Guild members do not generate footfall

(I am not the expert in this system - so I hope the following is correct.)

The footfall system is logically the same for guild and non-guild members.

When evaluating a particular player’s entry into a particular beacon in a settlement, if the player doesn’t have any permissions in any beacon owned (or controlled) by that beacon owner (or controller) then a footfall payment is generated. (The payment could be reduced based on cool downs.)


Sure - I’d be happy to see anything that helps us track down potential issues.


For the avoidance of doubt - being friends or being in a guild does not stop footfall payments.

On the surface you may think - “everyone should generate footfall” - but …

The only aim of these rules is to stop players being forced into doing cheesy things to game the system. What I mean here is that if normal play isn’t sufficient and players feel compelled to follow daft (and usually tedious) actions to win. For example, say every day you encouraged your friends or fellow settlement members to all walk through your beacon, and in return you walk through their beacons. This is a group that you can coerce into this arbitrary action to generate income. But the whole purpose of footfall was an encouragement and reward to creating something useful or beautiful and worth visiting.

So these rules were introduced to limit cheesing and allow the original ambition be the primary driver.

(And for everyone out there who’ll just respond - “drop footfall it’s rubbish - just pay everyone a basic income” - then please realise that footfall doesn’t aim to do this. If the only aim was a tap for adding coins into the game then fine. But footfall isn’t a daily tap. The daily and weekly feats are the tap. If you want more basic income then champion these being balanced.)

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So you dont get footfall from people that life in the settlement your beacon is in?

As I tried to explain:

I’ll try writing it in a clearer way:

For a player’s beacon:

  • James walks into SePras’s beacon.
  • If James doesn’t have permissions on any of SePrar’s beacons in the Settlement - then footfall is paid.

For a guild’s beacon:

  • James walks into a Guild Controlled beacon.
  • If James doesn’t have permissions on any Guild Controlled beacon in the Settlement - then footfall is paid.

The point is that footfall is not paid for “close” friends. And we’re defining close as players that you’re working with, and we test for this based on permissions.

(But again - this isn’t an area I implemented. I’ll need to check with the other devs to make sure I’m correct.)

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Footfall is an awesome mechanic to encourage community construction. As long as we get paid when anyone walks over our plots, then that isn’t an issue. If you are concerned about players abusing this - it will happen. It just a matter of time before a community footfall system is constructed just for coin where everyone runs over plots in 5 minutes and collects their cash each day. Don’t fight the mechanic. Enable the behavior.

The issue is the economy is contracting and there is insufficient coin coming in the drive economic activity. Removal of bomb-mining was a huge hit to the supply-side of things. For example: I was too low level to take advantage of it before that balance pass went through and lost out. So you had folks sitting on Scrooge McDuck piles of coin and resources and anyone afterwards is playing the game as intended. That is totally fine, but the economy isn’t.

I spend upwards of 3 hours a week pricing and scanning shops and find abandoned shops with huge amounts of inventory that are utterly priced out of the market. Their owners nowhere to be found. I also find shops that have tons of resources to sell, but little in the way of buying.

We need massive economic stimulus. The game is in a recession and looking just at footfall isn’t a sufficient enough calculus to assess whether players have more coin or less. It would be better to assess if players feel like its better to grind for resources rather than engaging the economy. At the moment, I think the overwhelming opinion is it is easier to grind than pay money. It should never, ever be that way.

Footfall is just a single aspect. The daily and weekly feats are peanuts. We need real economic stimulus and a strong vision of a great economic engine from you and the dev team.

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man i was nerfed badly by this
just switch to a random alt with no guilds and
it was fixed
makes no sence to me
so by not joining my guild i can make finally cash for my guild ??

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Totally disagree here. This path just leads to some players doing all the cheesy things to maximise their gain, and everyone else getting annoyed that playing the game straight doesn’t return the same value.

My evaluation is that for the majority of resources there is a huge over supply in the economy. Supply > Demand.

