Why is Boundless population so small?

Okay yeh, that is not just a delay. Must be some issue with the syncing of mesh updates across chunk borders getting stuck…

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I think most games have difficulty with retention. People burn out, their friends convince them to play something else, etc. You can’t do much about that.

I do think lack of exposure is probably one of the main culprits. I am part of a lot of gaming/tech circles and I almost never see BL mentioned anywhere, in any form. It wasn’t suggested to me on Steam…I had actually avoided Steam for the longest time. Boundless & one other game got me to finally sign up lol. I came across BL by deep searching for sandbox MMOs…I wanted something new to sink my extra time into. It wasn’t easy to find - that was back when they were still in EA/Oort online.

I know Facebook ads & other ads can be a huge black hole-waste-of-money. It’s a bit of a risk. A few years back, my company spent $$$$$ on FB ads, targeting our audience. It fell on deaf ears and the money went down the drain. It didn’t convert into any new customers. Ads at the right time & place are key. Maybe some ads on Twitch would help - if you could target users watching MMO streams like NMS, Astroneer, Trove, Cv, etc. Perhaps use a few $$$ and pay an influencer on Youtube or Twitch to do a quick little ad with a link in the description?

Also…how about an affiliate program to encourage people to get players to sign up? $ per new account?

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Great ideas, big yes on all IMO. :+1::+1::+1:

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You wanna see people work super hard to get people to sign up lol…$5 to paypal per $29.95-$39.95 new account…BL would still come out on top when compared to a 50% off weekend :grin: :woman_shrugging:t3:
(& the free or 50% off sale doesn’t provide any guaranteed new sign ups)

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I just started playing so i just went on a search to see if anyone is asking this question. Boom! here i am.

For me, i have 2 friends playing this. If we were to compare this to minecraft, the biggest highlight is that minecraft can be played solo. Even in an online server minecraft is much more efficient when it comes to the satisfying part of progressing in the game. This game, you can definitely play solo but it takes AGES to get anywhere good. There is a massive wall and here it is:

By the time you hit lvl 19 you realize that next level you won’t be able to quickly swap skills. At lvl 20 you feel like you are set in stone because now you have to just go ham on quests or grind lvls through other means to get the skills you need to progress your home. The grind is huge and honestly feels like you just went back to lvl 1 its so inconvenient. This is also around the time you want to get power(i don’t know everything about this game so right now the highest gem i have is diamond. Titanium being my most common tool now) Some of the things that are really useful require power and spending money to get around means i don’t want to spend it in a city. (i am lucky and got a Portal to a Portal Seeker hub up so it is definitely much easier to get around.)
The planets that have all the materials for progressing to the good stuff have atmospheres that require skills to protect yourself from it. Which means i need to sacrifice my skills that either; allow me to craft good items; or my skill that let me mine more efficiently. To me this SUUUUUCKS. this is where solo progression is terrible and just makes you want to drop it. Point is: progression to lvl 20 is great, anything after is a pain and you really do need friends or people in-game to help. Thus making it less attractive to people.

Here is what i think could improve the game:

  1. Skill pages: They work as a prestige past lvl 50(or lower level fi you swapped into it. not that usefull though), change this so its just a skill swap. Each page gets the same number of skills according to your level. Since crafting takes a long time to do at higher tiers i don’t think this will hurt the economy that much. Change the prestige to something else. This would litteraly solve all the issues i have with progression at the moment.
  2. Power: ■■■■■■■ make spark links for power. I hate having to wrap my machines in coils. Its okay if they only work for 1 machine, just let me put the power in a neat spot. (this one isn’t a big deal but imo i think a lot of people would like this)
  3. More advanced way of crafting items. Would be cool if there was a piping system or conveyor belt system. Let us setup crafting stations to only craft one or more specific things and pipe it to the next machine.
  4. Storage. The current storage system is pretty cool. but my idea of these characters is they are very intelligent. So why are they still using chests? Why not have a storage system that lets you store everything? Requires power/spark to keep running, and other machines to increase the amount of space it has.
  5. Tiny little thing: Add a button to quickly clear/reset your search and filter.
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couldn’t agree more - I was trying to throw some ideas earlier this year and, in short, here are some crude images showing how skills could be grouped (and reworked a bit):

The whole topic with more details and pictures:

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I feel like a skill tree just doesn’t fit with this game at all. I really think all skills should improve with use. That way, every time I mine, I feel like I’m better at mining.

All this skill point stuff is just… strange.

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Heyyy, that’s how I found Oort online too. I was searching for a voxel sandbox game.

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I bought the game expecting something more like NMS based on screenshots actually. Turns out it’s pretty different, but still fun!

Wouldn’t it be neat if portals were more like NMS? If you could portal to any other base you’d visited previously from your home portal?

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This would definitely work.

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Take me as an example then. I’m largely disinterested in Boundless with where it currently is (Though I obviously still care and keep an eye on it, there’s ridiculous levels of potential here and I am still pleasantly surprised by things they think of that I wouldn’t have… lattice chisels etc). Right now though I feel it’s way more grind than fun. But as a person, I’m happy to grind when it’s fun. I love to plan what I’m intended to do to be efficient. I played Runescape for years (back before it got made incrementally easier), and it was far more clunky, grindy and requires more planning than Boundless ever did/was.

