Economy Ups and Downs

I don’t know, just as you don’t. Just as we don’t know how many will upsticks if forced reliance is ever added. I don’t want to be forced to put up a shop to gain income to buy 2 thirds of the stuff I can’t gather to build and craft in a game that never said to me “Hardcore mmo” at purchase.

Yes, that is the point I was making. The devs likely dont even know as there is no way to give exit feedback on why people are leaving except for coming to the forums to make a post, which lets be honest most dont do that.

My point was simply that people like you may quit playing like you suggest but losing you or the other group, neither is good but what is more sustainable for the game to keep. Does that make more sense?

I think the game will slowly regain a larger following.

As new content comes out, and protection barriers arrive, and bugs are fixed – I think we will see more people playing.

I think new planets will appear t7 and such, new ores or resources, opening new avenues for trade .
Then I think new monsters will be added for fighting variation as well as other fighter content for those who enjoy that aspect.

As well as refinement to shops and how they work will come.

I think things will get better from here, just have to be positive and continue to give constructive feedback.

A lot of the issues right now I think stem from lower player base due to other big titles coming out and griefing issues. Once they are solved and people get tired of the other titles we will see people trickle back in.

Which I think will bolster the economy and the oort shortage seen by the hub owners

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This is very likely true, but if the only people that can participate in the economy are people already at the end of it, that just reinforces the problems we are seeing here. There would be a small boom as people rush for those resources and then a bust like we are seeing now where people have those new resources and nothing else is worth anything. Imagine IRL a situation where all basic goods and services all cost next to nothing, and the only things of actual value are various sports cars. How is a baker, for example, going to accumulate wealth if it takes him selling 10M loaves of bread to buy a single BMW?

Thing is, out of the 2.5mil I earned in crafting high end items and selling, all gathered by myself though purchasing some tools, nearly all of it I have now put back into the economy in lots of different shops. Voluntarily. So yeah I think I had a little value so far. One thing I loathe though is being forced to do something.
As for exit feedback, you are guessing what the problem is. There are other reasons listed which are just as likely. So what if the devs decided, ‘Right, Vetteq is correct and let’s cut off alts and skill pages’ What if you’re wrong and this becomes bomb nerf x2? Which I think is what would happen. You’d be cutting players off from huge parts of the game, it’s crazy.

/Btw I haven’t read every post so if i’m misrepresenting, this is my get out of jail card

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I’ll post your bail, buddy! :wink:

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I think you misunderstand. I’m on neither side here as per the statement you were pointing out; I was simply pointing out how you said you would be done if it was implemented is all and then I commented what I did. I’m in favor of whatever is better for the games longevity.

I’m thinking it will be a spread of resources not just high tier.

Maybe they will add in a few resources only found on low tier planets, 1 and 2, but are required for high end crafting of decorations or something else in the future.

That way people on tier 7 cannot get them at the same time. Thinking along the lines of farming and such that they are talking about in the new post.

Edit: I think including a low level series of mats for low level players or players who prefer low tier planets to harvest would be an interesting way to include trade between high tier and low tier planets. @james

Of course, but the problem remains at every level. If the only low tier items of value are A, B, and C, then low level players have to farm those to get money, and once supply of those gets to (over)saturation then prices collapse. While not everything is going to have real value, the economy needs to be durable enough that multiple goods across all play styles can be bought and sold by various tiers of players if the economy is going to be an important part of the game.

Well what I was replying too originally was forcing us into one skill set I think, so with you replying then I took that as you agreeing with it.
Point still stands though, cutting off alts and skills would be bad for the game. Nearly everyone likes either their alts or skill sets. Then theres all the alt builds and plots to take into consideration.The spent cubits. Even IF it was a magic bullet to longevity of the game, I don’t think they would recover the players from a rage quit, or it would be very difficult.

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Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe they will make the desire for the items high, like need a high amount of them to craft such and such, creating a greater demand.

It’s a potential possibility that might help growth in the beginning, much like gems in later game. Give them high worth and only availability on low tier planets.

Making the need to farm them with a larger demand. @james

FWIW, my kids have maxed out alts on the ps4 and I will on the PC as soon as I have the time to sit and game again. Shame Boundless isn’t available on a mobile thing like the Switch or iPad ;p

I don’t think we’d really have an issue if alts were gutted but you’re right, I’m sure a good percentage would be upset which led to the start of our side convo here. Which percentage would have been more? no way to know now. Game is on the path it is, we’ll see how things go! :slight_smile: well I hope of course.

Funny u say that :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

An app called r play works on iphone/ipad and lets you connect to your ps4 remotely. I used to use it at work but my signal sucks at work so i cant keep the connection to my ps4 :neutral_face:. Otherwise great app, especially on wifi. I think it was $7 or so when i got it a while back

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I’m having a hard time seeing a problem with low-level characters not making money hand over fist. If you buy an iron axe for 100c, you can make several thousand in leaves and sap. Is it slow? Sure it is, your character even runs slow. It’s still a good return on investment. Once they get in their mid-twenties, they would be more than ready to purchase forged tools, even if they don’t have the ability or knowledge to use them to their full potential.

It doesn’t matter how you spread resources or create artificial scarcity, new players will never really benefit in those battles. People that don’t have outside responsibilities and can play 8-16 hours a day will always profit more from those actions than the people these actions are trying to help.

The best advice I can give new players who are struggling with coin and stuff: make friends. Say hello to your neighbors. Ask to join a settlement or guild. The community is amazing. If you can’t find a buyer/seller for the items you have/want make post on the forums or shout out in a city. If someone doesn’t buy/sell it, they will usually know someone who does.

