The game doesn’t require large amounts of money for plots. I know more than a few people who are naturally reaching 4k+ plots. So that person may not have spent money to place those plots.
Either way, the plots could have been placed to stop people from expanding towards their base, or changing a nice view they can see from their build. They may also be looking to place a build there in the future, but don’t want to stop surface resource generation until the get the materials ready.
This is a real concern, the ability to surround a city with plots can damage major community hubs which can lead to an already small community shrinking even more. As it stands today, short of developer intervention in this specific case I don’t see a solution. The land was free so that guy spent the cubits and bought the land, whether nefarious or not he is, as far as I know,I allowed to do that.
How about… Once a settlement reaches a certain rank, say… a Hamlet, the Hamlets name stays the same and can only be changed by the Hamlet beacon.
So if I were to try and grief someone, it wouldnt work, no matter what I did. I would simply be adding to that person’s Hamlet. The only thing I could do is grow the Hamlet for the person, and then remove my stuff and reduce it back to a Hamlet, but that’s still no big deal. If the issue is of the name and leader, this could solve it.
This topic is more about the expectation that the second, unnamed player should be able to divine by mind-reading that the owner of the city planned to expand in that completely unplotted direction at some unspecified time in the future and therefore should consider that land ‘claimed’ by the city owner even without said owner actually spending the plots to claim them.
Would asking the city owner before claiming a large chunk of land be the polite thing to do? Absolutely. But one can’t always count on politeness.
Well yeah, I mean… the way the game is built you cannot expect to have every piece of land around your city, especially if you’re a major tourist attraction. I get that, but the whole settlement takeover thing could be nipped in the bud.
Two things wrong with that reasoning tho, Peyago, and if you went and visited it you’d notice it. Namely, a lot of the plots are very high in the area, but not all of them, there are some still connected, down on the surface too. To the ones up in the air, you can still collect resources under. But a section of his beacons is down on the land too, preventing people from collecting the resources there.
Secondly, I searched around and didn’t find any other plots or build owned by this player anywhere withing 60 blocks (10 plots) of the city, neither North, South, East, or West. These random plots are just there. Floating and on the surface, with no other builds nearby, and all the plots are empty and unused.
I did that this morning, 4 hours after Gill made this Thread, and he mentioned that the plots have been there for a few days. And still no activity, or building doing on? It’s obiously not someone expanding, or building, or even planning as there are no starting layouts or communication to the City or the Guild controlling it.
Nothing to show why these plots are there, other than to prevent the town from expanding to the north or west.
I won’t be going to look at it, as there isn’t any reason for me to do so. The only way for you all to fix the issue or figure out what is going on is to talk with said person. Though one thing to consider, I’ve owned plots for over a month before I started to build. Just because something is inconvienent doesn’t mean someone is out to get you. Then again, maybe they are. Who knows?
What a power trip. If you don’t own the plots you can’t say what anyone does with them. What happens if you had already expanded into those 500 plots? Now there are 1500 unclaimed plots on the 3 remaining sides that you would complain are “yours” on the forums when others buy them. When does it end? When you “own” the whole planet?
This new land owner could be up to many legitimate things. But because none of them are giving you power over plots you don’t own, you don’t see it that way. Even if they built nothing it is still a valid use of the land because they might be trying to preserve some of the natural splendor of the planet. Not everybody wants to cover every inch of the game in gleam-soaked concrete hubs of capitalism.
What if one day your bustling metropolis has a huge park in the middle of it because this person had the foresight to preserve some of the land before you paved over it for yet another hundred shop stalls?
This game, like life, is a process. If you plan theoreticals too far in the future, prepare for disappointment. My advice is to ride the wave.
I suppose I could understand how someone might consider the other points as being somewhat valid, even if I don’t agree with any of them, but this one in particular is just straight up nonsense.
Looking at some land and thinking “This will all be mine one day!” is not hard planning. Hard planning would have been to account for future expansion and place plots accordingly beforehand, which would completely negate the possibility of the issue arising in the first place.
The “hundred people” of your example would have 400 plots total just by finishing the tutorial, assuming only one character per person.
This is, AFAICT, not true just from their forum interactions here. They sometimes make decisions I disagree with and that feel punitive but this is a bit over the top.
In regards to the situation in Etherian Woods - Biitula.
