I like the plot buffer. But clearly it’s cause problems mainly it the malls. If they were all reset to be off. I think that would solve the malls problems due to the many many dead stores. Then we who do want them just would have to go turn them on. Bingo bango.
Anyone trying to figure out how they can use there thousands of plots to get them thousands of buffered plots… well you’re the problem. Stop, shake your head and use your plots for building cool stuff. And no that doesn’t mean roads to neighboring settlements and cities. There is no need. There are things called portals to get you there.
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In my opinion, this seems the most reasonable route for everyone involved. Additionally (as unpopular as this may sound,) later down the line perhaps there should be a small buffer system change so that severely inactive beacons automatically default their buffers to off as well…
Edit: Not saying this would solve everything, but it should reduce current the workload at the very least… I myself have spent the better part of the past two days toying with the system, re-plotting certain areas of my build and trying to make it work in my favor…
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I think a lot of us assumed the default would be changed to “off” and that it might be ok.
Sadly, this was not the case. Even when buffers are off, there are huge problems. He tried turning off some buffers and it didn’t help.
It’s not just malls. It’s any densely populated area. Malls are the same as apartments, essentially. Every single neighbor, now affects everyone around them. As people have been realizing this and posting about losing plots…not knowing the plots/beacon next to them was older and it took their place. 
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Yeah so if they were all reset to off you wouldn’t have a problem. And if people turned them on in a mall then they’re just being jerks. 
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This! Couldn’t have said it any better.
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On and off button for everything this point forward 
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This! Me neither.
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I guess we have to look at the root problems and then try to come up with solutions to fix them.
Problem 1 being some people don’t like others plotting right up next to their plots. The buffer solves this issue.
Other people don’t like being forced to be a part of another settlement. The ability to opt out would be a solution to that.
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Well this has caused so much frustration over “authority” that there’s not much attention to the follow-on issue with footfall either. That says a lot considering any issue with the footfall system normally causes a huge uproar instantly.
Luca is well aware of it so hopefully this will be corrected as well, since currently turning the buffers off seems to disable footfall.
HAHA imagine if they had implemented this will buffers default to off and that issue in place.
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I do want to offer one thing in response to this: I’ve seen many examples of people using this solution to horde huge areas with reserved land by this system with a very minimal amount of plots. I think this is taking advantage of the system and kind of exploiting it (for lack of a better word). This will be used to massively exploit plots.
I think @James and the team need to really be careful with how they decide what to do with this. We could see huge amounts of planets taken over very easily with minimal investment compared to before it needing significant investment.
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Is this land speculation which has also been discussed and a decent number of players seemed to like the idea, or reserving for a future build, or trying to spawn additional planets or something else. It is always hard to judge intent, so this could be interesting for the developers.
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I am surprised you’ve encounter many examples of this when the update just came out… The only ones I see where people reserve massive amounts of land are those who have an insane amount of plots. I strongly believe if the system begins to be abuse like that it would be moderated like any other plot issue(and the team appears to be handling these better).
But like I suggested, any plots consider roads(which appears to not designated that way for beacons align to guilds) should be automatically excempt from having a buffer.
It has been mentioned that because this is a Sandbox game we(players) will find ways to bend the game in ways they probably wouldn’t have thought of so maybe we should take the blame for using the system how it was not supposed to? I had an issue with the buffer system and thankfully it was resolved, however I can’t be mad as I did not go into testing and provided any feedback prior to release. But I do they do come up with a good idea on how to expand this update pass these hiccups.
Since it was default = on, I guess it would look like everyone is hoarding huge chunks of space. My new place on a different planet spanned several mountains…now it’s mostly filled in with the buffer. I definitely don’t have that many plots. 
However, if you saw one beacon plots everywhere…that might be the case…but the devs created that possible scenario with the buffers 
Honestly, default off would be a good bandaid to start with. The only downside I see, people might complain that because they didn’t get to turn on their buffers on first they now have less rights then their neighbor. Maybe they thought this would be the better approach 
I found an area but I cannot easily tell if it is 1 or a few people. Plus there was a post showing this. So maybe I should have said a “few” instead of “many.” I do think it will become a common practice though and that we shouldn’t make it a moderation issue.
Give people a small percent of “reserved” land off the plots they own in the account that they can plot but not build on. Not a huge bonus like this creates…
Maybe, but I think the larger issue is probably the fact that older beacons/plots “steal” nearby plots.
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I think it might be everything. I don’t fault people for this at all… I just see it as something that probably isn’t best for the game overall in the long run. Just fix the root issues…
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Two things number one I think we need a new tier 3 or tier 4 planet United States East.
Secondly I love buffer Reserve feature one suggestion I do have though to make it better would be to allow the person that owns the town or in this case major effects the owner of the mall to be able to override settings in her town. In addition allowing people to assign a beacons ownership to somebody else would be very helpful
Funny, because that’s exactly what my issue was. I removed plots from my pre-update buffer made off plots that had less than 10k prestige and upon remove couple of plots the neighboring beacon jumped and reserve those plots. I think that’s more of a bug, I don’t believe it was intended for a buffer to jump peoples plots… But who knows 
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I put that up as a poll after he threw it out as a possible fix and a lot of people didn’t like it. They said “what if two settlements merge? Who gets the rights?”. I didn’t have a good answer for that, so that may not work. I also thought it sounded pretty good at first.
As long as the oldest-plots/beacons nearby aren’t allowed to take plots with the buffer, when the trade occurs.