How to improve the underdeveloped market hubs/planets

In a sandbox game, I don’t really think there’s much we can do to solve the issue. It’s the responsibility of the owners of a settlement or hub to do that. This is also not something that’s possible to do on public worlds that the devs control who can and can’t be on them through whatever settings they have placed.

On rental worlds, I can see a little bit more control over this and if we see that sort of organization and clean design approaches it might encourage settlement and hub owners and groups to redesign and reorganize there locations.

I think a settlement or hub with an equal amount of value in terms of what it offers as another one but is far better designed and organized would compete for that foot traffic and generate more footfall.

I’ve had talks about this particular issue with @the-moebius through Discord about his embassy Aquatopia before 1.0 came out and as I look at the settlement’s design and layout now, it’s left me with a whole lot to desire. The old version of Aquatopia was a heck of a lot more organized and way better in design. That old version just wasn’t ever completed.

Perhaps when the homeworld for Aquatopia comes out then a better design and layout will be used. But the embassy falls short of anything that’s easy to navigate since it looks exactly like a bunch of people just stitched together their builds next to one another. I don’t go to it cause I can’t ever find anything.

Rental worlds is probably the answer to this problem along with a lot of other issues people seem to have. I, for one among many, do want to have my own rental world where I can decide who can build on the world and who can’t. Along with any other settings. This way I can enforce planetary rules regarding the world, such as a faster way to remove grievers from the world.

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I :100: agree and am glad to see someone speak up on the issue

This bit is a huge challenge today. Until you’ve internalized some of your favorite shops - shopping feels more like random exploration.

I think part of the problem is that very few shops specialize—and all the “general” stores end up being very hard to differentiate.

Would love to see shopping hubs that group stores by specializiation, to guide folks, and also make comparison shopping much less stressful

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I do kind of agree. My OCD screams in my head when I’m going through a settlement, marketplace or capital and it’s a mishmash with no matching pathways, places on different altitudes from each other and no decent signage to explain what is where with random plots in between that people haven’t developed and only want the footfall.

However I also think we were all too used to how small the game was in comparison to what we have now. Now we have so much land we’re all just going nuts grabbing plots as soon as things start, but in the future it should hopefully develop and look neater as players either stop playing or make decisions on what to do, move or choose to finally develop plots further.

Also have to try and keep in mind that the past places had been in development for some time, yet we’ve only just begun again. I can understand why some of the major builders are sitting back and watching things pan out.

If it’s still like this in 1-2 years time, then I’d say it’s probably a cause for concern and might need some strong and organised leadership to sort out. Even then…that many planets, it could be too challenging and require a large number of players.

Why should we optimize everything?
I understand the challenge of building efficient supersized hubs where everything is clean with straight roads.
Most new hubs/towns are like this now.

But some players like the first settlements too. Those with improbable convoluted design. Mistakes & stuff happened here, they got scars and that’s pretty cool! :laughing:

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Sounds to me like an opportunity for an enterprising Oortian to establish a competing hub :slight_smile:

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1-2 years? I’m thinking 1-2 months!

I agree with @crypticworlds that this is a sandbox game and you can’t force anything upon people. But a sandbox game is driven by humans. Humans are driven by greed or a desire to help others and that can be used to influence people in game.

Surely, all hub owners and land developers can see the current issues at play here? It’s not healthy for a handful of planets to garner most of the traffic and for lower tier planets to be neglected. Biitula is completely packed and building a 5th and 6th floor just to accommodate more shop portals isn’t the answer. Especially when half of the shop are empty anyway.

I like the Blacklight layout. As soon as you enter through the portal, via Biitula, you are surrounded by a ring of shops. Only downside is that the shops are alloted 1 plot only, but you are allowed to build vertically. With that said, it still limits what shop owners can sell due to design restrictions. As such, most end up being boutique specialized shops. And the ring is small, due to how the owner built his original layout. He can only make so many changes. Thus, you have limited choices.

i think there is no issue just dont use those shops and hubs ya dont like
maybe the owners are real proud off what they build and might dont like
someone saying its not good plus adding there bad designs cause the owners wanna profit on footfall seems unneeded there room enough in the game for every kind off shop our design think a better approach is showing them how it is done by making a good working example :smiley:

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That goes without saying. Hence why I said what I said (that things take time to pan out).

If you cannot control what others do, do not expect anything to go the way you want it to in the timeframe you expect or wish.

No one is in charge of elements like those mentioned. And no player is in charge of everyone. The Devs are in charge of making and fixing the game itself, but they leave the collective in game development open and free for all to do whatever they feel is right.

If you’re so concerned with things, try making your own ideal solution on each planet…

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Well I’m still in my first settlement. I’m still growing and trying to flesh it out. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot though. At some point I will want to start a new settlement, taking everything I’ve learned and making it nice to look at as well as functional. I’m sure there’s others like me out there. Just give us time.

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I agree with you and I own land on one of the underdeveloped planets. I don’t want to say which because I’m about to say this: It’s ugly. I hate it. It makes me want to set the entire town on fire because it’s so hideous. I can’t do anything about it and I haven’t seen person who owns the plots by the portals on, but I know he’s around because the town gets a few changes a day / every few days. I don’t even like going there to develop what I currently have.

