Yes, that was the point of my thread here.
I’m wondering what could be added, so when advertising begins, more players stick around.
I still feel turning the campfire into a way to cook food, and making the beacon a free item like totems is the first step in that process.
I know there’s been and increase of new players because there’s a lot more people on kada. Seeing new players pop up in my hub every few days. There’s been a bunch of new beacons around my place also. It’s been actually fun going to see them and charting, and giving them a little help . How many will stay and why still remains to seem.
One of the things I do think the game needs is a better tutorial. I believe that’s why the free weekend didn’t go as well as It could. Although I do find game easy the first days can be confusing, an example is for those who come from Minecraft. A different contrôler map can be frustrating to some. It frustrated me in the beginning because I was so used to the Mc layout.
well Boundless is the type of game that falls into the same catagory as minecraft where a lot of people play it for a period of time they build there base etc once they have all the machines and things they get bored so they go play something else but most people at some point come back.
I guess I could be wrong here but I was pretty in to minecraft and everyone i knew who was similarly into it was the same would play for 3-6 months then play other things and return later. I used to do this with minecraft and now i do it with boundless.
I think this cycle may not be so apparent to others because of the low population.
As for the statement about trading off game development for promotion it just doesnt work that way. if they wanted to promote the game they would and they would hire specific people to do it. it isnt like you can either have a dev working on content OR promotion they are 2 different jobs
BTW dont mistake Square Enix Collective for Square Enix. Im not 100% sure of the exact details but Square Enix finds indie projects they think are going to be lucrative and they back said projects im sure with funding I am not sure how involved they are in decisions or game development but it is 2 very different things.
I agree they could do both. I think they may want more development done before they advertise. They may think more features or some changes will help retention of the players they might get when they advertise.
I agree. Investing $$$ into advertisement while the game is receiving huge fundamental game-changing updates (like it’s in Beta) wouldn’t help the numbers and would just be money down the drain. They’re getting in a slow trickle of new players and I think that’s for the best right now.
It’s my firm belief that a large advertising campaign at this time (with existing materials) would be highly counter-productive.
Here’s an interesting number:
40% of people who loaded the game never left the sanctum
Nearly 70% never made it to assigning a single skill point
Now, This is something to consider. However especially given a free weekend promotion, we can dismiss a certain number of these people as idly curious or those who just wanted a peek.
Rough humbers I’m not using calc for percentages of percentages at the moment but there seems to be a common perception that the game is losing players at “mid game” Personally looking at the follow on numbers I try to see them as a percentage of the 61% of people who actually tried.
Less than half of those who left the sanctum ever broke a single tool.
Less than one third of those who left the sanctum made it to level 10.
Just over one tenth of players who left the sanctum made it to level 20.
Again, just my opinion but new player acquisition is not where the focus needs to be right now. With fall off numbers like that there needs to be a heavy look at retention and the new player experience before advertising and reaching out to additional people who are unlikely to come back to the game after a frustrating or dull initial experience.
Personally I think there needs to be a solid look at available in game information (or in some cases just how it’s presented) for a newer player. There needs to be a proper map. There needs to be a way for a player just starting on a level 1 planet to see that there ARE active shops in the universe and get a feel for an existing economy.
There needs to be an explicit tutorial around using the knowledge base and the tips/info system and there’s no call for that information to be hidden or revealed like little nuggets of bait only as a player progresses along a certain path in the game.
Get a color wheel or something in there PRONTO. Removing the bad light from the character creation area was a huge step but the process is still tedious and distracting. Trying to compare and select between two colors? By the time you’ve clicked through the 80 colors in between you’ve lost the sense of what you’re trying to compare.
Getting a basic map should not require two machines and when i started (yes this is fixed now) there wasn’t even a recipe for glass in any machine. Then once you have that map it doesn’t indicate settlement information or really anything useful. Even if you want to have a warp augment in it and see the info you could see from the sanctum you need a third machine and more resources and crafting.
Those of us that are still here, still active - the 1.7% of players that have made it to level 50 - are often worried about mid game experiences and clearly many people feel like getting more eyes on will result in a larger population in general, but with numbers like this more eyes on just means generally more negative sentiment, comments and reviews about the game, and more people that are unlikely to take a second chance down the road.
Address some basic items here, get people the tools they need to move forward from nothing. Stop shedding 83% of players who are willing to try the game before they’ve ever achieved level ten or made it off of their starting world.
THEN talk about advertising.
The players that make it to mid or upper level and then get bored (or frustrated) are a follow on problem, and a very small percentage of those who have tried the game.
