Yeap. Also aquatopian embassy has "new player"stand where everything is like under 100c
Orā¦just go build in a desert. Build in a swamp or forest and it rains way more. Used fo complain about rain in my old build. Now im in a swamp its about 50% of the time. Cant say i mind, makes it more swampy
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The irony in this comment is we have players complaining that they take a break and come back and their build has regenerated or they forgot to fuel and their build regenerated and a group of players keeps advocating that the system should not remove these builds or store them. So the players that are using the tool provided in the game to preserve their builds and resources are the problem now? Canāt have it both ways.
If you want the abandoned builds occupied and to not have the small community spread out over 50 planets them you need to find a way to keep the existing player base playing. Then recruit your new players.
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That is nice you have a few friends that might play the game, But free week ends are supposed to be about a much bigger cause, Your friends will have to wait, if you yourself can not convince them to play at this time.
We do not need another free weekend at this time. I was 100% against the 1st free weekend they put out, and I hope the damage caused by that will not be as bad as I think it might be.
The NPE (New Player Experience) in this game is extremely bad for the ācasualā player, Or the kind of player who doesnāt have enough gaming experience to be able to learn on their own, put things together, and most of all, experiment with everything in the game. Because the type of players this game attracts is more likely to be the kind of player who will start to give up the moment something becomes confusing or difficult, the NPE needs alot of work.
This absolutely must be done before the devs even consider doing another free weekend.
Then there is the lack of content that will keep causing players to quit, Even new players will quit from lack of content, as content is lacking at all phases of the game. All the friends I have gotten to play this game, quit after about 2 or 3 weeks due to this.
There is the problem with beacon fuel, While I personally think the system is fine, and the players just arenāt paying attentionā¦ It is creating a problem, Somewhere, the importance of beacon fuel is not being stressed enough, or the warning signs are not obnoxious enough for players to pay attention to them. I feel a few too many people have quit due to them losing just about everything. This may be another fault of having a bad NPE system
The leveling up system needs to be slightly redesigned, This is the only game that I have played where leveling up gives you an item you need to open, In other games, when you level up, you are just simply given the stat points and anything else automatically, and to further turn it into a problem, is the fact the level up boxes, look quite alot like RNG loot boxes, even if they arenāt it is an extremely bad 1st impression for reasons that should be obvious to most people. The feat reward system might also need to be looked at too,
Lore, This is nearly non existent, We get one text block at the start of the game with a tiny bit of lore/story line in it, and that is it, no more. A story line can give players a motivation to keep playing, because they want to find out more, and can take the edge off of some aspects of the grind, With out a storyline, I am sure some players will lose motivation, It is important in an MMO game to have lore.
There are other problems that need to be fixed that can be damaging for the new player if they remain as is, but I think this is enough words for now.
The bottom line from me is;
No More Free Weekends, Not until this game is actually in Post-Beta state, And I am not talking about version numbers, I am referring how the game feels in terms of completeness and polish.
I feel that each free weekend they do that turns out to be a flop will damage the potential success of the next free weekend by quite an amount.
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Imo the problem is that you fall to hard by losing everything besides level and inventory. There should be a system that stores at least your items for you until you return. The devs stated multiple times that it would create an infinite storage that will be abused. But I donāt buy that. All you need is a simple check if the beacon ran out on its own by lack of fuel and simply donāt safe items when the beacon was destoryed prematurely. Nobody will wait a month to put stuff in a storage, thatās just too impractical.
This just canāt be stated enough. Totally agree. Itās a huge problem in new players first impression of the game.
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Problem solved.
New players donāt generally have much coin, so it wouldnāt matter what prices a nearby shop might have. They are learning the game & figuring things out - they arenāt immediately aware of shops & trying to buy things.
Iāve seen clean titanium tools for as much as 5k each. I just assume that person hasnāt explored much & probably doesnāt sell anything. It doesnāt hurt/concern me. There are plenty of other shops/worlds to check out. Pricing is different in every area.
New players are guided to make basic tools almost right away & start on level 1 planets.
