Beacon Persistence

If beacons are going to be permanent-ish, I would agree that what you said would be a fairly large problem. Maybe a beacon will only have an expiration if it is within a certain distance of another beacon, and would then be able to be reclaimed/bought? after x months of inactivity.

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I think the idea of scouting out prime real estate locations, protecting it with a beacon, and then selling it is quite a neat idea for a profession. You could not only sell prime spots, but users could tell you the type of location they want, and then you could scout it out, and potentially buy a plot for them if it is taken. Imagine the competition. Haha!

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I personally wanted to use these prime locations, create a lovely build and sell it off. I get to see my build without needing to uphold a beacon, and I get some $$$ for it!

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Zouls post shows some numbers, maybe of quality but still hypothetical.

I see his charts in different way…

I guess, that most players who quit somewhen will reach the upper limit of beacons within 3 - 6 month. Within a time of half a year - a year his charts are possibly true even when i think the green part is about 2/3 (but this is of course subjective interpretation).
And time matters! I believe, after 1 year - 2 years, his graphics will be the opposite. People who are loyal players will be the minority. It’s hard for a game in our dynamic times to bind players over years and years.

Furthermore I am with @nevir I guess it will be a occupation desaster for cities…
You try to create some nice infrastructure with people, persons come (without joining the guild) and build their house just limitating to guilds beacon limitations, and then they leave forever… Naise…

In free space you will have probably often abandoned buildings in “nice” locations. Top of a hill, hidden caves, whatever… the nice spots within landscape. Usually noone builds his house “somewhere”… So you search on for the next “nice” place.

In both situations (cities and “wild areas”), active people either need to find new places or build around abandoned area. This is like dealing with persons not able to park their car right, so they block the second lot next to them too … hate that…(that’s a pretty abstract connection, but hits the point pretty much to me).

The distribution in both examples will be probably as best as possible. So whereever you go you’ll find abandoned stuff. The older the game, the more you find of it.

By the way @nevir the space occupied by leavers is just one problem to city developers. Think of all the griefers, either from rival guilds who want to “disturb” your plans or people who “just don’t care” about people interacting around them. I see quite a lot challenges to structured “big” ideas… But that’s another point…

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hmm… Interesting… I think you are right on this one. The playerbase would at worst case fall down and at “realistic” case be laundered (There will be a constant rotation of new players getting the game and old players quitting for good). I was looking at it as “new players leaving bad, old people leaving to come back alright” but if you have a long time player who stopped for good then that would be a good amount of beacons to occupy space. The doubled edged blade so to say. I said “that guy has more to lose” while you said “that guy takes up more space”. Which is completely true. Well done.

Alright, so that was a good long read. To clarify a few points, while yes I did not operate an automatic regenerating world like B<, I did have a decently large staff of 12 moderators who’s primary jobs included manual regional roll backs where large swaths of unclaimed land where regenerated by the server seed resulting in nearly the same results as WS is proposing for natural regeneration. These regenerations occurred bi-weekly to about 80% of unclaimed land between player claims. The second clarification is that my server used a plug-in called “residence” that gave players beacon like protection of territory on a block by block basis. Effectively, everybody had a budget of something like 10k blocks that could be claimed by selecting corners of an area by its coordinates then beaconing them for the owner. Players increased their budget by participating in the servers economy in various ways (our ftp way of rewarding players for time played).

In my example, I left out two major types of players that were not also mentioned in your reply- Griefers and quitters. Since my server was heavily moderated and dedicated to a positive experience for everybody, we had a massive ban rate (as high as 1 ban per 2 new members) for anything we considered griefing. This always resulted in a “rollback” that found every action by a single person and undoing it. The only reason I mention griefers at all is because occasionally these bans happened to players who had been with my server for 12+ months and resulted in large beaconed areas with nothing in them- perfect candidates for removal and restoration.

