Remove footfall to balance out the playing field

Suggestions
290

MY SOLUTION TO GET RID OF FOOTFALL

I am a heavy proponent of footfall, but I’m not blind tot he issues it is causing. I just think the benefits outweigh the negatives.

That being said, repeating the same arguments are getting us nowhere.

I still maintain that some form of passive reward is essential to the longevity of the game. People need to be able to earn while they are out grinding. I actually like the idea of dailies, and I hope it becomes real, but it doesn’t replace footfall.

So this is what I propose. And it works in three parts.

  1. A daily set prestige reward. Every 10Kp you earn 1,000c per IRL day, with the amount lowering to 500c per IRL day for each 10K over 50Kp

  2. A “Like” beacon. You place this on your property. You only get one per character. If someone takes the time to “Like” you beacon, you pocket, lets say, 100c. Only can happen once per IRL day.

  3. The portal payment. I don’t know what this would be, but i would suggest it be rewarded in Oort shards instead of coin. 5 (or pick a number) different characters use your portal, you get a shard. A character passage only counts once per day. Between this and a “Like” beacon, you make the portal hub self sustaining.

I think this would solve the issues. Passive income without overpowering the people at the top and still allowing the portal hubs to not be a huge resource drain.

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291

it seems it all comes down to playstyle. adding dailies might help to bring balance back but fully removing footfall will be taking away from those that like it in there playstyle.
so add dailies for those who don’t want to play the footfall game and footfall for those who don’t want to play the dailies game. there will of course be those who do both and those who don’t like that fact but it seems to be about as good as it gets.

292

You could balance them against each other, with some sort of cap (likely multiplied based on settlement/town/city status). So if the daily cap is Xc and you got that in footfall then you don’t get dailly quests. If you don’t hit the footfall benchmarks then you get quests to make up. Might be too complex, though.

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293

it sounds good and we might be getting closer to a solution but I think if someone is willing to go that extra mile and do both they should get a bigger payout.
we live in a day and age where everyone gets a gold star for showing up and I just can’t get behind that.

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294

The cap is simply so the devs can have some control on inflation. You could maybe cap it so that you can only get half the total from each activity.

I don’t think anyone wants “gold stars” for showing up, they just want to play. This is a game, after all. If we just wanted to play “IRA Simulator” we would all be on the Scotttrade Forums, not Wonderstuck’s. :slight_smile:

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295

I would love that system, but I’m the achievement-chaser type. I’ve been trying to do all my dailies on all 10 alts even tho their payout is pitiful in comparison to even my meager footfall. :stuck_out_tongue:

I still don’t think everyone will agree with this, tho I think a large part of the population would like it. On a different topic about dailies I recall seeing a few posts to the effect of ‘dailies are bad because they make those with limited time and unable to do them every day feel like they’re missing out and they give too much of an advantage to people with more time to play’ or something along those lines.

:man_shrugging:

296

A system that rewards play seems inherently better than a system that rewards not playing past your initial time investment. Ideally the daily quests are so simple as to be fairly close to trivial if you are just playing the game (Break 100 blocks instead of Mine 50 Diamonds, for example) in the fashion that you choose to play the game.

297

Wow, just what the gaming world needs: more dailies.

Without footfall say goodbye to those portal hubs you use constantly because that’s a massive source of how they maintain that.

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298

Discussed at length up-thread if you want to read up.

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299

Read my post, above. I think would work.

300

I just completely sold out of refined Stones, to someone going to upload them all for more money. Enjoy the higher cost, and it had nothing to do with footfall or bombmining. I’m going to keep selling for fair prices.

301

Better don’t touch the foofall.
The bomb mining change already made a lot of people leave this game.
Especially they are experience royal alpha players.

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302

I would like to see proof of how many people left a game because they couldn’t op mine. If that’s why they played this game, then I don’t know what game out there could even make them happy.

also at what point is this thread beating a dead horse. Original thread about backers making footfall more than non backers and an unfair advantage. That’s settles to a few opinions. Maybe a new thread for detailed opinions of financial analytical debates of mmo economics in it’s own thread.

I’m done with this thread myself. Peace out, enjoy.

303

You can only replace footfall with another form of passive reward. Building is the active…erm…activity. Builders need to be rewarded the same way shopkeepers or portal owners are.

304

The concept of the Salt Wall is interesting and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about ever since the bomb mining nerf- though I didn’t have a name for it.

In my mind, many problems stem simply from how the progression between Iron and Gem isn’t clear.
Bomb mining was a salve to this problem but without it, players are run against this wall…again…and again…and again…
We see this every single day on the forums, in game, on Discord. “Gem Wall”. Diamond grind. Iron Forever. What Gems?

Lots of things are considered upsettingly late-game due to being “locked” behind gems. Why is this a much more distressing problem than being “locked” behind any other tier? It seems clear that there is something happening that makes gems that much harder than anything else.

It’s shown itself in many places in many forms, but here, it’s portal conduits, tied to being able to be connected to the community for footfall. It’s created some perceived chasm or barrier that separates newcomers from the veterans, rather being than a natural step in progression.
So I wonder how people would feel if that problem was remedied?

Well, back on topic. I don’t actually have a problem with footfall, and overall I think the so-called abusers of the system are not actually plentiful enough to throw the baby with the bathwater.

Coin is almost purely a tool for player trading, so the majority of its circulation ought to come from services rendered to other players. I do consider building a thing that people come to visit as a service rendered- but it is a passive type of service and is so reflected. It makes a pittance, truly, compared to active trading, which makes sense. Obviously, active trading prices are being settled by players based on what they have from footfall + feats.

