It probably is a last resort in order to stop a shutdown and maybe give everyone enough time to release private universes.
I agree that if it was done, you take the chance to make the planets closer and reduce portal costs to encourage movement and keep the remaining players playing as a community. If you let players reclaim there materials it certainly does not make up for the time spent building, but everyone still has all the machines and materials to rebuild.
I think this is probably true so do you restart the entire universe so everyone is treated the same or does that create even more player loses?
In my opinion, you need to make the game less grindy for casual play and have something else than meteor for end game play. Something like small event that are replayable with many different challenge in them.
For the grind i would reduce the crafting time to what it used to be and maybe tweak some recipe to the lower end.
The one skill page like it used to be, but i guess we will have that again soon.
Bring back bomb mining, it was a nice feature that was different to the other game of same genre.
Making sure it is possible to get any color for the blocks in a somewhat “easy” way.
both will end up the same, you will lose players forever.
If you reduce the universe by 50%, does that entice Square Enix to keep funding the servers and decide to market the game again? If not, I don’t see the point.
If reducing the size of the universe reduces the costs enough so that the game can self fund without Square Enix having to continue to fund the game, then hopefully they would not reach a point where they shutdown the universe.
That would be the point.
As I said above, if the current server costs are covered by income SE receives from Steam, there’s no reason to change things. But that’s a long way from being confident we would start to earn some income from it (since once costs are covered, the next $x amount goes to Turbulenz contractually). We’d need to make a mid-to-high 5-figure amount in income every month for us to start recouping and feeling there was something worth kindling with more investment.
If Cookie Kingdom goes Poof i would be gone forever
Are we close to making some kind of decision here? I mean, we’re all grown ups, we can take it!
All cards on the table would be better than reading between the lines.
Agreed, it would be good to know a rough timeframe, and also, if we could have the chance (and this part is a Turbulenz question) to try a few different monetization and/or cost-cutting options like suggested by me and others to try to pull the monthly costs out of the red so we can at least maintain status quo. If by low thousands we’re talking 1-2.5k or so that isn’t out of reach I think, and if we used @Kal-El’s suggestion too, last resort, and reduced the public planet count by about half we might be able to bring it a good bit lower.
Does anyone have a way to filter the planets by # of beacons/plots? Curious which ones have the least at the moment. https://www.boundlexx.app/ is down.
A/B testing
I will just refrain from commenting further. This has been very constructive and I am hopeful that something positive comes from all this. I will be honest here I am quite frustrated as there has been a lot of quality input here and zero from @james or any one that needs to comment on the development and the current roadmap.
I will bow out here until I can give more constructive input.
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I think we should scale back the live universe. What I would suggest would seem drastic to some, but from a business point of view makes sense. 6 servers per region (1 of each tier 1-6), making the live universe 24 instead of 50. I think that would dramatically cut back costs. The problem would be deciding which planets go and which to keep. If implemented, it should be put to a vote with something of “IMPORTANT, please vote” kind of notification banner.
@tarranth sounds like a good idea but what would happen to the players effected by this? They would lose their hard work and hrs put into their project(s). For example I play on Angel I and if that planet was to be removed and I lost all my work I’d be pretty ticked off… I’m sure I speak for all of us… if something like this was to be implemented (which I’m not against if it helps keep costs down) devs would need to work with players effected to relocated their work (if players want to keep their work).
What If instead of downsizing altogether the devs can switch up some of the homeworlds and turn them into special sovereigns. Not give ownership to any one player in particular so all worlds would be owned by James.
We could say the initial turnover would be 2 months for the player base to add time to it.
I realize it would be a hard decision. Heck, US East has Biitula, Cephonex, and Gyosha. How would you decide which to keep and which two to go.
As would be the decision between the 6 tier 1’s that the same region has.
But if it became a choice between cutting the servers in half or shutting down the game, I’ll take the server cut and be happy.
Biitula has to go.
I honestly agree with you, but I wasn’t going to be the first one to say it. Cephonex has some good points, but I’d be most in favor of keeping Gyosha. Gyosha mall has been around almost since launch and was the first mall I went to.