The plan in the future is to have beacon fuel. If it runs out world regen will reclaim your site in a set amount of time. Three to six months was the favored consensus I think.
I don’t think that has been officially decided or confirmed… 
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If beacons disapear, i would rather it be based on gameplay time, but the game play time should be of a decent amount as it can happen a player have less time to spend on the game.
The better way would be to make a mean gameplay time of a definite period of time, say four weeks.
Players should have a small permanent space to store stuff in the event they don’t have time to make the gameplay time. It could also be that you would take “holiday” demand from players that suspend the need for gameplay time.
I think the idea is cool and would prevent worlds from being corrupted, but care should be taken about how it comes out so:
2 Base on an amount of recent time played
2 I would only make the beacon disapear and world regen/grieving process takes place
For the gameplay time, it depends if players have some sort of permanent item storage even if they don’t have a beacon. If players can keep items even when they are off, i think 3 hours of gameplay per week over a month is fair enough so 12 hours per four weeks period. If it’s a permanent wipeout and i lose all items that i dont have on me i would say 1 hour a week for 4 hours per four weeks period.
Gameplay time or login time definitely! I don’t think we should be considering fuel any further. There’s enough resource sinks in this game without fueling an inanimate object to reclaim your territory!
3 months is a decent period of time I think. Yes we may get a fair few ghost towns around launch but after a few months it will balance out. If someone’s playing this game for 2 years they shouldn’t be worried about about logging in every month or two when they have more important life problems to deal with.
I think it should consider login time of villagers as well, not just the beacon owner.
And the points about storage blocks being the last to disappear is spot on.
Regeneration time should be based on plot size. 8x8 is regenerated in a few days (after the 3 month window). Bigger plots take longer.
Plot size could also shorten the login window, if people are that worries about ghost towns.
For example a 8x8 plot has to be logged into once every two weeks. Bigger plots up to 3 months. We could have a visual indication of the “inactivity window” too
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We’ve come up with three ideas:
- It’s based on last log-in time which is simple, and clear, and allows people to keep their stuff just by logging in every so often.
- It’s based on amount of recent time played – similar to the above, but prevents people keeping their stuff just by logging on, they have to actually play.
- It’s based on gathering / crafting some kind of “beacon fuel” and putting that into the beacon every so often, which would force players to engage with the game and visit their beacons to keep them maintained.
If I must choose I would say Option 1, because crafting fuel for beacon isn’t good. What if you play the game often but don’t have fuel because you’re traveling to other worlds?
When a beacon is flagged as due to disappear what should happen to the contents?
We have two ideas:
- Initially the beacon remains, but the contents start to slowly regenerate back to the initial world state, once that process has finished the beacon disappears and the land can be claimed by someone else.
- The beacon disappears, and the normal world regeneration process starts reverting the contents back to the initial world state.
Option 1 gives the owning player more chance to come back and rescue their possessions, and means that other players cannot claim them, whereas option 2 allows other players to claim all the contents of someone else’s beacon (if they’re quick enough).
If I must choose I would say Option 1, because it shouldn’t be allowed to get stuff from others by free just because you are offline.
But I’d like to suggest an idea:
If there’s a beacon that’s empty or isn’t used anymore because the player doesn’t play the game, then people can report this beacon. To prevent people from having just a place that someone else has because it looks good, there must be several reports. After receiving several reports the person will get a message via email and the forum. You could make an option in the forum just for that. So if he doesn’t respond to the email and login to the game or clicking a button in the forum like “I’m still active” (because he may can’t play the game at the moment), then the content starts to regenerate and the beacon starts to disappear after a while (maybe after a week it will start).
Just for your information, because most of your ideas are already mentioned by someone (a long time ag) there is another Topic which collects “most” of the current ideas about beacons. You can add your ideas (if they are not mentioned already) there.
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Haven’t been confirmed in any way or form no, it have been brouht up though and heavily contested by @zouls a seen somewhere up in the thread.
Oh I forgot about this. Should probably have started by listing that
The beacon fuel concept is probably the best way to go, and the reasons I think that are two-fold:
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It does not have to be difficult to obtain or time consuming to make. A simple fuel is fine - anything crafted or acquired would do, from wood to the abundant tech fragments to whatever. It could even be leftovers or byproducts of other crafted components. The point is not to make the process of fueling your beacon difficult, and that’s because…
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The importance of this concept lies in the premeditated approach to beacon preservation. The player does not simply get X days of beacon time for X days of played time; the passive nature of that approach will allow players to ignore their beacons same as before. The act of fueling is an investment approach which has players actively thinking about and interacting with their properties (kinda like in life, y’know?). If you have five different properties strewn across three different planets, it is reasonable to have to visit each periodically in order to do “property maintenance” of some kind - and this kind of interaction would also fit that bill nicely.
