How would you boost player retention?

If you had complete control over development what changes would you make to attract more players and increase how often they play?

No idea is off limits or wrong. This is just brain storming.

For example… I feel more diversity in wildlife would be more engaging. More neutral creatures like harmless toads and birds. Possibly even creature taming. Slight variations on existing creatures like huge udders and rounded faces on some Wildstock but give them a new name. Perhaps “Milkstock” or “Calmstock.”

Perhaps increase inventory size so we can gather longer like No Man Sky recently did.

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all i want is a cure for this syndrome

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I would start with the forums.

A better setup for ease of discussion. Right now it is very easy to lose anything that isn’t the current divisive thread. I would make people have to link their in-game accounts to their forum accounts so we can get rid of the problems we have had with people making many different accounts to mess with folks. Anyone who’s account isn’t linked would not be able to post in anything other than general chat so they can still ask questions about the game, though they can still see all the threads. This stops people from creating troll accounts without spending real-life money. It also helps keep people honest because we know who they are in-game. Maybe cut down on the mudslinging from folks.

Then I would start with the basic skill system. I’ll edit this post in a second with what I already had sent to a few people.

Skill system change ideas:

Primary stats - free point every level up to level 50 or something like that. Only for the stats. At level 50 everyone would have the same stat points. It would help create a baseline for armour or the hunting classes that are to follow while still showing people progression as they learned the game. It would also allow you all to tune new combat and planet experiences (t6+) with a baseline everyone has. (Or just upgrade everyone’s stats every 5 levels until they hit 50, lots of ways to do it.)

Crafting and QoL skills - Much like our current skills work. Building, movement, exploration, farming, crafting of all sorts and whatnot. Turn each different activity into a skill tree and allow us to slowly work through them. Right now we just switch alts when we need a different crafting type, so there isn’t really a reason to stop us from doing them all on a single character. This also allows you to add in things like fishing and other non-combat activities while going deeper into their skills. A 10% increased output is great, but it’s also very bland. With us being able to get infinite skill points into QoL things, it wouldn’t be so much a choice of what I get, but rather what I find most important to get first.

Hunting skills - This is where our skill pages come in. Everyone starts off with a basic hunter skill page. It’s not anything special, just basic damage and sling bow skills. Then you create other classes that specialize that would allow people to choose if they want to be a healer, tank or ranged/melee DPS. It would allow you all to make combat much more entertaining and in-depth. This is where you can make the player make choices really matter. Do I want a sling bow that charges up or has a rapid-fire attack? Do I want to make it so my shots cause a .5m/s slow or do I want them to add 10% damage? Do I want to move .2 m/s faster in combat or add an additional 10 points in kinetic armour? Do you want healing bombs to heal more or do you want a healing aura when you are holding a staff? I think this could make for much more engaging combat decisions instead of just doing as much damage as possible and try not to get hit. Non-combat related decisions are bypassed by switching to alts, but combat decisions directly affect how you fight.

I think doing this would give the devs more leeway in being creative while adding new skills and talents. I currently like how it is, but I feel we are going to get very constrained as additional activities are added to the game and we won’t be able to get as creative as we could in a pure sandbox game. With both the combat and non-combat skills in the same trees, it makes it difficult to increase skill points to a tree without just giving everyone everything. I also feel like alts are a requirement for most players, and are considerably more useful than skill pages right now for early players. It feels pretty bad having 8 alts I never log onto now that were indispensable 8 months ago.

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What if they created an art asset of cobwebs that appeared over any build not visited by its owner in one month? Like ruins? Or cracks and rust in the blocks?

