Could you explain what problems it could cause?
I’m very interested in this, because I also tried to turn off the road buffer in my little town but the buffer didn’t disappear and the plots are still reserved to me. So i guess you are not really turning it off, you just give permission to everyone? 
yes, disabling the protection zone doesn’t change how the plot reservations work or which beacon they are reserved for, it just gives permissions to anyone automatically to plot in them.
Let’s say that works as you describe, the illuminaughty mall changed owners, the paths have been re-plotted after the shops were already there…
But the issue is also the direct neighbours of any and all shops which also have a buffer by default on and are smack next to the plots that need to be re-plotted…
How about a new rule for mall owners, have a mailbox within your shop? It solves some issues.
There’s no solution that works for everything. Maybe James can re-date the roads beacon to fix that. This problem will no longer occur exist when they finally add beacon transfer.
These beacons should be overruled by the older road. Maybe that’s broken at the moment. (I’ve reported another problem where the reservation doesn’t work as documented.) A plot can always only be reserved by the oldest plot in it’s vicinity.
off on default is the cure i think
by accident and design the sunken town mall has no problems with this
off on default was first thing i said when i read this change
i had a feeling this would happen
they need to think off the things allready placed ingame aswell whith stuff like that
i do think the option is something awesome we def need and was asked for by many people
JUST OFF ON DEFAULT and then a info pop up you have the option after lets say level 6
but another solution for malls could be an adaptation off the guild system
aswell
EDIT: we are afected after writing this i openend discord and first mail was a person switching plots and our protection took over 
lol i bragged to soon lol forgot we also have a town beside it
First my rant. . what I find amusing is when the lighting changed and had a very detrimental affect on my build and others we were told to get over and redo the builds. .
Ok all done. . if I was building a mall now I would plot as below to either make 4 deep stores or 9 deep stores.
To get the larger spaces would mean that the mall owner would have to do some 10k single plot beacons in order to always have first rights to the plots, but it would not be impossible.
Now of course this does not help the existing malls, but might work for expansions to those malls.
Given how it’s been received in it’s current state, as a temporary one-time measure do you think it would be possible to have a script run through the DB and just turn off the plot protection on beacons who’s owners have not logged in in X period of time. Then at least mall owners aren’t having to fight the reserve space of players that don’t play any more?
There would be the downside that it would turn of plot boundaries of non-playing users who are out in the wild and not a problem, but it ‘seems’ like that’s the lesser of the issues people are experiencing.
As an aside, do reserved plots/columns count towards the automatic generation of new planets (in the same way that once enough land is plotted, a new planet is generated)?
If not, it might be worth adding them to the calculation, so that we can’t end up with a planet that nobody can plot on, but still doesn’t hit that plot target? If they do already count, then people seem to be overlooking the idea that this could help to generate more new permanent planets.
That is an interesting solution. I wonder how much the time should be maybe 3 months?
Honestly, I’d hate to have to make arbitrary decisions like that (and am thankful that I don’t have to). I was thinking a couple of months or so though.
1 week per plot 
The fact that I reserved land for a farm near a settlement (204 plots) means almost 4 years I would have had to be gone. If I have 12 plots in a mall (not really sure how big most stores are) then it is 3 months. Since we are not even a year into the game, would this help?
Edit: sorry did bad math and corrected
No, because people buy gleamclub and don’t come back for months.
“it just gives permissions to anyone automatically to plot in them” If there is a densely populated area, this is a HUGE problem
Having a mailbox doesn’t help, since there are inactive players.
Also players have to find your mailbox, and sometimes chat/mail doesn’t work correctly.
How the heck is anyone suppose to know which plot/beacon is older? If you lower your buffer or unplot, you risk losing plots -which has been happening.
Something needs to be done, this new system is not helping anyone
I cannot re-plot the existing mall. I do not trust the game enough at this point to buy anymore cubits/plots to plot a new mall. Sure, if we had this info BEFORE we built existing malls/cities, we might be able to plan around it.
This is part of our issue and why we have not done any plot trading since the update. I’m hoping they just reverse this update change.
Yes, this is the only solution at this point.