I personally like the rain & find it very aesthetic/zen, but thatās just me. The only weather I donāt care for, is the weather that 100% impedes game play (snow covering blocks & builders/gatherers couldnāt see which block was which). I had a base on an icy mountain that I thought was amazing - I dismantled & moved it because I couldnāt stand the constant wind sounds lol
No it just makes the developers pay for the cost to store the builds of these players that may never come back. Why should my paying for gleam club pay for the storing of someone elseās build? It shouldnāt.
All you do is create a situation where you increase the overall cost of running the game on behalf of players that are not contributing any money to actually running the game.
James specifically commented that the cost is not minimal to store this amount of data. Especially for the large builds. Even if they have to store it now, at least now the players are possibly playing the game and might be buying gleam club to cover some of the costs of running the game.
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Maybe BL can give you a few keys/discounts or something for your friends? Maybe PM a dev? Couldnāt hurt to ask. There are a couple of games Iāve purchased on steam that gave me 1-3 keys for free to give to friends.
From what Iāve seen, I would have to agree that a free weekend might not be a good thing right now. People view/treat completed retail games differently from alpha/beta early access games ā I feel like this game screams alpha/beta right now. People have much less patience when a game is suppose to be a completed, polished, retail version of a game.
I donāt know what the solution would be for the beacon/plot/items issue, but it seems like thatās causing 50% of the negative reviews & rage-quits. I know itās really easy to fuel a beacon, but for some reason, a lot of people arenāt comprehending it very well. 
I think farming will bring in a decent trickle of new players, OG players, etc.
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This would be weird. Iāve never heard of a player quitting over prices at one shop. Most new players donāt even know there are shops.
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You highlighted a couple key points.
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The best beacon fuel shouldāve never been hard or expensive to get (ingame). Everyone shouldāve had an abundance of easy to get fuel from day one (that lasts longer than a month).
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Itās not that itās hard to comprehend, itās just that people arent thinking about Boundless every day/week/month if theyāre not playing the game.
The āreturn valueā for games like Boundless, Ark, Conan (etc) is much lower once you lose your stuff / base / dinosaurs / whatever. Iām sure thereās been plenty of people that have wanted to come back and play the game again, but once those people realize a lot of what they did theyād have to do again; it turns them off. The āTime lossā mechanisms in these games are rough and sometimes hard to stomach.
Actually Iāve assisted a lot of new players(a lot during the last free weekend too) & most of them donāt understand the beacon/plot/fuel concept at all. There are a few that I had to tell over & over that their campfire wasnāt going to last long and they should use a beacon. One placed like 15 campfires. They also donāt understand that blocks outside of the beacons/plots disappear. There is one steam review from a player that had over 1500hrsā¦beacon went out so he rage quit.
Fuel in BL is super easy to obtain/make. 2nd easiest thing next to a totem.
I canāt think of anything Iāve lost in another MMO from not logging in (besides expired quests & not getting log in rewards).
we need to isolate why that is tho we have already had 1 free to play weekend and it only saw a fraction of the people that played it stay in and if vet players are leaveing for greener pastures then that just signals that the same thing could happen to the free to play people down the line
tbh its better then the alternative where the new players walks around thinking all the reviews on steam are botted cuz there are no builds or players for miles around
that would be really hard to do they would have to change GC then prevent anyone with a already active sub form paying more so they could set the old GC has legacy then have the new one with the changed perks cuz we would see a massive ban wave if people came back only to find out the 10s or 100s of $ they spent on GC to protect there builds was removed and everything was gone
^ this i mean in boundless you can buildā¦or build or build some more if you are online at the right time maybe do a hunt but then boom back to building even minecraft atlest gives players a incentive to explore
thats another thing too new players are going to jump into the game see that there is jack all to do re bring up the steam page see a lack of early access tag and just stare blinky at the screen the devs pulled a fallout 76 in this regard where we are still playing a ābetaā over half a year into launch
sorry for the ping Kal-EL deleted my comment cuz i forget what i posted for your secton is a āhot topicā
So, from a strictly material and quantity view. I agree with both points.
However, all of the MMOs I have played generally are driven by new content releases. When you take time off from those games, the effectivity of you character and equipment suffers because even your end game gear can and does get washed out by the new common gear.