Based on this, it sounds like Boundless could use some RNG-levels and RNG-missions, much in the same way we have exo-worlds.
I dont know. I feel the game is past the EA phase. To me it feels polished and I am a very harsh judge about this. Do I think the game should not change and evolve? no. MMorpgs need change to thrive and keep players interest. However I play a lot of games and see a lot of indie games fail because the development team does not put enough into keeping a solid player base.
Personally I think Boundless is just scraping by. its close but I dont feel like it is failing over all to keep the social aspect of the game working. Would I like to see more players? yes. Do I think Boundless is capable of creating enough hype to really take off? Defanitly. So that begs the question why isnt it?
There is a huge hole int he market right now for a game to do what Minecraft did but updated and better? Boundless does that on a Vanilla Minecraft level and the only reason people who loved minecraft but are bored of it are not coming to bouindless is because they dont know about it, I know this because i tell those people about it all the time and there response is always the same. “What is Boundless? Ive never heard of it”
Its taking into account all the players that played the game before the achievements were activated.
Besides listening to the community and adding new content on a semi-regular basis, I am not sure what can be done. I think most every game loses players over time. Perhaps the focus should be marketing to make sure new players are finding the game:
example (low ridiculous, fake numbers for the sake of illustration)
(Game X) loses 4 people per month that are unlikely to return
50% of new players that buy (Game X) are still playing after 30 days.
You would need to sell 10 new copies per month to replace the 4 players who quit and still see growth.
I believe a lot of what you said is absolutely correct however I think part of this is because people dont have enough insentive to want to get past that first phase
yes the sanctum starter area is NOT easy to navigate its a pain i just created my 8th character the other day and what was i thinking as i went through it? “ugh what a pain” its so confusing for a new player. it shouldnt be that difficult. i think there should be a starter planet where everything is easy and there is a NPC city with portals etc to aclimate people to the system.
we need major streamers to build hype for the game. streamers are HUGE for promoting games these days. I for one would be there every day supporting anyone who would like to step up and do this.
I’ve been thinking about my mini robot thing and it be a tricky to implement . I mentioned farming crops for you but the more I think about it would be a bad idea. I have huge farms and it would definitely help but also give an advantage to some which I don’t think is good. Maybe smaller task like fixing coils and machines, id also make so it’s one robot per account as to not have places overrun with them. Not sure about which functions we could give them but something that would maybe give a little help but not give an advantage to anyone either.
I personally suspect the free play weekend skews these number a lot more than the relatively small number of players who tried the game during EA.
These numbers also completely ignore PSN.
I wouldn’t necessarily want to base business decisions off of these numbers and nothing else, and I hope that the developers have some better and more useful statistics. However as people are reaching out for information to inform the conversation, I think it’s significantly more useful than “how I felt at mid game” or just random “more ads will equal more players”.
By all means take it for what you think it’s worth.
Why hasn’t anyone suggested a server wipe to boost player retention? 
Quick, find out who hacked Fallon’s account.
This game is going to be huge and we are all lucky to be on the ground floor. I never put much trust in devs but I completely do with the ones from this game. We might lose more players some months or gain but no one can deny the massive potential of this game. The interaction between community and devs is beyond and above what I’ve seen other games do.
What i’d also love to see is a boundless etiquette guide to also help new players and help prevent problems. Not a bunch of set rules but something to help navigate new and existing players… I know beacon placement is also a huge topic and some new players just don’t know where they should start. Having a guild that would tell them to always keep in mind if people in your surrounding and such. Just the do’s and don’t.
It be a tough thing to do. We’d have to have a bunch of community leaders with opposing views working together and finding common ground. The devs would also have to help as well. Like I said it wouldn’t be set rules that anyone can be punished for but a guide.
*How would you boost player retention ? *
I would not boost it.
I personally wouldnt be opposed to this but taking a wild guess id bet that that is the minority opinion. But really why dont we ask ourselves what can WE do to make a change?
I still think the best thing we can do is find someone in the community to go all out streamer and all of us support that person and show up to their streams. get their numbers up and make people pay attention. I know @Lennexfox posted about streaming one of the sasquatch hunts yesterday. MAybe they would be willing to do more?
We could support a streamer by finding fun things for them to visit in their stream or just by keeping their stream open in the backround if nothing else.
I am supposed to flag this or find Fallon and grapple him into some nice warm lava?
Wait till he swings across a pit of lava then destroy the block his grapple is attached to.
Or let an elemental cuttle into his house.
