Probably smaller hubs with more portals changing and shutting down, since hubs would have less coin. Personally I think footfall is reasonable. I get a lot of footfall but I also do a lot of work (at least at my mall) to “earn” it. I would be far richer if I just mined t7’s all day and never started the mall to begin with. Nobody is getting rich by having their friends run in circles on their plots. People who get a lot of footfall are mostly “earning” it through hard work and providing value to the community. Note I say “mostly”, as there are of course exceptions.
I agree there are issues with footfall. And I agree with you footfall does not scale linearly with how useful a build is to the community. For example, my mall gets way more traffic than my Eresho hub, but my Eresho hub gets more coin. It is easier to plot hubs for footfall. Also, if someone spends an hour at my mall and visits 20 shops and spends 90% of that time on my mall roads, I still end up getting only 5-10% of the footfall generated compared to those shops. I’d argue I “earned” a bigger share of that footfall. But if the devs did that, roadbuilders would make spaghetti of the worlds to game it.
Hypothetically the devs could make footfall generated by each plot visited or by time spent on the beacon while not stationary, but people could game that even more easily. Or they could give you footfall once per hour instead of per 24h but that could be gamed too. Same for number of portals used. Same for number of times they exit then re enter your beacon.
They could do something to make footfall per account not per character, but then people would just use separate copies of the game or psn profiles to go around this.
Unfortunately I don’t see a good way to change it without f*cking up important parts of the game. I disliked it for a long time and didn’t use alts for a long time at my Finata mall, but eventually I accepted it and gave in.
Basically I agree with you and I’d love to hear ideas for how we could improve it, to reward “good/useful” builds.
May I ask why you don’t make your own footfall plotted area?
Because, as you said, footfall isn’t to get rich. But it warps the Oort market.
And it’s an arms race. Back when footfall was changed every hub had a single beacon, now one after the other changed to the multi-beacon plotting strategy - because they have to keep op with the Oort price the other hubs are able to pay.
I don’t think there’s a single person who thinks “I’ve split up my hub to 4 beacons, that’s so awesome I have to visit the build weekly with 4 chars”. Instead people think “I wish I could only visit it with my main but I have to do it to be able to afford the portals”.
If a mechanic annoys the player base and isn’t a useful game mechanic… just remove it. Alts should be treated the same as multiple beacons of the same char. We should not gain footfall for alts. Or, alternatively, every plot should produce footfall instead of every beacon.
I agree it is a massive nuisance. However, if they change it they would need to be very careful not to “break” it.
A good start would be removing the “visit with each alt weekly” thing. You should get the same footfall based on visitors regardless of when the beacon owner was last there. I think you, me and TNT could all agree on that one. 90% of the TNT hub is owned by an inactive and at this point generates 0 footfall.
That reminds me, I need to go visit each of my builds with each alt. sigh
I understand your point about alt etc… but the issue we are having the last year is that people leave/take a break of the game. During that period of time, they can’t or really do refresh the beacon not often so we lost footfall that way.
We just don’t want to start moving hubs/building every time this is happening.
Right now Malls and Hubs make the most footfall. Both have overhead to maintain them. Both of them require upkeep and maintenance to maintain. Having footfall absorb or help with that cost is nice, since it allows people to focus on the service rather then having to always have a shop to support the part of the game they enjoy.
A single active store is always going to make more money then footfall.
Portal Seekers is very open about their finances. The coin we make fuels the portals/guild buffs. Our single PS Store makes more money then our Footfall by 2 to 3 times. And it is only a part time activity for our members.
Footfall pay outs are low compared to other ways to make coin in the game.
Because people footfall trap I don’t think that is a reason not to make the system work better as it was intended.
It doesn’t make more footfall traps…or make footfall traps bad. Footfall still doesn’t make huge amounts of coin out of nowhere since malls/hubs need constant maintenance.
I think this would be a good improvement so we don’t have to keep moving hubs/changing builds as players leave. Which just stinks. ESPECIALLY with the new beacon changes.
You have a nice guild build? The new system will roll it up when the beacon expires. I am sure they will add a setting to prevent this (on the beacon maybe?) So you can reclaim it and take it over.
But if that setting isn’t set, or allowed to be changed by guilds…then we are just constantly rebuilding as players leave.
Just my 2c for improving the game and leveling it out.
