Yeah, great post Celt - many of the alternatives proposed to farming leaves/wood for beacon fuel just change it to farming other mats, farming prestige, farming visitors, or farming “friends”.
I am so against player voting - if I have to go round sucking up and paying tribute to everyone I meet just in case they decide as a group to “bully” vote my beacon out while I am on a break - it doesn’t make for a very pleasant game atmosphere living with that kind of fear.
yeah, the really big thing that the voting system would create is power. we (I) dont want that, because everyone alwayas will abuse it at some point
i’ve been thinking the same way
What bugs me with this system is that someone will make awesome builds and decide not to play anymore. Losing any nice builds would harm the game which is player-generated-content based. Imagine someone put hours and hours into resource gathering, building and tweaking a few builds. They look awesome. For whatever reason that person does not fuel those builds. They disappear. I don’t get the point of that?
I think maybe asking players to fuel builds only if they were flagged for removal. They would need to be flagged by more than one user. Also users that can flag build must be neighbors. So no one can over vote anyone, but can require active participation. That sounds kinda balanced to me. For bigger builds I’d require moderator action to actually remove it even if it was flagged, and even if user didn’t fuel it. For those cases mods could flag builds as permanent or something. Maybe owner could also ask mod to flag as permanent if he/she considers the build too pretty to be flagged for removal or if he plans absence or complete drop of the game 
For empty builds (ones that do not contain any significant build - determined from the diff with naturally generated state) it is enough for one player to flag them, owner is informed by email, has 24h to fuel it. Also empty builds should be actively flagged by system for removal after like two weeks of inactivity.
For actual griefing just report to moderator.
All together with all the complexities and server load I guess adding this kind of active system as proposed it absolute overkill, for both servers and players. Why track everything and anything if you could only track per flagging?
I am seeing an Oort Historical Society: a guild who’s purpose is the preservation of beautiful, but abandoned, builds. When a building hasn’t been fueled in the proper time frame, members of the guild come along to take the land with guild plots.
@jasoncfinley I actually see a good idea forming here. It relates to jason’s and @Spoygg’s thoughts. What if the system works as proposed by @olliepurkiss with one added feature: When a player’s build runs out of fuel the area puts out some kind of aura/area message (once per hour or the like) and during that time players can go to the build and claim it with their plots? It let’s cool builds be salvaged, and even crappy builds get used for materials, etc. This is a system that involves players, but doesn’t give them direct power over another person’s plots.
I could even see it working if the timing was modified for this type of event. E.g., when a player voluntarily removes their beacon, it’s the same regen as normal. But when a player’s beacon times out the former plots get a visible aura and/or sends out a message to the local region (like the current 50 named regions per planet) that there is some stuff for grabs. And this area would stay like this for, say, a week [or enter other preferable time here].
For maintaining the RPG feel I think auras would be cooler. Imagine going exploring to see a nice building sparkling with gold and the excitement you’d feel about possibly having found a trove of materials or a pre-made structure in a nice area!
With the e-mail notifications being sent to players and a timescale being given to them as to how long they have before this stuff happens, it’d be a fair system with possible rewards for others from those who stop.
i like the idea. my portal on berlyn is in the middle of a ghost town i believe. it will be sad to see all the little things around there vanish but at the same time i think that the lack of development of certain of those builds may be a deterrent for players looking to build by other great looking creations.
meaning, the half built homes that never change are like slums and condemned houses. no one wants to live by that.
while they make the area easier to spot i dont mind my portal being a secret find in the middle of the wilderness. There are some nice things pretty close to my portal, a lake house or two that look pretty nice. A nice homestead with a pretty fabulous windmill. etc.
I am for the proposed system.
Id just like to note, i hope we dont get too far into the habit of having to fuel everything. And if we do, as long as the costs arent to stress inducing then yeah lets do it.
i like the shared beacon fuel idea.
to counter the possibility of players making a ton of annoying pointless beacons and making them permanent fixtures, just up the cost of fuel depending on how many beacons you have out since it would be shared. I also like this idea since traveling between worlds can get quite expensive if you dont have portals / access to portals considering you need freaking gigantic warps and coin supply to travel regularly between distant planets, a feature i think still needs major balancing.
shared fuel among beacons +1
If you would like, I could connect your elopor temple build to the berlyn township. At the moment, the township’s elopor portal is connected to @Nyuudles’ grotto build, but since nobody was using it I shut it down to reduce fuel costs.
I definitely foresee preservation guilds forming as in @jasoncfinley visions. For example if 30’s hand or DzChans dragon were to become unbeaconed I would very much be on board with looking to claim these amazing structures to preserve the areas looks.
It would also mean, for example in Dragons Watch, there are some extremely prime market stall spots close to the portals and I imagine quite a few people turning up there to try and compete to place their beacons on the spots if they timed out. I think it would add a good dimension to the game for intergalactic real-estate agents grabbing and selling on these prime spots of land.
Public auctions - how much am I bid for this lovely dragon ladies and gents!
