“Main worlds” might never become considered “Abandoned” by an automated system because people tend to build portal hubs and links to all of the main worlds, which means there will always be a few “active” builds on a main world.
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Having central hubs where players start and can pick up quests, gear and items from npc would be a big help. Players can choose to start on a random world more difficult or in the hub/ npc town or whatever, where it runs through a quick tutorial of the How to parts of the game. Plus it would be nice to know that there is a hub/ town in said location or on whatever planet that you can rely on and meet other players. Instead of being
On an episode of alone. Player to player engagement is also very important.
I recall the plan was to have player towns of the highest rank be the spawn points for new players but that system is flawed for many reasons.
Difficult city layout
Bad locations
Ghost town
No npcs to help facilitate new player needs
Could just be someone’s hole in the ground filled with high prestige item.
To big or to small
Planets that need to be removed is something that is not new to gamers of online games no different than servers being removed on other games either pack up or lose it all. Because in 30 days your planet will get swallowed up by a red giant or black hole or whatever.
Blue print system could be taxing on a games hardware but if doable at least we could copy sections of our builds or all of it and it could rebuild it for us ideal or we could do it block by block still better than nothing. Especially if we have to leave our planet behind.
Having more than one way to traverse between planets like no man sky would be nice “wish list for space crafts” build them find them barter for them either way would be nice.
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And, regarding comments about the scale and elasticity of the persistent universe…
A central hub that is designed to handle traffic and to direct it in some manageable way would mitigate congestion problems on “de facto” hub worlds, allowing for the universe to grow (and, possibly, contract) without constant growing pains.
Two things I want to say.
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A blueprint system would be great. That way players can just pick up and move when they need to. But care has to be taken. One game that I’ve played (Planet Nomads) introduced a blueprint system. I fiddled with it and figured out how it could be abused (essentially generating free structures and breaking them down for materials).
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I agree that the NPE needs work. I like your idea of turning the Sanctum into a pocket world. But something else that I think would help. You can already choose which region your new character can start in. I think it would be nice if there was a sub menu of planets to choose from at that point. If you choose easy, then a choice of one of the tier 1 worlds from that region (instead of it being random).
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When I became a more experienced player, I would greet new players and give them two items. A diamond grapple and a smart stack of gleambow totems. Nothing overpowered, but enough to make the initial experience easier.
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That’s great, our community has always been so welcoming and inviting to new players. I was part of the original Black Light on Phem. We use to help lots of new players quite generously, but at that time the game was very active and busy. Most players stayed and settled with us, so in essence they learned the game playing daily along side us. Perhaps that’s why we grew so large so fast… those were very fun times. Certainly felt like an MMO back then. It may have been too much… perhaps there are players still here on the forums that could comment on that… but I will certainly do it again when i get settled, i feel a new excitement for the game again.
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A blueprint system (most likely) doesn’t help with resources. Not everyone builds for beauty, there are people who try to build useful/functional stuff.
Moving a regen farm isn’t going to work, unless the blueprint system also copies the terrain.
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Boundless is a universe in the sense that it has multiple planets with travel between them, although I’d argue that it’s more like a small galaxy with undefined solar systems. But aside from some superficial differences that ultimately come down to palette swaps and the requirement for different atmospheric protections, those planets barely differentiate from each other. This has been further highlighted by the proliferation of sovereign worlds. My main complaint is the lack of diversity in flora and fauna.
Every planet has the exact same set of creatures, with them only differing in strength and hostility. Similarly, the plants you encounter only differ in drop rarity, but still remain the same base product.
For the planets to feel like a real living, breathing universe with diverse ecosystems, I’d like to see this repetitiveness addressed and some variety added. The only planets which should feel close to carbon copies are the starter worlds, as certain base resources are necessary to the new player experience.
I’d love to visit a new planet and not know what creatures I’ll find, or what rare drops I’ll discover by exploring. I’d like to see unique weather patterns, biomes and gravity. In short, I’d like the planets to feel more procedural, rather than being built from a very small pool of repetitive elements.
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I have been both in the past and have started this process again. Current hope is to put a store with new player friendly gear on every east coast lvl1 or 2 planet, if that proves maintainable, I’ll expand to USW then, AUS, then EU (EU is last because they actually already have several of these that I’ve seen).
100% on board with this.
This was my understanding as well, although I seem to remember someone suggesting it was something of a switch that could be flipped off to make it so it wasn’t automatic.
This idea (in essence) has been floated here on the forums before as well. Personally i think this could be done on a single player generated world with extra hand holding, then interacting in the santum to journey to the MMO worlds… Could also give a bundle of items for finishing the tutorial on said planet for use in the MMO, like a copper grapple, an iron hammer, and some other starter things they would have made in that experience. Everything breaks anyway so item bloat of early gear isn’t a big concern.
Personally i really like that we only have the elder as the sole NPC in boundless, I’d rather everything in universe be built by players, but don’t get me wrong i see the appeal. Right now objectives are the only “quests” in boundless (“feats” are more like achievements), and they vary greatly in how interesting that they are (like most mmos so i guess that’s par?)
