Is fuel is tradeable, you can spend your not-so-hard-earned Coins on fuel. Tada, a 10 second interaction with a plinth and you’ve got a month of fuel!
I keep saying fuel should be crafted/made. We have already seen machines that refine. Why not refine crude minerals/resources/blocks into like the “essence” item we keep seeing or something similar and use that as your fuel. That way you can use these things to build with/to craft with/to power your beacon. You’re not going out of your way to do a job. You’re just paying a tax.
Speaking of taxes, no one said the fuel couldn’t be Coins.
I don’t think 1 week is long enough but I don’t think 6 months should be the lower cap either. There’s a happy medium somewhere in there.
And if you think people aren’t going to want to rejoin because their stuff is gone, that’s fine. It’s a lack of responsibility or ownership for said stuff, but I guess I easily forget that kids play this game. I just know I personally don’t play on minecraft servers where empty, protected builds litter the landscape and if private servers weren’t a thing I wouldn’t be playing on Boundless if that was the case either.
As @ChickenBranches said it provides a variety of choices also it adds another gold sink something I try to mash in everywhere and creates a new trade resource even if it spawns in aboundance maybe the hunter doesn’t want to use time gathering it.
Turning things from mechinacs into resources increases player interaction and therefore makes a better MMO
May of already been mentioned but maybe putting fuel into other people’s beacons(if its even allowed) to help them out if they have been gone or if they just like their buildings or w/e should be restricted to guild members and friends only. I could see guilds putting fuel into “ghost town” beacons near their rival guild’s base to try to restrict them. Or even some griefer/troll doing it to all the ghost towns when he has an abundance of fuel to annoy people cause sadly people will go out of their way to annoy other people
While I agree to an extent you do have to keep in mind that this is not World of Warcraft but a voxel based game which has a heavy emphasis on building. So if anything I would want a system that solves the problem of ghost town beacons without placing too many requirements on the players building and play-style, having fuel as a hard requirement to keep your base from disappearing is a very restrictive concept for a game call Boundless. If the fuel is used as a gold sink then there will be some players that only casually play once in a while who won’t be able to afford to keep their base protected and if the fuel is as cheap as dirt it loops back to my previous comment that at that point there is no reason to have it.
It could work alright but as you can tell from most of my comments its not my favorite choice for a system like this.
It still leaves you having to find someone who is actually selling it
I don’t think machines don’t come into play until a bit further down the progression tree - although I could be wrong.
It’s not necessarily just kids, and it’s certainly not a lack of ownership or responsibility. Real life will always come first (or at least it should) before a game. And games, for a lot of people, are an escape from real life. They should be enjoyable by their very definition.
Personally, I want B< to be as successful as it can be … for as long as it can be. I just think it needs to be accessible to as broad an audience as possible.
If the more hard-core gamers are so worried about lack of space, or littered builds, just band together and rent a private server where you’ll have control over who can place beacons.
I don’t think requiring someone who has a little base with 1 or 2 beacons to spend like 5 minutes of time to upkeep their beacon every 2-3 months is a big deal that will get in the way of real life. And if someone does need to be away for a length of time they could ask pretty much anyone to do the upkeep for them. I’m sure that a lot of people would be willing to help upkeep someone’s beacon if they have irl problems, so this isn’t really an issue.
If you go on an extended break from the game and don’t make any kind of agreement for someone to keep your plot kept up, then that’s either laziness or an outlier.
I don’t think making a system that is mostly for the 0.001% of people who have an issue that prevents any sort of contact with anyone who plays the game for a period of time exceeding 3 months is worth having the system be dysfunctional for an MMO.
There are a lot of ideas and strong opinions around this topic. Let’s try to get a numerical representation of what people are thinking so far (keeping in mind that this only reaches an audience of people reading this thread and that a wider Boundless-lead survey may be more fruitful).
Beacons should be permanent. They only disappear if their owners remove them.
Beacons should require some sort of fuel/payment maintenance. Once the fuel is 0, the beacon no longer protects against regen.
Beacons should fade away only if the owner hasn’t logged on within X amount of time.
0voters
If 2 or 3:
Beacons with full fuel/payment/time should last 1 week.
Beacons with full fuel/payment/time should last 2 weeks.
Beacons with full fuel/payment/time should last 1 month.
Beacons with full fuel/payment/time should last 2 months.
Beacons with full fuel/payment/time should last 3 months.
Beacons with full fuel/payment/time should last 4 months.
Beacons with full fuel/payment/time should last 5 months.
Beacons with full fuel/payment/time should last 6 or more months.
I honestly don’t think everyone will have the same play style - not everyone will want to be in a guild - sure, they’ll trade to get the stuff they want/need, but there will be people who prefer to just play solo. You can see that in the builds people have done across the servers… instead of joining a community build area, there are lots of players that have wandered off into the wilderness to be away from the main hubbub of multi-player communities.
I don’t think any of the options discussed in this thread make the game dysfunctional Some options just make it easier to continue where you left off after an extended period of time in the real world.
212.0654% of stats are made up to sway opinion or perception.
I fully understand the reason people want to have a fuel source for additional immersion … and the potential to be able to grave rob other people’s stuff when they don’t pay the fuel bills. I just don’t agree with the idea. I prefer a basic, easy system where you just need to login and play the main core of the game to have fun.
I think ‘coin’ would be the only suitable resource for beacon fuel since it is the most neutral resource in the game.
