Why is that needed? Why do we need to incentivize people out of hubs?
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Have you tried to go through a portal lately? Getting people out of the same region would help immensely.
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Because that leads to stagnation. The game stops being about exploration and construction and just turns into an endless supermall.
This occurs because of the portal system bein’ linked to blinksecs, and portal hubs. It takes less oortstone to connect the worlds in certain ways, which causes traffic jams.
If there were more portal hubs, there wouldn’t be crowding. That’s a problem with portal design, people wanting to be in “capitol cities”. People will always visit the largest city, with the most footfall, and the best portals, but with a 100 person limit, that’s causin’ lag. So the bottleneck is actually CAUSED by the mechanics put in place by devs, namely, portals, capitols, and footfall.
If footfall increased based on how far from a capitol city you were, that might incentivize people to move away, but right now it’s the opposite, but then you’d be penalizing people who want’to live in big cities, which is why I think there should be zero incentive to live anywhere. Let people live wherever they want without pressure.
It’s become a supermall because people want access to portals, and they want the most footfall. Without portal hubs, and footfall, people wouldn’t crowd together into one supermall because there’d be no benefit to.
Crowding is goin’ to exist as long as portal hubs exist and as long as footfall exists.
I think the range limits on Portals do need to be removed, so people can create 2 different ‘Portal Hubs’, and a bunch of mini hubs.
First being the Planet Hub, which would have a Portal to every Planet in the game, including the planet it’s on. And a portal to the Shopping hub. The reason for this is because each portal will lead to a ‘Mini Portal Hub’ on Said planet, which will have 1 portal to the Planets Hub, and the rest to Cities only one that 1 planet.
The second one being Shops, where people can have their shop linked there. Can even have it designed in sections. Such as Specalization Shops only, Big Malls only, and Small personal shops on a first come first serve system with a Curation to make sure the personal shops are active and not dead for more than 2 days before kicking them and first person to ask gets the spot. And a portal to the Planets hub.
Traveling at that point would be much, MUCH more cleaner. No more ‘City Portal is in this one random hub, on this random world across the universe that has nothing to do with the planet the city is even on.’
To find a City, you would have to go to the Planets Hub, Portal to the Planet the city is on to land in the ‘Planet’s City Hub’, then portal to the city from there.
People would never be lost, they would never even need a map of the Portal Network, Cause to get ‘To’ the Network, they just had to go to any city, which would have a portal to the Planet’s Mini Hub for Cities, and a portal to the Planet’s Hub, which leads to all the planets, and the Shopping Hub.
Very Clean, Effeciant, and simple!
The only ‘Issues’, being the limit of players on the Shopping Hub, and Planets Hub. As they won’t exist outside in the void, they are going to be on a planet themselves. So whatever planet they are each on, or both on, will be flooded with players. But going from those two hubs, to the other portals attached, would disperse the playerbase across the other planets.
I would say both Planets Hub and Shopping Hubs would need 2 Restricts to really work. First being, both on the same planet, and second being, no one can build on those planets. No Shoping Market or City, or anything else built next to or around the portal hubs. They are meant JUST for the Portals. This is to keep the players moving along and not stopping or staying on the planet that the Hubs are on, to keep the player limit constantly low.
Which would be impossibly.
All of that would be nice, if there was no limits on how far Portals worked, and the community worked together to make it so.
Too bad that will never happen.
Instead we have like a dozen hubs, all over the place, linked in a circle that each overlap the portals they have all the time.
So here’s a thing. Last night after reading this I did a bit of building work (it’s been on hold for gathering) to tip over 250k. The coin per visitor showing on the beacon did indeed tick up to show 40c. However, the footfall received today was probably at least half any other given day. I accept this could just be coincidence.
Does anyone know - if you have an alt’s beacon in the same settlement, both eligible to receive footfall, does the secondary, lower-prestige beacon reduce footfall earned on the primary beacon?
Something odd seems to be happening as the second beacon gets less per visitor but seems to have far more earned since it too became prestige-eligible when I tidied up the site.
I’ve stated before, this is how I’m abusing the footfall system. I realized what was going on and built roads to 10k prestige and tied it in to a huge settlement. Each alt is making on average about 3k a day. 5 beacons I one area getting 15k coin a day. That’s one area. Astute builders notice when an area is growing and plan footfall generation accordingly. 15k generates daily over the layout of several hubs.
Footfall generation racks up quickly. Alt stacking to use the footfall mechanic is a very wise thing.
They all receive different values because they don’t get the exact same footfall so I can’t elaborate on the thing you are describing. I definitely see the most travelled parts getting more footfall generation.
Edit: my footfall drastically pales in comparison to what others are getting. There is a reason why people rushed to get hubs up. It wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts by any means. They then use that footfall to buy oortstones to power portal hubs and still have epic amounts of footfall left over to spend on goods to manipulate market prices.
I’m still new to Boundless but have gotten a quick education on game mechanics on several fronts. The game definitely does not lend itself to the feel good community it seemed I originally bought in to.