For a few resources there is parity and a really healthy economy: Rough Oort Stone and Shards. Supply = Demand. In this market we can see that the number of resources entering the economy is equal to the number leaving. The market is fluid and is working well. Players can always sell these resources. Players can always buy them. The net result is that there are very few stockpiled resource.

For some resources there is under supply: some of the rarer creature drops. Supply < Demand. The price is high and the resource is in demand.

So my focus is on the majority of items where there is over supply:

  1. It’s simply too easy to find and gather almost all resources.
  2. Players can gather these easily, quickly, and in volume.
  3. Shop owners have spent all their coin, they’re now coin poor, but resource rich.
  4. They have more stock than demand wants.
  5. Hence you end up with request baskets without any coin. “I don’t need any more bones!!”

How do you solve over supply:

  1. You need to slow supply by making resources slower to gather. (But obviously everyone would freak out and screen NEEEERF at me.) Alternatively,
  2. You need to take the over supply out of the economy. The way you do this is by introducing a guaranteed mechanism for converting resources into coin. Thematically there are a few ways of doing this:
    • a game run shop but this has been rejected because we don’t want to make any parts of the world special,
    • allow the elder to buy items from players, also rejected for various technical, security and thematic reasons,
    • allow players to craft an coin / economy machine that converts items into coin.

An coin / economy machine would act as a guaranteed purchaser of some resources and would establish a base price for the item in the game. This would allow players to always generate a coin income if they’re willing to gather resources. I do consider this a hack on a pure economy - but there are real world examples.

This machine would:

  1. Take resources out of the economy and hence reduce supply.
  2. Establish a minimum price that the items can be sold for.
  3. Allow the player-player economy to sit above these prices.
  4. Allow an arbitrage for players who upgrade their economy machine.
  5. Allow players to always generate coin in exchange for collecting resources.
  6. Shift shops to focus more on crafted items.
  7. Give us a dial per item to reduce supply based on price.

So an economy machine will reduce over supply without nerfing gathering.

Another solution is to increase demand to match supply. IMO this is much harder, and I’m open to ideas to do this. There are a few options here:

  1. New Boundless players will increase demand. (But also increase supply!)
  2. Allow coin poor players a mechanism to generate coin to allow them to purchase more item - see the coin / economy machine.
  3. Create a reason for coin rich players to purchase items. (Any ideas?)

We have been thinking about this issue for a while and it is planned for release after the Exoworlds.

26 Likes

@james thank you for taking the time to help explain the features…

Is a faction considered its own guild or do factions link together to create the whole guild in the above example? I’m hoping factions are seen as separate.

As Moebius mentions below, working to create a guild and allow permissions and ease of team work really gets hurt by this design.

I really think we need to figure out how to adjust the model to allow footfall for guilds and not impact people for trying to team up and join a guild especially if you are giving people permissions. Obviously, assuming that the details you outlined are correct.

How about something to use lots of those stones people have, at a rate of something like 100 refined stone to get one refined block? Maybe “perfect stone” so it makes sense it would take a lot of raw blocks to get a single finished block?

Expensive recipes that use many resources don’t go down very well. Just search for feedback about the recent decorative blocks - players see this as grind.

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This is definitely true. People don’t want to be held back from building.

So I think your coin-creation machine is a good idea. You can’t build with coins. I doubt people would object to it.

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The wax is kind of annoying, but not that bad.

I find multiple ingredient recipes to be annoying especially with multiple supply chains leading into them. Like pies. But some people like them!

I find grind-y recipes like refined metal blocks to be okay though, with just one ingredient. And I think everyone recognizes the need to have some in game use for endless rock. There can only be so many rainbow rock shops!

As to footfall, when you reference guild people with permissions in the settlement, does that mean guild alignment of the plot OWNER? Or guild alignment of the PLOT itself? That is, if I un-align my plots from all guilds, will it remove all footfall “nerfs”?

I’m excited to read this and see that you all have some great ideas about it already.

