Why is Boundless population so small?

General
164

I can agree with this. As you mentioned, WoW is a lot different than Boundless but I can see the grindy parts WoW has that Boundless is missing.

The part where the article talks about finally reaching level 40 and buying your mount is something Boundless is missing. The closest thing we have is reaching the point where we can craft portals and maintain them, but the maintaining part is what I believe annoys people the most. When you finally hit 40 in WoW and you get that mount there is no more maintenance. That’s yours forever, with the option to acquire rep from other factions to get more mounts.

I believe the core piece Boundless is missing right now is finding a reason to grind. Sure we can grind building mats and make the most amazing builds, but what good are they if not many people see them. We try to maintain portals to attract people to see them but after a while the average person gets burnt out. We need ways to show off that time we spent grinding for something.

What do other MMOs have to show off your hard work that Boundless doesn’t? Weapons, armor, mounts, cosmetics. We spend hours and hours in other games farming dungeons to get that full set of armor. Not only for the stats, but for the way it looks. You get that rare drop mount and you strut around the city to show it off so people can say “Wow where did you get that?” “How many runs did it take for that piece to drop?” The reward for grinding is more visible. We need something to grind for that we can take with us to show off wherever we go. That’s how you get people to invest more time into the game in my opinion.

I know these are two separate games with different systems, but if we’re going to look at Boundless as an MMO we have to think of a Boundless equivalent.

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165

At work, trying to finish reading the whole thing but there is a delicate balance between Grind vs. Punishing Players for Playing your Game.

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166

I definitely can see how this makes sense and for many might be important. I even would enjoy this but only if we make sure that “grind” isn’t linked to things that are made easier via regen bombs or other “short-cuts.”

167

The grind is not the fun part. The fun part is progress. That’s what Classic does excellent. And that’s where Boundless fails, because Boundless only has grind but no meaningful progress.

You grind your coils, great. Guess what, now you have to spend extra time repairing these things up to the point where you add additional machines without them. This is regress, not progress.

You grind out your ash, clay, mud, stone and coal to produce bricks (which, btw, forces you to repair these coils…). Then you build with them (progress!) only to be forced to make some more until you wish you would have just started the build with mud…

Finally you’re able to obtain some Oort and a portal and you open your first portal (progress!) just to now have an additional weekly task to refill that thing (regress!).

Let’s build a farm. Sounds like fun. Make it big, let’s grind some seeds to make some progress. Welcome to your new daily task of taking care of your farm (regress!).

Oh, let’s fill a second skill page. Sounds like fun, finally I don’t have to switch to an alt all the time… unless you’re not in your home beacon or you forget to active the skill page with the tax epic while taking care of your shop… You get the picture, doesn’t feel like progress to me. I have yet to use a second skill page as it feels more painful to use then alts…

WoW Classic is a game where you grind for progress!
Boundless is a game where you grind for regress!

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168

This is exactly what I’m trying to get at. When I mention grind in reference to WoW, I’m thinking about running the dungeons/killing whatever and slowly getting pieces of gear to get your set (progress). There is no hardcore maintenance after that.

The maintenance is part of what turns me off to Boundless, but the progress like the examples you used keep me around. I realize devs seem to want us to have some form of maintenance, but if they can find a way to turn down the maintenance we could see more retention.

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169

Alts > skill pages until your main character is ridiculously high level.

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170

How about we lets this be a sandbox and quit trying to make it a RPG. Let a player earn and spend as many skill points on one character as they want without having to create skill pages to do it. Eliminate the places where you have to choose between skills except for the combat skills. Let us make or craft anything and everything if we want to spend the time.

Then eliminate skills sets. Take all the skill points across all the skill sets and put them on the main skill set to let the players reallocate them as they like. Credit them back the cubits spent on skill sets.

Then eliminate alts. Take all the skill points across all the alts and credit them, the coin and the cubits to the main character. Take the cubits spent to buy alts and credit them back the main character. Give players a one time option to purchase a license for Boundless using cubits. This allows those players that may be using alts for children or other family members a chance to maintain a separate character.

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171

I was agreeing with you. Probably should have mentioned that. :slight_smile:

But only until you break.

I want Boundless to be about “what do I want to do today” and not about “what can I do today that doesn’t increase upkeep but still produces a little bit of enjoyment”.

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172

I was agreeing with your agreement lol. You added in a part I should’ve mentioned about feeling like you made progress.

Personally I don’t mind small amounts of upkeep. But at this point something like coils should be able to fixed all at once or the wear feature on them deactivated completely if there’s technical issues.

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173

I agree with you 100%! The reason I posted this was not really to say “the grind has to stay”, just to highlight that sometimes convenient isn’t better. On the same note, change also isn’t always better - nor always worse. I agree that we shouldn’t just resist change for change’s sake, that sometimes changes bring out huge parts of the game that wasnt there before and that sometimes change is just a bit of a disaster.

