Good catch. Yeah that was from the post under yours, sorry about that.
Mhmm. @Thorbjorn42gbf was it really necessary to tag me twice? Never the less this got my curiousity slightly peaked. mainly because i disagree with almost everybody here.
So before i start my rant, my usual disclaimer, I am speaking from my personal view and from my own logic. I will try as much as possible to avoid stating anything as definitive proof but rather as âi thinkâ or âi believeâ (although i might slip up once in a while). secondly this is a rant, not nice and coherent thoughts. So i will more than likely offend a few people. Dont take it personal, not trying to hurt you. Im just indifferent to your feelings and find them a hindrance.
Mhmmkay? Enough warning. Lets get to the meet of the topic.
So i will try to control it. But for me this topic is as determined for me as @KuroKuma is about character progression. Very very ironed out opinion that will influence what i am about to say. I find the idea of beacons running out absolutely disgusting. Now i dont think there is inherently anything wrong with it, But i find it to be the bigger of two evils. Let me go through some of the âgood pointsâ that was mentioned which people mentioned
- âit stops ghost towns and unfinished buildsâ This argument is slightly⌠Annoying. to put it mildly. Because i completely understand it. But it still bothers me. It reminds me of the posts that has pretty much just been âi dont like the way this guy builds and therefore i can say it looks like â â â â â Now im sure that the people using it has no evil intentions with it. However that is effectively what i believe it says on a grandscale. âWe will find these cities and they will be uglyâ. But what if they arent? wouldnt you then be HAPPY that beacons didnt run out?
(Splitting so its easier to read) This argument comes with the assumption. Extremely rooted in it. That any person who does no longer play have created something that is a nuisance to the community as a whole. AND THAT WILL BE THE CASE AT TIMES. But it isnt different from a guy who plays who make something ugly right? I suck at building, i will most likely live in a god damn assymetrical dirt hut. And i have EVERY SINGLE RIGHT to live in that damn dirthut. a guy can come up and be like âyour house sucks, i dont like it. remove itâ And i can tell him to â â â â off. that is the beauty of it. EVEN if i played every day i would still live in that ugly dirthut and people would STILL be annoyed by it. So what is the difference on that and a person who leaves? âIt will have ugly unfinished pieces in itâ I could make ugly unfinished houses and still pay for it if i had to wouldnt i? I think that of the people who quit it is very likely that many of them came in. made a half arsed building and then never touched the game again. But at the same time it also affects those who DID try to build their houses. So forcing a system of upkeep would NOT stop ugly builds, unfinished buildings or unfinished towns. Again i completely get the annoyance, i am a piano player who by most standards is fairly good. It physically pains me to hear people just mess around with a piano and just slam it or just completely â â â â it up. I can EASILY imagine it might feel the same way for people who build alot, But the system proposed DOESNT only delete those unfinished things, it would also make people lose fully fleshed out houses and builds.
All that above is only saying âit only has a minor positive impactâ so let me explain what i think is the NEGATIVE impact of it alright? Again lets just try to free ourselves from the mindset that people who doesnt play anymore only ever build horrible things. Just try to enter that state of mind. Done? Good. We as the players affects the world, we as the players makes choices which changes the world that we will play with. Natural regeneration as a gameplay system works well, because it keeps a constant influx of materials getting into the game. BUT it also effectively erases the impact that players have on the worlds that they live in. Beacons are there to stop erasing that impact. Beacons will allow us to shape the world. Beacons should ENCOURAGE people to shape the world. I would love. absolutely love to walk around in boundless and see a bridge between two mountains. i would love to walk around and see someone having carved a nice tunnel through as a way to minimize the amount of time required to travel from places. I would love to walk around in a cave and find a small statue with the inscription âMay luck be with you travellerâ. All of those things are POSSIBLE by allowing people to change the worlds that we live in. People can decide to make a path which will help EVERYBODY. people can make a bridge that will help EVERYBODY. people could make hidden monuments that would be a âwowâ moment for everybody. If it only cost a beacon. A one time investment. A constant reminder for what was done. A year after a person stopped playing a new player might stumble unto that bridge and thank the person creating it for saving him time and reducing his risk. If you have a forced constant upkeep then those things would eventually run out. Or the people who were always on the line saying âeh i can use a few beacons on itâ might instead say âits not worth the upkeepâ. A big discussion on the other topics was something like âWhat if it refreshes upon people travelling through it?â âWhat if people through them could donate fuelâ And that might be an answer to the bigger roads. But what about the hidden ones? what about the easter eggs hidden by players, What about those things made with a purpose and a certain intention to be a truly unique find or to only be used in extreme cases but in those cases it makes the difference between life and death. those would still get destroyed. Those things wouldnât survive. And I fear that set a constant upkeep or an increased price might just mean that everybody only uses beacons when they are truly necessary, like homes and stuff. and discourage using beacons and fun and interesting things that could help everybody.