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I think you need T10 @min to reclaim
Agree.
I started playing Boundless specifically because it offered player content only environment.
Big selling point for me.
Objectives are practically a continuous tutorial - they are there to teach about mechanics along the road (even after the actual tutorial is finished) more than to give reward (that’s just added incentive, I guess).
Feats are indeed milestones, a data on in-game activities, with rewards tied to them.
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Boundless is more of a Distributed MO, It’s not a MMO anymore than DayZ is a mmo.
the only thing that makes it mmo like is the fact it has centralized identity and authentication (like minecraft). But heck in that case RUST is a mmo because i get the exact same thing, including moving between servers with the same identity.
Individual servers are not shards of other servers, if 80 people are on bitula no one is going to bitula.
Heck you can even tell that other planets are other servers since portals take more than a second to connect. you use to be able to make a infinite falling portal with the exit above the entrance that only works in test mode because the servers take so long to make that initial connection now.
In all honestly most of boundless can be replicated in minecraft with existing mods including the moving between worlds and having a universe that is just a collection of servers
Calling a game a MMO sets up the false expectation that this game can host “thousands of players” sure 4000 to be exact, all separated in to 50 groups.
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Boundless should add a portal token that you use to connect to external player hosted worlds, just add a parental control so players with out permission cant go to those worlds.
If i need gleam club in my private universe that isnt connected to the main one that least they could do is let me connect to them.
We have already proven that you can prevent inventories from crossing portal AKA creative worlds, so the only thing stopping this from happening is the devs being cool.
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But NNNNNNoooooooooooooo, thats never going to happen
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i’m sitting here going “did modding get added and i missed it? why are they talking about Null Pointer Exceptions boundless doesnt use java”… damn you new player experience.
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I’ve missed your honesty. Glad to see you commenting again. 
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My understanding is that new T1 worlds get spun up when the servers get full. Do the higher tier planets also spin up new instances? If not, you are going to end up with the higher tier planets being completely bottlenecked with a large player increase. Sovereigns cannot really counteract this because even though you can make lots of higher tier planets, you have to get to a world close to those sovereigns to travel to them. You cannot do that if the higher tier planets are all full. I guess you can technically spend 1000s of coins warping from a T1 every time you want to go, or run through oort like its air to make a portal from a T1 to your T6 sovereign, but I somehow doubt people are going to be happy doing that.
Higher teir planets have been spawned in the past, I’m not sure if this was manual or automatic though (it was about the same timeframe as a free weekend when other planets spawned so that lead me to believe it was automatic as well, just not as many of them spawned)
I’m not sure I see thousands of players hosted at once as my expectation when i see MMO, i think of things like:
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player ran groups (guilds)
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hundreds of other players online (even if I don’t see them all at the same time)
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Thousands of players existing, but I’ve never seen past a few hundred in any mmo at once, wow used to crash with less than 300 in dalaran at times…
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being able to communicate with any player anywhere online (whisper chat, or “global” channels)
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Large places to explore
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Some aspect of travel to find resources, people, goods for sale, quests, or enimies
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Not having to use IP addresses to setup multiplayer play, i expect an MMO to either “always be connected to the server” or obvious when it isn’t, and connecting is only a single click without setup away.
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Maybe not thousands, but i totally expect to be able to freely move around any mmo circa 2020 with out getting stopped by 80 people in any one place because the server the region is on is at capacity.
Great post and I agree with lots of it. There’s definitely a bunch of work ahead of us.
That said, I don’t narrowly define an MMO as a game that can “host thousands of players”. To me, the key pillar is a shared persistent universe that continues to exist and evolve when you are away from the game. It also needs to be able to support lots of players that can socially interact with each other - communicate, trade, cooperate/compete, and self-organize.
I think that Boundless does an amazing job at most of those elements.
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100% agree
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I like that idea. I have a grandson, two granddaughters, some nieces and nephews that I could bring in more often or grow into the game if I thought they could be protected in a private universe… but I want to be able to play everywhere too. I mean you can protect others from coming to a sovereign but not the reverse. Why not?
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I don’t agree.
Boundless is more of MMO than most other game that call themselves that.
There can be instances when one might not be able to enter a world. Temporarily. But they are performance-related limitations, not design ones. Universe is designed as shared.
Most of the time you can find and meet anyone that is online, no matter if they play from Asia or Americas or Africa or Europe. You can visit and see any build/creation by players, if you know where they are located.
Even in most busy times world were locked only when there was a big hunt with 60+ players. And when there was influx of new players and automated world creation wasn’t on.
What matters is that beside this performance limitation, you can join any ongoing hunts or any other type of players gatherings. It’s not a locked event like a WoT battle or WoW raid, where a limited number of invited/randomly picked players start and no one else can join.
No event in the Boundless world happens in some separate pocket location either. It can be observed within the world by anyone who is around (as long as server performance allows that).
If that’s not MMO than I don’t know what is.
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