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Oh I think it is generally a positive and appropriately feel good community. I had offers of help when needed, made offers when I thought I could help, that kind of thing. Footfall seems minor in terms of community and I’m grateful for the hubs whoever might run them or earn off them. I get a service, they get some coin. But yes stacking footfall can make you rich quick by the looks of it.
I see, so it’s probably just that the less built up beacon is a clear path versus my base/shop and so people run over it more. Makes sense.
I think motivation goes to a lot as far as community goes. It’s a lot like politics but I’ll leave that side of the convo alone.
Regarding the remainder in your quote, you nailed it. Roads and pathways are the ‘footfall’ generators of obscene proportions in this game. Building roads seems like a nice community thing to do right? People see them and build shops to them hoping for others to run down the roads and purchase their goods, which they often do. I’m not doing it to be helpful. I’m doing it because I’m selfish and want to buy the overpriced items being sol with the footfall I’m generating passively. I’m just honest about why I’m doing it. It was an aspect of the game I didn’t even think about until o saw the first footfall conversation a bit ago and decided to explore the mechanics myself.
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It’s a novel approach to sidestep the grind, that’s for sure. 
I don’t blame you, the game encourages it. That’s why I think footfall is a bad mechanic.
Monetary rewards shouldn’t be needed to promote a healthy game, if they are, that’s bad gameplay design IMO.
If your game is fun, people are going to log in and play it often. If exploring is fun, people are goin’to explore, if combat is fun, people are goin’to fight, if mining is fun, people are goin’to mine.
The second a game needs to offer rewards to promote gameplay is a sign the gameplay it self is lacking IMO. Sure, there’s exceptions, but most’of the time I’d say this is true.
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But what if both? I can have a base that generates some footfall and still play the game.
I don’t disagree with any thing you’ve said to date about the mechanic itself. It’s a very selfish system and encourages boxing out others to maintain control thereby giving an individual or group greater market control over goods. As long as it exists however I will continue to use it to my benefit. It’s the only way I have currently to compete with all those players who were allowed to keep all their blocks and gems and ores from the “great bomb mining of September 2018” 
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Footfall is an interesting mechanic but ultimately it will harm the economy by making the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. I recently saw a certain portal guild starting a contest with prizes in the millions. That is so far above and beyond what anyone starting the game in the future can attain that it will create a culture of haves and have nots.
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Yes, spot on with the culture of haves and have-nots. We’re already there. I had some guys come do a meteor near my house on a level 3 world with forged gem slings. On a level 3 world. I was flabbergasted that they could afford to use such an expensive tool so freely when iron fists one-shot most of the mobs on level 3 worlds…
Maybe that football mechanic is inteded.
If it’s good or bad it doesn’t matter.
Anyways coins are meaningless right now.
There are not enough money-sink mechanics to spend on.
The only interesting one is buying mats for centraforging.
Sure you can buy better stuff to gather faster to earn coins faster
but what you will buy when you are lvl 50 with your megacity already built?
You’re wrong, the bomb mining started in August lol, all those prices you see? I guarantee you some are charging as much as they can despite probably having storage block after storage block filled with smart stacks of gems.
But yeah like I said, I don’t blame you for usin’ the system the way the devs designed it. And I applaud you for admitting you are doing so, and for recognizing why it’s unbalanced.
Back in august, you had a few groups of people who, with 7m aoe bombs, had full access to Serp, and just nuked the entire planet for gems day in and day out before the main population got in game.
I tried to raise awareness to this, but the devs let it go on for 2 months before nerfing it.
So instead of balancing it, or buffing hammers, they just added to the grind, while all those vets had benefitted from it.
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Not everyone started at the early launch. New players are still struggling to get the gems for coils, especially with the mining nerfs that only hit as new players were just reaching bomb mining. So they don’t have hundreds of easily obtained gems. And footfall is pushing prices up because those who live in the larger cities or take advantage of footfall can easily spend 30k on an advanced coil whereas 30k is basically all I have after saving every c earned after 100+ hours and doing as many feats and objectives as is easily possible.
TLDR: coin matters for new people trying to get coils and gems for tools even if coin doesn’t matter for you.
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They’ll not have the coin necessary to afford a replacement unless they sell hours and hours of sap to someone. What’s happenin’ is these people are gettin’ a ton of coin early on from the objectives, seein’ stuff in shops, and spendin’ it, but they’ll soon realize the objectives dry up and they won’t have tons of coin anymore, and they won’t have good plots on capitol cities, so they won’t get much footfall either.
And that’s the problem, once those new players realize they have no coin and no way to get it they’ll go online looking for a solution. When they see the solution has already been monopolized by early players, how do you think they’ll feel about the game?
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100% this. When I came into boundless I thought that the cities were interesting, but not a place that I’d want to live (sort of the same as me IRL). I have a nice little hamlet now with my Girlfriend and our 2 alts, but we generate like 30c a day in footfall. My thought had been to make footfall global (so people just have to step onto your world, not into your city), and based on the world traffic cities get X% of the money to split up, then towns get Y%, and so on. This way people that live out in the sticks get to participate in the economy a little more, and you mildly discourage (by no longer encouraging) the road building “exploit” and/or having to cram into cities.
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