This is where you throw Tiggs to the wolves
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James already threw them all to the wolves 
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Maybe there is an automatic response away message for forum pings that can specify that person’s number in line 
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Tiggs is very patient with me - even though I make her job more difficult by constantly talking to players.
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Well, this is exciting! Glad to have you here, @monty1 & @Tiggs!
I’m really interested to see where you folks begin to take the game once things have stabilized for you …e.g. in a ~year, once you’ve staffed a team up, and have begun to understand the game’s systems/code 
A couple high level questions ( if you’re willing to talk about any of these this early on 
) for you folks:
-
Do you have a good sense of how you want to transition the game into a sustainable property with an active development team? (between the lines: any potential changes to monetization that you’re considering? etc)
-
What’s your runway? Or at least, how long are you hoping to give yourselves to prove out the investment?
-
On the gameplay front: Do you have a sense of whether you’re keeping the current narrow-ish focus (e.g. on builders / socializers) of the game…
…or plan on widening it to a broader set of players (e.g. leaning into more RPG elements for explorers / killers / achievers)?
(I’m really hoping that you do end up leaning more into the RPG elements - titans are such a fantastic concept, amongst other things!)
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Not remotely. That said, I do believe that acquiring new players is going to be what makes or breaks Boundless so we’ll likely explore a path to free-to-play. We’re open to other models and will definitely be exploring them with the community.
We have pretty deep pockets and we are thinking long-term. I’m not setting any deadlines for Boundless.
I don’t really buy into Bartle player types but I believe that Boundless is big enough for lots of cool ways to play.
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You get it. So exciting. I will return to play!
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Boundless is really a game for people who love games – so many of the old timers here (like myself) are people who played MMOs a lot and especially sandbox style games. It’s really a testament to how special and unique the core experience of Boundless is that people have stayed around, still playing, even during these years of content drought when the game felt like it was dying. The experience of a lonely but interconnected world brings me straight back to playing games like Everquest as a kid in the early days of the internet, it’s a wondrous, magical feeling. We just need more content, more planets, more players, and I’m really excited to see that the game is going to continue being developed.
I had a bittersweet feeling of “what’s the point?” thinking that the servers might get shut off before long. I always felt Boundless had such massive untapped potential, which was frustrating. After more than two thousand hours (gulp) playing Boundless by now, I can easily see myself spending two thousand more if the game will receive updates and a new lease of life. In the closed beta before release, I seriously expected we would see a population of 10,000+, the game is just that good. It was like being in a special club because you were in on the secret before everyone else. Unfortunately, it seems like lack of exposure, lack of development resources to follow through on content updates, or whatever the problems were, meant that Boundless never lived up to its potential back then.
I’m very excited to see what Monumental will be able to do with it. Boundless will, even if the servers get shut off, always remain with me in my memory as a special part of my life. That “intangible factor” which people fall in love with is maybe not something that’s so easy to come up with a marketing slogan for, but it’s what many people are looking for in a game.
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With all the dev ideas popping up here and in other threads, it’s important to remember that the way boundless works brings us a bit of a soft population cap.
Blasting out advertisements and attempting to flood the game with players immediately just isn’t going to pay off. There needs to be a fair bit of work on the internals first.
Definitely not being a (trying to be a) downer here, just a reminder that it’s not like someone can just bring 10k people to the game. Or honestly, 5k. Much less “minecraft numbers”.
As it stands, massive viral success of boundless in terms of revenue or player count would 100% depend on the private universes coming out, and more people being attracted to the private building game than the MMORPG game we’ve been enjoying all of this time.
Again, these things are addressable, in code and in simple management of expectations, this isn’t a “we’re going nowhere” post in any way. More of “this is about work not miracles”. So many posts about “just fix this one problem and bam…” but really none of them address the real obstacles.
