house or shop.
I was thinking some more about my own builds and plot usage, and I realized that I don’t make large builds because I like giant houses – I’d actually rather build smaller structures, because the FOV distortion makes giant things look weird close up. But I end up making giant builds because I want detail, and if the smallest spatial scale is a 1-m cube, well, I guess I’ll just embiggen everything…
So: decorations! Decorations will certainly help. But even then we’ll be limited to whatever meshes the devs give us – which I have no doubt will be beautiful! but there will be a finite number of them: Chair A, Chair B, Chair C. I can’t create any ludicrous Chair Of My Dreams (which you should all be thankful you can’t see) – at least, not on a small scale. I could chisel it, but even with the new chisels, you have to go pretty large to get fine detail in.
So…What if: we had some sort of shrinking machine that would let us select the contents of a plot(s) and scale it down by some factor (4 or 8 maybe), while also turning it into a single-object mesh that could no longer be edited? Then we could channel a lot of builder-energy into decorating, which might help fill up rooms and avoid enormous empty builds, but preserve the creative freedom of voxels.
First of all, I really like that post that you linked! Such a creative way to utilize plots/zones and enabling functions without limiting the builder to some specific blocks. Totally encourages creativity!
And I’d be glad to sell them! I usually have surplus of plots as I tend to build small and I just spend most of my time outside/not in home. By selling them, this prevents me from building too large if I just feel like it one night then forget about it for the rest of the game (but occasionally still fuels it since you don’t want it to go to waste). Builders would also think something like “Do I really need this spot to be another big tower with no use? or just convert it to coins for it to be more useful?”. It does not force them but gives them more options that just to hog all available places. Just something to help keep the place tidy.
I know you are coming from MMORPG side of the game based from our previous discussion! I tried on my alt to completely not build and craft things and just be a miner. I try to utilize the markets as much as possible. So far it’s still fulfilling and fun but I’m overflowing with rocks as no one wants them! (or at least the tint that I have)
It’s really cool! But I think it’s far from happening XD. I think most of us are in the same position as yours. You just wanted to have that “little curve” here and “little bumps” there on your house but ending up adding meters of blocks I think I can take it as it is and try to utilize the new chisels as much as possible. Those are a lot of new variations!
Interesting idea. However, I think that meshes cost a lot more to render than normal blocks, so it’ll probably be very difficult to do. You also have the issue that you would potentially be trying to merge blocks with different shaders involved in their display, which is also why things like gem tools do not have wooden handles.
More decorations! Definitely! It will go some way to making “ghost towns” less empty and give people more to do to keep them occupied, but I don’t think it will be the complete solution to solving empty towns (aside from more people playing). As it stands with the current player-base, they would just be prettier, better decorated empty spaces. Giving those decorations some sort of function will definitely help - and could give people a reason to visit those towns as well.
I’m starting to think that we’d need more interesting things, like (dare I say) a redstone equivalent, so people can build their own functionalities, like secret doors, moving blocks etc. This is one of the things that kept me interested in games like MC for so long.
Any sort of sellable plots, in my opinion, is too easily abused with the introduction of alts.
Additionally, even if I wasn’t a builder, I still wouldn’t want to sell off any of my plots in case additional content after 1.0 made them more valuable to me in a different play style… such as farmlands, lumber yards (grow all different types of trees that people can cut down for a fee), PVP arenas, or anything else that can make use of them in a different or interesting way.
Oh, they do! But I’ve been playing around on Testing, and, strangely, they don’t help make things smaller as much as I’d expected. Still awesome, though.
I know nothing about the working of the engine/rendering/etc. I don’t doubt that it’d be difficult but I wanted to get people thinking about it, at least.
I’ve never played MC, but I would love a redstone equivalent! Anything that adds complexity or interactivity or makes the world more dynamic. My suspicion is that towns are ghostly largely because there’s no reason to hang around in them.
Even with all players having access to effectively infinite plots, like we do now? I’d have felt the same when plots were strictly limited, but as long as you can always get plots for 500k XP it seems the same as any other rather costly resource. And I would guess the alt problem could be solved with some suitable restrictions – can’t sell plots until level X, or you have to have at minimum Y plots of your own but sell any others, or some such. – But it sounds like the issue has been discussed to death, so I’ll leave it there.
I tried making a hunter-alt …and gave up around level 12. The leveling process was just too much of a slog for me, and hunting doesn’t yet provide enough to sustain a whole character. But I’m keeping him around for when more weapons show up!
I think there are some good ideas here. If you can get a buff from consuming something (eating or drinking) could someone not build a pub or a brewery or some type of structure where the items are produced and hopefully consumed. Instead of buying from a market, maybe these items are bought and consumed at a specific type of table.
I also like the idea of a buff for having your character at their home when they quit the game for the day or go to Sanctum for a period of time.
And millionaires can have their mansions on different planets. 
)
) I’m thinking there should be luxuries enough to shaken that bank that’s why I thought of plots being tradeable.
. So with dungeons there will be a use for smaller city’s and bring more live in the environment. Bosses should spawn every hour I guess with items dropped only by dungeon monster’s what are your thoughts?
I think I can take it as it is and try to utilize the new chisels as much as possible. Those are a lot of new variations!
