Player retention would have to happen by fixing the early game. The tutorial quest at the beginning is dull at best and loses alot of players especially kids.
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When I ran ARK servers I ran primarily Roraima, but also Alluvion, that required you to play with a modded avatar that breathed underwater 
Another ARK I ran for a while had a mod for tides.
early game is significantly a downfall. its sad when u have to start a character spend a month flipping in DK mall just to get a few forged AOE hammers. then to realize u could have just sold animal parts u cannot even get without flipping to get forged bows.
bows which u cannot afford.
scarcity of forged weapons/tools & the lack of them will break everything.
Maybe if forging wasn’t such random BULLSHIT, then maybe there would be more forged weapons.
And I don’t know where you started, but in less than a month, I had a titanium slingbow that killed most mobs.
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The things I’ve read from @philelliott make it sound a bit like Wonderstruck are scamming Square Enix at this point, if SE pays for the servers, 100% of the Sovereign money goes to WS (before, I was led to believe that we were paying for our own sovereign servers, but I guess we were actually paying for… the future of the game?), most of WS might not even be working on Boundless anymore, and they are making arrangements with Larian. Add to that the now 9.5 months of waiting for update 249, the general silence outside of fixes… IMHO, it’s looking REALLY bad for WS.
And definitely, if there’s a wipe, WS are gonna lose A LOT of their most faithful players who have been around for a long while. If there’s a wipe, I would certainly not want to return ever, and I would make sure to never ever buy a WS game afterward.
EDIT : I received a message saying this message has been flagged… for being inappropriate? How?
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I know everyone is bored, but this thread did happen
and it resolved like this:
At least that’s the last I heard of it, and it seemed pretty final.
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Yeah it did. And yet, there are people who wouldn’t mind going the Thanos way, who wouldn’t mind losing their own builds and the builds of others in the process, and who keep floating around that idea every so often, as if that was a good solution. But it’s not.
Here, I think it was suggested as a way to introduce new blocks and natural props into the worlds, but Wonderstruck doesn’t need a wipe to do that. They already introduced new plants with the farming update. I’m sure they could re-generate the un-claimed section of planets with new things on it, while keeping the claimed plots un-touched.
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A Wipe was suggested here as a way to cut the cost of running the game by reducing the number of planets to fit with the number of people actually playing the game so that maybe Square Enix would be making enough to cover the costs and not shut down the servers.
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So now imagine if that persistent universe just… died. 
That’s what happens when servers are shut down for good. I’m not advocating for a wipe… however If server shutdowns were the current destination, I’d much rather have some form of access to Boundless as a game I love somewhere down the line. For a lot of you - this community, your builds, your inventories - are everything. To some of us, Boundless is just an enjoyable game… and it could still exist and thrive outside of it’s current form. Popular opinion or not.
No, they just need developers dedicated to developing the game… which brings us back to square one. Even if we as players were to create content, it would still require a significant amount of work on Wonderstruck’s end.
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Not sure why everyone is talking about a wipe of the current 50 Known Worlds. It makes no sense. It wouldn’t solve anything for SE or WS. Things that would solve issues:
- More time/work
- More employees
- More content
- Marketing
- More money
- The bad - Removal of most planets altogether, leaving a couple in each region. (Or removal of all planets, to be fair to everyone. Then adding a couple of planets in each region…then grow from there. Yes, people would leave.)
Edit to add: a “wipe” implies a reset or a refresh of things. That wouldn’t help. Removing some things (ie: planets), even though harsh, would help with sustainability.
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I’m not advocating for or against anything; but as far as I know:
- wipe is a “no”.
- more devs/content/marketing is a “no” until post BG3 at best.
So if there are different ideas, those would be better to focus on.
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Yeah, as has been said before, we cannot solve the game’s problems. We can only continue to show interest in hope of signalling everyone involved that the game is worth saving…
Personally, I choose to believe that the fact this non profitable game is still up and running, is a sign of dedication to a dream and not a sad attempt at milking the last bit of money from the remaining player base.