But I think the problem is partially because of people like you and me and probably most players in general. They see that it’s underdeveloped and ugly and don’t even want to be there. We don’t want to put in the effort for something that may never become anything. But perhaps the people who own it feel the same? They aren’t seeing more people come to develop there so they figure, “Why put in the effort if no one is coming?” Maybe if we try to make something of a certain area, it’ll slowly grow. I’m not sure if you saw Merika before what it is now. It was just two portals and a sand walkway in the desert. The only building that was there was a small stand next to where Chisel King is and I think 4-5 shop stands where Chisel King now stands. Me and someone else grabbed a handful of plots there in hops it would become something and it did. However, it was hideous for days. Even after people started building, it was very, very ugly. The hub remained sand w/ no real platform for maybe a week before they started to build it to what it is now. Meanwhile, the surrounding land was turned into beautiful shops and buildings. I can’t speak for the PS Hub players that worked on Merika but perhaps they just didn’t have the time or thought it wasn’t worth working on up until they saw it bloom like it did. Maybe they were just gathering more materials to make it great again :wink:

So, in short, I think the only solution, currently, is for everyone to pitch in and at least try to help make a nice hub and main town for those cities. If you see the hub area on that planet is following a certain design / color, try to stick with it so it’s a bit uniform or at least not horrendous. Instead of spamming gleam and basic rocks, go out and farm wood and stone to refine. Now, about the signs… I’m not sure we can do anything about that, sadly. I have had so much trouble in certain towns because it’s impossible to find the exit / portals sometimes, even w/ the navigation bar. I agree 100% that most shops in the bigger places are hard to see who sells what, unless it’s specifically spelled out in signs. At the end of the day, it’s really a community effort to make these towns beautiful. I think the fact that we don’t like the ugliness of some places is okay because we can make our own hub / town. It’s a lot of work but maybe that’s the best solution. I would love to do that but I don’t like working completely alone on such a big project :frowning:

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You too, friend. :wink:

by nerfing or removing footfall

I don’t think a convincing case can be made that removing/nerfing footfall would make a particular planet’s activity increase, but I would be interested in hearing your point if you would elaborate on how this achieves deen’s goal.

Pretty much this for the Portal Seekers hubs. Between gathering local resources, converting into building materials and building the hubs it can take quite some time. I’ve personally built 5 oe 6 of the hubs with materials I gathered myself from the planet. Each hub took me about 4 or 5 hours in total. With 42 planets out there there was a lot of work to be done on the hubs.

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its our embassy couple off friends waiting to build there city then lots off people came flooded in since aquatopians worked very hard to create a massive hubnetwork then all the stuff we working on in our main forum post Aquatopian Empire¸.·´¯·.´¯·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><(((º>Super Portal Offer/aqua embassy woodlands/New Mayor(read it all lol)
hunts minigames big focus on helping people
think @Lawrizze made a pretty organized hub for us and my infocenter seem to work pretty good
also only rule off aquatopia is no rushing and i think we doing pretty ok without rushing :smile:
the embassy is a place where nobody gets bothered about there house style
how they do stuff etc

so what have you been doing :rofl:
not our fault our empires embassy is huge lol
i would not want it to be anything else then like it is now lots off people around
more fun then a well designed town with 5 peeps

it is not there responsibility all they responsible for is doing whatever they like

this is all getting planned :smile: lot off stuff getting planned behind the scenes off aquatopia :nerd_face:instead off looking at our simple small embassy people should focus on preparing for whats coming :sunglasses:think half the game thinks that the embassy is aquatopia its pretty obvious the embasy is grown out off the stoneage and the aquatopians are arriving into the Modern era (Edwardian period) is all part off our evolution
https://giphy.com/gifs/TBRcpLzURDjyw/html5

yeah take away our only reward for running these big city’s good solution?

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You’re taking parts of my post and taking them out of context it looks like.

Perhaps this is a reminder, but I don’t really care how you run the embassy or the lack of cohesive design theme that is going on or the straight up difficult to navigate layout of the entire place. In the grand scheme of things, the PS hub is a lot better resource to finding shops because it’s better organized and easier to navigate. Plus there are a lot more shops connected to all the PS hubs than to the Aquatopia Embassy. It was the entire point of what I was saying with my post. It wasn’t in any way a jab at you or the efforts of the group behind Aquatopia. Something that is better organized and designed will get more traffic and use.

So yes, it is the responsibility of the owner of a settlement or hub to design something that’s flexible in its designed and planning for future expansion to make it easy for visitors to find stuff. There’s a reason why in real life we have street signs and names that allow us to know where we are. A settlement that offers that is going to pull traffic from other large and massive settlements because they can offer the same things but with easier navigation. Why use something that’s harder to utilize than something else? This is a sandbox MMO, players gravitate towards min-maxing on everything in these kinds of games. Including how to find stuff easily.

But come on man, I am not NL-Tim… We want the same thing in this game anyways. Let’s try and stay on topic of this thread. Sound cool?

To answer this directly all I have to say is a lot more productive things in my life than playing Boundless. I’ve only recently came back to the game because real life has allowed it. I’ve been pretty busy. Adult life is busy life. /shrugs

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I think what @the-moebius is referring to here is that instead of pointing out how everyone else is doing everything wrong, it would be a whole lot sounder if the critics just built whatever they enjoyed and in that way showd the community how they thought a good city should look. It’s a lot easier to type it in the forum than to make it.

I’m not gonna reply to any quote on this. I purposely stay away from the forum cause after launch it never fails to upset me reading here. People are more concerned with winning an argument - which is already so far away from the original point - at all cost, than to actually constructively discuss issues or exchange good experiences from a great game.

Please help keeping a welcoming and friendly environment for everyone. It’s equally important on the forum.

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I would love to help you guys collect materials for hubs. Just let me know what you need =O!

You’re wrong! We’re not! :rage:


Ps. :crazy_face:

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