You’re not taking my dragon away from me 
Too much sentimental value.
the portal is already open for two weeks and im about to add another two or three weeks worth of shard.
if you want to put an inter-world portal up to same spot where mine is, that is fine. they are far enough away i think that cross-hemisphere portals could be nice. I dont really want to undo what i have going atm though.
Thanks for the comments guys. Overall I still think the proposal is a good foundation for the system. One suggestion that we really like is the idea of returning the contents of all the storage (and machines) in a beacon to the original owner whilst leaving the blocks and props in the world as they are. That’s something we will look to do, although not for the first release of the system.
I think this idea should be reconsidered. It does not promote people actually playing the game or create a vibrant community of players that log in regularly. That is likely much more important to this game than a few beacons that expire. An email notification system will only create larger ghost towns like we have now and persistent areas and plots that will never go away because people will log in to refuel beacons.
It might do that, it might not. If getting an email makes you log back in and refuel the beacon, I’d say you’re pretty addicted to boundless. Most people that leave won’t come back email or not. And the people that come back for the beacon, they might come back for a while.
I left for months, I came back refueling before all my beacons die off. I had to go buy fuel and try to figure out how the new fuel work, next thing I know I had played all day and had way too much fun to stop.
I don’t think emails would change much either way. I didn’t need an email to know roughly when my beacon were going to run out. I think it would be more useful for active people with many beacons that play all the time but lose tracks of their stuff. There is a reason the guys you see asking for those features are Moebius and Virresss. I’d say they are the active kind.
All people whether active or not already get a warning every day for 7 days. If they aren’t fueling a beacon then, an email shouldn’t be able to help then because they are still ignoring the constant warning. The warning we get are both visible and it is very easy to determine what beacon is low and the exact amount of time you have to fuel it.
So I do not see any additional help that an email will provide and all it does is create an additional technology layer and coding to the game. The additional infrastructure requires additional cost, etc. So it is a redundant feature that creates no additional value.
Those warnings require you to actually be in the game to be able to see them. That level of notification is not enough imho.
Real life will (or at least should) take priority over a game, so in those instances where people have had to be away and genuinely forget to refuel, they shouldn’t be punished for that.
You’re also more likely to regain players that have become inactive for whatever reason, when you notify them that all their building efforts so far are going to be lost. In not notifying them, you’re more likely to push those people away to never return. I’m not delusional to the fact that some may just log in, refuel and disappear again for 12 weeks (there’s absolutely nothing to stop them doing that now), but I think not having this mechanic, or similar, will do more harm than good.
In all honesty… running a dedicated mail server is a very minimal cost. I run mine for about $10/month. Now, I have no idea of what operational budget the devs have, but I’m not about to try and make monetary decisions for them and to be quite frank, neither should anyone else - that is something that is well outside of our remit as early access gamers.
As I briefly mentioned in another post, it doesn’t even need to be an email. An integration with Discord (and the equivalent on PlayStation(?)) would be sufficient - it’s essentially a free service. As long as you have joined the official discord, the game would be able to private message you about your beacon statuses.
The devs have already expressed an interest into looking at the possibility of integrating the voice coms of Discord into the game… using private messaging wouldn’t be too far of a stretch from there.
Real life also contains technology like a calendar application where the user can easily put a reminder for them to go in an fuel their beacons. Almost all people that have email have a calendar component to it. The same goes for those that have a smart phone.
In a production environment you should at least have 2 mail servers to support fail over especially if you are going to provide a good service.
Of course it is up to the developers to decide their costs but as players of this game we should also consider that cost and development time cost in our suggestions. Especially when there is already a game mechanic that does provide a decent amount of notification. It is not hard to find or restrictive in any nature.
So mostly we are talking about personal responsibility of a person deciding how important the “game world” is to their “real world.” That is all we are deciding on… everyone will have their own view.
I am not opposed to this but then the person will have to be on discord for the warning. Additionally, you are now relying on a secondary tier of services to support your primary infrastructure. In some cases this is not a smart development decision.
If I was going to put a “real life” notification anywhere right now that required some development time, then I would lean towards integrating with the Forums. Currently there is some linkage (unknown to the extent) for our names and backing level in the forums. So there is a possibility that they could link our beacons to our profile and track at some level the times.
I do not know the development time needed for any of the options discussed, but I still think we have many more important things that their time should be spent on like Guilds, etc. Trying to grow a feature that provides a decent level of functionality right now is not really the smartest used of time and certainly does not fall at all within the critical path of the game development.
I think a decent middle ground would be a perk from an authenticator app. Many MMOs have begun implementing this kind of account protection and enabling it for your account could allow the player to receive alerts to expiring builds.
This could also be used as a rudimentary form of communication along the lines of the guestbook. A notification of this player has liked your build. If gone for greater than 2 weeks, friends could ping your build with a where have you been emote or something along those lines. Of course the app would need to allow for which variations of push notifications are sent out to the phone.