Footfall should scale with beacon prestige

Footfall currently has a few major flaws stemming from:

  1. Using alts/alt accounts leads to more footfall from the same plots
  2. Building small plots in other players builds’ leads to footfall for your build

This leads to a build-style which encourages spreading out and placing beacons at spots where people are most likely to move - which will result in many small meaningless builds simply places at points where people would normally walk.

In order to resolve this - and reward sizeable builds with more footfall - it should scale with beacon prestige/plot count and require a minimum prestige/plots before a beacon becomes eligible for footfall.

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Yeah, I believe that a road, say, shouldn’t get nearly as much footfall as a portal hub, which is of more value and more prestige.

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Definitely. (Active) portals should get much greater prestige values and footfall/coin/bonuses than they do now. I believe the footfall from portals will go up a lot as the player-base does - but they still need a bonus vs roads (which will get the same effect).

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I think it already does scale against prestige. I’m on my phone at the moment so will double check when I get home as to the scales.

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One could arguee that footfall for roads is to high. Over the last few weeks the things that were build are mostly roads… roads and roads… to nowhere… with the potential to grant footfall if someone decides to build something great / interessting there. There are so many dead roads out there. Yes footfall should scale with prestige but it should not be luctrative to “spam” the world with streets.

is in controversy to what a lot of people are complaining about… massive “useless” builds. Yes there are a lot of massive builds that are very impressive, for example in Elop Portas but also part of the charm of the city is its unique market place. You have to decide here if you want a world full of massive ghost towns or accept smaller “meaningless” builds.

This is not a controversy in my opinion - it is two different problems. One problem is that builds do not have enough function (several suggestions related to that already exist - including some from me). Another problem due to the footfall mechanic is that people are encouraged to build things with no objective other than to intercept passersby. I am suggesting that the game should encourage larger builds by making them profitable vs spamming plots randomly all over the place and building a ton of roads. In addition we need more functional/interactive things to make these less of a ghost town.

I’m home now… confirmed that footfall is linked to settlement prestige, as follows:-

Prestige Settlement Size Footfall
< 10000 N/A 0
10000 Outpost 20
50000 Hamlet 30
250000 Village 40
1250000 Town 60
6500000 City 80
32000000 Great City 100

Footfall per player can only be generated per 24 hours, so one player visiting twice in one day only generates footfall once in that 24 hour period.

8 Likes

Thanks for this! Did not know this. However, it doesn’t address my concern as it links to the settlement and not the beacon (thus even more encouraging players to build small beacons in big cities to intercept footfall).

It does however encourage us to make portal hubs in larger settlements (or build larger settlements for them) - that’s something!

I don’t know if the footfall is also individually linked to beacons as well (something I would like to test) … it would make sense if it was, as it would be odd to receive footfall because a player visited a shop over the other side of town.

It definitely only rewards footfall if somebody walks into your beacon - I have tested this. But the amount awarded is based only on the settlement’s prestige as far as I can tell: my alts with 1 plot on my shop’s road get almost just as much coin as my main does for the whole shop floor.

I am all for adjusting footfall cash. But I think if we had more sources of income and ways to generate cash then footfall wouldn’t be as key. Not everyone can create roads or intercept traffic especially in already established places. Also not everyone can have a shop. Also, contracts are not the solution but an addition that still isn’t enough.

Clearly if we want an economy we need a system to really support it.

Also, I really don’t want this game to become a “money” game. I get some people like to feel like millionaires and its great to have that cash but why is that super important… I don’t mind it but certainly don’t want mechanics in the game that limit me because I can’t easily generate cash.

Let’s be honest… we already have 2 decent hubs. We might get a third but after that most people will use those over others. We already have a primary shop that almost the whole community uses. So we might get a few more. Footfall is mostly linked to those areas and won’t expand out far beyond that. So for us that aren’t established it’s very hard to get customers or footfall. Sure new players will help grow this a bit but not much initially.

I have no idea what the worlds will look like with thousands of players (assuming we get there) but the design for income and economy is limited.

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Is what you’re saying, is that your shop, being bigger, should earn more from footfall?

I disagree.

Whilst your shop is providing a valuable service, I don’t think can you directly compare it’s value, across multiple players needs, to a single plot that provides free access of a portal to another planet. Both places hold value, but for entirely different reasons.

