Testing 210: Guilds and Messaging++!

I legit almost said Gotham in my mini-story. This made my night. XD

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Can any tester or dev tell me what the ingredients are for the new items?
If possible I would like to see this info on future test patchnotes.

Reason for asking for this is because i would like to prepare beforehand, to create the new items.
Im on PS4 so I cannot look this up in test.

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What holding you on creating a guild, build a beautiful hub and shop district and start generating massive footfall?

You are correct. The people complaining for individual identity did not ask for this change.

They should have just created a new item, “Plot Buffer Zone”, that you place around your build to make it so it can’t be absorbed.

All anyone wanted was to, for example, create a “Hobbit Village” and have that be the sole name.

It’s clear the developer vision for Boundless didn’t match the vision of many players who wanted to create destination themes. In one year most planets are going to be gigantic settlements because of people continuing to plot. Cubits are infinite. The game is going to turn into planet vs planet basically.

I really don’t think that will happen if the game population keep dropping.
Even now, a lot of great city is falling. A lot of small towns despawn as well.

If population is keep increasing i think the case you mention may happen, and more planet will released as well.
But due to current state, i really don’t feel planet vs planet is the thing we need to worry about XD
Basically we may need to worry about ghost town vs ghost town.

Hopefully the patch may bring some players back, I really love the guild system they do, and really exciting about that, but still i don’t feel this is enough to save the population.

At least its a good start. Great job again dev team :slight_smile:

Well from my understanding when you log into the larger settlement it will say that, but when you walk into their settlement it will say their stuff. Each settlement will have it’s Mayor… Whatever has most prestige for the bigger settlement will be the mayor for that… but guilds can then compete…

At least that was how it was shared when I talked… but that was the initial ideas. I am not sure how it ended up when they coded it.

Hope they will enable us to rename our oorts soon…

Edit: big fat finger chose wrong reply to button

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Usually for most city owners / great shop owners, footfall won’t be the majority of their income.
I think you misunderstand about the game system a little be.
Let me explain to you.

A city with only great design and large plots + prestige they don’t get a lot of traffic
The key points is how many portal you setup, and the choices of connecting to right cities.
Otherwise it just a ghost town, and will fall very soon i believe.

The reason you have traffic basically are 2 factors in following list.

  1. Single or Multiple great shops set up in 1 city
    (People remember your shop and willing to come back daily or weekly. Some of them may want to settle near the shop, so they can be part of it or get some attention by settle near. )

  2. A great portal hub / City hub / Functional hub setup in 1 city.
    (Portal hubs like Ultima guild and PS hub …etc)

Basically you will find out without open a lot of portals these 2 points is impossible to achieve.

As result, for a lot of guild or hub or shop providers, they only want the footfall can somehow balance the daily cost for shards, or at least minus the cost.

Also depends on the size or type of hub you have, footfall somehow affect how you running the hubs.
Especially for functional traveling hub llike ps hub and ultima hub.
Without footfall, basically they don’t have any income, but the cost to remain all the shards cost is very huge.
I believe their goal is to create those convenience hubs to help people play the game easier.
( Don’t tell me you never used any portal network above since you played the game lol)

This why most of guild management team wish devs can balance the footfall to minus their day works.
As i said this is the volunteer type of design, and most of them barely get any profit by running those portal network system, even the successful guild like ultima and ps group.
They spend most of their footfall to buy the shards on market + hosting hunting event couple days in a week.
With all these kind of setup they can barely break the even for the shards cost daily.

No. They set up a sliding scale. The more footfall you get, the less you make from each person.

So the low traffic folks will get a boost and the high traffic folks will have less per person.

Frankly, the high traffic folks are getting the smelly end of the stick here.

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All I am wondering is:

Where is the jiivita video! :smiley:

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That depends, now they get x coin per person every 24 DAYS. With this patch they will get y coin per person every 24 HOURS.

If y times 24 is bigger than x they still get ahead with this patch!

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They will still be getting more than they are right now. And they will still be getting more than everyone else. I feel it is a boost to everyone.