Oh, and the alts will never go away so you all can beat that poor :horse: until PETA shows up. People beat it over and over again in EA going back and forth. Though most of the conversation was about making it so a single character could do everything instead of needing to have alts or multiple accounts.

Edit: I don’t condone the beating of horses.

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I’m also not concerned with new players making money hand over fist, but I am concerned if they can’t participate at all/participate in any meaningful way. What you are describing is an incredibly narrow way to play the game (make every decision to maximize profit, sell everything, loop) that is more akin to share-cropping for the larger players. It seems wrong to me that a game called “Boundless” requires a specific guide to play “correctly.”

One of the major issues economically is that everyone needs everything. Every job needs fibrous leaves, shimmering orbs, gems, ore, maybe a few others. In WoW, for example, if one of your jobs is mining, while you are out in the world mining you are going to collect various drops that you don’t need, so you can keep what you went for and sell the extra stuff. Here, that extra stuff doesn’t often have a ton of value (and prices are trending downward), so you are put into a spot where you can either keep the mats you need for your own stuff or sell them so you can buy better tools to get new mats to sell (and loop). While you can, of course, figure out the correct ratio to keep and sell, it’s just a feel-bad experience, which probably causes some amount of material to go unsold because “I’m sure I’m going to need this later.”

If people want specialization, and to be a part of a bigger picture, crafting needs to be looked at so that maybe each one job can be done on 1 or 2 machines instead of needed the full suite for everything, and the recipes need to be diversified so there isn’t this huge overlap of mats between all the jobs.

Here’s a list of the 23 items I need as a brewer;

Clay Soil
Large Fossil
Titanium Ore
Silver Ore
Iron Ore
Tree Trunk
Gravel
Shimmering Orb
Milk Gland
Adrenal Gland
Bark
Fleshy Leaf
Glowing Lamella
Petal
Viscous Blood
Fresh Blood
Saltpetre Fragment
Cobalt Fragment
Olivine Fragment
Sulphur Fragment
Tallow
Sap

I use a Workbench, extractor and Mixer to create every brew available in the game.

Sure, if you want to do everything you’ll need everything. But not everyone needs to do everything

I don’t really see what you are saying that new players can’t contribute in a meaningful way to the economy. I gave only one example, its not the only correct way to play. I didn’t play that way.

What do you want new players to accomplish? What should their role in the perfect economy be?

I’m legitimately interested because I don’t know what everyone thinks new players should be doing economically in a game where the players determine the economy. I didn’t take part in it while leveling my main and alts because it wasn’t there. So these views are genuinely interesting to me.

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The purpose of new players in the economy is to be able to make coin. Or they can just ignore request baskets until lvl 40. No other game makes it near impossible for new players to earn coin.

Which is 60% of the non-centerforge machines in the game (This one feels different to me as it is so niche, but I’m willing to concede 50% of total machines). Unless you are buying all your fuel or running on raw peat and coal for spark you also need a compactor. So to do your job, you only don’t really need the Refinery (or Forge). This feels off to me if we really want specialization, but I understand where you are coming from.

These are great questions, and I don’t have a great answer, unfortunately. Right now, I don’t think we have a real problem yet, so I am more looking at current trends and trying to figure out future state. For the new player experience, at least for me, it was just progressing via wandering around, building my house, and then eventually hitting the gem wall (R.I.P.? I hope) and scrambling to figure out what I could sell to get money to get over that wall. I had the fortune of doing that when you could still get 25c each for Fibrous leaves, as well as the higher buying prices on sap, opal, etc, and the coils needed at the time were already starting to drop down to the 11K range if you looked a bit. Assuming everything comes down at the same ratio, this is all good, but there exists some floor as to how cheap coils can be due to the effort required to make them (same goes for forged tools which are the other big ticket purchases).

When I am thinking of new players and being a part of the economy, I am thinking about them mostly as sellers to buy baskets (anything they can make at this stage isn’t a revenue driver) of materials gathered on T3 or lower. At the moment, that means Fibrous and Inky Leaves, Rough Ootstone, and Waxy Earthyams (while there are other things of value those players can get, I don’t think I’m missing any they can get in reasonable quantity). And as the supply of those goes up, prices are going to continue to falter. Even if Advanced Coils/Forged Tools get down to 5k, selling basic resources for 1-2c each just isn’t an appealing use of time, and those new players also have finite feat money to earn (which is going to be spent inefficiently as they don’t understand the systems yet. This is normal and expected).

When I think of crafting in WoW, there are tiers of gear, and an economy functioning along all those tiers. Level 20 people are buying stuff to craft level 20 gear, level 80 people are buying level 80 stuff, etc. And this allows everyone to always be able to progress in multiple ways (Grind it out, sell your extra stuff, sell what is currently hot, get money from mobs/junk loot). The boundless economy is more and more looking like only the people at the very top make any products that only they can buy, and lower level people sell them the mats. I don’t find that fun or appealing to participate in, from either side. It’s certainly realistic, but if I wanted to play with a realistic economy I’d just go play with my IRA distributions.

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One recipe in the compactor, two in the extractor and everything else in the mixer/workstation.
While I get you want to have strong specialization, I don’t really think narrowing down the machine use will make any major difference considering how incredibly easy they are to set up and maintain.
You’re also ignoring power coils, which I only need for the workbench and mixer.

Maybe if they introduced new machines for a higher tier of recipes they could be job specific and hard to make, but I don’t think anyone will have trouble creating a full suite of basic machines regardless of their job

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