Hey Everyone.
I want to share an authoritative position on the aims of footfall.
There are quite a few threads on the forum about the iterating state of footfall and lots of players explaining how it does / doesn’t / should / shouldn’t / used to / usedn’t to work.
Originally:
- The aim of Footfall was to reward players for creating useful and hence popular spaces.
- It’s a function of prestige, player activity and time.
- It’s a system that we want and need the ability to balance as the game and population changes.
- Pre-release 211 there was a mistake in the system where some logic was reset every 24 days instead of every 24 hours.
Aims of Release 211:
- Boost the footfall received by less visited settlement.
- Maintain the footfall received by popular settlements.
- Smooth the footfall received so that it’s less effected by player population.
- Make the system independent of server resets.
- Fix the 24 days / hours issue.
Any claims that footfall has been deliberately nerfed are false.
The challenge with the update is that modelling how much footfall an updated algorithm would generate is extremely hard as it is driven by the chaotic input of player movements. We would have needed to replay all player movement to compare iterations.
(Don’t laugh at the next bit…) We considered running the old and new systems in parallel for a release so that we could balance the updated algorithm before exposing it to players. However when we planned out the released around the Guilds + Messaging update this would have significantly delayed the public release of the Footfall changes too much. Given the community urgency around fixing footfall we instead concluded that it was better to fix it publicly and get it released sooner.
Release 211:
The release has contained a few issues and we think they’re now fixed.
However we still need to review the footfall generated. As above it’s extremely hard to model the systems, we did our best, but post release balance changes will likely be required.
Giving us feedback on how your beacon performs is helpful. We will use these reports alongside reviewing the game analytics to balance the footfall.
Future Presentation:
I’m planning to remove the “Footfall per visitor” value from the GUI. This is only a single parameter used by the system. (Players often query why they have generated 100c in footfall when they’re getting a reported 30c per visitor. Did a 1/3 of a player visit me?) Sharing a single parameter isn’t helping players understand the system and is leading to more confusion.
My preference is switching to a presentation where a settlement reports the maximum footfall a player can generate. As the prestige increases their maximum footfall will increase. This will also be a clear indicator for when their footfall has reached a known capacity.
I think this is a clearer, and helpfully, completely accurate measure of the additional footfall generated by increasing your settlement’s prestige. This was the original aim of sharing the footfall per visitor metrics - more prestige means more footfall. But this is a single input and not the result of the system.
Conclusion:
The footfall system and importantly it’s balance are still a work in progress. We tried to get the balance right with this release but fully expect to tweak the balance based on your reports and analytics.