Beacons Survey Results

What if guilds/individuals could get a permit from the central guild to build a large structure, similar to getting a city permit? Individuals could be hired by the central guild to check up on these builds and see if the players are actually using the area for what they said they would. Getting a permit would allow you to build without using your own beacons. … I like the concept by I can already see a myriad ways to abuse the system

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is there currently an issue with beacon plotters? I created my beacon & a few plots, successfully. Then I attempted to create additional plotters, to expand - the next time i played. Now it’s creating tons of single plotters with “0” as the value - taking up all my inventory.

@olliepurkiss, @ben: Because we cite this topic in an other post and because there are still questions open i’d like to revive this topic. Can you please answer two questions.

i’ve asked my first question long ago at the beginning of this topic, but i don’t receive an answer yet …

My second question is about “guild beacon permissions” (or beacon permissions in general). Is ist possible for guilds and/or players to “rent” beacons from others ? Apart from protecting your possessions and creations are there other functionalities for beacons ? (sell, rent, stackable [player and guild can protect the same space - eg. guild city but player house])

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This is a tricky one, but we’ve put a lot of thought into it, and we think we’ve come up with the fairest and best solution. A Guild (i.e. whoever has the correct privilege within the guild) can kick a player out of the Guild, but in doing so they give them back the beacons that they have donated. If the Guild doesn’t have enough available beacons then they cannot kick them out until they have freed up some beacons, or added some more. A player is not allowed to leave a guild of their own choice. This is because if the Guild doesn’t have the beacons available at the time then they would have to leave the beacons behind, and that is something that is not in the interest of the player. Given that being in a Guild is of no disadvantage to a player, it doesn’t seem like a problem that they cannot leave. This system makes joining a Guild something that must be carefully considered, but also prevents Guilds from easily being able to take advantage of players by taking their beacons and then kicking them out.

We’re not currently looking to allow renting or stackable beacons. You can sell them though, so if you wanted to build a city and sell people plots within it you could, but they would be a permanent transfer to them.

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When saying transfer you mean as in the player who sold a plot would now have one freed plot to allocate and the player who bought a plot now has one used plot(expected he/she has any left), or will the player selling give a way from his total allowed plots adding to the player who buys?

Also I’m interested when such transaction happens in a beacon which has just one control block would the buying party have to place control block into the plot they bought so it won’t just disappear or would such beacons have to be bought as whole?

Sorry that, wasn’t very clear. I’ll explain with an example:

I make a beacon using my last five plots, and I now have no more left. I want to sell this piece of prime real-estate, and to do so I put a pay lock on it, and set the price I want. You then come along, inspect the pay lock and decide that you want to buy the beacon for that price. If you were to have less than five available beacon plots you wouldn’t be able to buy it, but luckily you have eight available, so you pay the money, and the beacon is now yours with everything in it under your control. You now have three beacon plots left, and I have five left.

I hope that explains it better.

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Yes it does, thank you for taking the time to write the example.

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I think not allowing people to leave a guild would be quite a major designflaw, for various reasons
What if the guild leader turns out to be a jerk that doesn´t use the plots for their intended purpose?
What if the project changes direction mid-build and you don´t like the new idea?
What if I really want to leave a guild but the leader won´t kick me because he wants to keep my plots? Honestly I`d just start to grief the build until he´s forced to kick me…


I think a guild that has an insufficient amount of free beacon plots to give you back your invested beacons should behave like a bankrupt company. Meaning that if you leave a guild that doesn´t have enough free plots to pay you back the plots you donated to the guild it effectively has a “beacon-dept” to you. This would mean that all additionally donated plots directly go into your “plot pool” until the guild has paid off their depts to you. And only after a guild has paid all its depts it can increase its available beacon pool again.

Example:

This system could be extended by a rule that automatically closes guilds that have a too high dept %. (Just like the tax-office IRL)

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I agree that not being able to leave a guild of your own volition is going to be a bit of a problem.

All I can personally see happening, is that guilds are going to start stating that you need to donate at least one beacon to be a member… and then prevent you from leaving. Or worse still holding your beacon(s) (and your freedom) to ransom.

This might also become an issue if you can only join a finite number of guilds… or will there be no cap on this?

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I like this, well thought out.

An other thing popped in my mind regarding the beacon selling, would it be possible to dissect a huge beacon if it contained multiple control blocks(additional control blocks been added after the beacon have been expanded with additional plots)? If so how would the plots included to each control block would be decided?

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This is a No-Go for me … Let the sponored beacon plots be temporal still available for the left guild and then going back to the player, but not to be able to leave a guild is a good cause to never become a member. Sorry to be so direct, but this idea is worth some words which would be shown in tiny black blocks here in the forum :wink:

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You could expant that and say that every time the beacon remove one of their beacon plots the plots would go towards their depts before themself.

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I think that approach will be rife with abuse: form a guild, spam everyone you meet with an invite, place a bunch of beacons, kick them all. Boom, infinite beacons. Also, holding players’ beacons hostage

I think a simple tweak to “beacon oveedrafting” might fix it, though: prevent any modifications to beaconed plots until the guild has enough beacon slots. Give players their beacons back when they leave

My suggestion would just be an addition to @olliepurkiss system.
So this rule would still remain:

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Well, the same behavior works in reverse: recruit a bunch of friends, have them donate a bunch of beacons, and then they all leave. Keep doing that with multiple guilds. Boom, infinite beacons.

You may have missed this part of @Vastar’s suggestion:

I still see some abuse that could happen with it. Say you join a guild of 5 players with 4 of your closest friends. Donate all of your beacons, wait for the guild to use them all, and then you leave. You can basically force dismantle guilds that way. But that’s an edge case. Maybe if there’s a delay between acquiring the debt and shutting down the guild it’d allow for the guild to gather more plots to save itself.

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This would also mean that your friends would reduce their private beacon pool since they don´t get their plots back until you´ve freed up some guild-plots. This system does not ‘gnerate’ any plots.

Maybe a 24h timer could be introduced before a guilds gets “auto-closed”. So that the guild leader has a chance to reduce the used plots in and adequate amount before the guild gets shut down.


Anyway, this is merely a rough suggestion I wrote up in less than 10 minutes so please don´t go into detail with it.
I´m sure that the devs would think about all those cases and find a solution for them if they´d decide to adapt the idea of my suggestion.

2 Likes

I’ve just moved this over to a new topic: Guilds and Beacons with some more background.

Please have a look and continue discussing there.

A post was merged into an existing topic: Guilds and Beacons