Remove Portals from Boundless and Replace them with Waypoints

Suggestions
1

Remove portals from Boundless. The current implementation doesn’t scale with the amount of planets and unfairly favors the few people that have a lot of Oort.

It is no longer possible to run an average shop, you either have to fully commit on a big shop with tons of portals or run a small stall in a mall. Nobody cares, or visits a medium shop with a single portal.

With rising Oort prices it gets harder and harder to connect “fun” or useful projects because they will not produce any meaningful footfall amount but cost more and more to keep the portals open.

In my opinion this is a problem as, even if you have a good or interesting idea, you most likely will not be able to bring it to life because you cannot acquire the Oort required to connect it. Stuff like Code Gleam is a good example. Beautifully build and useful but it goes down from time to time. This is also bad for us, the other players who can’t use this service.

I think we should switch to a system like GW2 with waypoints. Instead of running portals we would use Oort to fuel our own waypoints where everyone can warp to for free. This would scale much better because every shop or other useful or fun location would only have to run one single such waypoint.

1 Like
2

i like portals

11 Likes
3

So use waypoints from one location on a planet, to another location on the same planet?

We would still need to use portals to travel from one planet to a different planet? (Or do you mean remove all portals? - this would likely destroy the oort market)

3 Likes
4

Why not just add the Waypoints while keeping portals as they are?

3 Likes
5

they have waypoints thru the location tokens and in game shopscanner

6

True, location tokens are somewhat like waypoints. You can go there without building a portal, by using the sanctum.

1 Like
7

Maybe give the waypoints a blinksec limit based on their size (and Oort they consume). A Small 1x2 waypoint could only be freely warped to from the planets where you could open a 1x2 portal today. Bigger portals could be warped to from farther away.

You can only warp to things you have in your location tab and it’s limited how many you can have and you must go through the sanctum (or build a temporary portal if you’re on unplotted land).

I want to run a waypoint in my shop, labeled with the name of my shop. Then, everyone can open the new waypoint menu and see all the waypoints, select and and warp there for free.

Locations are to get to some place you’ve already been. My waypoints would be for people who have never been with me to find me.

You can warp to shops through the scanner?

1 Like
8

all the portal situation needs is more ways to get oort, or more ways to power a portal. portals are way too good to be removed :slight_smile:
there could some mechanic that would reward well optimized portal networks. no idea how tho, but there’s a lot of duplicate portals, portals leading to a shop 15 meters away from the hub and other similar ways a lot of oort is currently wasted. portals within 1 beacon, settlement or city could have reduced costs too

4 Likes
9

There’s nothing unfairly in this game we all equal ti get as much ort as anyone else. But I would love to see minable ort. For those miners not just for the hunters.

1 Like
10

I think they really are not. These long distance portal networks are kinda cool, I give you that. And the implementation with the ability to view through them is top notch.

But. When you try to shop at one of these portal sopping hubs… that’s just disgustingly annoying.

You might know that shop ABC on Gellis has what you want (which already requires you to walk through 30 portals at the TNT hub and open the scanner menu on every planet). Now, if you’re lucky it’s either nearby the TNT portal already or has a portal at the TNT hub labelled “ABC”. Spoiler alert, it is not. The portal is labelled XYZ, why label the portal the same as your beacon if you can confuse potential customers? :slight_smile:

Let’s assume you haven’t found a portal and you don’t want to walk 2000m (EVERY shop is always located >2000m from the TNT portal. Always!) Next stop is the PS shopping hub. Ok, Gellis… doesn’t take that much time to figure out it’s a European planet with the PS network, everything is very well labelled. We are now on Lamblis. But, again, the portal is, of course, not labelled ABC. Now we have to stare through each and every portal. Loading… *humm* *humm* … Loading Arie… ok, can’t be right, next…

And maybe you found a portal that’s relatively nearby… why do some people have to put a lock right next to the portal? Or build under water without an exit. Now you have to fight with the sanctum portal to cheese yourself out. And if it’s one of these flying bases you can try to grapple at the tight second.

Portals are highways. But they are a terrible implementation for the “last mile”.