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âThen people could get the spots other claimed that they dont use anymoreâ This. Is peculiar to me and makes very little sense. Again im not a builder. But how uptight do you have to be to play in a universe with a many different worlds and ATLEAST a few billion square meters of land, and then just go âI have all of this to build on. but i want THAT particular 30x30x30 spot or my build wont be goodâ. There isnât much to say about it because it makes no sense to me honestly.
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This is my personal and biggest problem with the system. I have a feeling i will get alot of âbut you arent a builder so why do you even careâ and its true. iâm not a builder, which is why i donât care if I were to lose my own cosmetic house. The real problem for me is this. âBeacons are effectively. Most of your progression.â
Almost every single argument i have seen so far from skimming through it was A) in favor, B) considered ONLY the building aspect. So as a shortcut into my mind. Imagine that nobody could build and that every beacon was just a grey square, Okay? For me building is purely a matter of functionality cause i cant build even to save my life. That doesnt mean i dont think its important how they look. that is what i said above is that i think there would be awesome monuments and stuff. But right now i am talking Personal housing which for me might as well be a grey block. Slightly went off-topic, bear with me. Okay so the whole âbeacon is part of progressionâ is really the biggest problem i have with all of it. From what I SEE from the game is effectively that people start from nothing and then slowly build up houses, machines etc etc. Upon dying you would love stuff meaning that you would most likely have it stashed in your house. So in your house are all of your excess crafting materials, maybe you have extra gear, maybe you have machinery. the only thing that is NOT in your house is your skills, currently equipped gear and items and you gold/gems. This is where the biggest problem is for me. Losing your house is not just a matter of âoh i lost something that looked niceâ but rather âI lost about 75% of my progressionâ which would be REALLY FREAKING DISCOURAGING to those who MIGHT want to get back into the game. Can you imagine it? Those who stopped playing and wants to play again. And they log in and they lost that much? Can you imagine in any MMORPG where they would get away with making it so when people came back after a few months it just said âDue to being gone for too long we have decided to wipe everything in your bank and everything in your backpack. Welcome Back!â The reason this is such a big problem for me personally is that i jump between alot of games, i might play something a lot for a few weeks and then come back again half a year later after having gone a round through various games. If i were to come back to the game with that sort of state i would just be like âyou know what. â â â â itâ. And this is not meant as a sort of âbow down cause i decide everythingâ argument. But simply a statement of how people like me would feel about it. And because while i am arrogant I will only argue from my own position. And THIS is even only a luxury matter, as @Thorbjorn42gbf mentioned several times. Real life DOES HAPPEN. And people are suggesting you to PUNISH people for having a life? You want to PUNISH people for coming back? Look deep into yourself. If you were to leave a place you loved and decide to come back. What would you prefer? A person standing in the door saying âwelcome back. i missed youâ or a person standing the door saying âI assumed you wouldnt get back so i threw out all of your stuff. Well whoops. not my problemâ
Those are my thoughts on why i HATE the idea of a fuel system or any sort of upkeep system. This doesnt cover much of various other cases which is beacon specific. But to make an ending comment all i can say is that the ONLY time you should ever lose a beacon should be in extreme cases like someone building a 30 block tall majestic phallic symbol. But donât punish the guy who just has a small house with his stuff there who has too much stuff going on to play.
-Zouls
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Couldnât say it better myself, i am one of them who can get hooked by something new for months, and donât care about old stuff, until after long time when bored, looking into old games and get hooked again. I still visit old games from time to time and chat with friends, and eventually start playing again for a time. If my stuff in those games was gone, i would start write angry letters, and ask what the *** they are doing, and demand to get it back.