Plus I am tired of pinging old guildies and asking them to log on Like a nag lol
Yeah, this is it. Ill admit, we were super excited to split beacon our hubs originally. But the fact of the matter is that players have to run alts though every few days and of course stay playing. A real analysis of multiplot hubs that have had time to normalize is kinda sad. Id guess we have 20-25% of our beacons paying out close to full and maybe 50-60% of network beacons effectively not paying out at all. Then … Blah blah blah
I just deleted about a 300 lines of analysis.
Dude I would trade it all for unlimited unscaled footfall on a few beacons. I’d be willing to bet the TNT network would be better off on a “usefulness” ff scale.
I understand your point and appreciate that you don’t move the hubs around all the time, which is annoying for people who use the network.
The problem is that footfall is passive income, which doesn’t match the rest of the game. Everything else requires constant tending to. If one char can refresh its 9 alts beacons by just visiting the settlement (you don’t even have to visit the beacon, only the settlement) that becomes the most efficient way to play the game.
The most efficient way should never be the stupid way and there should not be an advantage for using alts, in my opinion. Treat alts beacons the same as multiple beacons of the same char.
Maybe instead of visiting the beacon they should change it so that the beacon loses durability when it generates footfall and needs to be repaired, like you have to repair machines. They could even add coils to increase footfall instead of link it to city prestige. That way you could repair your guilds beacons. But, of course, repairing wouldn’t be a “once a week” activity for often visited builds, like you have to repair your refinery daily if you use it.
Granted it would be a patch for now to make the beacons refreshable by guild visit.
Not a real fix.
As there have been multiple suggestions on what would be preferred or maybe a better solution, even most of those will probably have flaws and or simply don’t work.
The fact is as a main (how ever low) income to help with the oort demand (for example) in most cases is barely enough to cover the cost for 1 hub.
Don’t know how correct i am but didn’t footfall used to cost others and they changed it to generating.
So I don’t really see what the problem is of a “footfall trap” as it doesn’t trap you or cost you anything. All it does is generate a little extra coin to help with upkeep.
So why not tweak it a little to help us out more.
But the problem here is that the beacon owner could be a guild member that is not playing for a while which means their footfall income drops dramatically.
Any other ideas to solve that particular situation?
Demanding that people who take a break continue to login weekly to keep a guild alive isn’t ideal.
But running through your network with a single character to refresh all guild aligned beacons is to little effort for the gain.
Use a repair-requiring machine that collects footfall, either the beacon itself or something new.
They could even allow you to place down multiple of these machines, fully coiled, to scale up footfall. That would still be better then splitting up the beacon.
That could work, but… the problem a little is, we haven’t seen an update in quite some now and the last update didn’t exactly have any new content either which also took ages to release. I know for a fact they are cramming a lot of stuff in the upcoming one and sure they are all very, very much needed, but I sooooooooo want new content in release 243 (the one after the next)!!
Anyway, if there’s an easier stop gap solution which can be implemented quickly until they can solve it properly that would kinda be awesome. I like your idea tho and if they think it can be added fast enough I’m all for it!
It’s a shame there isn’t a permission that can be granted to allow access to collect footfall from the beacon. They could just fire a reset event whenever someone with permissions checks the beacon’s footfall / visits the beacon.
Interesting idea, i like it. I think at the same time there would need to be a way to set the location of your “warp to your home beacon for free” I had to move mine from where i thought it looked best to berried in the floor just so it wouldn’t throw me outside of my home each time warped home =/
One workaround would be to make the footfall machine/coils and beacon two separate things… it would add an extra progression layer i guess having to gathering the matts for enabling / upgrading footfall
on a more on topic note, i think alts should be able to refresh your own beacons as well… i find it frustrating that my slow crafter has to walk to all my stores to refresh them since he’s the owner of the beacon. He never leaves the safety of his workshop otherwise. The only reason he’s the owner of the shops is because he can spare the skill points to have the tax epic on each skill page… but maybe that’s a sign that the tax epic needs some TLC?
I think scruf has a good number of points about being active or present to some degree to gain the rewards. A case that could be a good compromise is 4 weeks+ of inactivity decay on a guild-controlled beacon etc. and after that point the refresh is turned back over to the guild who is controlling the beacon anyway(?) Refresh being on the beacon level, not settlement wide, ofc
Like a nag lol
then anyone with perms can send footfall to the guild