The other type of player (actually a majority of removed beacons) were of players who were with my server for 12+ months, but then leaving mc completely to play other games -cough cough league of legends-. It was always a big decision to wipe out these claims because for the most part I knew the owners on a friendly basis since they were a major part of my community :frowning:

Like I mentioned before, our regenerations happened every two weeks, and this is when we would appraise the many thousands of claims against their owners online time.this was done by viewing log ins, not the size, scope, or locations of the claims. Claims who’s owner had not been seen in 90+ days were wiped, with special consideration for well-known community members. Our system was work intensive and imperfect, but it allowed us to stave off world resets for about 15-20 months at a time. If I had to estimate the number of claims accounts wiped over a 4 year period, I’d say about 2, 2.5k. I also want to add that that does not meen 50% Raye of removal, since my original comment of 5000 players was my peak “recent activity” count with many server hoppers and bans.

So, while your graph showing roughly 25% of placed beacons qualifying for removal is mostly true to my experience, I disagree with your assertion that “sprint players” make up a majority of those affected. My estimates are closer to 5% of removed beacons belonged to “sprint players”, given a time frame of 90 days.

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Hmm… interesting. a few more things I believe you should think about and am curious on your thoughts about

  1. (meant with no offense) Two of the biggest differences are modability and how servers work between MC and B<. You mention hosting a private server and your experience etc. but in the end didnt you just host one of a million servers? What made your server so special? In the end it was a server CHOICE that people made. Picking a server was just PART of the game wasnt it? While Boundless we are not talking small personally hosted servers, we are talking for the entire universe that is the “main” place to play. I dont question that you had players but in the case if you ran a normal server its just about habit. if not then unto 2)

  2. Minecraft is this huge modable monster of a game with people creating a variety of servers (i assume there was a bit for everything). Either you had the vanilla server or you ran a specially modded/ruled server pulling a certain “Crowd”. Maybe sometimes even people who wasnt interested in what you were doing. (Not sure how to explain it. But to put it into perspective i imagine WC3 custom maps where one guy only plays TD and then enters a HL server which he then ruins for other people. while both are playing WC3 there is a HUGE difference on those two maps)

  3. Upon removal of “beacons” did you ever do a checkup again? Did you ever check to see if some people came back to check but just didnt stick around because they realized that their stuff was gone?

  4. You mention “people quit the game for good” i assume you had personal contact with some of them. BUT. i question that you knew all of them. I also question that you were able to monitor who quit the game for good and who just started playing on another server. So even if we say 50% quit for good and 50% went to another server it still quite drastically changes the numbers doesnt it?

  5. You mention griefers. Which will obviously be a problem. But again as i mentioned before if nothing griefers do will stay because of world regen and the only thing they CAN make stay is what they beacon up then how big an impact do you really believe they will make? (you mentioned giving people a massive area to start with. I would assume that beacons are gained gradually so that a majority of griefers would quickly fall off since they actually have to play the game legit before they can start griefing.

  6. You mentioned a bit on “5000” player recent activity which seems quite big. But going back to 1 about how the servers are split. there was a rough estimate from a year ago that 1 million people were playing the game. so have to use that. meaning that your huge server had about 0.5% of the active players (if we assume they were all active at the same time) meaning that the rest is split over OTHER servers of various kinds. (this number helps your argument actually) but to the tricky question. Do you believe that they are applicable? Do you not believe there will be a more… Distinct pattern of thought between the players? Imagine you made a test where you said “Anybody who likes food come here!” and then use your experience from that to say “Oh that event where they ONLY serve mexican food will most likely have problems with people not appreciating other peoples food like we had the problem” (Analogy for very widespread net to the more tight net that B< uses)

Just some thoughts to think about.

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Nice that you try to point with some number examples but your example is pretty far off from the reality if you compare them with statistics from other (similar games).
Let me take a second try at this.

#Chapter 1
Research

I´ve chosen 3 games for comparison:

The Elder scrolls online [A classical AAA MMORPG]
EvE Online [Massive “One Server” Sandbox environment MMO]
Rust [Similarities since both are about building structures in a finite world, no connected servers though]


Checking steamspy.com for the number of activated copies on steam (i know that this source is not the most reliable one,but certainly better than guessed numbers :wink:)

Activated copies on steam

ESO: 503,980 Âą 17,109
EvE: 383,701 Âą 14,931
Rust: 3,734,572 Âą 46,324

Peak number of concurrent players for each game from steamcharts.com:

Peak player number

ESO: 3,461
EvE: 3,622
Rust: 49,920

Checking the websites of various games that share the number of their total subscribers/ actively playing accounts (DotA, EvE Online, and some others) and comparing those numbers with the peak number of active players I approximated that the number of active players roughly translates to 10 times the peak number of players (Which goes along with the number of active players displayed on steamspy.com (2 weeks observation period))
Which results in this approximation:

Approximated total active players

ESO: 34,610
EvE: 36,220
Rust: 499,200

I couldn´t believe the number on Rust myself but several websites confirmed it.

