So @Kawwak was showing me our new neighbour, that actually does not live close to us at all. Apparently furnaces can be spammed to give an insane amount of prestige:
More importantly, as seen in the before-last image, they cause a massive amount of FPS drop. The game normally runs between 50-60 fps for me, but at this person’s base, it drops down to 10.
There are just furnace firepits and crucibles spammed everywhere, and there are 2-wide roads made entirely of only firepits connecting this person’s distant house to Danzorg’s place, which in turn connects to Kawwak and his neighbours.
Furnace gives about 65 prestige per firepit/crucible. I have used firepit in my Vulpto build, but haven’t used crucible, firepit does not give any FPS drop, and it’s a nice building block that can have lots of colors.
But this seems like an exploit
Haha, perhaps I was wrong about the prestige system? That aliens screenshot is golden.
On a serious note, although I like the idea of the prestige system, I’m not going to let it dictate my builds. I hope the future system that was alluded to by @luke-turbulenz makes your aesthetic choice of blocks almost irrelevant.
If it wasn’t for the gleam, something like @Naxie’s garden would be worth almost no prestige, even though it’s a magnificent sight to behold. If it seems like I’m going over old ground, it’s only to drive home my concerns. It could be the downfall of the game if there’s an ‘optimal build’, especially seeing as the prestige system is tied directly into the classification of cities.
Another thought I had about the whole ‘leaderboard’ aspect, which some players love to pursue; you could perhaps consider adding more information for players to review - so instead of just having that prestige variable to wave in people’s faces, you could have things like;
Total visitors
Total blocks
Total plots (already in)
Build age
Average footfall
Average visitors
And other such information for players to view and aim for?
We will iterate the prestige system - but it wasn’t till we had an initial version against some real world builds - that we could start evaluating what needed changing. It’s actually quite a complicated algorithm because it’s also attempting to be efficient and not kill the servers.
We’ll need to look at the scoring heuristics and work out which builds are being over scored and which are under scored.
Maybe there is something more we can do beyond pure blocks-placed analysis.
Well, you could rethink my ‘like’ or ‘thumbs up’ idea. Not as an alternative, but something that would work alongside the current system as an additional factor or multiplier.
I liked that idea but I guess I can still see how it would have some potential for abuse, as was mentioned last time by someone.
I did like how it worked on Rift dimensions, but of course there the likes a build had received didn’t mean much other than that it was popular.
If a build has high prestige because it has thought put behind it, or interesting patterns or whatever, I think it’s well earned. It will always be difficult to balance a mechanic like this, but spamming a single easy block on its own in large “blobs” for the sake of high prestige is more what I was referring to in the OP.
Honestly, the thing that bothered me most though, really was the fps drop! If I don’t like someone I can put a beacon next to them and start spamming a relatively cheap and laggy block on purpose… I wouldn’t want that to be done to me either.
