this doesn’t make any sense. just because someone has more plots than someone else doesn’t mean they automatically have the resources to put on said plots. they still have to work for those just like everybody else.
wait… is your entire argument based on the fact that if people with so many extra plots (which I sense is what you’re against) are able to nab expired wealthy beacons therefore instantly having those resources?
If so, that would make so much sense. why not just say that?
I sort of agree with that but at the same time, if someone lets their beacons expire that’s fair game.
What I don’t think is fair (ironically) is everyone having the same amount of plots.
some people use a ton of them, some people use none of them. I am one that could use more than twice the amount of plots I currently have available to me (probably more)
Ok. I am understanding your argument a little more now…
I think you misunderstand the way it works now, which is different than before.
BEFORE: all you needed to do to was put a beacon next to a large settlement and you got coin every time someone walked by. you didn’t even have to build anything.
NOW: you can place 1 or 100 beacons and you won’t get any footfall until you actually build something. a player that has more plots will still have to do the same amount of work as a player with fewer plots to get the same prestige level.
doing this you are simply playing the game just like everyone else. the player that didn’t buy plots will still be receiving them as they level up giving them more plots to place the blocks they are refining etc.
ok finally you’ve put it in a way that makes sense, but I mean… they spent real money to get those rewards (more plots).
When you pay for something you usually get something in return. To me, more plots to build seems like a worthwhile investment.
I agree with everyone having the same/ish income, but NOT the same amount of plots.
So, if coin was removed from footfall, where do you think we should be getting more coin from then?
The only thing I agree with here is that plots shouldn’t be monetized…
I think Xaldafax has some strange idea’s about footfall and I would tell him that Portal seekers small cluster of plots makes far more footfall then most any other huge cluster of plots and why??? Because there is a good reason to walk on there small cluster of plots… And good on them they worked there but off to create an awesome portal network and they earned there footfall…
However on this topic of boundless making money or how is it going to pay for the servers I see a very simple answer!
Subscription FEE PLEASE…
Its wonderful that you want to be a one time pay to play game but, free to play and all these other gimmicks are just that. The best most simple way to earn money in a fair way is to simply charge an affordable sub…
$5 a month
$24 for 6 months
$36 for a year
^^^^ Very affordable and it still gets you income to keep the servers running… Makes far more sense then trying to figure out how to avoid every pay to win conspiracy theory that will develop from whatever crazy way of attempting to make cash otherwise…
Although this statement is likely true, it is misleading. Currently the actual amount of footfall from all the PS gateways combined is in the tens of thousands per week. You can make tens of thousands of coin mining for an hour. The gateways have costed A LOT more than just plots to build, and they certainly consume multiple hours of multiple people’s time each week (fueling portals, building more conduits, updating signs, etc). If we just wanted coin, we would be mining and selling to request baskets, not making gateways. Most of the money from the gateways is given away to other players through events anyways.
I think if you talk to any popular hub owner you’ll find their time investment per footfall is way higher than it would be mining. Footfall is not a significant advantage, it’s just some nice coin to have on the side.
On release there may be more players, but I don’t really see the value in speculating about the changes the dev’s will do to balance this. They have made it clear that they collect metrics on money going into the system, and that they are able to adjust it. I have faith they will continue to make reasonable decisions in the future as they have in the past. There’s no value in getting upset about a possible future that will almost certainly not happen.
Yeah thats correct… footfall is not some end all be all way to strike it rich and thats the other side of this arguement thats getting overlooked…
Its not a huge amount of money… for the number of people that use Portal seekers network and the amount of Oort they need to maintain those portals the footfall I would dare say barely pays the bills for the oort…
Again I think some of the persons idea’s about footfall are greatly skewed…
I despise subscription models. I tend to switch games from time to time and - most of the time - having to pay a sub to return to some game simply means picking another one. I’ll happily spend money on whatever I am playing at that moment though - which works great with microtransactions.
Many of the games I play release patches over time - and I tend to log in and check out the new stuff every time they do. If that catches my fancy I’ll play it for a while. My point is: Subscriptions do not work well for everyone. Optional payment plans allow a larger player audience.
I would like to point out I was referring to prestige as well. I also said we are making changes to the system to prevent it from being P2W. One way is to remove the number of plots as a bonus to the footfall. But this appears to been missed.
I still fundamentally disagree more plots = more prestige or money for that matter. I just don’t get it and haven’t seen a convincing case as to why. Busy plots, shops and good gathering/hunting/mining runs make money.
