That’s on them. We do not need a boundless welfare program. If a returning player says something in global chat or posts in any of the discord there is no doubt in my mind they would be assisted very generously by this community.
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This attitude is what drives people away.
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The game regens if you cant be bothered to fuel your beacons.
I would donate material, machines, good tools etc. if a new player was returning. All they need to do is say something. Definately not the dev’s responsibility to help someone return to the game.
Or you know…log in every 2 months and refuel your beacon. That’s what I’d do because it’s my problem if my stuff regens.
Edit: I dont want the dev’s wasting time on this. They have new stuff to make for us. This is a a great community for the most part. We can take care of each other.
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They have. Multiple times in “why I left boundless” threads. And they don’t want handouts. They want the materials they grinded for. Many people who play this don’t want an MMO. They play it despite the MMO not because of it.
The devs need a higher retention rate among new and older players or you won’t get any new stuff.
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How do players that have left us know we have a great community if we have not made any effort to reconnect with them in a way that resolves the potential concerns of their return? Few mmos have you come back starting with nothing at all.
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Oh…well than too bad. If they dont want help from the community and they cant maintain their own beacon then I definately dont care.
The dev’s have more important things to do than cater to people too lazy to take care of themselves.
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This is all the feature is. A simple way to help people on a limited scale. This goes beyond the community because not everyone engages the community. So you cannot use that as the defining factor.
You forget that the development time would bring in various components that could be leveraged in other ways. So this feature could be leveraged.
Maybe a simple place to start is for the game to send an email when you haven’t logged on for 1+ weeks and also have a beacon expiring in a week. This email would contain a reminder about regen and recommend you refuel the beacon or move the items to your character inventory where they are safe from regen during an extended break.
I haven’t seen an in-game solution mentioned yet that isn’t exploitable as a slow-cooking item dupe trick or attempting to reconcile game rules with players who willingly don’t want to obey them.
If the theory is that Boundless’ plot fueling rules are too harsh to support a larger more casual audience, you would want to address that way more upstream than the refuel flow. It’s usually better to manage expectations or adapt to them than to create compensation flows.
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The devs have more important things to do that cater to a community that will not respect players for reasons on why they left and what they themselves want from the game. Or a community that clearly has shown here that they think that a person that leaves the game is lazy and “deserves what they get.”
How does that feel or sound to someone promoting the “community”? Probably not great.
The author of this thread and a few others have communicated in multiple ways that this thread is not about “fueling your beacon or not fueling your beacon.” This is about people leaving and easing the way they come back.
The complete failure of the “community” to even respectfully have a conversation around this thread has shown how “not helpful” they really are. Basically communicating that they disrespect anyone that does not agree with them or play their way.
More than likely every person that is opposed to easing the returning players plight is actually opposed because they want to keep their monopoly or fear losing something in some way. It would have been VERY easy for people to disagree with the original post and provide ideas on how to augment the idea to be more attractive to some people but still actually help the original player.
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They really don’t. Player retention is and should be priority #1 or #2.
Without new players none of the new content you want gets made.
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Well. They kind of did.
The collective idea put forth was…
‘You lost most of the stuff you worked for because you’re lazy and stupid so we can give you some handouts because we are such nice players.’
Some of this community is like Stockholm syndrome. Showing love to new players by teaching them pain.
Everyone has the chance to replenish their beacon with fuel! 4 weeks, so one month you have time to pack this in the Beacon! If you do not use this chance, you have to start from scratch!
I think it should be enough. If I do not play another game for months, I usually have to start from scratch, because I do not remember anything about the control distortion, and so on! Well - you can not compare this type with an RPG - Nevertheless, I think the time is fine!
what else should you do? You do not play the game for months and are not interested in it - are you coming back and are suddenly a millionaire? I do not think everything is alright!
But of course that’s just my opinion and nobody has to agree with me! 
