And I come back and the other thread is locked? Shocking. Truly.
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I don’t ignore the experience. I point out that there are different viable decisions available.
Bullying is a trigger - what a bullied person does after is a decision (sometimes impulsive, sometimes delayed and thought over). That decision can be different for different people. One bullied person will leave the game, another will keep playing. One will avoid the bully, another will fight. If someone bullied decides to keep playing, would you say the bully caused them to stay?
Any difficult situation can be approached in 3 basic ways - accept it, change it or leave it.
Anyways, I am not here to fight you over semantics.
Long story short, I don’t condone bullying or trolling (RL or game) and I sure have a lot of compassion for any hardship as I both seen it and lived through it. But I also advocate for responsibility for own decisions rather than disowning them by blaming outside circumstances.
The difference? Not “I was bullied out of the game” but “I met a bully in the game, so I decided to leave”.
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Well, I will give you this: consistency is one of your strengths
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I will take it as a compliment… I think 
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For someone trying to keep “bullying” part of the discussion this seems to be a pretty aggressive way to construct your critique as well as just overall passive aggressive.
Did you ever think that Boundmore just didn’t want to get into depth on a bully conversation before you chose to attack him?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? No, you didn’t, because you wanted to make this about your feelings and demand that everyone bow to your viewpoint on this matter.
People like @boundmore have been in this game so long they’ve seen all kinds of things happen. They’ve moved on from pretty much every ugly situation because they finally came to the realization that they can’t control the game, the players, or the feelings they have. They’ve learned, especially for ugly situations like bullies, that it turns into a nuanced argument on who is the bully, who was bullied, whether it really was being bullied, could of X, Y, Z happened, blah, blah, blah. There is never a winner in that type of discussion - just everyone loses. That is why you - accept it, change it, or leave it.
There is no game that doesn’t have jerks playing it and some form of people causing problems in the game because GAMES ARE AN EXTENSION OF REAL LIFE. There will always be people out there that have to ruin some experience - that is unfortunately what humans do.
Just because we don’t sit here talking about it over and over doesn’t mean we are ignoring “people’s experiences.” Instead, we’ve accepted life is the way it is, tried to change what we could in the situation, and moved on from things or people outside of our ability to change.
It is certainly easy to sit in the victim mind-space complaining how everyone is a bully and then attack them because they don’t live in a victim mind-space. No one should be criticized because they chose to NOT BE THE VICTIM.
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It says something when you have more traffic here in forums than the actual game.
The game is dead.
If you wanna play it .. then do,but don’t hope this game is gonna magically reborn.
I wasted.. yes wasted .. many years hoping something that was promised.
I come here time to time to check if light are still on but that’s all.
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I got Over 1500+ hours out of the game. Now back to searching the steam library/store for that next game that needs my services in gathering all of the shiney things.
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Yep. Business as usual
To get to $300K average monthly income you need to look at the numbers.
$300,000/1000players = $300 average monthly spend
$300,000/2000players = $150 average monthly spend
$300,000/3000players = $100 average monthly spend
$300,000/4000players = $75 average monthly spend
$300,000/5000players = $60 average monthly spend
$300,000/6000players = $50 average monthly spend
$300,000/7000players = $42.87 average monthly spend
$300,000/8000players = $37.50 average monthly spend
$300,000/9000players = $33.33 average monthly spend
$300,000/10,000players = $30 average monthly spend
I don’t think the average monthly spend becomes reasonable until you get somewhere in the 7000-10000 player range. To get that number of players the game has to go FTP. It has to become less niche.
At that number of players there is no way the devs can arbitrate disputes, especially since the game would be free to play and people could just make new accounts to continue doing whatever they were doing that got them banned. The players themselves will need to be able to form protected communities that they can moderate themselves.
No one sane wants their entertainment to come with a side of harassment. Currently, moving to a new part of the universe does not help because trolls can just follow you to wherever new you move. There have been numerous examples of this happening over the years.
Building alone cannot draw a crowd of 10,000 players, because there are other building games where you don’t have to worry about things reclaiming. The MMO part of the game has to be worth it to make people play. That means communities are needed. That means combat has to be a real part of the game. You need combat players to want to play this game to get to 10,000 players.
Yes, getting to $300k monthly income means updates are needed. Yes, there needs to be a way to drop planets that have not enough players on them. This needs to be gamified to make people accept it, and it needs to be done algorithmically so that people can see if their planet is in danger and recruit new people to increase activity.