I get that I could make a super large flat plot of cheap refined metamorphic and gain 150k prestige off say 30,000 blocks. That’d be simple and quick to lay. It wouldn’t gain me any footfall, but I’d still need to gather or buy all that. It’d be infinitely quicker for me to do that with compacted copper over a much smaller area. I’m not sure I could get a better prestige gain than a copper block (for the time to mine and lay it). - I found this by accident when I started using up all my excess copper to make a gorge through a mountain out of it. - It is also reasonably cheap and I like the shade of it.
For reference I am going by this still:
Not to mention I can actually earn decent money alongside gathering the copper/iron or whatever I am using.
I think @Xaldafax’s concern comes, not from the fact that you can build one giant plot to get more footfall (coin), but by building many smaller ones in many more locations and gain footfall from each of them.
The average player-grinder who is playing (not paying) for their plots, can still do this, but over a much slower period of time, which could be perceived as putting them at a disadvantage.
The very (second) thing I started to do was this and I don’t believe its true. My neighbors give me some footfall as they pass by to cut leaves. I am promising to setup an area within the plots that is wild but reserved for them too long term. I thought if I connect up areas I might benefit, but then quickly realised why when there are portals.
That’s about I dunno 300 plots on the roads, one of my alts does the roads and most of his 400 or so are on roads. They get almost nothing compared to my tiny shop and I am in a reasonably busy area for wilderness. I’ve got 3 large active settlements around me and several smaller builds. Nearly always see a player or two doing something around me.
If I ran three well stocked tiny shops with different things in them, connected to portal hubs, I’d be getting a lot more from footfall but even that would pale significantly from one mining trip. I now have I think 15 mines because of this.
Hello James! I’d like to chime in on this subject very briefly and try to offer a SOLUTION I touched upon in some ancient post a few years ago. I do think that (in theory) the prestige system is a bit flawed. When this game goes live, and is made available to millions of gamers, I think they will take and exploit such an “automated” system (for lack of a better term).
So… I’d like to suggest turning prestige into a voting system. A player that ventures into a town or a plot should have a choice as to whether or not they even like the area they are seeing. I think human choice is probably the best solution to a “prestige” system seeing as though prestige is literally predicated on the public’s opinion of something. How does “footfall” equate to admiration of something? The complexity of a shape doesn’t make it beautiful, and for that matter, neither does the rarity of the material used. The THOUGHT that went into it is what really distinguishes it. And that cannot be so easily captured or understood by coding. No matter how complex it is. So i took a stroll through the city… wasn’t impressed… lol. You see? It doesn’t exactly make sense. I’m sure you guys have worked a lot on the prestige system, but computers can never truly emulate human emotion.
NOW. As for implementation of this more “organic” prestige system, you could offer a simple “thumbs up/thumbs down” choice when the player enters a settlement. Or maybe have a message board of some sort where players could interact with it and vote there. Speaking of message boards… WE NEED THEM. Lol. Settlement activities like hunts, sales, quests, and such could be stored there. And they could all be player sanctioned. As well as dev sanctioned events. (But that’s for another thread)
Hmmm… maybe not as “brief” as I thought it’d be.
P.S. I’m sure you don’t wanna have to keep digging through old code to change those prestige parameters in the future. think of all the time you’d save! Lol
This is the thing, there is only going to be so much coin that is generated from daily and weekly feats on top of the one time feats and leveling. Without some sort of increase in the money supply it will create some other problem that’s going to be far worse than someone using thousands of plots. That being someone hording billions of coin because there’s a definitive limitation on how much coin someone can bank up, on top of that it would stale shops across public worlds, and ultimately kill the economy more than buying plots ever would. There are already people who do this and we have footfall.
As far as I understand, footfall helps prevent that cause having a few thousand coin injected into the economy on a regular basis helps make sure that coin is flowing from person to person more readily and so it keeps up the economic gameloop. People need coin in order to buy stuff from people’s shops. That’s just a fact.
But yeah, let’s throw that out the window cause footfall is bad and gives unfair advantages to people cause it some how is directly tied to how many plots someone has.
I was there at the beginning to and right next to Aquatopia. I moved too. In fact it was my plan to move anyways cause I just wanted a spot to get started at. I did and moved to where I currently am.