I like most changes as any chaos stirs up opportunity, and so far I haven’t been disappointed by the devs :slight_smile:

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175

I haven’t played in almost a year. One of the reasons being I couldn’t play as much so I would hop on once to fill my Beacon. I had missed this by one day eventually and everything was ruined. I picked up my valuables and whatnot and have never gone back. I worked so hard on my base and it was just gone.

I asked my buddy if he would be getting it as he liked minecraft, after knowing about the Beacon fuel every two weeks he absolutely would not get it. Now I understand why.

I get beacons to a point but I think they should be less greedy with Beacon fuel (gleam clubs biggest push from back then) and make them permenant. Maybe make it so people can’t build in the shiny rocks area as that was a big concern.

I see minecraft was brought up here and there. Whatever you build there is basically permenant, no chance to have it disappear every few weeks. This, I feel like, is one of the main reasons why people won’t get into this game.

The only reason I still get email updates is to hopefully see that they have changed Beacons one day.

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176

I’m going to agree with Scrufola

There is grind and there is useful, good grind.

Grinding for maintenance is not fun. Grinding for vanilla objects is not fun. Grinding to replace the tools that you need for more grinding is not fun.

Bad grind=doing the same thing over and over again for the exact same “rewards” for things that are not permanent

Good grind=doing the same thing, some times with variation, for mostly the same rewards but with occasional rare drops in order to get drops or create gear that is permanent.

Good grind is about crossing barriers. “Finally, I’ve done enough A to get to X. Now not only do I have the snazzy X, I never have to do A again.” THAT is good grind.

Bad grind is spending hours just to fuel a portal or beacon.

These are not the days of WoW classic. There is too much going on in people’s lives to spend 40 hours a week playing a single game…and that’s what Boundless requires, with far less reward for the effort.

And how do we STILL not have a way to save our builds without fueling a beacon? Sure, don’t fuel the beacon and you lose your spot. But I should be able to bank my build for when I come back. It’s insane that I maintain gleam club simply because I don’t want to lose weeks (months) of work.

Many decisions on this game seem to be less about maintaining fun and more about extending play time.

Why do I need a forged shovel to gather…water? Why can’t I just scoop it out with a bucket and pour it in place? Because that’s 20 more hours of grind they can add into the game, that’s why. It’s ridiculous, unnecessary and emblematic of the issues that plague this game.

Heck yes.

I would love to Crisis on Infinite Earths my alts into a single page of one character.

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177

Misinformation can be relatively damaging to any game.

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178

I would agree with all of that except for TAKING away alts. No no and no. A lot of us play the game in a special way using our alts. I sign in and my alt is right where I want him. Example would be I’m on a hunt and realize I need to craft something before I get back. I log on to him and craft and log right back to my main or hunter. There are many other reasons as well. Now if the game was introduced different as you said I would be happy with that.

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179

The lowest tier beacon fuel lasts 4 weeks, so not sure where your getting 2 from.

The highest tier beacon fuel lasts 3-4 months (forgot which one, one of the two).

The whole point why beacons arn’t permanent is because if some random troll decided to plot somewhere you wanted to build there was absolutely no way you’d ever see that spot ever again.

What if someone plays for a week and never plays again? Their spot would never be usable by anyone ever again. Given enough time, every planet would become a cluster of messy plots everywhere.

With our current system you can atleast guarantee that wont happen. It not really that hard to remember to log in once every 3 months if you set reminders IMO.

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180

Pretty sure when I played a year ago it was two weeks for the minimum fuel. Doesn’t matter, some people don’t want to play a game where their creations are just going to disappear on them. Add a month or two still same concept but thanks.

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181

Pretty sure when I played a year ago it was two weeks for the minimum. It’s been a year forgive me if I’m wrong. That’s fair. I’m not saying to adopt that system with just that as is. Maybe make it so if you haven’t played in a year or so (not logging in) it should get removed. I dunno, my point being the fact that things can disappear withing a month and others don’t even blink at getting the game for that reason.

182

I love this game :woman_shrugging: I don’t mind tipping wonderstruck 5 bucks here and there for beacon fuel.
As to the grind and maintenance - I think we need those things to put some sort of ceiling on how much a player can do in a day… if we take those things like coil repair and fertilizing crops away, I think It’d be bad for the price of the items being mass-produced.

183

I will agree with this point. You may not, but a lot of players use alts as a way to increase footfall. There are some that have areas set up to level an alt to say level 20 quickly shift the cash to the main and then delete the alt and repeat. Do these violate the game rules? No, but they are certainly not the reason we asked for alts. Having been there when it happened, alts were asked for to allow us to have more skills with the caps on skill points per set.

If the only way to get a unlimited cap on skills was to give up alts and skills sets, I would do it in a second.

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184

If you remove alts, people would just use multiple accounts for the same effect. Yes, people are that nuts.

If that’s a problem, change footfall. At the moment footfall is per beacon, that’s why multiple smaller beacons on alts amplify footfall. If you would generate footfall per plot, instead of per beacon splitting it up would no longer make sense.