We are running out of patience with the current situation because there was a large emply plots claimed in that area before. We managed to wait until the beacon expire. It was a small valley requires 200+ plots. We want our entire market in the valley (surrounded by hill on all side) and we simply don’t have enough to claim all of them. Then, comes a player who plotted his beacon shortly after dev posted about plot transfer/buying.
He plotted a one road plot lining a “U” when looking towards west, with the underside of U cutting half of our planned market. I tracked the guy down via forum and cringed to find post where he favors on plot buying. As I tried not to be biased on his position, he dodged our efforts to contact him until I personally met him by chance on a shopping area on another planet. There is no argument during the discussion and I simply want to know why he plotted that way. His reason was to have his road leading to a meteor landing site south of his plot. I’m not sure if he is trolling with me or he is being sincere. His plot clearly leading to towards the west instead of south. The negotiation failed despite I pleaded my case by explaining our plans to him. Instead, he asked us to include his plot into our plan. The reason we haven’t is the mechanics of a one plot road. Anything we plot inside the “U” is technically not part of our settlement.
We explained this situation to a dev, and his ruling was to expand the opposite way. Only shortly after that I realize he has another beacon on the north-west. This is where his true intention becomes clear to us. We have a half-plotted road that was going to connect to a house in a straight line. We simply don’t have enough plots to spare for a road plot, we haven’t even build anything on that road. This player clearly knew this and hijacked the other end of that road and surrounding the player house, leaving no empty plot in between. His one plot road then continuing south but not linking to his other beacon that is less than 10 plots in distance.
To this day, his plot remains empty. I contemplated of reporting this new development to a Dev but I find myself feeling helpless and pessimistic. When you have a players with a clear intention to avoid participating in a community settlement, plotting one plot road blocking a community advancement towards a large area, leaving no space between other people’s plots; that is a clear intention of abusive nature.
I personally can tell the difference because we have a linked settlement NE of our village. They are not part of our guild, they avoid communication for the most part, but they respect our theme and built around tree and foliage. They left us rooms for expansion, and based on their build we can see how they simply want to have fun designing their village. On the other hand, this player completely block us on the west and northwest of our village, with an empty one plot road!
This is a frustrating situation and our leader felt so helpless that he’s literally waiting for rented planet. We pride ourselves for our theme settlement but we are stagnating because we don’t have a marketplace to attract new players. One of us even moved out for that reason alone because of our poor foot traffic. There is simply nothing we can do but to swallow that frustration and try the best we can to enjoy the game.
You only need one layer of plots at any height to reserve the land for future expansion, no need to make it 4 plots tall until you’re actually ready to build there, and by that time one would have leveled up and gained even more plots.
You do realize that its extremely easy to get infinite cubits by just leveling up? There’s no need to pay if you don’t want to, you keep earning cubits forever by just playing the game (even after level cap you’ll get 300 cubits every 200k xp).
Or are you saying that people should have thousands of plots right out of the sanctum for free?
I am ok for selling plots, but before that we need a better way to communicate in game.
Everyone should have a mailbox. But not a placeable 3d asset, people will hide it or never place it.
You step on a beacon and you can leave a unique message to the owner (no spam, same interface as signs, you can only edit it). This allow you to thank people, cheer them, ask them infos… and of course solve issues like this without debating on the forum each time.
I am sorry for the victims This is sad, there is nothing we can do about it.
Solves nothing, unless you have idea how to force people to respond also don’t forget there has to be an option to ignore people you choose, if you want harassment free game. Yes the contradiction is obvious.
Personally I would reach out to the person and see if you can agree to some adjustments. Also you can never know what they have planned from just wanting to reserve the land to actually having a build… Or maybe they just don’t want your settlement closer to them?
Either way, try to ask them.
Another option is to just expand in other directions… Many have had to adjust plans a million times because of other changes in the game… It isn’t fun and no one really likes it, but in most cases builds can still adjust to take on the new look.
We have always had issues with people grabbing land… this is just part of the game. So the only way to deal with it is to either reserve your land as fast as you can for your builds or land you want to keep for yourself or move to new locations… It is kind of just a fact of life in this game and we cannot stop people from being able to reserve land… (e.g. some of us like natural landscape).
This is sad, there is nothing we can do about it.
also don’t forget there has to be an option to ignore people you choose, if you want harassment free game. Yes the contradiction is obvious.