One example, because you have the plots outside of a portal hub they use. They are crossing it because it is there not because it offers any value to the player.
The portal hub is interactive and does offer value to a player. Someone with a beacon immediately outside a portal hub like a road, offers no value to a player. You do not move faster on it and the player using it gains nothing while the player who built the road gets footfall.
We will probably not agree that a road is interactive directly or indirectly. In some instances I have seen, all the player has is a beacon and enough blocks to have it be 10k in an area outside of a portal hub. They have the plots for the footfall and are not even making an attempt at making anything interactive. There is noting wrong with this. It is how footfall works and why not get the passive income if you can. but to the point a build does not have to be interactive to get repeat footfall or footfall at all. Location can be the key to footfall as well as having built something players are seeking out or using.
I think this is one issue the current system could be attempting to address. They can still make coin that way, but not as much as before, which reduces the incentive for a land rush of sorts around high traffic areas to plant beacons that don’t add anything of value to the place.
I would add to this that there are probably more players that didn’t have much footfall and now get more (smaller places, less exposed settlements etc.). It should help create a middle class of sort, I hope. More players with some spending power, than before and thus more traffic in shops.
Time will tell.
As unsettling as the changes might be for some players, something had to be done. We will go through teething period and get a better system than what we had before.
I’m not a dev but I would say that they probably don’t. Not with so many players still having tens of millions of coins in their inventories. The issue might be that those aren’t circulating enough, and no change to the footfall system would change that.
Just like their server stats when a whole bunch of us are having extreme lag issues and they check their server status program everything is honkeydorey so it has to be a problem with all of our connections, not the servers?
And in the case of connection issues it might really be fine server side, too. There might be a problem on the route to certain providers/people that wouldn’t affect everyone, etc.
If there’s a hunt going with 25 people and everyone has the same issues and not even everyone is from the same region then it’s quite unlikely it’s our connections that are buggered!
No surprises today, the last remaining question (if the 5 day timer would reset no matter what) was unsurprisingly no, characters do need to stay away from a beacon for the entire 5 days to go back to generating the maximum amount.
So that should conclude this experiment unless there are still any outstanding questions, feel free to point out any.
The only interesting note is that, as far as I could determine from today’s tests, there were no changes to footfall with today’s patch. So, consistency at least
I’m actually confused by this maybe I’m too tired. But you don’t have anyone at 5 days out of 5. Maybe it’s just how you worded it. But also I would think it’s after 5 days so tomorrow would be when you see the reset