I wish whoever had come up with the ftp model had burned his notes in a camp fire. Why do we ask gaming companies to do that which we we don’t ask other industries? Do we not value their efforts?
Olive garden doesn’t offer free to eat pasta…noodles ONLY…everything else you pay for. Pizza Hut doesn’t offer crust for free with toppings extra.
I fully support robust trials. Let someone have a week to play for free then his game deactivates until he pays. I also wouldn’t mind paying a bit per month extra to not pay an upfront buy the box cost. (but then everyone would have to pay a sub, so it’s a coin flip on that one)
I pay for my game and a subscription model as a show of my support to the company and because I’m fine with buying things I use. I get that finances are a challenge, esp. now with more people being out of work, but that’s where one makes choices and budgets, I realize it’s an unpopular stance but I’m ok with that 
FTP would most likely be a bad idea with how the game works (plots, planet population limits, etc) , but a demo version would be nice. see how it looks, if it runs well on your machine, if the connection is good enough.
Boundless needs to be more finished and then advertised.
You know what we need?
To lock forum posts after they havent had any new activity for 6 months…
Truthfully I think FTP could be an amazing opportunity for a smaller company… you’ve got the game, game progression ideas etc… it’s just such a good business model. We know how good the game is, just the reach/decent size player base/advertisement and it would be unreal.
FTP would give you the reach, of potential new players who had maybe saw the game but lack of advertisement and exposure maybe put them off buying it. Give these people access to say 5 worlds, to gain knowledge of the fundamentals of the game and you know full well they’re going to want to unlock the full game.
Not to mention that making this FTP on consoles, the network themselves would do the advertisement!
Endless possibilities then once you have a player base. It’s the thing that’s put me off playing the game… empty shops. Empty shop stands… Nobody to visit, same people on every day. The game is so good, it just lacks that exposure. 
Successful F2P games require both a very very smooth onboarding process to retain as many users as possible as well as a deliberate setup of friction to cause in-game purchases. It should also have ways to allow “whales” to bring in their large stacks of cash at high profit margin. IMO, Boundless has none of these.
This is another issue with ‘free’ to play as well. We already have people complaining hard about how much more grindy it’ll be for getting cubits with the upcoming update. To have a working F2P model for boundless, you’d get something like 10 times higher exp requirements to get the same amount of cubits, with half the things in the exchange being real money exclusive instead of being able to bought by cubits. Want an extra skill page? Sure, you can pay in cubits. Want more than two skill pages? Well, that’ll now cost you real money
Why don’t we add random lootboxes and make lootbox exclusive body paints and outfits? Cause you know, F2P.
A lot of the things people hate about F2P are there so the companies still can make money… and in cases, more money than titles that you just pay up front to play.
In my experience, which is the “Classical” MMO Experience, most MMOs I had played required a monthly fee for you to play the game or you can’t log in anymore, So I consider boundless to be very cheap, especially when you compare it to WoW which not only requires a subscription fee, but you also have to pay for the expansions that come out if you wish to keep progressing.
And to be frank I prefer the subscription fee model, Pay a monthly fee, to get access to everything¹.
I do not like F2P games because they are more often then not, designed to nickle and dime you to death, to the point that you end up paying more in a F2P game, then you would in a monthly sub game,
¹ “Everything” does not include cosmetics, Cosmetics are 100% fine to charge extra for.
I am curious to what data you are using to come to this result. You claim you had just gotten into the game, Most people who just have gotten into the game won’t know enough about the game to draw this conclusion, show us the data that you used to come to this conclusion.
I am not very inclined to believe this based on the fact that the very 1st MMO I ever played, Darkages, Is still online with a player base of less then 50. So I do believe the devs could find a way to keep the servers running for quite a while with a very low player base if they wanted to.
Therefore I personally prefer to have a positive outlook on such things.
My opinion is simple: I feel the universe would be more full of dead beacons if it went f2p without a subscription or purchase price.
2. without a purchase price it opens the door to ‘any person’ not everyone is nice on this planet and im worried how much of a headache that would be to manage for the devs.
3. i do support the devs earning a bit more money but im just not onboard with f2p being a positive way to do it. Surely there is another path available? DK mentioned higher priced content added to cubits store?
4. For now afaik the store is fine not to say it shouldn’t or can’t be improved upon. I myself have bought plots with money rather than mine it out and its cool that we get that option if we so desire to do so. I’m just worried f2p brings more potential for problems than solutions.
begins to roast marshmallows with chat
(edited to try to remove rudeness)
Edit: I have played since 2018 launch with only an 8 month break and i do not consider the game dead. I consider it niche. Just because it doesn’t have millions of players doesn’t make an mmo dead. A real good example of a game not being dead is Darkages mentioned by @Trundamere
Picard says it for all of us.