Keep in mind that the more complex a tutorial is, the less likely someone sits through it or keeps playing. I wager the vast majority of people who try this game just want to smack trees, get wood, and build stuff.
All this plot stuff is getting way too complicated for all the 5-12 year olds who might try the game.
I mean, shoot, I’m not a kid and I’m confused.
As would most others and any dense city, not just “my mall”. We’re all trying to work around this for everyone. Obviously no one in the mall is complaining to the devs about being next to anyone.
We all helped many fresh noobs set up shops in the mall with no issues.
I don’t understand what you mean.
Anyway, I firmly believe the solution is to remove all incentives for griefing (yes, that means replacing footfall with a “Like” system where people can have a top 10 list of favorite builds and people get bonuses based on that), then introduce a beacon renting system/giving system and maybe plot buffers.
Maybe just removing all the incentives would be enough to lower the amount of support requests that none of the other stuff is needed.
Remember, the issue is the AMOUNT of support requests. No matter what there’s gonna be support requests.
Yeah sorry I meant everything and anyone in any situation like that. Just used you as an example because I am talking to you. lol.
“no other plots in 5 chunks before you can enable” - basically that the “land development” beacon option could only be turned on if there are no other plots in 5 chunks radius. So in this case 10 plots each direction from you. (chunk being a 2x2 plot area).
I do agree the more we focus on the why a person plots beside another person the more it will help things.
The conflict really is bad… even those of us that are here a long time sometimes get mad a person plotted beside them. And sometimes you are like, “HUH!!! Dude I am in the middle of no where, why did you need to put your plot right beside me!!!”
Maybe my brain is fried. I can’t wrap it around this right now. I feel sorry for people new to this game. lol
Then I would like to order one commerce zone beacon to apply to the entire mall please.
(I wouldn’t want a builder’s beacon that grants extra space/buffers. We want to be close. No one likes running for 2 hours across 50 mile long huge city blocks to find a pie).
I would like to make special ordinances for our commerce beacon zone:
A quest told me to.
lol
Wait till you tell them how to optimize farming setups. Or how to use the forge.
Yeah we have been going at this brainstorm for a while. I did link @James (and now @lucadeltodecso) so they have some ideas to chew on.
Basically I am saying with that land dev feature that you can only enable it if no one has another beacon around you in a set amount of space. It doesn’t solve the close quarter situations but at least some of the ones for new people that built in no where then find out Bob moved in next door and it pissed them off or something.
I still think the overall system is the problem of trying to put people close together intentionally. It just causes the conflict.
So, I understand this, and it makes sense. But is that really the path we want to go? Add even MORE complexity? I think your idea would work, but at what cost?
I feel like we should be removing features, not adding them.
Remove the settlement quest.
Remove footfall.
Remove settlement absorption unless someone opts in.
I nearly cried reading this thread, it’s like, “Why… WHY IS THIS SO COMPLICATED???”
Yeah you got the hard job of exploring exo worlds 
(Which is a nice contribution to the community and should be recognized as such 
)
But exploring is one of the things I love to do most in Boundless. I absolutely love it. I turn on some Bach (or Korn depending upon my mood lol) and I get lost in the beautiful landscapes. I love to discover new things.
Not to derail anything (I’m totally derailing this), but this is what I loved most about Trove, and why I want private worlds. The single biggest appeal for me is exploration. With Trove, every time I logged in, I got a new world to explore, and it was free to explore, no coin cost.
With Boundless all the planets stay the same. For such beautiful worlds, I feel like it’s a shame. Hardly anyone builds on T4/5/6/7, might as well just make all planets above T3 RNG, so every day we can explore new worlds, with new resources.
(Oh no, what have I done, I just brought up the idea of wipes again).
This is just a working session of ideas to help the developers when they come back after the weekend on how to answer the problem I presented.
We don’t want more complexity really… I agree we need to remove features. But how will any of that solve my original question? Is it really the features causing people to move close together or not. Sorry to beat a dead horse but I want to see if we all had at least 5-10 things we think might help solve the problem… I do think we are close.
I gotcha. So let it be known my contribution to this discussion is REMOVE lots of features that encourage actions that cause conflict, thus possibly reducing support requests.
I won’t repeat it, so you can find more options.
I think it’s possible, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s only a piece of the puzzle. I for one think making all T4/5/6/7 worlds refresh and change every day would be an incredible boost to content in the game. Every day you wake up and there’s a new world to explore. Every, single, day. It would be like opening a present constantly.
Regardless of whatever is done, I think the quest telling people to join a settlement has to be removed, period. Far too many people join Boundless and want to build alone or with a small group of friends, that quest is really encouraging conflict.
So could the real problem we are being faced with that causes the conflict is that people are just all building on T1/lush planets and hence we have the fight for land? If James and team adjusted the universe a bit and gave more space for building would that just solve the problem organically?
I wonder if this could be a setting that could be specified by the mayor of the settlement.
Replying to myself… OMG I must be going crazy…
I was just talking with Lesley and we mentioned how much Biitula and Circa grew in player population. As that happened we watched the conflict among people rise considerably.
Maybe we just do need MORE LAND where people want to build and LESS hard to live on worlds. Our ratio is off and we can organically lower conflict with Bob building beside Mary… while we fix some other problems that cause more conflict or what the more land doesn’t solve.
Does this mean making exo-worlds a constant content addition, like how every time I enter a portal in Trove, I get a new world to explore?
Does Boundless use it’s portal technology, and make it so instead of having portals to specific worlds, we have portals to “Tier 6 World Portal” like Trove, and we land on a new world? And once everyone leaves that world, it is automatically deleted?
I think it will be easier to achieve the behavior you desire by rewarding it when it happens.
ie: if you want towns & people interacting with each other, then create more simple & fun events where people can exchange special items, provide/receive more coin, give/receive more kudos, more fun interactive things people can place at their builds for other players to enjoy, etc.
If you have mechanics that are rewarding negative/aggressive/undesirable behaviors in any way, you will always have people that (for whatever reason) will gravitate towards that instead of taking the more positive/route. It’s usually the easier route too.
Right now, there are rewards that are possibly rewarding/encouraging undesired behaviors:
becoming viceroy of a planet (aka: plot as much as you can and do a hostile takeover)
for having prestige (this would promote greed, undesired building patterns, local take-overs, people plotting too near others, etc)
for gaining coin (if coin came from drops or NPCs or afk quests that other players post on the local community board [I think My Time at Portia had this…or maybe it was Tales of Toast]…it would be spread more evenly and people wouldn’t step on each other to seek it)
I’ve thought about this, and I feel prestige is fine as long as people can opt out. There’d be no benefit to plotting next to someone if you couldn’t absorb their prestige. I think the leaderboard for this is okay even though I don’t care for it much.