Also think it’s a comparism of apples and pears.
Charakter developement in Boundless will be stored as well.
If you are off for a year in wow your collected stuff is also quite useless, because a new expansion appeared and gave a lot of more valuable goods.
Depends on what progression for you is ingame. For example if it is reading all the storyline in WoW, it is possible you keep it as a memory.
If it is building the biggest builds in BL you would annihilate the whole progression for the person who has done so, by sweeping it or letting it corrode. Others might keep it as a fond memory, but for the builder it would be like ripping out a pear tree which has grown for 5 years in your garden. If you see the tree as ressource it would not be a problem. Same to builds - livestock/material for others to harvest.
For a person putting it up much more than just ressources. But you can take screenshots. After all some things left to remeber. 
That’s why these players should tune in from time to time to spend 5 minutes to fuel their beacons ^^
No offense but I don’t want ugly dirt houses or unfinished and long abandoned buildings to destroy the imersion and take away building spots from other players. If you want your building to be infinite without doing something to keep them protected you can still rent a private server.
that’s just my humble opinion though
But at least they are going to be used for something ^^ I’m only talking about abandoned buildings
Sorry I didn’t check up on replies, I slacked a bit there!
Just want to add to my previous post that, splitting fuel up, allows the player to have acces to different stats/advantages depending on which type of fuel is used. This in turn might answer to the need of a broader community and technically, this can provide the game with a currency or resource-dip. Transforming blocks in the world into beaconfuel, that protects and defends more precious blocks in the world.
@Smoothy, thanks for the consideration.
@Heurazio, I will surely read that thanks for bringing that into view. I’ll go ahead and dig into it.
Unfortunately, I see more gamers buying a game and finding out after a short period of time, it’s not the game they expected it to be or the buying was more of sudden, acute motivation then of long therm thought. Afterwards they abandon the game forever… To me it happens from time to time.
I don’t wish it for B<, but I can see it happen…
This would place beacons of many “game hoppers” somewhere (estethic not mentioned). The amount of these guys (i bet) will be far more then guys with “worthy” monuments. I think of “ugly dirty huts” all over without use to anyone that just are permantly occupying space in nice landscape.
I can imagine, your builds maybe are the monumental ones. So for personally you I don’t have a point against permanent buildings. But YOU will be probably with some other like nyuudles or havok quite a minority…
My concern is not for the quality of builds that are abandoned, but the volume of them. I’m of the opinion that abandoned builds should decay regardless of quality. Though the community will find a way to preserve the builds that matter to them the most (donate batteries toward it’s upkeep or buy time extensions from WS, what ever).
My humble builds don’t compare to the mastery of @Nyuudles 
I personally feel the same as you, everything should decay through lack of beacon owner use. The only difference for me is that nothing should be saveable by the majority. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what some people think is a great building, others may not.
I also feel that if beacons are to expire, they need to do so after a certain amount of decay (regen) has occurred first. I don’t feel that anyone should be accorded with that much of a “leg up”, via looting, from someone else’s hard work. That for me would be game breaking, especially if it were only offered to the explorer profession.
I’m still against fuel too - for me, it just feels like a completely unnecessary game mechanic that offers very little to the overall immersion of the game (other than being a chore I think everyone could do without).
I’d love to make monumental builds. It is an obsession. But often I feel like scaring people away by it. It is nice to build huge structures if you have the time. After a while they don’t seem that gigantic any more. I’m already impressed by what I have seen in the trailers and on Steam. In combination with screenshots I have seen before, the trailer conveys a story and progression and most of all creative interaction between the guys building the structures.
One (Many) could build an eternal city - maybe would be ingame phenomenon that players constantly contribute in beacon upkeep.
I think a good solution here is the absentee storage idea. On expiration, chests, machines, valuables are removed from the confines of the beacon and placed in storage till the owner claims it. That leaves only building materials that must be mined before natural decay, and maybe some plants and animals. Not a huge leg up, and only available for a short window.
Tl;Dr abandoned builds should only leave behind the build itself, not the valuables inside.
Yeah, that’s the option I’m leaning towards.
For added realism, buildings will decay. But to honor players, their valuable items will be saved until they return to retrieve them.
I know when I’m playing video games (especially with boss fights) it’s so disheartening to lose everything that I sometimes just quit it for a while.
While playing Hexxit once, I dug into the side of a mountain and built a huge mountain temple. Something happened and the chunk was reloaded. It didn’t delete everything, but it regenerated the natural blocks much like the world regeneration is described in B<. I will admit that it looked like an amazing Indiana Jones movie, but I was so distraught at the loss of my building that I didn’t come back to that world.
I can understand why people would want permanent beacons, but they will be if they just keep playing.
I am no master at building. Just a guy who loves to create ^^’.
Looking at the last few replies (I haven’t read through this whole thread, nor do I want to now ._.) I agree with @Stretchious about the unnecessary need to fuel our beacons, but I’d like to see how fueling our beacons would work out first before jumping to that conclusion.
I really wish there was a good balance for both casual and loyal players.
i considered mentioning it for the previous post you made but decide not to. but since you put it once again i wanted to chip something in for you to think about.
Now this isnt a discussion whether or not you are correct or your analogies are correct this is just a thing to think about.
So skimming through your previous post you used the evidence of “having run a minecraft server and not having any clean space” which is quite good. except for a few things.
