Is there really a problem with player retention

So much talk about boundless and player retention I just wanted to share a little bit of what I feel about this subject.
When I first started playing I noticed I would bump into groups of players in their far out towns but never when I go venture on higher tier worlds. Now as those towns start to fade I noticed a few places are growing and booming with more people then I have ever seen in one place in this game. The population of the game feels more centralized and less spread out and I love that about boundless. It makes it feel like the game is thriving every time I step into a hot spot. Example ultima or gyosha mall. Always people Around and on top of that I have only bumped into a handful of negative players most people are nice and they wave or solute they stop and say hi it really puts a smile on my face knowing that I can enjoy the time I spend in boundless every time i log into the universe.

I’m not going to lie though I have noticed a big player drop off but people shouldn’t be scared that this game is dieing because it’s not. so many of us have invested countless hours playing boundless that we just want something new and when we arnt getting it we often move on to other things. But it doesn’t mean it’s not coming it takes a large amount of man hours to push out content for this game. I am very opinionated and I do believe certain features should come first before others like craftable armor but above that I think I can speak for many other players that we just want something that is going to pull on our heart strings even if it’s just a video or few pictures of really rough unrefined content we would be okay with that. Kind of like a wild raccoon if you keep feeding it. It’s going to keep coming back. I know some dnt share in my belief that we should get tastes of hard content very often they believe it should drop when it’s ready and only then shall we see it but that is their opinion and I will stick with mine that I feel boundless would benefit off of sharing early progress.

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idk the way i see it the retention problem is kind of what is makeing the game appear more active in those hot spots what is happening is more and more of the smailer towns are starting to decay away and kind of forceing the remaining residents to ether start a new town or what i see happaning in alot of the cases join one of the bigger towns that dont appear to be going anywhare and thats why places like ultima or gyosha appear way more active now.

in my opinion the centralized playerbase could do some damage as players join see 1 or 2 worlds with citys and players runing around while the remaining 46 are just dead worlds and thats if they see them…i have seen on the steam forums people who did not find any of the active citys cry that the game is dead cuz they run into decying towns and no one being anywhere in sight.

EDIT: the point i was kind of badly makeing is the older players leaveing and createing kind of dead zones mixed with the games steep learning carve seems to be driveing new players away and the boundless store page is starting to reflect that

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You have a point but there is one thing that you said that many people dnt pay attention too just the crazy amount of planets we have. What is it 48 now and then we are getting t7 planets soon at some point someone is going to have to dive hard into this and find out what to do about the amount of planets we have all these servers will never be filled and each new planet added just thins out the population even more and it’s more then just a steep learning curve if I’m a casual player and I want to build the house of my dreams just to get the tools to do it takes days if not weeks for some people and on top of that after they finally get the tools they need and start collecting resources then after a few hours of use your tools break and your back to square one but that is a big discussion for another time.

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So back to the main post I guess I’m mostly referring to long time players and their need and desire for content just a glimmer of greatness to keep them going.

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They added a ton of t1-t3 planets back in the fall around October. Wasn’t really necessary at the time, and now things are super thinned out. Don’t know why they added 20 t1-t3 planets and not 10-15 t5-t7’s…

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I think at that point we were having severe performance issues and the player base was still mostly lower level and need places to call home. Since players were having problems getting to their home planets, I think the developers felt more lower level planets would spread out the player base and eliminate some of the bottlenecks. It seems to have worked, but I would agree with some of the sentiments expressed that now we have 48 planets and probably not enough players to make them seem populated to new players (or even to some of the veteran players).

This part is more a response to the thread and not to you personally. I think the developers are struggling to make sure they keep the existing player base engaged with new content and also have a game that seems inviting to new players and keeps them playing. Not an easy task, portions of the existing players do not want things to be too easy and some new players do not want things to be so hard/complicated they feel that they are not advancing at a reasonable pace.

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Yes, the population does seem scarce outside of towns. But that’s okay, because that means us as a community, are Soo awesome at helping each other out, and get along with each other so well, that we want to live in towns for those reasons. To help out. For camaraderie. For the feeling of being a part of something bigger.

I personally love the t1 worlds, and that there are so many of them. Not because of the population, but because of there being a ton of room for huge builds without having to worry about a stray hopper blowing holes in your production. Even though I have a lvl 50 character, my alts all started on t1 planets by choice. Makes for a beautiful transition for new players to get the hang of things before moving to worlds with danger popping up in every corner.

I also agree with the OP. This game is far from dying. We (Duskmoor) are getting new players moving into town a few times a week. And not just someone’s alts. They pop onto discord and ask questions like crazy, but, that’s what us as a community are here for. Not only for ourselves. Not only for helping the devs find bugs. But also for helping out the new players in any way we can. And it feels amazing knowing how far just one spare titanium hammer can get a new player.

You guys/gals are amazing!!!