I am guessing there needs to be an average of 50-80 people per planet to make the profit margins worth it. This would result in about 125-200 planets for settling on. Plus whatever number of exos are needed for people to explore.
Realistic plans are what gets updates.
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Hate to tell you but running the 50 original planets don’t cost 300k a month. The servers aren’t that expensive. They still make a slight profit off of sovereign planets for the cost of them for a month. Free to play would not help. They have to fix things like the new player experience and giving more defined definitions on things for explaining stuff to the player in the information section first. You can make a game free to play but if the new player experience and stuff isn’t defined really well you won’t get players to stay
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Aye. Not fixing the NPE before something like making the game f2p, would mean people who are very interested in the game may still be chased off before they get to the parts that’d truly captivate them.
And the first impression tends to be the most important thing for a f2p game, since most don’t dive in for a second chance after that.
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It’s over bro. They are not going to fix anything. Enjoy while you can before it’s gone
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300k a month is how much John-Eric said would be needed to get updates, per the screenshot in that post.
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Its not a matter of cost, I think it was more based on this comment I shared.
Free to Play is easy to implement and make money, but again it requires development. Which is the real “pickle”. It’s hard to invest in a game that has no proven track record and the track record it did have is questionable.
Going free to play is about:
- Increasing world activity
- Bringing back economic movement
- Creating visible player presence
A shift in monetization shifts:
- Optional subscription (Gleam Club)
- Cosmetics and visual customization
- Optional world services (Sovs)
- No pay-to-win changes
- No competitive advantage sales
If Boundless stays paid with a declining population the outcome is predictable:
- Fewer players
- Less economy
- Less content visibility
- Lower revenue over time
If it opens access:
- Population stabilizes
- Economy reactivates
- Monetization becomes scalable
- The game becomes sustainable again
More players = more:
- Economy and trading
- More building
- More to explore
Make Gleam Club better.
- Add Gleam Club only cosmetics
- Bonus portal time or free oort per month
- Quite a few other options
Add Cosmetics for purchase.
- Blocks
- Tool skins
- Character skins
Worlds
Sovereigns already work and will only increase revenue as the player base grows.
Seasonal Content
- Cosmetic based seasonal items (sort of have this now)
- Rotating content
I am not a fan of Free 2 Play, but I don’t hate F2P when it works and makes sense. The goal is not to change the game or what it is, it’s just to make sure it actually thrives long-term.
Just remember:
A dead MMO with a paywall is not a premium experience.
It is just a shrinking one.
Granted the real kick in the ass is the last three words of this comment:
Monty would pay attention to a concise, believable plan of how Boundless could easily make $300k a month with little risk.
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One thing that sticks out is the Better Gleam club perks and the extra Cosmetics could be done even without going free to play. Something as little as those things would be something. Many have said just small things would encourage them to play more. I know you have proposed these and I wish they would consider them. I mean why not try it to see if it makes a difference. I mean the Oort per month could be delivered by a reclaim at your beacon. Great Ideas Red! Sure would be nice to see them try anything.
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Also just to address my thoughts on Free to Play meaning more toxic players.
We are going to get more toxic players the more players we get it just comes with having more players. There are some F2P games I’ve played that I felt weren’t very toxic, but it does happen. Warframe was pretty good about being F2P, still has a decent player base and isn’t toxic.
Games are toxic when:
- Players are forced into competition
- Punishment is high for failure
- Communication is unmoderated (we have this currently)
Games aren’t toxic because they are free. F2P doesn’t create toxicity. Bad systems do. Sandbox games consistently show that large free populations can still be friendly if the design supports it. Think about the game a couple of years ago with 500 players. We had our bad eggs, but the percentage of toxic players was farily low.
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Yeah, I’d have to agree; genuinely never bumped into a single toxic person in-game before.
I’ve only seen some toxicity whenever I went onto the forums over the last five years or-so, and it’s hard not to feel sympathetic to the reasons for some of it.
I know the lack of communications part definitely caused a lot of it, at the very least…
Really do hope there’ll be a way for the game to get back into a more hopeful state.
I know I’d love to help, if there was any way to do so.
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I have run into a few toxic players in game in the early days and chased off of Phem and Alder due to being surrounded. Otherwise, Post 2021 guilds I were in were awesome.
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