Even so, I could accumulate the data and compile the information myself. It doesn’t actually change that this tool that shows a loose estimate of the health of our game indicates that it is ill. I don’t need many second opinions if I suspect that my child is ill. I go to the doctor. This is a sign, and it’s a bad one. That’s what I’m calling attention to. And obviously, there are a good number of you all who are willing to put on blinders to that fact.
Ok and I’m saying that the trends the publisher has been seeing is/was about 5% loss per week, but of those who remain there is a high degree of engagement. And that they aren’t concerned about these numbers.
So what either of us thinks about the number doesn’t really matter, if the game is doing fine by the indices the publisher uses.
In this case, wouldn’t Phil be the doctor? And he’s telling you you’re being a hypochondriac.
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Boundless population is almost always double the steam stats population.
Highest peak was 832 which is about 1600 player logged in at once.
This is how boundless population looks like on PC.
It isn’t that much different, people are just playing less. Whole my guild is not playing now and I personally played for over 500 hours in the first 1.5 month since launch and need a break too. It’s natural process but look, people don’t leave in a huge drop. They play for long, it’s slowly decreasing.
Every other MMO had decreasing number of players. Look at eso. Almost every big spike on this graph is a free weekend. Look at the difference in playerbase and the timespan. ESO is part of the Elder scrolls universe. A huge project developed by zenimax. It has like 10x playerbase of boundless and look how huge it is.
Boundless has just been released. Most time after relase has been spent on optimalization and big fixing.
- Developers stated they want to develop the game.
- We will soon have a roadmap
- There are features in the game which are not implemented yet to the public.
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- Players have seen beams, blocks hidden within files.
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- New ores underground, new tier of tools.
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- Titans are in development
- Test tools were just introduced to the game! You don’t develop test tools for players if you don’t plan for the future.
So guys, give everyone time. Devs definitely plan to work on this game and over time there will be more players. We have just started and there is no need to worry. You may underestimate our current playerbase but in 2018, 1000 players online at peak is a huuuuge success for a game studio that did not promote their game before release.
Peace
8 Likes
Okay. Good to know. I’m done arguing about this. It is beyond frustrating to talk about this.
Seeing a steep decline after launch is expected for most games. I’m not informed enough to know whether the drop we’re seeing is bad. (Also given @philelliott’s quote below, it may actually be a pretty good trend)
I also don’t think you’re interpreting the steamdb numbers correctly. The “on right now” stat isn’t going to be indicative of trends, just a current snapshot of things. At the very least, “in the last 24 hours” is going to be a bit better of an indicator (but lagging)
Edit: goofed the graph portion of my post; I was wrong there
Other evidence that steamdb’s “right now” and “in the last 24 hours” numbers are not great indicators is this quote:
If steamdb was indicative of the overall trend—matching this 5% week over week decline—we should be seeing somewhere around ~680 players for the “in the last 24 hours” number (given that weekends are the peak)
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I also made some numbers to look at! 
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does it really matter how many people are playing. my home world seem to average 9 players - 15 players. F1 - Debug and look at connected players. Even with 9-15 players and a 40ms ping i lag all over the place every 5-10mins. Worse when i head to Serp. thank god there at not more players playing. Either the servers are way under spec in allocation or the the netcode can’t handle it at the moment.Either way more players mean more rubber banding and lag until it’s fixed.
Hmm, try lowering the chunk download rate to its lowest setting—if you haven’t yet—and playing with that for a while. And if it is stable, keep raising it until you figure out what to limit it to.
Also, generally when investigating connection issues, the devs will want to know the following (in a different thread):
Biggest issue is crafting timers are too long to cover up nothing to do outside of crafting. Need dungeons and raids.
i’ll give that a go. thanks for the idea.
Don’t know why people are saying the game is declining in players cause whenever I am on and running through hubs I rarely ever notice the same names. Even when I have the debug menu open (PC thing) I see different names all the time on the same worlds I mine from.
I don’t know about you guys, but I know I spend time away from the game to avoid burn out and because I like to have a variety with my gaming time and not just loaded all in one basket of entertainment. I run a D&D campaign, play Black Ops 3, play Rimworld, play Grim Dawn, play Duelyst, and alpha test Crowfall from time to time. All on top of a busy work life and physically active life style.
So if someone isn’t logging in every single day to play this game I see nothing wrong with that.
There could be a lot of players waiting for more content and server stability issues to be resolved. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really knows but I think we’ll see an influx of players, old and new, when new content like Titans come out. Same thing for pre-made and player made dungeons along with pvp enabled worlds. Having more triggered events besides meteors would be helpful too. Rift does a great job with their dynamic events and probably is a good point of reference for something like that and could be applied across all world tiers.
Even the introduction of rental worlds would help out too. So yeah there’s a lot of things that could be implemented when they’re finished being designed and developed that could bring players into the game. After all, the more stuff we have to do all the time to break up any of the more boring stuff the better. I think that’s one of the goals the developers want to reach towards and they’re doing a great job. Core mechanics are rock solid. Just need more content overall to play through.
I certainly would buy more Cubits to get more plots just to make a multi-leveled dungeon if I was given all the tools to craft in order to design and then build the dungeon. It would let me be a D&D GM in Boundless and I think that would be extremely cool.