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Absolutely, Thatâs what I feel, Nice Words!
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Most players are casual players. Also, noone can âliveâ in the game, or be expected to play every week. We all have an actual life and the game NEEDS to accept that it isnt a persons priority. Thus, the game claiming priority is only causing player frustrations and they will all leave.
I know there are like 1% of hardcore players, they will want it hard to maintain and something they want to âwork forâ, but they are also through with the game once they play for a month.
The best effect will be had for both the player and the game if player areas dont decay at all. and are never lost. So, a player never has to actually think with negative thoughts about the game while having real life priorities. Instead, they will know the game will wait for them and respect the fact that they cant play rigth now, they will look forward to logging back in and finding what they had been working on intact, wanting to play on. If it is gone, each time they have time to invest in the game, where would be the point in playing your game in the first place?
Of course there are also going to be players that mess up the world and leave it behind in a bad manner, their structures untoucheable forever.
So yes, a difficult question indeed. I think, for sure, the mere idea of an empty area and yet the stuff decaying for the sake of decaying while there is plenty of room for people to build still, sounds silly.
Maybe the first thing that should be thought of is a way to track all the changes that were made in the world, and only then, if the world gets âtoo fullâ, should buildings be removed. Else, players can just find another spot instead of wanting to claim a spot when tehres plenty of space elsewhere.
When the world then indeed gets too full, it should be based on the oldest beacon in place plus the longest time the player was offline.
And, in order to reset this time, players can make upgrades to their beacon to reset the oldest beacon plus also log on again.
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Well it was more an afterthought, we had started running in circles and I thought your input would improve on the discussion, because the large amounts of new viewpoints you so often bring to the table.
And in this case I knew you would disagree with beacons disapearing a point that have basically not been defended.
I would say that a lot of the better build would be allowed to stay though one of the many proposed systems to keep good builds alive for others to enjoy, those it would not stop ugly building but increase the overall ration of nice building to ugly ones. ^.^
on the other hand I Really REALLY like your argument on small easter eggs and such.
Good spots can be seriously hard to find when a world starts getting players, especially if you find a really nice like bot right besides you sit an abandoned dirt hut left by some dude years ago. Just like pointing that out, I can use 10 hours on a minecraft server just searching for a nice house spot for my ideas.
(Not saying you are wrong but damns sometimes I could slaughter people who take me good spots, I innnitiated faction wars spanning months to get the mountain chain fitting for a specefic idea i had)
DAMN I like your rants.
I am still for beacon decay but it needs to be thought through a lot.
Idea proposition: Allowing people to remove the beacons when they reach a certain age, that would still leave the problem with progression though 
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Is there such a thing? Doesnât making logic subjective instantly defeat the definition of having a set of reasoning adhering to certain principles? People always hail you as having âlogicalâ arguments but really theyâre more full of pathos than logos. Which I think you admit to. Just saying.
My personal argument, which Iâve mentioned three or four times in this thread so far, is that Iâd like explorers to be able to loot town with weak/vanished beacons. My argument for beacons decaying is that I want to scavenge the builds and take advantage of the world regen tech. I donât think anyone arguing for this has ever assumed that the ghost towns will look âbadâ, because âbadâ in the aesthetic sense is subjective to each person. We just assumed that, by definition, theyâll be empty. Or I did at least.[quote=âZouls, post:142, topic:4285â]
This argument comes with the assumption. Extremely rooted in it. That any person who does no longer play have created something that is a nuisance to the community as a whole.
[/quote]
You know what they say about assumptions ;P. I think I debunked this with my personal reasoning above. So Iâll skip the two major paragraphs assuming everyone making this argument is in the mindset that all builds suck.
Letâs say thereâs a town with 25 people such that itâs arranged like this:
A B C D E
F G H I J
K L M N O
P Q R S T
U V W X Y
Now letâs say player G has left the game and has no intention of rejoining but player H has a really good friend Z who wants to join this town. But the town belongs to a guild called âThe 25â or something and they wonât let player Z join. Now if Gâs beacon were to deteriorate in their absence, Z could join. Yes this is a weak example. Yes this doesnât apply to everyone. But it is a valid example and thus can be used to fuel that argument.