I think this is one of those times that size really doesn’t matter :wink:

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What is “footfall?”

What I’m saying is that my level 9 alt shouldn’t be making as much footfall from the plot in front of the portal hub then SWProzee1 does who keeps the portal open, or my main who owns the shop.

The current system is easily exploitable and will lead to negative behaviour that severely disadvantages the community. This will become very apparent with more players and planets as this will vastly increase their gains. I do NOT and will never make suggestions for self gain - it is in everyone’s best interest to have a fair system that is protected from obvious and effortless exploitation.

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If the plot from your level 9 alt is a path/road between places, then I would argue that they should still receive the same footfall… especially if you happen to be in a floating city high up in the sky… or you happen to have built over a lava lake. That pathway provides just as an invaluable service as any other plot really.

Could you provide some examples of how this would be easily exploitable, would lead to negative behaviour, and would severely disadvantage the community? I’m honestly missing something on this one.

I don’t agree the effort for building a road is not the same as for exaple a portal hub or omnis shop. There should be a difference in the reward for those things.

Imagine Omni would replace the 10 plots of road to his shop with 10 plots by 10 different people, or 10 alts? You reward 10 times the amount for the same service. This is a problem and with my example very easy to exploit.

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And if the road is made of Machined Silver / Gold / Titanium or Refined Oortstone… what then? You could argue that more effort went into building the road over some fairly easy to make shop stands :thinking: It’s a difficult one to quantity I think.

Thanks for clarifying (I was having a brain dead moment and honestly couldn’t think of how it could be abused!).

In fact you could even exploit it with just 2 people with alternating plots (although each one would then need to be individually fueled, but it could be done).

My first stab at a solution would be to say that you’d need to have a minimum amount of prestige on the players beacon to be able to earn the coin, but that doesn’t stop people paving their roads with gleam and gold. It’s still the same section of road and serves the same purpose… it’s just shinier.

How would you account for one plot or group of plots to have more value over any other?

This is already covered - you only get footfall once per settlement per character.

We don’t have to stop it, we just need to make it hard to exploit (which kinda removes the exploit part then). Restricting footfall from beacons with low plot counts (subjective, I know) would limit players’ ability to dot the landscape with low-effort structures to maximize revenue.

Imagine Therka Market: It would be in anybody’s financial best interest to add at least 10 random beacons across the place to maximize the chance of some soul running over one of them. If I place a few of these I get my cut of Therka Market’s traffic @ 80 daily coin per person - that’s a pretty sweet deal. I really don’t want people thinking this way about what to build. Make it a bit harder (2k prestige, 4 plots?) and suddenly this becomes quite a lot of work for that coin - evening the scales.

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So a portal in the middle of no where to help people access it or some other small thing like that loses the ability to generate cash?

Just to play the other side of the discussion… Maybe we should just make it easy and remove all footfall cash. Why does it even exist?

Or honestly someone makes a bit more cash because they have a two plots via an alt in an area that generates footfall… How is that affecting anything really? How is that hurting things?

I know we kind of got off topic but honestly if you have footfall cash then it needs to not be linked to prestige because it isn’t fair to us smaller people that will never have access to any plot in a major city for footfall or are trying to provide small portal or other plots.

You already have an environment where there are a few that earn a lot of cash because of established plots/stores and others that are lucky to make 40 c every few days because of very limited traffic and actual player numbers. Even with a scaled player count you will still have the same issue because once a town is established those that started it and have plots in the core of the town will get all cash while others will have tiny amounts. Added to that there will only be a few towns and hubs while others will struggle to grow because people won’t go there much.

I honestly don’t see this as being a major problem - if people are willing to go to the lengths of fueling those 10 beacons, then why shouldn’t they earn coin from that?!

I’ve actually only got 2 plots in Therka Market - vertically placed, so even less chance to generate footfall - but it still generates a fair amount, because what I have placed in it, is (hopefully) useful to people. I don’t think a road that connects my small shop / portal (no matter how many plots it takes) is any less beneficial to Therka Market, as it facilitates easy access to my shop from all other places. Those roads are still of immense value, whether they are 1 plot or 100.

I foresee that, once guild functionality is realeased, that this will become less of a problem, as many people will break away to form their own cities, which should be better planned. I’d also imagine things like roads etc. would be taken care of by guild plots as it’s easy footfall revenue which would go to the guild itself and not any one player.