Sorry for the little rant. Just think some of the stuff I’ve mentioned would help improve the numbers and give players that aren’t all that active and just are refueling beacons to have more incentive to play. So… 
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maybe we should review the numbers when the halloween event starts this weekend
Seek first to understand then to be understood.
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Review the numbers after Q4. Surely some glorious holiday gift money noobs are on the way. 
A voxel game similar to this one made it out of beta about 10 years ago… Try analyzing the Google trends on that one and see how you feel. Don’t get discouraged by sheer numbers; data doesn’t tell the whole story.
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The problem people don’t see, is two fold. First, this is an MMO. MMOs are meant to have large number of players, and using ESO as an example is bad because A, that’s also on multiple consoles, and B, Elder Scroll games sell more on Consoles than it does on PC as well, thanks to Pirating. Modding is ‘Big’ but not many casual people actually MOD the game, nor know how. Bethesda has come out more than one admitting that Consoles make them more money than PC more than once. It’s why generally Xbox has many more exclusives and get the games first and promoted the hardest. ESO numbers can’t really be trusted, especially when the game is split between 3 different consoles. And EVEN THEN, it’s still in the low 20k players.
Secondly, the game is meant to have a lot of players. It’s about community, people buy and selling, about new players bringing in new money to spent, and a work force collecting resources to sell to crafters and so on.
So far, this game works cause it’s so small scale, but take Eve Online for example. With less than 2k players on, on any given day, would kill that entire game and the economy of it.
Even right now, most shops are dead and no longer exist after a week. Hubs with dozens of empty portals not being used, and so on. The game needs to draw in more players, not push them away and keep a low population. The only reason the game can function right now, is cause there are some players dedicated to the game enough to grind the end game and craft end game items to sell to people. But what if they left? What if the population gets so low, no one is selling anything anymore. What if you guys had to, at all times, grind out everything you wanted to use and make, farming all the materials, crafting it all yourself, just for yourself. At that point that game is more single player than an MMO.
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From steam.
| Month | Avg. Players | Gain | % Gain | Peak Players |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Last 30 Days | 401.5 | +46.9 | +13.22% | 832 |
| September 2018 | 354.6 | +258.2 | +267.91% | 832 |
| August 2018 | 96.4 | +63.7 | +194.83% | 293 |
| July 2018 | 32.7 | -8.4 | -20.51% | 74 |
| June 2018 | 41.1 | -12.5 | -23.27% | 125 |
| May 2018 | 53.6 | -16.4 | -23.41% | 122 |
| April 2018 | 70.0 | +3.7 | +5.51% | 141 |
Looks to me like its doing fine.
Daily people, avg and peak seem to be pretty consistent since its “official launch”. Certainly not something that indicates the game is dying any time soon.
There is a drop off lately but that doesnt mean much, a lot of the games even more so the case for mmo’s have a drop after official launch. Question is wether people stick around and regain enough people to stem the bleed, which only time will tell. No reason for panic currently if you ask me.
3 Likes
Nothing to worry about.
Boundless is a low population game with few dedicated players. Servers would never be able to handle high population anyway.
This allow the economy and community to run smoothly despite all the things who remain to be fixed. More than 10k player in the current state would be unplayable. Let’s be honest, we are still in early access. By the look of the slow updates/fix , it may stay like this for years.
Sound like a pessimistic point of view. But I guess we are familiar with this pace now, not a big deal.
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I’ll say what i said in the patch notes post for the last patch.
They lost a lot of players with that patch. A lot of us had hopes that that patch would show us that the Dev team is listening, and the game would take a good step in the right direction.
Sadly, the 200 patch did the exact opposite, and a lot of us just kinda gave up.
Several of my friends down right quit that day, gave away their plots and just logged off for good. A few others went from playing 4-8 hours a day to just a couple hours a week (if even that).
And just to be clear about it, we are talking fairly high profile players here, with well known names and shops (at least some of them).
I expect to get the same kind of responses i got in the patch notes thread, and i could already in this post try to counter argument, but truth be told, i don’t care. My post in that thread was the most liked player made post in the entire thread, which had hundreds on replies, so weather you agree with me or not, a lot of people feel this way.
With 2 patches, Boundless went from being literally my favorite game of all times, to a game that feels more like a job, than a game.
It also showed me a Dev team that not only doesn’t listen to it’s player base, but will down right lie to it, and try to cover it up as “mistakes”. This made even worse by the fact that it was proven that those “mistakes” were in fact planned all along, and were done with a very specific goal in mind.
Why even write this? Well because, like i said, this was, for a brief time my favorite game of all times, and while i have almost completely stopped playing, i naturally haven’t completely given up on Boundless becoming the game so many of us want it to be.
I do however, kinda feel like I’m fooling my self, but i’ll stick around for a few months, lurking the boards and fueling the beacons, to see where it ends up… <3
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I blame broketober plus the fact that the game didn’t release to much fanfare. A game that wasnt overly popular to begin with having to compete with releases like red dead 2, A.C. Odyssey, black ops 4 and battlefield 5 is a daunting task. I feel the community is going to mostly be people who are already playing with a slow overall decline until Christmas.
In addition, while boundless isn’t a full priced game, its still expensive. I expect a small but welcoming and friendly community in this game for the foreseeable future with the growth of the community, as always, in the hands of the developers.