It will definitely be interesting to see the direction this takes. Boundless is too many pieces of too many things right now. And most of it is hopium wrapped around an actually somewhat fragile core. Boundless really needs these things:
- A clear direction
- A team that holds the line
After that, commercial success could come from where we are now in any number of ways. Very different versions of commercial success. Lots of options. But not just 100x (or whatever) growth of the current model by adding some UI cleanup and better tutorials. It’s literally not feasible.
It’s going to be much more interesting than that.
also here have some extra quotes “”"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 
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You could not be more wrong about this. There is no way that Boundless ever competes with Minecraft on that kind of experience – if you want a “private voxel universe,” are you going to wrestle with this new, experimental fork of an existing (far less popular) game, or are you going to search up one of the many, many available guides and get a custom Minecraft server running for your kids in an afternoon (or whatever)?
Where Boundless differs (and is much better in my opinion) from Minecraft is precisely in its MMO aspects.
However, you are right that the current situation has many problems. Could the servers even handle 10,000 concurrent players? We don’t know. The existing set of planets, not counting sovereign worlds paid for by players or subscribers, certainly couldn’t.
Why is it not like someone can do this? Plenty of people can do this. Boundless, as far as I’m aware, had close to zero marketing around the time of release. Another factor is that the price point was prohibitive for many people. If the game goes Free-to-Play, and is promoted in more ways than just word of mouth, why couldn’t we see as many as 10,000 concurrent players? I don’t see any reason why not.
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Just give me a better NPE, Real-time chat system with no delays and better dev communication and you can have my money
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We do know.
See above.
50 x 85 = 4250. The game as we know it is basically unplayable well before 4250 concurrent players. There are some snap answers people will drop to why this “doesn’t matter”. But oh, it does. It really does.
But also please if people want to discuss this matter in detail let’s have a thread about it - not another announcement that turns into several thousand posts of petty argument over potential future scenarios.
In general and the reason I mention it here is honestly because the number of people popping up and certain things starting to be said again make me feel like I don’t want to take another lap on the exact same roller coaster, again.
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There are 50 large Known Worlds with plenty of room (we didn’t launch with 50). There are well over 300 planets, if you include Sovereigns. There have been over 300 Sovs on average since they were introduced. There was a bad bottleneck after the official launch, but they upped the max number of players allowed on a single planet and they added the ability to spawn new planets to meet demand. I don’t know if they’re using AWS auto-scaling or if it’s a mostly manual process, but this seems to be less of an issue than it was in the beginning.
After watching numerous videos and streams of people playing this game for the 1st time, I agree that the NPE needs a lot of attention. Some of those players gave up in the sanctum. A lot of the others gave up during the initial gathering resources quests and placing beacons/plots.
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I think, to one of @Nightstar’s points - the NPE is also a somewhat coupled with the universe size (and density), as well. The larger and more complex it gets, the more challenging it is for newcomers (portal networks are overwhelming to understand early on, etc). There’s a lot of interesting things to work on improving there! (possibly also requiring some community involvement as well)
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Nice; thank you for those answers!
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Jumping in to confirm this. AWS, which is the PaaS for Boundless, has elasticity and can automatically scale both horizontally and vertically as needed/contracted.
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How Boundless scales is a major discussion point behind the scenes right now. It is critical to the game’s long-term future so we’re definitely going to figure it out!
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I’m very excited to hear there is a future for Boundless!
After pouring so much into this game and having it slowly die was heartbreaking. I let my beacons expire and figured I’d call it a clean break at that point. This feels like good news, I want to believe it’s great news. I want to go build stuff, again. I’m going to need some convincing that it’s real.
@monty1 you’ve gained a small but passionate player base.
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Hello @Tiggs! Seeing official signs of life here brings back fond memories of Boundless early days right after release and for the months that followed. I am so excited to see what’s in store for us. 🥹
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I totally agree with you. Those threads need to back off and settle down. Throwing big suggestions out there, especially some of the crazy ones they’ve come up with need to wait. They already said it will be at least 6 months before they’ll have any plans to show us, but some people are so TRIGGER HAPPY as to just fly off the handle and go nuts. I mean come on guys, settle down!
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