And because coins are pretty much just a tool for user trading, it really does make sense to me that it would be generated by building places where players congregate- especially in a voxel building mmo. The proposed alternative is everyone, hermits and socialites alike, generating it through some form of daily quest augment to the current daily feats, but this makes less sense to me since the purpose of coin is to be social.

Why should coins, a tool almost exclusively to be used in a player-to-player community, be generated from activities that contribute nothing to the player-to-player community?

The currently existing reward for active play is coin from selling stuff to players.

I could understand the argument against footfall if and only if Boundless had other major coin costs that were not related to the player community, because warps alone aren’t exactly big.
As it is, Boundless isn’t really comparable to other mmorpgs economy-wise because it’s not as if there are ways to spend coin outside of player-to-player trading and warps.

The only problem I can identify is that the coin sinks in the game (warps and taxes) aren’t really doing much to balance out the coin generation. But obviously the devs can know its actual impact more than any of us.

Edit: oh my god that was an essay. sorry. I’ll try to prune this through further edits.

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305

The 2nd half of your essay (it was good read and I appreciate your perspective) seems to boil down, largely, to your experience as an active seller. That is a valid play style, obviously, but not everyone wants to do that (I, for sure, don’t.) So for those that aren’t doing that, request baskets are more of a ■■■■ shoot (I just got all these things that I know have value… oh… this basket doesn’t have coin… they are buying them for 1/4 the market buying price… why am I even here), and this gets back to the salt wall. If you aren’t actively selling, and aren’t bringing in footfall money, how do you get money to trade, because you need to trade to get past the gem wall? Well, you could passively sell things by setting up a store, but unless you do it in the city itself you have to have portal tech, which is ALSO behind the gem wall. So if you’re a new player, WTF are you supposed to do other than plink on rocks for way too long to get over that wall.

Edit: My TL;DR to my whole point in this thread is this. Please add tools so that all play styles are actually viable like the marketing. If someone wants to be on their own or in a small group for the most part and only travels into cities every now and then to trade, they should be able to. Obviously they will make less money than others and that’s okay, but currently it feels like they just can’t participate at all until they do their time in the diamond mines.

Double Edit!: The silver/gold tools are another place the devs could expand and fix this. If you keep portal tech behind the gem wall but make silver a strict upgrade to iron and gold a strict upgrade to silver then the gem wall becomes a gem slope. I’d even be willing to grind more if it felt like the grind was doing anything.

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307

I can agree with this, provided portals at some point change to be pre-power tech. Players in other MMOs can be “part of the community” by selling to bots or posts in auction houses where no matter where people are they can buy the goods. Here the people have to come to you (which, frankly, is cool design, getting to show off your work and make some money on top), but the game doesn’t provide you (easily) that link. I do hope that change is made, then if I don’t get footfall I can at least say “Okay, what can I do to make this cooler” or if I don’t sell anything I can study the market and find out why.

308

That is, I think, a core part of the issue, and one that I try to look at from the ‘new guy’ perspective, even tho I’m past that point myself now.

Warp cost is negligible ONLY with access to portals. And so, players feel forced to build close to other people’s portals (cities or personal portals, doesn’t matter) when they don’t have a way to get their own portals going, and thus the freedom to live anywhere that comes with it.

Now, someone that chooses to stay away from civilization from the start (let’s say the player in question dislikes having 50 solid gleam towers built to build height limit within render distance) would be cut off from access to portals, and be forced to either warp (and push the barrier further away, because their coins are spent on traveling instead of, say, power coils, or better tools, or whatever their chosen path to get past the gem barrier would be) or to waste travel time (thus also pushing the wall further away, because that is time not spent grinding at the gem mines or whatever their chosen path is) and potentially, depending on planet level and choice of skills, incurring some death penalties from that travel time, which also slows down their progress.

So it seems like a minor thing once you’re past it, but it may not be so for those that are at that point in progression.

I don’t know if you were in the head start, but I recall very vividly how everyone was constantly out of coin from warping until the portal networks got fully established. That may very well be where those new players are at today.

To sum it up, the end result is choosing between two bad alternatives (if a player prefers to avoid the gleam towers): either feel the loss of freedom in choosing a location for their base, or feel the frustration from slowing down their progress.

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309

I have a plot in a major city that makes generates a lot of footfall income (800-2k depending on the day). There are two shop stands there. I made more money selling on those two stands when I sporadically stock them than I have from footfall.

I’ve made much more from selling leaves into request baskets.

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310

I was going to write about this too because yes. I was a day 1 launch player and was on Storis prior to PS connecting it. It definitely led to some strategy changes like building planet outposts and limited travel. I also packed up and moved 3 times due to this. But that is never needed now.
The saturation of portals is what drives down warp cost. Yes. Presumably this is why ea players were given the time to get infrastructure up.
Fact remains that portals are more available than ever before and now only requires 200c for a round trip…I don’t think that it’s fair to say that they are inaccessible to people who chose to live away.

Footfall still isn’t where the problem is.

I don’t really see the hard choice because footfall and shop stands are not the only ways to make coin. Request baskets absolutely fill that gap, as is grabbing a small plot just for your shop in a hub.

I firmly believe that if you are not at a point to get ppl to come to you, it is fair to instead go to them.
The problem outlined is how hard a climb it is to get players to come to you, which is absolutely a fair complaint.

Edit: I may have misunderstood your point, which was less about trading power and more about covering warp costs (?).we already have daily feats which covers 1 round trip but I wonder if it could be boosted or otherwise give warp credit…?

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