Did your minecraft server have beacons? or was it just base minecraft? And have you thought about how that compares to boundless? Not sure how to put it… Atm they still say beacons are 16x16x16 as far as im aware? that is the space that people can “take up”. I might be wrong but if there is no such thing in minecraft then one person could “easily” ruin lets say a 1000x1000 area with random building and random digging. boundless? Not so much. after all we still have world regen for anything NOT beaconed. so the guy who might just go in to “ruin” stuff or do mindless things he would “ruin” 16x16x16 area, if God forbid he had four whole beacons he could ruin a whopping amount of 32x32x16. Which if you take into account the amount of space/universe is absolutely nothing. its like saying a single specific grain of sand on a beach can ruin the entire beach.
acquiring beacons. If we split people into three groups for convenience. We have “permanent” players who play daily and as such they arent going to lose beacons. “Sprint” players who will be playing the game for some time, level up, and then stop playing for a long time to come back later. “Displeased” people who will go into the game. play for some time and not like the game never to pick it back up again. (This is purely hypothetical. dont take the numbers too seriously). so if we split the community into these. lets say there are 60% permanent players. 30% Displeased players and 10% sprint players (again random numbers). Now we go to the main point of acquiring beacons. It will either be
A) Constant
B) Exponential.
lets assume that people are given a beacon at spawn. Then we have on the constant graph that people earn a beacon every 2 hours of playing (very low number i would assume. if it was constant i would put it way higher but im trying to favor the side i disagree with) and have a max of 15 beacons.
the graph would look like this
Meaning upon reaching 18 hours you have 10 beacons. Now the permanent players will hit that point and it wont matter, so lets ignore how big a percent those would count for the beacons that would ACTUALLY be in the worlds (because for some reason they wont have ugly builds xD) so then we have the 30% displeased and 10% sprint players. how many hours do YOU believe the displeased people will put into the game? lets again use really ambitious numbers and say that 15% players under 2 hours, 10% plays for around 4 hours and 5% plays for around 8 hours. Then you have 15% of people who only have 1 beacon. 10% who only has 3 beacons and 5% who has 5 beacons. These are the people who wouldnt lose much and dont intend to come back. Then looking at the sprint players if we assume that 5% of those spent the 18 hours and build stuff up to get 10 beacons and 5% spent 12 hours in the game getting stuff (i would still assume low numbers) then you have 5% who has 10 beacons that they have stuff in they want to keep and 5% with 7 beacons who has stuff they want to keep. these will be punished with disappearing beacons.
So let me put it into a pie chart (mhmm pie) in terms of beacons and the numbers that I used (again this is PURELY HYPOTHETICAL but qualified guess) for 100 people
600 beacons placed by permanent players. 85 placed by sprint players and 75 from displeased players. So if THESE EXTREMELY low numbers were to be the case then the amount of beacons placed by “permanent” players would be 4 times as many as the two other types combined. These people could still make ugly and unfinished builds. setting that aside that would mean that 53% of the beacons that would be deleted would be legitimate players who have spent a ton of time in the game and 47% of the deleted beacons would be single or very very small clusters of beacons that would be deleted and that is ASSUMING that there are 3 times as many people who buy the game and quit it early compared to those who just play it for a long time and stop for a long time.
Now if it was to be exponential? then the scale would be tipped even more to the point of the sprint players being the majority being punished. since the assumption is that the sprint player plays until he reaches a certain point or certain beacon size or whatever. while the displeased only play for x amount of hours.
Even with numbers picked that i find extremely favoring how many people were to stop rather than how many legitimate players there would be. even then there is such a close run and it is still only a FRACTION of the beacons that the rest of the people placed.
So when you think “but the new people who will play a bit and never come back” then think about. how many beacons would they even get? would they even spent enough time to ACQUIRE any significant amount of beacons? and how insignificant would that amount be.
So this isnt to say that you are wrong, it just seems like you werent taking world regen into the equation. And again this is why i believe that there should be a system saving everything of a value for the player. because if you dont then i fear that it is a system that punishes the sprint players a hell of a lot more than it benefits the permanent players.
Brainfart over
I’m impressed with the amount of time and thought you put into these charts. Even if you’re numbers aren’t completely accurate, I appreciate the logic and critical thought process that went on behind it. Expiring beacons won’t be as serious of an issue if the displeased and sprint players don’t have that many beacons to begin with.
It is fairly interesting that is the impression you got from it. Because i think the opposite. that permanent beacons wouldnt be a major problem since the amount of “useless” permanent beacons would be fairly limited and that expiring beacons would punish sprint players alot more than they would ever benefit the permanent players.
I must have hit quite the neutral ground for arguments if it can be used for both sides. Sweet!
Why not test and see how much problem permanent beacon is. If 1.0 ships with permanent beacons, with an option to put in disappearing ones in upcoming patches, if there is to much trouble with permanent ones.
I promise to get back to this soon and digest all of what you wrote, but it’s Mother’s day and I’m up to my chin in work. Gimme a day or 2
Oh, I’m sorry @Zouls. I thought I was agreeing with you. Haha.
I see what you are saying now.
Your system for giving players more beacons as they play works well for permanent or expiring beacons.
One thing that hasn’t been taken into account (I think) is where beacons are placed.
My hunch: people prefer to build near existing population centers. Furthermore, we should expect a large # of players to get the game, play for a while, and then quit.
This suggests to me, that population centers will have a fairly high density of abandoned builds - and those builds are in prime real estate locations.
If beacons are permanent, that’s a pretty frustrating situation for many, I think. On the flip side, people might camp expiring beacons in prominent locations and resell em (good? bad? not sure)