THIS. People use natural disasters or multi-month holidays as an argument for a 6+ month regeneration-buffer for beacons. But I think such a timespan would only help a very small percentage of players while it would be a major annoyance for the majority of players.
It’s taken me a while to read through all of these posts. Damn, this topic exploded pretty fast!
My thoughts on beacons is a bit different than what I have read so far… rather than gathering fuel from resources to power a beacon, what if instead you gain power charge from work? This has a few of its own pros and cons, but I’ll go into a bit more detail for clarity first.
What I mean is that by doing actions in game, you slowly build a charge to power your beacon, much like charging your phone battery. No matter how long you charge your beacon, it has a max amount of discharge time before you need to begin charging again. (It’s a hotly debated topic, but my opinion is 100 days, 1 day = 1% charge) know those lovely glowy cubes on all of our tools and weapons? We simply know them as “oort cubes” but what if they function as some sort of kinetic energy transfer device that stores energy from work done with that item and transfers it directly to your beacon? Effectively, simply being active in game will charge your beacon.
Pros:
Powering a beacon is not a chore, just play the game.
You don’t need to return home to maintain the beacon.
Any profesion can charge their beacon without having to switch to finding fuel.
Cons:
Not tradeable
Not transferable
Possible fixes for these cons, perhaps if your beacon is at 100% capacity, you can then charge tradeable batteries that can be traded or socketed into your own beacon to add additional days to a beacons life? Perhaps batteries could also be used to power other devices besides just beacons such as airships, or consumed by a tool to allow that tool to output extra power (ie break speed for hammers, or damage for weapons)
TL:DR work is converted to energy that charges beacon’s capacitors, and excess work is stored in tradeable batteries.
Nevertheless you would be forced to play a lot or constantly. It wouldn’t be in favor of permanent beacons. Although I like this idea. If balanced right (for example by 2 hours of mining you gain 2 weeks beacon energy) this could be very motivating. Especially tradeable beacon energy. Well done.
1 UP!
That’s highly dependant on the conversion rate of work to power, and subject to simple balancing. A few hours of play every 100 days is not constant by any means.
Now that I have finally read through the wall of text and am not too tiered to write a reply, I’ll share my opinion/idea for beacon persistence(and a suggestion that doesn’t directly concern the topic).
I’m going to kick off with the suggestion for new consumable container, without further ado, let me represent:
Time capsule(just a concept name)
So the idea of this container is for the players to store their gear and what else they would like to for extended period of time.
The container would be accessible only by the player who placed it and it would have ‘lifespan’ up to 6 months, after running out of the time span it would still be available for week or two while anyone can loot it and after that it degenerates with the items inside(also the container would be consumed immediately when/if all the items inside are taken).
The container would persist one log off, so if you place the container log off, come back and log off again and don’t empty it before the container will remain in the world for week or two and is open for anyone.
Players can have only one Time capsule placed at a time and they could have double the inventory size of regular chest.
So now that’s out of the way, what I think about the beacon persistence is that they should last for 2 months in total.
For the first 6 weeks the beacon would work as it would regularly, for the last 2 weeks the beacon would let the structures to degenerate up to 66%(this would be the state at the end of the 2nd week, after which the beacon disappears and the world regeneration kicks in as well), while the beacon is at the last 2 weeks and if the owner(or anyone else associated to the beacon) recharges it, the structures can be restored to their former state if the player(s) have the materials to replace the degenerated ones.
What comes for upkeep of beacons I have to say I’m with @Stretchious as it shouldn’t be a grind to upkeep the beacon, so if there has to be some sort of substance to fuel the beacon I like @Havok40k’s suggestion a lot.
Maybe the time for beacons to run out should be depending on the distance to the capital, so very attractive spots in crowded areas go down faster, and my lonely building out in the wild can stay, maybe not for ever but much longer.
Then you have a choice when you build and know you not so faithful to a game.
See now you gotta take that idea and crank the capitalism up to max, start a power company that recharges other people’s beacons for a fee with a low paid labour force producing that energy working in the mines, so you get energy to sell and raw materials.
All joking aside I think this idea is on the right path, it encurages users to play the game to keep their beacons active instead of just having a system where a timer is reset when you log in or a fuel system where the resource could be scarce, which has its pros and cons. This makes beacon upkeep easy for people who regularly play the game but harder if you don’t have time to spend on the game.
A few concerns I have is how the energy would be distributed, would their be a global beacon power bank that all beacons draw from or do you have to charge each individually? On that same note if all the beacons draw from the same source then does having more beacons increase the energy consumption which forces you to be increasingly active to support multiple beacons?
My other concern would be the rates and methods for generating power (an example you gave was 2 hours work = 2 weeks energy for the beacon. Is 2 hours too short a time or is it a bit too long? I’m not sure.EDIT: was thinking of the wrong post, just ignore that last part) for whatever conversion rate that is decided on would the charge be a constantly updated value or is the energy only produced once milestones are met?
Dude, stop leaking my evil machinations to the world!
Let’s keep it simple- your work charges only your beacons- no matter where they may be in the universe or how many you have. This is ancient alien tech, after all, so why limit its range or capacity?
Those numbers were not my example. I would not measure power in hours worked, but by actions done. Example, hammers power based on stones/ores broken, axes on trees chopped, grapples on distance traveled, slingbow on creatures slain, etc. Each tool would need it’s own conversion rate so that average use across all forms contributes roughly the same power output over a given period of continuous use. Profession trees could allow a player to buff this rate slightly for their favorite tools.