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why not lol but doesn’t that make the town even worse :smile:
i rather have some puzzles our homemade games in those places so if the owner is away for longtime people still have reason to wonder around town
if people get like spanners that can fix ruins then i would love this idea
ruins was also one off my sugestions i made a while back as extra building blocks

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Also, Private planets with the ability to connect to other private planets with large amounts of development tools. Give player communities the chance to change up the balance so the dev’s can get feedback from those as well. See what works and what doesn’t. See what we come up. There are a few hundred of us and most of us seem to be based either solo or small group with the only real player interaction coming from shopping stands. Empower me batman…cough cough…I mean @james …>.>

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Perhaps any ruin or old build with cobwebs has a chance to spawn a chest of goodies. It would give treasure hunters a new way to play.

That way exploring old builds could reward you with oortstones and coins and ore.

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I agree with private planets let like minded players play the game the way they want versus a constant battle over how the game should be played. And if the developers discover that a majority of the players are playing in private universes versus the public maybe they can look at commonalities and integrate those into the live universe.

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I’d also strait up steal a WoW style friends list and communication system.

Edit: In game communications upgrade along with long lasting guild messaging. Kind of like how discord text works. SO we can constantly see it. Also the ability to form parties and chat that way as well.

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i hope so when i first got into the game and forum i noticed there is a modding channel i really was hoping there would be people building items and decor
that the dev’s then just could accept as awesome and add to the game
i bet there are people when given acces to some gamebuilder software for there engine they would make awesome stuff for free and the dev’s have one less thing to do themself growing game faster
atm i havent seen much been done on that side off the game

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seperate from private planets, in the live universe I would remove campfires and go straight to beacons. Unneeded complexity that has resulted in too many new players loosing progress. I would also eliminate beacon fuel as I mentioned in a different post and just have players log in to fuel beacons.

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then people cant fuel them for other people
thats something that happens alot in the aqua community

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Guild aligned beacons could be updated whenever a guild officer walks over them.

Edit: In all fairness it could easily be in addition to the fueling system. Make it harder for active players to make a mistake.

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I have played several games one being space engineers where the developers did integrate player mods into the game successfully. Does not mean it would work for boundless but might be worth more discussion.

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Also, the ability to put my space station around a planet. I would love to be able to purchase orbital platforms.

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Yes. 100 percent yes. Give campfires the ability to cook food and make beacons an icon in your inventory that autocrafts for free like totems is my idea.

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Not necessarily retention but increase player base. Make it a ps plus game of the month. The weekend free on steam added players. Plus games I’ve never thought of buying I’ve played ps+ free and loved them. As for retention I’d say add more to building…ladders, contraptions, quest building, things like that. Hunting new mobs and harder mobs (titans). exploration adding random storage or machines you can find in game with loot in them not just burnt out beacons. Mining random spawned storage like exploration but not on the atlas like gleam. Would give me a reason to mine rock on tier 1 worlds cuz may get lucky and find gem tools or weapons

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So…let the game grow with further updates, which will provide more content for people to stay entertained. Once established a nice solid base with more content other then building, hunting and being a shop owner then promote the game further.

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I was trying to think of a way to do this, but require as little extra dev effort as possible (so, reuse existing components). Maybe a door that changes position depending on how many liquids are “nearby”? We already have liquids that stop/flow when a door closes/opens, and a “nearby” detection system, so that would at least let us chain things.

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I would start from making game easier on start that new players wouldn’t need to be battle with hunger and feel that every action is so slow.

  • Change hunger not to kill character, low energy pool is good reason enough to eat
  • Have skill points available on level 1 those could be assigned around some default build, so that player would have attributes on some power and speed related skills.
  • Continue improving UI, recent search is awesome addition and now knowledge should be really easy to use.

So that players would stay longer around I would like to see more reasons to build, there are many topics about this how we would like to be able make buildings more alive many different ways: for example moving machines and dungeons :slight_smile:

I think needs to be more interesting, it is right now fun sometimes but after playing longer time it is just slow really repetitive work which would need some improvements outside of (group) meteorite hunts.

I like game visuals much but it is missing character customization. I hope that we get there more customization options at some point with player tailor system: gathering materials, completing certain milestones for some outfits or other customization options should be thing, everything shouldn’t be available via cubits :slight_smile:

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