A way to fix this, would be if you got rewards coins from things other than Footfall, which has been abused and now people are seeing just how much everyone is relying on it. I would love for Footfall just to be removed all together because of so much reliance on it being so high, and the reward so unfairly high.
And quests, quests you can’t repeat, and in activities you really really hate.
But look other other MMOs, where do you get money in those games? There are 3 ways.
First being Quests. Lots of quests. You are CONSTANTLY doing, THOUSANDS of quests. Every time you move, talk, and kill something, you’re doing it cause it’s a quest.
The second is items selling to NPCs. Doing dungeons, killing mobs, doing quests, and crafting professions, you’re not only constantly doing quests, but also constantly collecting loot, items, junk, rare drops, potions, weapons, armor, and so on that you can sell to NPCs.
The last I hinted to in the second, is the main goal, action, and gameplay of the MMOs. Aka, killing monsters. Killing monsters not only progresses quests, giving you gold, and drops items, which you sell for gold, but the monsters themselves also DROP gold for you too.
Without taking in player trading, AH, and player owned shops, ^ MMOs have at the very least 3 different ways, that are heavily tied together, constantly making you money, all the time.
But again, boundless only has 2 ways of giving money. Quests suck as there are a limited number of them, and they get progressively harder. However unlike in an MMO where you’re forced to constantly move to new quests area to keep progressing in the game. Boundless is a Sandbox, so you can go anywhere, do anything, and even just stay in 1 area for a long time if they wish. But the quests don’t reflect that. Take mining quests for example. They constantly want you going to higher and higher tier worlds, but you might not want to go to T6 worlds to find 10 Coal vains to do the quests. Eventually you’ll setting down into a build/home, and quests get ignored. At that point, you are no longer making money.
Next is the Footfall system, which relies on other players, and not you, stepping into your Plot. And that’s so imbiguous, so abstract, that there is no right or wrong way to go about it. There is no guide, no ‘Do this and you will get millions’, or anything else.
The only sure fire way we know of, 100% working, is creating a Portal Hub, which takes a lot of work, and again, relies on people willingly using it. But as you pointed out I believe, all that money made pretty much goes into supporting it to continue existing, you don’t get to keep very much of the footfall gained from that. So it isn’t very rewarding either.
And that’s it, those are the ONLY two ways of getting money, without relying on players.
And if we have hundreds of thousands of players, or millions? It wouldn’t be an issue. But constantly having less than 200 players on at most? That is freaken crippling. A player driven only game, can’t sustain itself on such a small community.
