The purpose of having a Pvt server connected to the Real universe is to avoid plot griefing, settlement theft, “ruined” landscapes, random plots everywhere. You could have a planet just for your Guild City… or make the whole planet into a giant Little Japan theme. And if it follows the same rules as normal planets you can mine here or there all the same.
Best part though, there are regular servers for anybody who does not want to participate.
How exactly do we get here, though, if the world is connected to the main servers? If the owners can portal into the main universe, then randoms can portal there unless the owner has GMish powers (at least the ability to ban people/remove their beaons). If you are giving someone that power, that world now no longer follows the main universe rules.
Inless some of the other stuff I have read from other players was misinformation, yes I do believe it is apart of the plan…
I would assume and hope just like any other new world that gets added to the universe.
Randoms can and should be allowed to portal there.
And now i think you understand my concerns about this situation.
Real question here, as I never played Trove or Ark or a lot of other games that I see people make comparisons of boundless to. In those games that had private worlds, did any of them allow those to be connected to the main game, and if so what was their solution?
In my mind, a private server would only ever be private (or part of a private universe, I guess). If someone is going to pay the devs to host a special server for them, is that not also a guarantee to be able to do whatever you want on that world? Most of “whatever you want” would be at odds with the main game’s drop rates/economy/whatever.
I prefer to have population on live server and adding more planet than adding private servers. Private server would be a huge single player server as i assume people do prefer MMO than going to a private server with a single owner and a couple of friends 
I played ARK, but i can not speak for the other game you mentioned,
In ark there were 2 types of servers, Official servers, and player ran servers, and the 2 server types were kept isolated from each other, You could transfer your character between the same server types, regardless of the map that ran, but you could not ever transfer stuff from an Official to a private, or the other way around.
There were 100s or maybe even 1000s of official servers and quite a lot more of the player ran servers.
I’d pay a small fortune to be able to have a fully modable rental server ala minecraft.
Right, and this is the only way that makes any amount of sense, at least to me. It isn’t remotely fair to allow a character on a planet where the diamond drop date is 50% (or whatever resource, block color, basicly anything), to participate back on the main game, at least with those resources.
It does seem like a very boundless thing to do to look at a problem with a known solution, and then throw that solution out in favor of something that doesn’t really work and then iterating on it 10 times, eventually arriving at something that resembles the known solution.
Ease of access.
We don’t know if they will add this color changing thing to the game, but let assume they do add it, we don’t know how hard, annoying or grindy it will be to do so. Buying a world, and being allowed to prevent other people from mining the blocks, and only you can mine them and sell them, might take alot less effort then someone who haves to mine a different color block and then go thru whatever system that may or may not be ██████ to beable to get the same result and may or may not have to spend more to do so.
I honestly don’t really care if they connect to the “main” servers or not. I’d prefer they don’t actually.
I’d take server, grow it with some friends, and dial back the grind about 95% as well as mod in some additional shop features and NPCs. So fun!
Probably won’t happen though. Who would want to play on the main servers then?
This is my only concern about private servers that are not connected to the main universe. is what it might do to the player base on the main server. We already have a draining population if one is to believe all of the doom and gloom posts going about theses days.
The main world is never going to grow much at the current rate. I look at the average play time of people that stick with the game and its something like 200-400 hours. The market for these players is like the .2% of gamers in general.
And then you have to feature complete games it’s a hard proposition. I think the set of “regular users” will more or less remain the same. And you’ll see casual gamers who are interested, buy the game, play for 10 hours, maybe create a stone hut some wood tools, maybe copper, never even find the PS or AQ hubs and then never play again.
Edit: I realize this sounds gloomy, so I wanna state, I love the game, but the current time requirement, in comparison to other nearly identical games will limit the appeal to the vast majority of gamers. I hope this changes for the better.
“Roadrunners now have a 100% spawn rate on my T1 world and drop 50 Rough Oortstone Each” or some such would be the “god mode” fears of devastating the economy as it currently stands. I, however, hope that at some point the economy is going to be re-made with a more stable foundation, and in that case it wouldn’t take something nearly as drastic to cause harm.
Hopefully the date is never.
This will either P2W the game or fragment the player base…either of which is game breaking.
This should be years down the line, if ever.
You wouldn’t be able to make roadrunners drop 50 oort stones and still connect to the Boundless universe no more than you could make trees out of rubies.
Then we are right back to “What are the renters getting for their money?”
One thing i miss in this discussion is the price of the rental servers. We can be talking about what you can and cant do on your private world, but that discussion is kinda moot since we do not know how much its going to cost.
Say renting a world is as expansive as the rental fee for a region in Second Life. Then we are talking about 250 $ A MONTH in rent. I am not sure, but i doubt if the rental fee is going to be about the same as a general subscription for a MMORPG if you get a complete world to your liking to play on.
I am very interested what the price is going to be when private worlds are released. Seeing that in Early acces the backer price which went with the private world was somewhere in the 2.500 - 4.000 $ range i have the impression its not going to be cheap.
Rental servers, for me, had better be in sooner than later. They were advertised as being part of the 1.0 release. They were in the trailers. It’s a key portion of the game that drew me to purchase it to begin with. Without them, I definitely won’t be a long term player, but that’s fine. Plenty of other games out there when I do have time to play one. Speaking of time I haven’t been able to log in but maybe an hour this past week.
When they do introduce rental planets I expect the monthly fee to coincide with other server hosting services ranging from 20-50$ per server per month. As it was originally planned under that assumption I’d planned on paying 150$ a month towards 3 planets minimum under those assumptions.
Further I don’t want them connected to the main Boundless world at all. I plan to make mobs harder, buildings destroyable, and reduce the grind by significant amounts. Just like with ARK and every other similar game, the devs give a great sandbox toolkit but I can manage and run a community of like minded interests better. Boundless suffers a massive identity problem and for myself, my family and friends, and like minded players I know I can tweak the Boundless settings to a level where we would get far more enjoyment out of the game and ultimately sale more copies of the game as a result.
Or we never get rental servers and we just quit playing regardless.
This minute private servers release, the game dies for anyone not on one.
I don’t see it. Instead, people would just keep doing what they’re doing but their “house” would be on a private planet.