Oooh Idea!
So, Drichter and I were just talking about this and he suggested something pretty cool. This ties in directly with the beacon fuel idea, and it addresses the concerns of using potentially valuable in-game resources to fuel beacons.
We would like to see the fuel come as a passive resource from performing any of the game’s skills: mining, building, hunting, etc. Fairly similar to the passive resources gained from leveling skills, like coins or plots, in this case you would be able to gain fuel passively when you perform any game skill.
It is important to note that this should cap out each month (or some other designated time period), and that I could reach that cap rather quickly, and the cap of my fuel is commensurate with the plots I have available to me so that I don’t have to short-change a particular beacon. For sake of example, lets say I could cap out my fuel after mining 200 blocks. Or killing 200 creatures. Or building 200 blocks. Or a combination thereof. Then I could go around and fuel my beacons which would then gain resilience against world regeneration equal to X days.
With this system, a player could not simply pop into game every 90 days to preserve their beacons passively, and - more importantly - they could not simply beg/buy a fuel from someone else’s plinth or wherever in order to quickly fuel and then go AFK for another 90 days. The fuel could only be acquired with effort, so they really have to make a decision whether they want to put the time into the game to hang onto their properties.
Fair? I think so.
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Agree - and, well, the beacons themselves are already a constrained resource. So if you’re an active player that has swaths of land that you’re trying to reserve - you’d need to juggle which chunks are most valuable to you
Could possibly simplify it further and just have those actions fuel all of your beacons. E.g. you just have to be in the game and have some activity in order to preserve your beacons
(it might penalize the socalizers/RPers/etc, though)
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This is the same as passively fueling your beacons or simply extending your game time by playing. It’s an ok concept, except it does not force interaction with beacons you have placed across the planets and biomes. The core issues will arise from lonely beacons who have not had visits or regular uses from their owners for extended periods of time. These beacons block land that could otherwise be used by players who wish to actually develop and utilize the vacated space. By being forced to at least interact with the beacon periodically, you have to make a conscious decision to preserve and maintain your land.
I have a possible issue with this … learned from planet jumping in the latest releases.
I have a single beacon on every planet I have visited … nothing fancy - just 1 beacon, with a small ‘safe’ room for me to warp to, if and when the need arises. They allow me to know, without a shadow of doubt, that when I pay a lot of coin to open a warp, the place I am going is safe to warp to - no matter what.
Now, firstly, if I didn’t have those beacons placed as a safe place to warp to, what happens when someone decides that my saved location is a great place to build their fantastic mega-build? Am I still able to warp there? If so, what happens if I warp into a room with locked doors (without knowing it’s locked before I warp in)? Yes I could probably get back to the sanctum, at a cost, but then what about my saved location? Considering it could probably be the only location I have for that particular planet?
Secondly, it would be a massive coin sink to have to physically visit each and every one of those beacons to keep them alive. I’m sure that is something that would put a lot of players off.
Something like beacon fuel, with a physical visit to to the beacon to keep it alive is something that would certainly be in favour of people who are set up in multiple planetary markets, as they would need to visit their plinths every once in a while anyway, but I don’t see that solution benefiting may other play styles at all.
Personally, I’m still in favour of just logging in to renew your claims - something that doesn’t have to be a chore to do, for a game that is supposed to be fun to play. Simple is better in this case IMHO. I also think that people should not be punished for having real lives and needing to take a break from playing for a while, for whatever reason that may be. Being able to just log in, even for a few seconds, would allow them to continue playing at a later date.
One thing that keeps bringing me back to games like WoW, is that no matter how long a break I take, all my stuff will still be there in 12 months time, ready for me to pick back up and get back into the game and enjoy whatever new content has been released. Admittedly WoW is not a persistent world where other people can physically see what stuff I have accumulated, but that’s not the comparison here… being able to get back into a game where you have spent countless hours is. Going back to practically nothing and effectively needing to start the game again, would be enough to put off even the most stalwart returning player. It needs to have a mechanism where players can get back into the game where they left off, otherwise you will lose people … probably for good, and that IMO is not a good thing. What that mechanism would be, I do not know.
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Agreed. None of these beacon fuel ideas are appealing.
We have plot limits already, the way people play this game they can’t afford to leave stray beacons around other than for the purposes of warp locations as above.
Requiring a player to simply log on every few weeks/months to keep their beacons alive is all we need.
If you want to avoid one (active!!) player having a few abandoned/annoying beacons hanging around, all that needs to be done is make beacons decay over time and regenerate as soon they are visited.
But they ONLY decay whilst the player is active in-game.