As for the OPs question. I think @majorvex had a good idea with friend keys. I would take it one step further and suggest that all players get 2-5 temporary account keys (1-2weeks) to hand out. That would provide a better pace of new traffic and it would allow players to hand them out to friend that they can coach or guide past some of the NPE shortfalls.
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The only thing with this is that in other MMOs, we get new costumes, new maps, new blocks, new weapons, new skillsā¦things are added. It gives you incentive to log in & play some more.
In the case of the vanishing beacons/plots/items/builds, things are removed. People are losing items, time, bases, equipment, etc. = disincentives (to log back in to BL or continue playing).
Iām not advocating for all abandoned things to stay in the BL Universe - I fully understand that would be a huge burden to the servers, from what has been mentioned.
However, I donāt know what the difference is between the BL servers/capacity that wonāt allow players to retain itemsā¦and other MMOs where your items stay in your club/inventory/chests/etc.
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yea like for say if WoW removed a level form all your charās for evey week you did not log in and do a daily quest
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How about a T1 exo planet appears that only allows free weekend accounts to build. Limit the plot count to 4-10 plots for the weekend. Allow access to teleport to the outskirts of each T3 and below capital city from the sanctum so new players can explore the live builds. Only condition is they cannot build on live servers under the free account.
Upgrading a free weekend account gives them a +X% exp gain up to level 20. To simplify this process, they can only carry over whats in their inventory to the live universe when they upgrade so a new system wonāt need to be implemented first (like the blueprint idea).
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I have begun to think that it would be better to have set places for a new player to arrive at. Close to a town that has a portal, maybe even select towns where there are players who are assigned to help, volunteers, we could offer to take on a couple new players to guide them perhaps for a short while.
In theory it sounds good to let players pick to land anywhere they want, but then they are lost in what to do, how to do it. Such as not understanding that a campfire is temp, that even though they get told, several times when they log in that their beacon needs fuel they donāt seem to get it and then lose their beacon and what they have.
I agree about the loot boxes, they see them as P2W, which unfortunately is stated in some reviews and in many posts on Steam by those who donāt understand and in spite from some who are mad. Several of us can think of one who wanted everyone to tell him what to do and then told us we were wrong and sent nasty PMs.
As I had stated, a free weekend should be for a holiday, such as Christmas not soon, hopefully after the farming is released and bugs are taken care of.
The issue isnāt with the 4 week fuel, itās with the higher level fuels that last longer. They should all be super easy (for new ppl).
I dont know of a MMO that you lose items in either. If you miss content and youāre less powerful than you can be, thatās okay, because you can always play the new content.
You bring up excellent points about the new player experience. Boundless doesnt do well explaining the experience. It only gets worse as you get higher level and see a 12 step process to produce blocks.
They donāt have to wait a month to put stuff in storage, If someone is keen on abusing this system, And the only rule for this system is that the beacon needed to have ran out of fuel on itās own, Then, What someone can do is set up more then one beacon, for an example, 4 of them, And stagger their fuel end times evenly, This would reduce the wait down to one week. More beacons would further reduce it, Up to the player how much micro management they want to do to abuse the system.
Abuse problems aside, it would be helpful to players to give them a reason to come back, but on the other side of the situation, it destroys the looting/raiding aspect of expired beacons. At this time I feel that player retention is more important then Looting/Raiding. But I am not sure if removing looting is going to cause even more players to quit.
The other thing is, while I do agree there should be some kind of help in this regards, The help shouldnāt be to such a degree that it promotes laziness and letting beacons expire becomes common place because letting it expire is no longer much of a downside.
In EVE online stuff can become permanently destroyed when ships get blown up,
In Darkages, When you die depending on the item one of 3 things can happen to it,
The item remains in your inventory (Not too many items do this)
The item breaks and is destroyed (Not too many items do this either)
The item falls into a ādeath pileā on the floor where you died, You have to get back to the pile to pick the items back up if you want them, You have one hour to do so before anyone is allowed to loot the items.
Also any item that reaches 0 durability will be destroyed if you fail to repair the item.