Yeah, I’m certainly not going to argue against wishing to keep builds alive, ESPECIALLY now that the game’s population has gotten lower. I’ve always been on the side of the fence which prefers to keep builds alive when they’re artistic-projects.
Though I won’t lie, if I had no other project on the horizon, I would love to tackle a Mall project.
And then I left the game for a while, gave my build to Host, came back to try to help a little bit, then started to help a little more, than I went “you know, I could make you a cool-looking tower there” and that turned into a 4-5 months project… not gonna drop that one otherwise I’d hate myself.
Plain glass floors would be fine if they improved the rendering so that it actually looked like glass (i.e. with some simple shine, reflection and/or refraction) rather than just a slight colour change.
But that would require someone to actually be developing the game engine…
Agreed that should be the overall viewpoint. I’ve had my disagreements with a variety of people but I always believe in the end we could move past the situation we didn’t align on and at least still find a way to enjoy the game together and support each other’s efforts.
I dont even get malls… I get market places and smaller kiosk systems…ye Maybe Gyosha Mall was Only one that worked properly as there was enough players To Carry it and it was the first mall.
After Gyosha Mall… Many… Even too many were popping like flies as everyone noticed that could be a great footfall For them. There was no demand For so many malls as it was mainly “hey we have a mall now Then you went there and basically what you saw was all the guild members selling their stuff and leaving so called” scrap shopplots For other players".
I dont think malls are part of the game… I think Gyosha Mall had the right idea as there was like 200 Shop places In one point plotted.
At this current state i Feel like smaller market places are way To go For now.
I think one central mall would be ok. I know when I first started DK Mall was the first mall I saw. There were very few ashed plots if any at all. I’d be willing to bet it had a good 150+ shops easily.
I know I watched a ton of good shops drop though in all the malls. It’s really just time to condense them all down and try and make one mall everyone can visit.
I rly dont like how mall became mainstreet… I think many EA player would fully agree with This.
Also i think malls destroyed many People businesses… It wasnt good enough For People that you had one Shop that had some items… People started To specialize To things To keep up with the malls… As you couldnt complete with nick nack store vs mall that has 10 stores that specialized some specific stuff… You could just walk 20m and theres other stuff you could buy.
As much as I am intrigued by the challenge of it, I must agree.
To me, malls are the land of inconvenience.
Just now, I wanted to find some gleam colors, and my go-to is always @ellyphant’s Gleam Farm Hub (great design, nice looking, easy to use, fantastic prices ).
But there are colors missing, so then I go to malls, and I just run in circles, most often coming back home empty-handed, having wasted my time.
If you’re looking for specific colors, malls are hell.
Yeah, colours are tricky to find, even using BUTT. I’m trying to create a market that stocks all the colours of most main building materials, buying and selling at reasonable prices… building up stock slowly. Check it out on Lasaina via TNT.
I think the main problem is the game itself when it comes to trying to find items. I should be able to search for a block and it’s color not just the block. I also like the idea of malls and the competition it creates. It creates an economy that is pretty fun at times.
BUTT more or less tanks the economy for the most part. If you want to sell stuff, people will go to BUTT first then see where it is cheapest and go buy from there… be it in a mall or not. So the argument of a store being in a mall or not kind of becomes null and void.
Having a specialty shop also doesn’t work because you run into the same issue whether in the same mall or anywhere in the Boundless universe. I have a concrete shop and I know of 1 or 2 others that are great. There used to be a few others, but I’d promote them just as much as I promoted myself. No reason not too as it just helps the economy.
Want to find some gleam colors @Goblinounours it’s going to be a difficult road especially for any of the Gleambow colors… I know from experience having gone through the process of building 3 different colors storage ideas since I’ve been playing. I have my goto places for gleam, it used Roxie’s and sure there used to be a heck of a lot more gleamballs in Elly’s, but the game and it’s population prevents that from being much bigger.
Needless to say… regardless I don’t think malls destroyed peoples businesses, but I don’t know that it really helped them either. Having multiple malls though make people feel they need to make multiple shops in order to compete and sell things.
BUTT though … sigh as much as I love it… makes you nearly have to sell something so low you take a loss…
I’d love to have a city with a few good priced shops that specialise in specific items, with active request baskets. So people who want to sell stuff, don’t feel like they have to open another shop at another mall.
And with the Knowledge tab Buy and Sell list, there’s no benefit to loads of different shops, as people are always gonna go to the cheapest/most stocked shops. (Which is annoying when they are 1000m away, but still in the same mall)
The game never had a good economic model unfortunately. Obviously there are other issues as well and all of them, in my view, merge together to just create a mess. I think shops are good ideas but in an infinite resource model it doesn’t help much.