Let’s not get wrapped up in who is getting the bigger boost. The guy that gets 25 shoppers a day, will see his footfall increase from, what 2000c daily to 5000c daily.

The portal hub that gets 25k daily will get 50k daily.

Even though one is a bigger increase than the other, both above win. And you could argue one is winning more than the other with this buff.

Typically I don’t do responding to community posts, but yours is surprisingly considered, and I have had additional thoughts after more testing.

You say that guild skills will make for a good resource drain. I’d agree that if the footfall alterations work as hoped, we’ll need a good coin-sink other than shop tax. But then why limit it to people in guilds? It would be better to make coin sinks that affect the entire player-base irrespective of play-style.

You say that the buffs are minor, but that’s exactly the excuse that lets big divides happen. Buffing one play-style over another because ‘it’s only a small buff and won’t really make much difference’ repeatedly soon builds up to be a big difference. Unless they’re planning on adding buffs you can ‘only’ get if you’re not in a guild…

Ok, but… why? Just because that’s the way other games work, it doesn’t mean that Boundless has to. If the multiplayer aspect of a game isn’t good enough that people WANT to engage in it without further encouragement, surely that’s an area that needs improvement, not just adding incentives.

And because every good post tries to offer solutions to presented problems: a personal observation / potential for improvement. As far as I could tell on testing (because I had nobody nearby to test with), guild skills have a flat costs. A much better idea would be to have the those cost based on the number of members, and then if you really want to keep '‘community incentives’, then fractionally reduce the cost-per-person based on the total number of members (capped, so it never becomes free). So, using example figures: Base Buff costs 200 per person. Guild X has 1 member, Guild Y has 5 members, and guild Z has 50 members.

The maths would be something like:

(base_cost * ((100 - max(number_of_members, 50)) / 100)) * number_of_members.

Guild X pays 198 (198 per person)
Guild Y pays 950 (190 per person)
Guild X pays 5000 (100 per person)

That would enable much fairer access to game features without forcing a play-style. And yes, I do understand there would be things to work out, like (Why wouldn’t everyone leave the guild, trigger the buff and then join again), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions.

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Um i am a little be not sure how come it will affect solo playing style.
Join a guild doesn’t mean you have to interact with others.
I believe a lot of guild will use the guild buff to attract new members to join.
And you can still play solo mostly, and maybe just say hi to some of them when you see them.

Even now, i believe most large guild leader or manage team they don’t know everyone in their guild discord.
So i feel you can find a guild which already has buff to join, and keep playing as same style as before.
(If i understand ur concern correctly)

I don’t know if this is counter-intuitive to this whole update… but as a shopper, that popup of the city/guild info is really annoying when looking at shop baskets… can we have a flag to remove it?

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Was so much worse in ea though…would go make a cuppa while it caught up with all the portals had gone through.
would still be nice to have that pop up info completely seperate though

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Can any of the testers list the mats need to build guild machines please?

I’d do it myself, but no test available for PS4 :frowning_face:

Maybe if I/we weren’t crashing every time. :slight_smile:

Edit: Also might be useful on testing to be able to make the client request a character wipe before loading; I would personally suggest this to be in a config file to not become an annoying “everytime” prompt on initial load of the test client. This doesn’t resolve the base issue of crashing but does allow us to get around it and maybe avoid it during the rest of testing. :slight_smile:

Hmm, maybe we won’t be getting guilds soon after all then!

How about Devs helping out then?

In-between trying to fix the test crashes that is.

It’s not so much a concern, more an observation that I think the system could be better.

If things stay as they are on the test server, I will do what you are suggesting. I’ll find a guild that is set up purely for the purposes of getting the buff, then proceed to participate to the minimum level required not to get kicked.

My observation is that this process doesn’t benefit me or enhance my game experience, and it doesn’t benefit whatever guild I join. It’s just an arbitrary hoop to jump through that really doesn’t need to be there, especially if I’ve given a suggestion about how it could work a lot better, for a wider range of play-styles and still encompass the apparent desire (however much I disagree with it) to make it artificially ‘better’ to do things in a group.