I mean, how do you even go about deciding which world gets deleted, then. o___o
A LOT of players would be shafted one way or another.
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The issue is finding a fair way to lower the cost to run the universe. Since SE is not making any money on the game and is in fact loosing money every month covering the cost to run the game then at some point they could say enough is enough and quit paying to run the game. Since SE only gets money to run the servers from Steam players, this limits the source of funding to run the game even more. So there are two options. The first is lower the cost to run the universe and the second is to find more money to pay for the game.
As far as lowering the costs, you can move the universe to cheaper servers, lower the number of players allowed on a planet simultaneously and/or reduce the number of planets. All of this does require developer effort and there may or may not be resources to do any of these.
The second option is to find additional income sources. Per Phil the cost to run the game is in the low thousands, if there are 500 steam players then they would need a way to generate maybe $6 per player monthly to add an additional $3000 USD of funding. Hopefully the amount needed is less, but there is an assumption about the number of steam players active and willing to spend more money every month. Also any money generated through steam does mean steam gets a cut. I have seen posts that discuss Exo rentals and Gleam Club Plus as possible ways to increase cash flow. This seems to generate a lot of comments on making Boundless P2W but on the opposite side the game can be more P2W (if you can even define how you win Boundless) or possibly not exist at all. Which is worse?
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The question then becomes, which would be more helpful for the game, overall:
-
More rental planets & playstation sales that go to WS (development?).
-
More Gleamclub & Steam sales that go to SE (to help them “re-coup” their investment, which I’m guessing was around $1-2m). They want around $3k/mo to sustain the current servers, $75,000/mo + in steam sales before they’ll put anymore time/$ into Boundless. If it can’t hit $3k/mo, how would it reach $75k/mo?
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That is an awesome breakdown of the issue. No complaints there. However, if we need dev interaction or work to go with those ideas, it’s best to assume none of them are going to happen. My point is that if we’re looking for something we as players can do to help, we can only do what we have the power to do without the help of the devs. We’ve already been told we’re not getting more dev hours; and we’ve already been told the universe (in part or whole) is staying.
As far as I can think, we are capable of:
- building something significant
- doing player-driven advertising/streaming, which we do some of already
- modding/hosting private universes
Any other ideas for action we can take that doesn’t call on the busy devs?
edit: best I’ve seen so far is that $100 special sovereigns idea, but that could also take dev time
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Unless something truly remarkable happens, I do not see SE recouping their investment. But it seems (or it might be my personal wishful thinking) that if the game at least paid for its running costs then they would let it continue.
edit: I am hoping that if the game can last long enough, that the individuals still working on Boundless might have the chance to finish some of the planned development and maybe put the game in a position to not be dependent on the MMO universe for its survival.
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Phil did seem to say that they would if so -
That is why I’ve been basically desperate throwing out ideas and trying to put them under the devs’ noses, like in that poll thread I made. If we have a low player base (he said costs scale with number of players) but enough of those buying premium stuff, I really think we can keep it going at least.
I wasn’t going to post in this thread again, but… I’m losing hope on that, bigtime. 
I also just hope they are able to get the update out so that those who want to play privately or on private servers can.
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So there are 50 planets in the universe. If the cost to run the universe is $3000 USD then the cost per planet is about $60 per month. We do know from Sovereigns that the cost is a combination of size and how many players can be on the planet simultaneously so the $60 per month could be in the ballpark.
Could they find players willing to sponsor a specific planet? It is not a small amount of money but are there enough players with the means and willingness to do this? As a perk, could the player be given Gleam Club and maybe some cubits every month?
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Part of me also thinks “well then shut down the game once and for all and move on to something else, but THIS TIME, make sure to run it better, with a way to implement player-made content, actual marketing, maybe more micro-transactions”.
It’s the same as the other thread. The players are NOT going to fix the game for Wonderstruck, not unless Wonderstruck shows actual signs of life first. This also means players are not going to find a solution for the devs.
Now if SE maintains Boundless until Baldur’s Gate 3 goes out, maybe something can happen? But until then, I’m pretty sure it’s a waste of time.
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