I can suggest more possibilities:

  • allow players to easily trash items they don’t need. I think rock might be a huge candidate for this.
  • create an upgrade machine that can absorb a lot of lower tier items and convert them into few higher tier/rare items
  • create a magic/gambling machine that absorbs lower tier items and blocks for random chance of it producing out rare items

All these add value that discourages selling an item at 0c or 1c

The coin machine is a great idea as well for setting minimum values and introducing more coins into the market, but it may have the side effect of limiting exchange of items for which players can not afford to pay the price the machine does or the supplying player doesn’t think there is a market for. For instance, less desirable rock colors may have to be mined directly if a player wants them.

Also, I wish we could sell some items for less than a coin somehow. If we could sell stacks of 100 rock for one price we could move them more easily. If possible a second type of receipt basket and shop stand for bulk items could possibly do it.

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Why trash it when the coin machine will convert it into coin?

We did consider this, but rejected it - because we think players will get blocked on the “large input → small output” recipe. It’ll be perceived as grind. “I have to mine 100 rocks to get 1 blah. In MC you only need 1 rock to generate blah, etc.”

You must be new around here :wink:

This will be supported.


Unjoking aside - we did consider a sibling machine to the coin machine that was a recycling machine that would take large quantities of lower grade items and return a chance of some higher grade items. But we turned off this idea, as above, because we weren’t confident that players would appreciate the mechanic.

If you’re throwing something away, maybe it’s fun to have a chance of converting it into something better?

But the machine didn’t seem worth the risk of the usual suspects complaining about it.

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Well some will now complain that we don’t have the recycling machine lol

Seriously though, what are we supposed to do with all this growth?

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The thing I like about this is the ability to generate coin is entirely up to player effort. If I make the machine and grind rock I can always exchange it for coin without wasting time looking for a shop that might be willing to buy it. If the players want more coin then this seems like a good way to bring it into the economy.

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Growth … hmmm … farming maybe?

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Because you’re not at the coin machine or maybe the coin machine consumes time when it’s converting. I’ just throwing out ideas and alternatives here.

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Yes, more craftable items! So many in fact that it will become hard to just gather and make them all yourself.

Also more consumable items.

And change the food items into sub-categories just like brews.

(in short:

  • Well Fed be like the instant brews, works instantly and doesn’t cancel other buffs
  • very special, hi end food buffs like teaching, persisting and perhaps shielding, work long term like now
  • all the other food buffs like floating, energising, protecting, etc. basically all the ones that are replacements for skill points work alongside the hi end food buffs just like a reviver brew does

this will both get rid of the silly eating meat when on a pie, but also will make sure people will be able to make different type of skillset loadout, now everyone has highest atmosphere protection since they won’t be giving up a shielding or persisting pie

also they will finally sell more :slight_smile:
)

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I think there is nothing wrong with some small and gradual adjustments that players can agree on. For example I doubt anyone would object to some slight reductions of Bone/Tallow/Hide drops from high level creatures.

Blocks are trickier of course, it’s hard to come up with a good sink for refined stone when there are such massive gaps between players and a nice sink for the huge quantities some people have can be seen as unreachable or unfair for players just getting started. We definitely could do with some more uses for Growth, Mud and Ancient Corruption - or if you ask me, a closer look at how much of a culprit regeneration bombs seem to be when it comes to over-supply.

Personally I really liked the expensive new blocks, it felt good to finally burn through a chunk of accumulated resources. But of course I see the issue with dedicated builders getting frustrated by that. Perhaps the prestige rework or at least some re-balance talked about a while ago could slightly help in the direction of rewarding builders more, where the coin reward can then be spent on the more expensive to craft blocks/resources.

The economy machine sounds like a good solution, a way to normalize the market. I think it will also make it less overwhelming for new players to get engaged in it if there is a rough guideline of item values. It took me a lot of spreadsheet-ing and hours of running around in shops to finally be confident in buying/selling. Looking forward to hearing the more fleshed-out details!

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Make it alternative recipe. Something like compressing massive amounts of rock converts it into diamonds. This should produce something that is obtainable through other methods, but be less effective that the those methods so that it doesn’t become to the main path to get the item/block.