Easy. Stops abandoned beacons from both active and inactive players and encourages players not to be greedy placing beacons. Doesn’t require worrying about yet another fuel or resource in game and it’s pretty simple.
anything that forces you to play the game is a bad thing and majority will avoid that, if i know that i have to log in monthly to keep everything, it kind of make me not even want to start anything because i know that i don’t always have time to log in. there is better ways to do this example: report system or you can’t place a beacon too close to other beacons. also report system can be faster and more effective to remove someones beacon that blocks your creation intentionally than just waiting month(s) to it fade away, actually if someone really wants to ruin your creation he can just log in or fuel it and you cant do anything about it. it will be big world and surely not everything will appeal your eyes but it would need so much limitation to avoid every bad thing.
Report system would definitely be better but it requires more intervention from the devs unfortunately.
It’s also open to abuse, for example what if a group of player or guild decides to try and report someone’s beacon just because they want the plot even though the beacon is actively in use?
Could make the report system automated if it was combined with a decay/inactivity time.
So using my above proposal, instead of beacons automatically disappearing you can only report a decayed/inactive beacon.
well, i dont think there will be that much people reporting everyone’s beacon that 1 developer or someone hired for the job would not be able to do it in a week or so. checking when that beacon was placed and where, did he place it before the other one and is it blocking the other players creation etc. not hard to investigate. also warning mail to propose removing hes beacon in certain time would be sent before deleting that beacon. there could be its own section for beacon reports and player reports. if its automated then people will definitely abuse it, i have seen games where this happens and its totally unfair. also if you are inactive 2 years and you happened to build your beacon in a nice place where others want to build as well, they will report that beacon and due to inactivity and automated removing its as bad as the fueling system.
The details of how we will deal with this subject are still up in the air, but this is where we currently are:
- Long abandoned beacons will definitely disappear after some amount of time.
- The timing of when this happens is a very difficult balancing act, we want to clean up dead things as quickly as possible, but we don’t want to unfairly penalise players who are away for a while, but intend to come back.
- The system is unlikely to be based purely on “time since last logged on”, nor purely on in-game fuel, but will most likely be some hybrid of the two.
- At some point we will come up with a proposal, using the ideas in this thread as the basis for that, and post it on the forums for you to digest and dissect.
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A good point that we thought of but I did not want to bring up because I am already bringing up so many points. Now is a great time to address this, though.
First, you are absolutely right in that money - coins - are an extra cost that is unnecessary. The cost of porting yourself to any of your homes should be very minimal if nothing at all. In any case, why not take advantage of a group portal or a semi (if not permanent) portal system to worlds.
Secondly, if you aren’t visiting your reserved locations on other worlds, then give them up to people who would like to maintain and utilize them. Hanging onto them as a “safe port” location is kinda greedy, don’t you think?
And I’m totally not blaming you for wanting to do this!
Because if the system is set up in such a way that you can’t tag onto at least one of several static warping points on a planet in order to farm or explore or whatever, then the system needs to be tweaked in order to discourage players from engaging in behavior that inhibits fun for all.
I tried to read it all 
don’t kill me.
Fuel and Rent concept are ok but also have big downsides all it takes is for someone to forgot and then lose all there stuff.
personally i think it should be based off active time so i made this !!! to give idea of what im thinking the days i have listed in the photo are just idea’s
I also feel if anyone is gone for 2 months aka 60 days its there Obligation to make sure someone can assist in taking over until they get back or fully understand the risk of loss or someone else claiming ownership.
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I really like the idea but again there’s downsides to it like 60 days is pretty huge to have abandoned plots and beacons about. I have 2 abandoned plots right in the middle of my land and I wouldn’t want to be waiting that long in 1.0.
My biggest fear with this just based on logging in is with alt characters if you wanted to troll someone you could just place beacons right in their way and only log in once every 60 days. At least make trolls work for it and gather fuel if they want to block others.
I much prefer the fuel system myself, if you don’t log in once every 2 weeks and gather fuel (or however long it will be) it will give someone else the chance to build on your area. It’s not as if there are limited building plots in Boundless, the entire world is open to build.
You can add friends to your beacon to fuel it for you if you plan to go AFK for 60 days I believe. Taxes in most games with open world property are every 2 weeks.
In Archeage when prime plots of land were about to expire it was a pretty big competitive event for loads of people to go and claim the land or take any resources they could before someone else placed a plot on it, I imagine a prime market slot in the middle of a big town would be the same in Boundless. This is how a real estate agent would make his money on grabbing expiring prime slots, especially if he grabs a spot in the middle of a guilds land and they have to buy it from him. If every plot goes pretty much to the guild or a friend on claiming rights there wouldn’t be much rush for prime land spots.
Edited to add: also in Archeage you got a warning sent to your in game mailbox telling you your taxes were due, and then again once you ran out of taxes a warning mail telling you your property plot would be up for grabs - I’m not sure if we’re getting in game mail boxes, I hope so but in case not how about a coloured warning system when the beacon gets down to a certain amount of fuel?
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