I think this is where you and I disagree, and why I take so strongly against your analogy. I don’t think it is those things. I believe that irrespective of whether people are tenacious, or have a desire to learn or any other any other specific trait, the absolute root of what people want to use their leisure time for is to have fun. I just believe that the small population is just a metric for how much of the gaming community actually want what Boundless offers.

Possibly, they shouldn’t make any. If Boundless is financially stable then they would be right, however disappointing I might personally find it, to carry on in their current trajectory. If not, then they probably should be looking to incrementally alter it to the point that it is.

No worries, I’m not offended exactly. It’s just that while this community isn’t hugely toxic compared to many I’ve participated in, and even though you didn’t intended it as such, I see an increasing number of posts which are demonising whole groups of players simply because they have a different idea of fun. It’s essentially blaming people for not liking the game.

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Many people have said that and I always wonder why people think it is.

I’ve paid way more for games I’ve spend way, way, way less time with than Boundless.

But perhaps it’s the unknowing aspect, not knowing what to expect, not knowing for sure if you like it or not.
With this game for the very first time I did not buy the deluxe edition, because quite frankly I wasn’t sure yet if I would like and figured if I do I can upgrade later at any time anyway.
Sadly I’m on PS4 and there is no upgrade to Deluxe (tho they say they are working on it)!

This is just to show I wasn’t willing to pay another 20 to get the Deluxe since I wasn’t sure if I’d like it. 40 might be too high for some people to try it out.

What if, and I think DK already mentioned it too, the initial game costs 15 or 20, you can do a lot of things but are limited in your progression, then if you like it you spend another 20-25 to get the rest of the game.

This way more people might take the plunge to check it out and there are bound to be a few of those who like it and pay the extra and stick around!

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In retrospect, I was a bit nasty in that analogy yesterday, apologies again. I do want to add, I didn’t aim it at anybody here - I have specific critiques myself which I throw out regularly. Definitely not meant for anybody who has reasons like elaborated in this thread. The thing that set me off and why I posted it are the Steam reviews, particularly from that free weekend (and I should have been clearer that the post was to elaborate on why that sort of approach is maybe not best, that we’ll never keep a lot of these folks and probably shouldn’t try, why to focus in on audiences more likely to like Boundless) that clearly the people who left them never would have stayed and never gave the game a real chance or made any attempt to try to understand - some of these reviews make no sense at all, even.

Sadly, I do still stick to my feeling that the type of gamer who were leaving those reviews could be a large percentage of the whole. I shouldn’t insult them I know - it just sort of sets me off a bit, because I love Boundless. It is why I feel strongly now though that while there needs to be advertising, it has to be honed in on groups like fanbases of other indie games of similar sort, rather than doing a broad campaign. To add a little too, in my analogy, the students in those classes, they are capable of understanding if they wanted, or they wouldn’t be there… it is the instant “BORED! Tuning out…” reaction and not making an attempt that gets me, IRL and in games - not reasons like in here, but stuff like those reviews that showed they took the briefest glance at the game, misunderstood something entirely or tuned right out and decided to bash it. But that is me and I shouldn’t make comments like that - games are for fun after all, I shouldn’t judge others on how they have their fun.

Once again, sorry to everyone, Evil Paka came out a little. :wink: :smiling_imp:

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Pleeeease add this. I want my characters to be able to grow, not just have random skills across 5 tabs.

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Lmao. Oh you must have not been a launch player. Coils started at 40k. Better right? Merlyn got rich fast.

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Why is it so small? Maybe because they cater towards one play style (building) the community is literally split in 3. You hunt or build or do both. But yet they favor the builders 100% of the time sense ps4 release. Oh wait we had gleambow event and snowball fights. So building is 95% my bad

Yep, I bought a switch a while back and have played that less, in total, than just one of my longer sessions of boundless… Defintely had my moneys worth from boundless.

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I started August 2017, long before coils even existed.
10k+ means 10k and more.

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Well if you found them close to 10k when the game launched you were lucky. But I know if I was to talk about coils when the game stated I wouldn’t have chosen 10k+ to describe it. Would have said 30k+ kind of like how aoe tools used to be. And those persisting pies being 3k+

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Here’s a bit food for thought.
Disclaimer: I do like the game a lot, very good voxel builder and I hope it will see many successful years. However here’s viewing the facts as objectively as possible.

1.) A wild guess is that around 50% of starting players from launch will have left for the abysmal grind the game was. (Before some balancing patches) The game’s grind factor was off the hook.

2.) False advertisment, there is hardly any mmo aspcet in game except viewing other ppls builds. The videos and pictures put out on media sources give a false impression of the ingame content and were never updated to reflect the games content and state of development.

3.) The game’s building focus will leave it empty for the time being. Playing a sandbox block builder most ppl will only log in if they want to build something and leave the game dormant for the rest of the year.

4.) Moderation was and still is an issue, I cannot guess how many players will have left due to a lack of ingame moderation. (Forum was bad some time ago too, but it improved)

5.) The in game chats are below mmo standard (I already stated this in another post)

6.) Technical problems, frame rate issues, server issues, lighting issues etc.

7.) The game should not have been released in it’s state of development, this burnt a good chunk of the potential market with a subpar product.

8.) Steep price point, a comparable game with arguably more features (MC) launched on 20 bucks

9.) No contraption building, only block placing.

10.) Unmoddable

11.) No single player

12.) No roadmap, leaves the remaining community guessing if it’s investing it’s time in a dying product.

13.) The list goes on, any more questions? Yea thought so.

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