Letâs also not forget theyâre promoting real estate brokers and whatnot as something people can do if they want. Not sure how many idyllic-cliffside-waterfall-facing-sunset-with-a-valley spots there are going to be in these worlds, but I also donât want to search every inch of every world to find them. If someone has claimed this beautiful area and hasnât been around in 9 months, itâs hurting my business.[quote=âZouls, post:142, topic:4285â]
Due to being gone for too long we have decided to wipe everything in your bank and everything in your backpack. Welcome Back!"
[/quote]
I donât understand where youâre getting the idea that the inventory is wiped too. I donât think anyone is suggesting inventories be tied to beacons and when you lose the beacon you lose your inventory.
Iâve been thinking about this for a bit, but would functionality like an ender-chest be something that would appeal to people to save important/rare materials?
And as Iâve said several times, there are responsibilities in real life. Taxes, rent, bills. You go away for 6 months and neglect these, youâre going to be discouraged when you come back too haha. If youâre planning to go away, ask someone to watch over your stuff. If some major big bad thing happened and youâve lost your computer and all internet access for a year, then idk what to say. I donât play it, but I think you lose your EVE âbeaconâ or whatever that some people were talking about. You lose towns in Minecraft Towny. But most MMORPGs donât allow players to shape or impact the world. Most donât regen the world. Boundless isnât your typical MMO and I donât think the typical everything-you-do-is-immortalized-forever aspect of most MMOs has a place in Boundless.
I think as I suggested a bit above, having an ender-chest type thing (built with end-game mats/tech, of course, and probably a shared inventory across containers) would be a good answer to this.[quote=âZouls, post:142, topic:4285â]
But donât punish the guy who just has a small house with his stuff there who has too much stuff going on to play.
[/quote]
Again, people have suggested in this thread that it would take maybe 5 mins every month to replenish your fuel cost. Or if we go with the login route, maybe 30 seconds. And if you get multiple emails saying, âHey, you, log on or you lose your beaconsâ then whose fault is it really? If youâve got too much going on to spare 30 seconds every month, maybe youâve just got too much going on to even be playing video games in general.
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I personally find this argument rather weak, most people play games to get a bit away from the responibility of real life (In general all intertainmnet is about distracting us untill we can go die really), if you want to chain everybody joining a game with responibility the playerbase will take a huge loose in people who just want to play it casually.
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I just really donât understand how itâs too much to ask someone to log in once every few months. Especially if theyâre getting multiple emails.
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I think a misconception some people might be having is that beacons are only in place for home bases, which isnât the case. Beacons can also be used to lock down resource nodes so nobody else can collect them, they can be used to set up other areas that people may not want to be permanently controlled by another player, for example as mention even on the front page of the website with all the other things you can do, players can lock down important travel routes. Got a big mountain range with only one easy tunnel through it? Claim it with a beacon and then charge people a toll to use it. The economy is still growing with features are still being added so saying you are either for or against beacons disappearing because you donât want your home to be open to raiders after not playing for a month or 2 is a good reason but thatâs only one of the things that beacons affect.
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I think this argument so far can best be summed up as:
Beacons should not require so much maintenance as to discourage very casual players from playing or returning but also should not persist long enough to discourage active players from performing activities or accessing areas simply because someone who does not play got there firstâŚ
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Second one. Also i detach myself more from things. However what you are effectively saying is logic is nothing but DEFINITIVE TRUTH. and i might be arrogant. But damn would it be alot of responsibility to say that everything i say is 100% unarguable and true.
It was a comparison to other games. Never said boundless. i said other MMORPGS. In most mmorpgs you cant build so it wouldnât make any sense to say âyou lose your buildingsâ. I was trying to make an equal understanding of loss of progression.
where. citation needed (if you want to go all out war)
Oh yeah you wont only lose all the stuff you earned, we will actually encourage people to go find them cause they can take everything you owned.[quote=âClexarews, post:147, topic:4285â]
Letâs say thereâs a town with 25 people such that itâs arranged like this:
[/quote]
Build around it. you shouldnt have any right to remove what he has. Why would you? âhe doesnt play therefore it is unfair he has stuff?â
I ASSUME you misunderstood me. (hate when people say that). You should know by now that i donât give even the slightest â â â â about the whole âBut in the real world!â analogy. actually I dislike it. I didnt say âthat in the real world you can do this blah blah therefore you should do so in boundlessâ I said that âSome people will not have TIME for boundless due to real world issuesâ
I do. Just two different opinions.
