First of all, you need to realize that for a lot of the remaining players, going down with the ship is a point of pride. Those players do not want the game changed in any way, for any reason, even if it means the game dies. They are happy to have the game die, while they revel in their diehardness to the original vision or their current fiefdom in the game or whatever niche market they have carved our for themselves. The game has been the exact same game for 6 years, they are fat and happy in that place, and they want exactly nothing to change. They will fight to the death to keep absolutely everything exactly the same as it is right at this moment, even while they know it is killing the game.
Second of all, you need to realize that for the game to take back off, major changes are needed, which will require development costs, that absolutely no one is willing to pay unless they get to micromanage absolutely every change that is needed to the benefit of themselves.
For the game to turn a profit, it needs to go free to play, and it needs a relaunch. Relaunch means wipe, which means ditching the HISTORIC builds of excellence, which means death. Ugh.
We will all QUIT! We will never build AGAIN. Blah blah blah. Sure you will, because Boundless is your entire life and you don’t know what else to do with yourselves.
Moving on, I see 2 potential futures for the game, one of which will mean slowing its eventual death, and one of which means an actual revitalization.
POTENTIAL FUTURE ONE
People pay for the planets they want to keep: queue the screeching about P2W. You have a whole bunch of, at minimum, $100 a month planets to pay for. The people who want to keep them, pay for them. If no one cares that much, they go away. Basically all the planets become sovereigns, and people pay to keep the ones they want. The game survives because it breaks even. Queue the slow death.
POTENTIAL FUTURE TWO
The game goes free to play. This requires many changes, but also contains actual potential for the game to succeed. It also requires a wipe and a relaunch, as well as investment. Investment leads to profits, and has the potential for serious profit. First, you need to figure out how many players you need per world to be successful, and then you need to implement changes to push that many players to live on a world. This requires major changes. Right now you have maybe 10-15 players max living on a world. The entire game incentivizes people spreading out and grabbing as much space as they can to build pretty, useless things and brag on the forums about how awesome they are.
Guilds are fake, mostly filled with alts to cheat the system for buffs. Most buffs are never used, most foods are never used, most of the forging is never used, most of the skills are never used, and most of the game is never used. You have a whole bunch of code that means jack. Everyone runs around in diapers whining about Oort and portals and pretending that no problems are solvable and everything must stay exactly how it is or the world will end. Figure out a way to reuse all the stuff that never got used. Be able to assign the unused guild buffs to actual builds so people have a reason to use them. Add planetary government systems so that all the ■■■■ the developers were having to moderate can be moderated by players. Add a road system the government can control. Add zoning the government can control. Give players the ability to keep trolls off of their planets, and give players a reason to group up and visit other people’s builds. You want that brew buff that used to be a guild buff no one ever used? Add a doohickey to taverns that gives that buff when you visit them. Take that defeat insurance helix and add it to some doohickey that can go in a hospital build. Then let people stack all that stuff. Its a PvE game, who gives a flying dumpster about balance. Governments grant these 3 buffs, guilds grant these 3, and you can visit builds for 2 hours of x, y and z. Let extra foods be stacked from food consumed in restaurants on top of the stupid one you can consume by default. Give people a flipping reason to group up and work together and be around other people.
Get rid of the stupid skill caps. This is a survival game and yes, people are going to want to do everything. Stop pretending its an RPG. It has absolutely no RPG elements.
Oh, people should not be able to do everything! Guess what, they absolutely can given enough alts. And everyone hates that system. They want to be able to do the stuff they like doing and won’t do the stuff they don’t like doing anyways. Doing what you like and not doing what you don’t like is how you get an economy.
Speaking of stuff no one likes doing, COMBAT. The game has no combat system. No, meteors don’t count. They never did. They were a placeholder for a serious system that was never implemented and that is why no one likes doing combat. Because it doesn’t exist. Add a flipping combat system. Add instanced dungeons or something that can be found in the open world. That lets the devs place different rules on the combat voxels so the stuff actually works right. You enter a dungeon, and have stable rules for pathfinding. No more mobs underground.
And clothes. No one likes running around in diapers. That is so stupid I cannot even put the stupidity of it into words. Armor. Just…seriously?
If you are going to have less planets, then the color system needs major changes. Let people make pigment out of anything. Maybe goo is a facilitator and doesn’t come in colors at all. You just crush up whatever you have in whatever color and make it into the color you want with the help of translucent goo.
Also, you need a reason for people to live on something other than a T1 world. Stop making it hard to do that through the skill system, and add some perks. Faster crafting times, better prestige, something. And also, more exoworlds faster and allow campfires or improve inventory management.
Get rid of planet bottlenecks and make every tier of world equidistant from every other world. Let go of failed design elements that didn’t work.
Add the ability to turn weather off or make it actually do something.
Add buffs for working together to something other than combat.
Make the game fun for more than the handful of crotchety buzzkills who currently hold a stranglehold on everything and attack everyone who isn’t them.
They will never quit trying to download a life on this game