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See I think this isn’t quite fair to say the whole community is like this because so many of us are always out helping new players that pop up in our areas. I know multiple guilds that help out including mine.
I think this issue is very touchy and definitely needs some fine-tuning. At the end of the day, you have to understand though this system is in place so the planets can regenerate and still be alive rather than be a landscape of claimed empty beacons.
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I respect your opinion but my opinion stays the same. I disagree that it’s not the players responsibility.
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I responded to your post but was not trying to target you directly. I should have shared that at the start. I was trying to make a generalized statement… but I can see how some of the other statements by people were generalized.
Overall for me I don’t disagree that there is some personal responsibility. The person choses to play the game so they should deal with how the game is played. I think we could find a balance in helping those that leave and making sure they have enough work to do afterward. I am not for giving anything any more myself either… I just think we need to find ways to encourage people to come back and if getting a few things back like maybe machines and power coils helps - then great.
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I agree with you. It’s completely on the individual player. This is not an investment for the player, it’s a game. It’s nice to retain players, but instead of babysitting them the focus should be on why they left. If they left once, they’ll properly leave again. Meanwhile for those of us that stay and enjoy the game expect that devs are working on bugs and new content, not the perpetual complainers.
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Returning players have the benefit of connecting with a player base that is well established and eager to help.
If someone returns to the game and asked for assistance…they would be flooded with items/help and advice. I don’t know if the game needs to institutionalize that.
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You’ve moved the goal posts. No one has ever once said it wasnt their responsibility.
What’s true is that these players grinded out those materials. They earned then. And in many other voxel games they would get to keep them.
This creates an expectation of feature parity that Boundless currently lacks.
But if you don’t want them in this game then you also don’t want their money.
I can see both sides to this …
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Players that want to come back, but their build (and everything they have gathered and placed within their beacons) is gone. They don’t want to have to start again, even though they have their levels, skills and any inventory on them at the time they stopped playing.
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Expired beacons are a sort of “ruins” that other players can stumble upon and reap some rewards for their explorations.
So I see most of the issues, concerns and exploits revolving around these 2 things…
- If a player (1) gets to keep all they have gathered previously, removing it completely from the world, player (2) loses out on reaping those potential rewards for exploring.
- If items are both returned to player 1 and left in the game world, it causes an item duplication issue. Players would intentionally let their beacons expire so they could do this.
- Storage of returned items is an issue - Player 1 could intentionally let their beacon expire, giving them a mass storage - which Wonderstruck needs to store somewhere/somehow. Local storage of this information is not an option, no matter how much security you put in place around it, someone will eventually exploit it, thus tainting the entire universe. Even if this storage is time limited once accessed, it’s still exploitable as a mass storage solution.
- there are others, but I lost my train of thought as soon as I started thinking about the solution lol
Possible solution:
In the past I suggested that any mesh objects (and their contents) are returned to Player 1 so that the most important components of the game, which will enable a player to hit the ground running, are retained.
However, this doesn’t leave a great deal of exploratory reward for Player 2, and is quite clearly exploitable for Player 1 - so…
How about all placed blocks are left in place for Player 2 to find, along with a random 5% of any mesh objects. The remaining 95% of mesh objects are then returned to Player 1. This negates some of the exploitability that the mass storage allure has, as the player could end up losing stuff they wanted to keep.
For items like Storage Blocks, the contents will be included with the block itself, so if the block is left in the world, so are it’s contents. For machines, if part of a machine is left in the world and the rest returned, just divvy up the contents based on the position of the inputs … machine part 1, slots 1 & 2… machine part 2, slots 3 & 4 etc.
Background about my position on this subject - I have advocated for items to be returned to players in the past, in several threads. I have also advocated for emails to be sent to players when they had beacons expiring.
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This is 100% correct, and was the point I was making above.
It does zero harm to the game to try and retain and incentivize the return of players. It absolutely harms the game to not do those things.
To say that the individual was responsible doesn’t take into account that this is a game!
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