The original design and assumptions from the game developers was that people would have more localized trade supply chains. You’d see groups of people from higher tier stay in that tier for stuff and there would be smaller trade channels between each of planets or tier zones. They did not plan or conceive that we would have an universal centralized hub that would make access to everything a few steps or portals away. They just laid the wrong ground work and system for something that didn’t happen due to emergent game play. Unfortunately, no time has really been able to be put towards revamping that.
Yea this exactly. I can only bet they never expected a huge number of hubs popping up like they did. In the end though, I am pretty happy they did. I mean it’s a double-edged sword though, while it’s easier to travel and easier to find hidden corners of the universe I am sure huge hubs created some bottlenecks like Circapous I hitting max player counts and hubs creating lag etc.
Needless to say, game economies are hard. There is a whole lot that has to go into making them work and even then finding the correct balance to prevent hyperinflation is hard if not impossible. Games tend to have to take coins, and most of the time, items out of the economy so that the coins and items do not use value.
As an example, coins are taken out of most MMOs by NPC repair shops or NPC’s selling items or taxes on trades or auction house taxes. Ever wonder where the coins given to NPCs or taxes go? They get taken out of the game completely.
Some have item shops where it takes in-game currency as well as real money. Items get removed too. Sometimes you might make something like a teaching pie… you take all the ingredients it takes to make it and put them into a machine and then all those ingredients get removed from the economy. Thus making the ingredients value higher.
Removal of coins from the economy means the value of the coins are higher. You have to do this or you have everyone with billions of coins and the economy tanks. It’s a difficult balance…
Yeah they didn’t… it was all emergent game play. I asked James specifically about some of this and he said roughly the original lead architect expected more isolated areas of the universe because Oort is rare, we didn’t have meteor hunts, etc…
But once people really started banding together some and then I ran the first larger scale coordinated hunts to gather Oort reserves for more people we ended up getting meteors and the whole dynamic even changed more than some of the original centralized hubs and specific hubs that were able to survive prior to that.
I’ve always believed we shouldn’t have had coins or at least footfall and moved towards contracts and other ways that people can barter/trade. There just was too much push for the economy stuff without really the robustness and maturity that is needed to make it of value in the long run… I kind of wish none of that stuff existed and it was more of just a building game. But since there was a strong belief they could build a MMO game I see why those things needed to exist.
Youve never even been to the future mall back then, so…
Also, every mall has their goods and bads, I love the new design from dk mall, but even that one can be for sure better with the setup. It’s less like a mall more like a market? Village? Pathways and shops are too big. Great for shop design so you can create something unique and memorable for sure, but reminds of an art competition. Sorry Tmmk… Gyosha was horrible for me, I got always lost and ported just home when I found what I wanted. Old Dk mall was unorganized. Future Mall was good, never busy enough though so the portals to each shop got in use. Size of shops? Should be a good in between, not too big not too small. For some people probably though a challenge in size. I liked Hamburg Mall. Had trouble to find the portal Hub as well though. Navigating in Mega mall was hard, too closed up. Rainbow Mall too small and with a maximum of 10 people a time a big organization mistake. Kree could never be filled, nice idea though, never understood the set up and the hub confused me with the access possibilities. EZPZ reminds of Hamburg Mall. No good hub set up. NaughtyMall i also got lost. There are of course many more, I’ve not been to everyone myself.
Nice idea but hard to realizable. Beacon names are short, I can’t even do a proper name on my farm hub because of that.
For me not necessarily my money count is low but I recently walked a lot around for specific colors and inspiration and my goals were the big sellers not the prices. Or known markets. Price is not everything.
The new design of the DK hub was all TMMK’s idea. The pathways are simply the same as the old DK Mall. My thoughts on the shops was to make the inner circle larger shops which is roughly about 8-12 shops. The rest of the shops were to be smaller as you left the inner circle. I had several shops in the old DK Mall area request larger shops as they just had an enormous amount of goods to sell. Roxie’s Gleam shop is a prime example. She had so many items to sell she requested more space as did a few others. Sadly the hub wasn’t done as quickly as Roxie want and she moved her shop to her Sovereign. Is the design the best? Nah… but the hub itself is great and quite beautiful. To add, many shops are huge in malls but simply give the perception of being smaller due to the design of the malls and their heights.
I was a pretty big fan of the Kree mall (shoutout to @kemyobra and the others) as it had shops setup for particular items. So there was only one gleam shop, one forged tool shop, one rock shop etc. Pretty nice idea if you ask me.
Malls all in all are a good concept and regardless of how they are designed some people are just going to dislike them for whatever reason. Malls may also just be a dying concept given the population as of late.
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my money count is low but I recently walked a lot around for specific colors and inspiration and my goals were the big sellers not the prices. Or known markets. Price is not everything.