In my implementation, shop ABC would run a waypoint. The waypoint would conveniently be called ABC because it’s on the same beacon. You would take the Gellis portal of your favorite portal network (remember, you already have to, to run the shop scanner) open the waypoint menu and off you go. After being done with shopping you would open the waypoint menu and either select Ultima at Eresho, PS at Lamblis, TNT at Circapous I, or whatever your favorite next location is. These networks would obviously run a more powerful waypoint, consuming more Oort, but would allow you to directly jump to their hub of choice.

Advantage for the shop? It only needs a single waypoint instead of a ton of portals.
Advantage for the customers? They can reach the shop that sells what they want.

3 Likes
11

Shops doesn’t need to have like a 10+ portals, all those portals are more for malls, 2 to 3 is just fine for a shop(any other portals is from people wanting to have a direct link to that shop) as long as the portals go to key locations. If you promote your shop people will come, you also need to have stuff to sell but thats a different story.

3 Likes
12

That’s very accurate description of my shopping experience. Even the obligatory 2000m away, and wrong sign on portal.
One simple tweak that would help with that is if portal would show beacon name in its own description you get when you point on it. From there it’s not far fetched to have portal highlighted when you set its beacon as destination.

2 Likes
13

Portals are one of the prominent features of the game with all the freedom they bring. It is one of the features why this game went on my wishlist back then. Removing them would immensely harm the game.

Hard to find shops are not the problem of portals but labeling. When portals are not / wrongly labeled then it is a problem between shop owner and portal destination.
Another solution can be the shop name. I added a @PS Dzassak to beacon name so that everyone knows how to get there. A “via PS/TNT” is another way to do it.

3 Likes
14

I’ve had the same experience and even tho it’s frustrating it’s also let me stumble across some awesome builds

1 Like
15

I’ve had the exact same experience, and I think we even went to the same underwater base.

I try to avoid this hassle to others and thats why I name my beacon as the portal sign.

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But I wish beacon names had more length, I have to abbreviate too much location names.

Maybe add a feature to the beacon where you can add a list of portals.

Another option could be that the beacon would show a list of closest active portals in a reasonable radius (100-200m) and then we could check some and when hovering through shops at the knowledge scanner we could see those portals, even click one and add it as a waypoint because many times, even knowing the name of the portal, you have to spend too much time spinning around trying to find it.

1 Like
16

The location tokens already serve this purpose, i don’t see having a UI menu with all possible shops listed would be much more comber some than just using the BUTT and finding shops that way, I have visited all kinds of shops this way that had no active portals just running… (also, like how to become registered as one waypoint?, should that have an upkeep? I see it becoming crowded with empty shops too…)

17

(couldn’t add or correct my previous comment)

I see now you suggested

I missed that. Apologies.

I feel like that other thread

We need more oort from hunts instead of getting 9 to 12 oort shards you get 15 to 25 per meteor

Has demonstrated that oort can be amassed quite quickly in it’s current iteration. Despite the game being 5 years old soon (current live universe) and many players having amassed a lot of coin in those 5 years, the current price of rough oort still isn’t enough for me to part with a ss I’ve got stashed “just in case”, many players hold onto a fair bit of stock, because they don’t have an immediate need for the coins. If a need arose, I’d probably offload it to use that coin for other things, but running a single hunt a month has me fueling 4 1x2 portals currently, quite comfortably with oort to spare… And of course some people do sell their oort so you can always buy some

1 Like
18

Portals are a good addition to the game, I would suggest maybe creating a different type of portal for on world only.

This would hopefully help with the bandwidth issue as well since it’s not having to connect to another server.

So there would be…

Warp Conduits: Temp travel portals that cost coin to travel to same planet locations or other planets close by.

Shop Conduits: Permanent same world portals that don’t cost Oort.
Note: These would be made out of 10 Refined Rock, 10 Refined Wood, 2 Gold Alloy, 2 Silver Alloy, 2 Opal, and 4 Refined Diamond. Single Craft = 2 Shop Conduit blocks.

Creative Bridge Conduits: Portals to the creative world that don’t cost Oort.

Portal Conduits: Permanent portals to other worlds that cost Oort.

4 Likes
19

Waypoints would be better utilized in less established areas, like caves, and combat zones. Drop the way point and use it to go back to base, and then back. Maybe like Diablo franchise’s Town Portal spell?

2 Likes
20

I’m not sure on the Power and Spark cost but I think those are good ingredients for what you want.

1 Like