Now this is the problem where i mentioned @KuroKuma where he basically under no circumstance wants anything to be impossible to be done solo. he wouldnt care how hard it would be as long as theoretically it isnt impossible. Which still leaves some major hindrances. That is where iâm in the same stuck mindset about it. You can use whatever slippery language and be like âOh but what if it was only a minute per month!. What about a single second every year!â You can keep stretching it out. But no matter how long a period of time you suggest for how little time ingame there would still be unavoidable consequences (unless you are like what about a trillion years which is where you reach the point of there not being a difference)
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Nope. they cant. resources doesnt respawn in beacons. and even resources of rarer qualities spawns randomly outside of beacons. This is something very specific which cant be done. unless you mean âpeople can lock down for the period it would take to getâ but if you lose lets say 20% of the mats you used to create a beacon every time you move it, would it then be worth it?
Beacons are limited to X Y Z size, so effectively they would need to do the entire mountain. if not then you could just beacon your own part of the mountain and make your own path. But yeah you could beacon it to take a toll for passing through tunnels. Would be a gameplay element (actually it WAS mentioned on the site, not sure if they removed it)
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I kinda ran out of things to say after, âI ask questions therefore I existâ.
Then I realised that even that sentence was not necesarily true because that is asuming that existence is a requirement for observation to be made which is not necesarily true if todays percived laws of nature is created from our immagination.
Halp logic not found 
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Now for a quick easy to see thing for @olliepurkiss pleasure mainly. To put it simply the biggest worry is all my progression, screw my land, screw my house. I would be perfectly content with a fuel system if every capital had a âChest of Redemptionâ or whatever. to make it nice and easy i will just make it in a step by step point
- Player builds beacon
- Player builds nice house with chests and crafting stations
- Player cant play for a few months
- Playerâs beacon run out
- Player when returning can go to the capital and find every single block/item/chest that was within his beacon in that chest (other than the beacon itself)
- Player can take out the things as he wants to or completely discard things he doesnt want directly from the chest. He can ONLY take out things. Not put things in.
This would pretty much solve my problem of being afraid of losing my stuff. NOW i will take the first problem with it âIt allows people to effectively use it as a free chestâ That is the biggest problem i think. However if you lose the beacon (AKA the mats) and you cant put things in but only take things out (in full bulk to mention) + the time it would take for it to happen (lets say a month or two or whatever) i dont think it would be an effective way to store it.
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I was discussing something like this previously in the discussion and the main problem wasnât that it was a free chest but that it allowed you to move large amounts of resources from your outpost to in this example, the capital. I donât think its much of an issue cause you have to wait a number of months for it to happen but some people disagree. Also, to add to your âchest of redemptionâ, I would like it to include a blueprint of your previous beacon that allows you to recreate it more easily. I mentioned two common ways to do blueprints earlier. Some people will probably argue that all of this is too carebear and that you should suffer for not maintaining your stuff but this is a game and if they can include a system like this that doesnât hurt other players, then why not include it to increase the amount of people who will actually continue to play this game.
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I guess I could spend all Saturday going over nitpicky details and talking about why my opinions donât matter because you donât like them, but I guess Iâll just let the numbers do the talking. Got a progression H HFC to help out. Peace yâall.
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I think a blueprint would be too overkill but i am not a builder so i cant comment on it.
For the whole âyou can move between two areasâ very true. But i assume if a system like this were to be set in place then removing the beacon MANUALLY wouldnt remove the stuff. neither should you be able to take out fuel. So if you just place a beacon to move it around then i assume there would be a month or so before it actually move anything. Maybe its worth it. maybe it would become a gameplay elements. who knows.
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Pretty much why I refuse to take part in this.
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The toll part is under the economy tab/button on the front page.
Yep. But the resources that are present already stay.
Devs have mentioned possibly reworking the size of beacons and number of plots (sorry canât remember which dev log it was in) and yeah I was talking about some passage through a mountain, lord of the rings mines of moria style.
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