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Too many planets thin out the players.
Doesn’t matter how many planets you have, If they all have the same stuff on them with regards content and in most cases, same gatherables then what is the point of moving around.
Doesn’t matter about the future content as without a playerbase there won;t be anyone to see it. Game came out too quickly and/or new content is being added too slowly to keep existing players or recent leavers to come back. Leavers from the early days will likely have forgotten the game and as I mentioned in another post, returners will come back tto nothing as their stuff will be gone now.

The games has evolved within it’s tiny walls.
Used to be things cost an earth to buy so we used to go out and farm materials ourselves, kept us active with something to work for. Now prices are in the toilet for almost everything so no longer worthwhile farming for as it’s quicker and easier to buy it.
Additions to the game so far are lacklustre - the theme events are just things we do / did anyway. Items added are the luxury bricks with the laughable ingredients and time to manufacture and the poles and beams [matchsticks] that are ugly and useless.
I enjoy the game but have recently started on other games and there’s AAA title releases about to drop being Anthem and Division 2 which will also have an effect on the playerbase as folk will vanish for a while to play those games. Will they return though ?

Whatever is planned for this game, I feel it needs to happen pretty quickly to peek players interest and keep what it has at the moment with regards playerbase numbers.

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I cant remember what thread but I did read a quote from a Dev stating that they expect this game to be a slow burner, so I wouldnt be concerned

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People just think it’s low total player numbers because there’s 48 planets, which means tons of ground, people play around the world, which means different groups play at all times of day. Then there’s the fact that not everyone plays everyday and just hop on for a few hours a week. All this makes it hard to get a good idea just based on looking around at a few planets, only finding a few players. There’s also going to be a fair number of players who don’t care to play again until future updates, hopping on every couple months to refresh their beacons.

Having more content drop faster would be nice but probably not possible with the team size they are working with at least showing players more content of what they are working on would hold people in way more then showing hardly nothing at all.

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If you take a 100 players and put them on one planet you have 100 players on a planet if you take 100 players and put them on two planets now you split that number so try 48 planets and then future planets you just keep splitting the player base more and more

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Actually the split is going to diminish with each new planet added. Right now, with 48 planets, we should (if people actually worked like perfect numbers) have barely more than two percent of the population on each planet. The number of planets needs to double for the percentage to be cut in half. So not sure why people are concerned with extra planets, at least in the higher tiers. On top of that, most players visit many planets regularly.

Planets are added based on usage. As each planet starts to max with players/beacons - new ones are added. So you are going to see more lower levels over higher due to the distribution of players as the game was released.

Personally I think this is an issue. The tightly constrained location of activity with not much ability to actually get into that area causes frustration and people to go other places. Yet, those other places aren’t able to stay as active or get the same benefits that the high traffic areas get - so you see things die out.

Success comes from everyone being able to participate and feel like they can in as many aspects of the game as possible. When there is a small select group that can access certain things but others cannot it drives lower participation as a whole. We are seeing the same problems we had in EA with mostly the only difference being “more planets” and instead of 20-40 people playing we have 200-400 (or rough numbers).

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I am not sure if you were in this game when it just release.
Its more than just how much people live in the main city.
It was also a lot a lot of players walk in to your city daily to admire your hard work.
Its the best reward for every city hosters.

Also competition between town and town is very interesting too.
At least you need to think about why they can attract so many citizens, and what can you improve.
But now, if you host city you will realize, new players quit very fast, and sometimes experienced quit as well.
Basically the feeling is like i was spending a lot of time to help them, but they gone in 1 month.
For now, unless your city can get new blood daily and they all very active, otherwise the city will fall very fast as well.
Sooner, I help less and less and i login less and less till now.

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For a game that speaks volume as this it would benefit greatly from better connectivity. I think the server host is just not strong enough for traffic of this magnitude across oceans. Often I can’t play past 6pm central time on Eu servers

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I think that is outside of their control. They sit on Amazon hosts and it really comes down to internet traffic to their servers. That is out of the control of the developers. I like in Los Angeles and can connect to any server most of the time with minimal issues.

Lucky you! I’m in EU, no issues with EU, USE and USW. AUS servers is luck of the draw, usually it works tho, but it’s just at the edge of what is still playable, one slight change somewhere in the connection and whoop can’t play on AUS servers.

of course I have no idea if it’s true or not, have no experiece in it myself, but have heard from a few people that Amazon’s AWS servers shouldn’t be used for games. Perhaps another server host might work then? But am sure the code is too heavily dependant on the AWS API by now…

This was more or less referred to growing the game’s population. Not progressing through the game.

I personally think the strategy of growing the population slowly does more harm than good since less feedback and perceptives are being shared as a result of it.

This game can’t even handle 2000 players. It buckled at launch with 800. So take that for what it is.

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Most days I can connect just fine anywhere. I’m USW and sometime EU just isn’t happening. The worst consistent lag seems to be during large meteor hunts. Last night on Norkyna was great until a meteor decided to land almost on top of another meteor we were headed to. My connection to Norkyna didn’t manage to smooth out after that moment.