#Conclusion:

Percentage of active players in comparison to the total number of accounts
(Bracketed values are from steamspy.com)

ESO: 6,9% (7,8%)
EvE: 9,5% (12,2%)
Rust: 13,4% (13,5%)

Or in pie charts:

And those numbers just show the total number of active players (including old & new ones) so the percentage of, what you call, “Permanent players” would be even lower than that.


Considering the similar values for this (very) different games I´d assume that this will also come very close to the numbers in Boundless.

#Chapter 2
Translating into beacon numbers

This discussion is about inactive beacons, not inactive players after all so I tried my best to translate my results into a number of beacons.
I combined your assumed percentages with my ‘activity results’ and the result of the Beacon survey result to hopefully get the most neutral and fitting result.

(I just summed up your “sprint players” and “displeased players” and extrapolated the percentages to a whole of 100% for easier math and used very basic excel and linear interpolation tools for the results.)

Result:

(Based on the results from Rust to get the most ‘optimistic’ results)
(Assuming that the average “active player” has played around 100 hours (≙ 111 beacons))


So after the initial hype around 50% of beacons would (could) be owned by inactive players.
I don´t dare to conclude if this would justify not-permanent beacons (although personally I think so) but it would definitely be mildly annoying if every 2nd shop in a city would be abandoned.


EDIT
PS: These are the current stats of Boundless according to steamspy.com:

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Ohh man. This is so sweet. i appreciate you took the time and effort to look it up while I just half fumbled through it at 1 am at night. I realize now that permanent beacons as also mentioned by @Smoothy is that over the years they add up. The last two posts have just been me trying to figure out a pattern or add something new to the conversation rather than real discussion. My main problem was never the “loss of land” but “loss of items = progress”. I can indeed begin to see that with the current rotation of players (joining and leaving) the perm beacons would stay for too long. Now again the main discussion point or the main REASON that this system was suggested was to “clear up land” and i do agree that in many cases that would be convenient. Which is why i still believe that it is fine that we dont have permanent beacons if the player doesnt lose the progress put into the beacon.

As long as that would be considered then i dont have the slighest problem with temp beacons. The real question for now is what would happen with items in it. that is what i will fight for.

Really do appreciate you taking the time to look it up. and i agree they are some pretty wellpicked games :smiley:

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I… I can’t even write a whole paragraph in 10 mins. Meanwhile you guys can make research papers in one sitting :frowning:

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Therefore you create the most fabulous buildings. It’s a bit of comparison between researchers and creators. Often to types of person :wink:

I really hope both of the posts above from @Havok40k (by experience) and @Vastar (rough but well representative by research) will be read by @olliepurkiss, @james and @ben (since they seem to be the ones discussing this topic). I think the posts above, between all these opinions, give the most valuable base to consider a beacon permanent or not. Well done.

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I’ll answer these questions briefly in the order you asked them.

  1. yes, my server was a moded survival server with emphasis on economy (pre-emeralds update) and private land protection (res protection , anti-grief, anti-cheat, etc). The idea was turning SSP mc into MMO Survival mc. We were only one of many thousands of similar servers, but we were one of the more moderately popular at the time (I base that statement on data from various server list sites at the time)

  2. yes, our server was not what everyone was looking for, and in fact many players were turned away for various reasons. We had a certain “crowd” we catered to. Players with less than 30 minutes log in time were not included in my data.

  3. for handling res (beacon) questions or concerns, we utilized a forum tab for players to contact staff 24-7. We did have occasional petitions to undo a res-deletion, tho not many. Unfortunately, we did not utilize a void storage to save a res’ contents. Players that petition a res restoration were instead gifted a compensation pack of building materials, spawn eggs, tools, food, etc to Jumpstart their return. This typically retained 1/3 of those return players.