You sound very anti-big business right here too. It isn’t unbalanced or unfair. Some can say that about @slyduda with Gemporium cause he has a pretty strong foothold on the pricing of certain things but him and the team of people he’s working with put the time and effort into maintaining a high traffic shop that flips items and coin regularly each week. Maybe we should be suggesting ways to screw with that as well cause it’s unfair and unbalanced to certain people? That’s actually a really silly idea.
If someone wants to build multiple shops, portal hubs, cities, towns, portal networks, etc. and have the plots to do it, they should have the option to do that solo or with others. It’s just going to be a much larger time sink and commitment from that player.
It’s irrelevant that Moebius is making coin from two locations. The added value he brings to the game with Aquatopia and Moebius Plaza is greater to those using it for free than whatever footfall coin he makes.
If I decide to spend 12 months building 3 locations and having them become high traffic spots that generate lots of coin from shop stands and footfall, then that 12 months of time doing it all myself should have some sort of reward attached to it. That reward being coin and a return on my time invested into building out each spot.
YES!! 100% agreed!
This is what I’ve been trying to advocate for. this is the best way to calculate prestige… Human input!!
nobody likes a big ugly block of compact gems or machined copper and then what? that person is mayor because he has the biggest ugliest block of high value blocks?
Nuh-uh.
Thats what voting should be for. I want to give kudos to all my favourite builds!
So how about diminishing returns to a players total income from footfall, rather than an individual beacon. I have no idea what the high footfall people make, but I can clear 200k a day from mining easy. More like 50k a pie, so what do you guys make? I would say I am at endgame mining now, with just a few tweaks left to get me to the peak. My hunter can do pretty nice for himself too.
So if someone earns over 150k from footfall, in a day (from all beacons), they get diminish returns? Something like that? Set it to whatever the end game miners and hunters make for a relatively fair system to builders. This would have to take into account alts of course.
nono! i’m not saying 100% voting, that could cause problems too…
I think that a thumbs up/down would only be part of the calculation, taking the other things into account too like chiselling and block types, but I’m thinking more of 50/50 user votes and automatic calculations.
Yeah I like that a social area should count. I like that a busy area should count and that prestige as it is now should count.
So like 1 third footfall, 1 third voting and 1 third block value, but 50/50 would be okay too.
Having high prestige at a build location doesn’t make you more footfall coin anymore than having 100k plots does for just having them on hand to use.
In fact, there are plenty of people who like the gem blocks and machined metal blocks. I personally like machined metal blocks.
Personally I think what determines who is mayor in a settlement needs to be overhauled. It shouldn’t be based on prestige and voting can work if the voting system for the election is robust enough to handle it. Such as only a single member of a guild can vote to represent the entire guild. That way guild sizes will be irrelevant in any settlement mayor election and instead would be more of a popular vote type of thing; which has it’s own problems that may or may not even need to be addressed.
This game is already going to have plenty of politics and rivalries going on between shop owners anyways.
not sure what you’re trying to say here but that statement sounds wrong.
I also was unaware that more plots on a beacon would give you more prestige as this comment suggests:
so yeah. I thought the only way to increase footfall was to build in your plot, not by adding more empty plots.
So, @Xaldafax I understand your concerns on that now.
oh I know, I like machined too, but I’m talking about prestige vaults.
the city of steam is a whooooooole different (and gorgeous) ballgame. (so much machined lol. but that’s building done right. I would thumbs up all over that place. )
(the ugly comment was aimed at the decorative gems, (I said compact but meant decorative) I cant stand tiled textures. I MUCH prefer seamless edges like sedimentary rock or patterns like igneous brick.)
oh absolutely. I think we can all agree on that.
but of course things take time. all we can do is provide as much input and suggestions as we can. my idea was only part of what I think should be in the final iteration, not its entirety.
Sorry, I should have been a little more thorough with my response. That’s my fault for being misleading.
Having a settlement with 1 million prestige doesn’t necessarily mean you make a lot in footfall cause footfall is generated by people visiting the location. That’s all I was getting at. It’s akin to saying someone with 10k plots available to them makes more footfall cause they have 10k plots. Both are irrelevant if nobody is visiting the settlement to begin with.
Although, I’d love to have 10k plots so I don’t have to worry about plots ever again.
Regardless, as you’ve said, you need to build the settlement up and give people a reason to visit the settlement to make any kind of footfall coin.
I don’t know if plots attached to a beacon has any sort of significant influence. I think prestige has a bigger impact on footfall per unique visitor every 24 hours than how many plots are attached to a beacon cause that makes more sense than how many plots make up a settlement.
think of all the time you’d save! Lol
)