Hi! So Instead of necroing a thread I made suggesting this suggestion some ages ago I figured I’d just resuggest my suggestion in a suggestion resuggestion thread in suggestions.
So quite a lot of players come to play boundless and they are presented with various places to start at. You can start near a Steam friend if you planned ahead and knew a lot more about the game than most people do when they start a new game. Or you can get lopped on a random world, with optional spitter hospitality.
My suggestion is to add a third ‘cities’ selection. Come up with some metric based on any or some of the following: prestige, active players in a radius, recently traded goods, recent footfall, # of portals in an area. You somehow pick the top few of those without offending anyone (I know I ask the impossible! This is your chance to rise to the occasion!) and allow new players to start in a city of their choice.
Or you could sort of have a newbie beacon that eats oort or fuel or something to stay active that lists your city as a selection for newbies to start in.
Or a combination of the above. Or whatever else you like.
Just, please, let newbies who choose to start in a city.
6 Likes
You can already do this to a degree. When you start the game and load up your first warp augment into the totem. You point it at the planet to decide where to go. I intentionally chose (my first time) to go to a place with little to no development (it can be pretty obvious at a glance if there are large cities on the map).
Not only this but, while you have that totem pointed at the rotating ball above your head, you see little red player icons if there is someone there (I also immediately knew that’s what they were, even with little knowledge out side of a game informer article years prior). I believe there is a gold icon that also shows you a settlement is the capitol from the santium as well, which would tell a new player that the area is more likely to be populated since it is a “capitol”.
the one thing you can’t choose is the exact planet… which a new player would never know what planets were what anyway… so i guess you could say “more populated” or “more barren” be options, but I’m pretty sure if we get big influxes of new players it spawns new planets, so it likely wishes to push newer players towards less inhabited planets (helps with the tutorial to not be in a city for sure).
1 Like
I am not sure if this is such a good idea to promote to new players in a list, They may not understand the downsides of mistakenly starting in a large city, for example, having problems or being confused why they can’t get the items needed to do the „Tutorial“ because everything in a large area around them is plotted and protected.
I feel only new players who already know players who are playing the game, and those players are willing to help that player are the main ones who will get the most out of starting in a city.
I feel it is much better for a new player who has no friends in the game to start somewhere remote, or somewhere somewhat near a city, but never in a city
3 Likes
Yeah I landed on Arie and could clearly see the cities, I chose land just outside of River Towns because I had no idea if I would need to be near a city. I still remember saving up a pittance a day to buy diamonds for my first power coils 
But I think a little info when we do our first warp would be handy. Information about using other people’s portals (because I had no idea they would be public) or information about buying things (again I didn’t know we could even buy and sell, I came in completely blind to this game!)
1 Like
if we had a little more explanation in the sanctum stating what all the icons mean on the screen then it would be a little clearer what we are spawning near.
Ironically i ended up spawning outside of the city i live in today.
What i would like is the ability to add a description to the beacon that you could see with the warp totem or from the beacon itself
The start near a friend can be a really bad idea. I had a friend do that but I was homes on a T3. They spent the first hour just dying nonstop and I haven’t been able to get them to play since 
I came to this game from “that block game im not sure we should say” following one person i knew who was playing only because we had done survival servers before and accomplished some mega builds and fun times.
I purposefully didn’t start next to him.
I chose instead to hit up a random planet (Maryx circa 1 year ago) and picked one place that sounded interesting because i figured that worst case i could figure out how to change later. I moved over with my friend eventually and then made a ton of new friends- but honestly my starting place was perfect.
I’d like to vote maybe a bit more choices of planets to spawn on- allow selection of USE/USW/EU/AUS and then show a list of the smaller planets and current online populations. It would allow for more ease of selecting your starting planet if you know you want to be where the people are!
1 Like