  4. unlike boundless, I had a near permanent presence online for my MC server. I was logging 8-12 hours daily in game, with my forums pretty much burned into my second monitor. (Real social type, I tell ya!) I made a point of introducing myself to every new player that joined my server, as well as observing them passively (invisibly) throughout the day constantly watching for griefers or d-bags. I also utilized our forums to gain emails for many of my players and used them to contact them prior to res-removal when necessary. I keep in touch with a small handful of my former members to this day :slight_smile:

  5. my policy on griefers was an outright permanent ban on the first offense, with the option to petition a ban on the forums. With millions of potential players to replace them, I was never concerned about where they went after. That likely won’t be the case in b< though, so I’m not sure how that will affect the game in the long run.

  6. wha? I don’t follow you here.

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Let me rephrase. Do you believe that the knowledge you gained from running a specialized server on a very broad game are directly applicable to boundless main server with a very focused core audience?

For clarity’s sake, are you implying with that question that you believe modded Minecraft is more broad than base Boundless?

Edit: And if so, which type of modded Minecraft? Because survival MMO is much different than modpack A is much different than modpack B, etc.

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Precisely! You just answered your own question.

I’m trying to explain it in simpler words without sounding condescending. But its hard. But lets try anyways.

Since i am only familliar with MC on a “stranger” level i want to explain it using something i know more about. which would be warcraft 3.

WC3 was an RTS in its normal game. Base building, kill enemy base. that sort of thing. BUT it had a massive variety of “custom mods” which completely changed the playstyle and created new genres, DOTA, Hero liner, Tower defense. ETC. Now even though some people played the normal mode there were also people only playing mods and some only played SPECIFIC mods which meant that there was a big part who might jump into the normal mode but not WANT to be there and a percentage bought the game for OTHER reasons than the normal mode. Now if we use another RTS. lets say Red Alert which works kind of like the normal mode of WC3 there wouldnt be all of these mods and it would draw a much more concentrated crowd which would NOT include the “mod players”.

TL;DR: People bought minecraft for many reasons since it has many options which might eventually try out some of the options they don’t like. Boundless has severely less choice of options and as such would cater to a CERTAIN playstyle. They are also vastly different in the approach they take in the fact that MC was made around modding and Boundless appears to focus more on a “preset” path.

Damn, i cant phrase it easily without sounding offensive. To put it simple. i appreciate @Havok40k imput of experience but i question whether or not it can be applied as much as it seems at first due to a massive array of variables and differences in the two games.

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No offense taken, but to answer your question bluntly, absolutely yes. The server I ran, though it may be a small sample size and took different approaches to many if the same fundamental problems faced by boundless, was essentially the same game that boundless is aiming for minus the rpg elements (which my server fulfilled with player made dungeons and clever use of mob spawn devices). So, as for questions about beacons (res), automatic world regeneration (manual world edit), and player habits and populations in an mmo sandbox voxel with RPG elements, I’d argue that my experience is about as close as you can get to traveling into the future and playing boundless yourself as you can get.

The similarities between Oort Online and my old server, Zero-craft, are what led me to invest all of the time and money into it that I have.

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Forgive me if I’m mistaken, but won’t Boundless be moddable (dated link, but still applicable, I think)? The modded worlds won’t hook up to the main worlds but I believe providing a wide variety of niches will still be possible.

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Indeed it will be.

Minecraft, TES and Fall out are also modable and has an active modding community and a reputation for its mods.

But then again. So are Fable anniversary. Mass effect 3. Darkest dungeon. Far cry 3 and the Batman series. (to mention a few)

I have never once heard anybody say “im gonna buy batman for the modding”. So the fact that it CAN be modded does not mean that is the main selling point. To be noticed though is that you are right to some degree. Some people will go to boundless for private servers and maybe mods. But to the same scale as MC? i don’t think its going to be even remotely close. MC Is also very much a “do EVERYTHING you want sandbox” while B< is a bit more restricted.

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I’ll reserve my judgement for when the APIs are released and we see what the community comes up with. Hard to say that one is definitively better than the other when one has yet to see 1.0 and the other has seen many many updates (at least imo).

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I’m curious to see how internal discussions about this topic have progressed.

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