I’ll have to digest it a bit further but I think I like this even better.
It would probably solve many of the complications that the protection system would bring into city building.
And I think it’s also fair to mention that before any of this is implemented, some sort of offline messaging system needs to be in place. Easier contact with neighbors that may have different playing times would go a long way to solve most non-griefing land disputes.
I voted “No”, since I believe we have some other related mechanisms that could take development priority and implementation before we open this can of worms. To name a couple:
I voted “Yes” Because while it isn’t perfect, it’s a step in the right direction to promote anti-griefing, and cooperating together as a community.
<Edited by Steggs - No need to be antagonistic>
Ok Steggs.
mmm I think it will only gets worse
People will just spam 1-4 block sky gleam towers and prevent even larger plots to be available.
Even worse if they afk for weeks.
Maybe we need some PVP 
Like the Judgment Hour in Life is Feudal.
This particular point, while a seemingly simple solution, would not fit with the developers ‘view’ for the game. Basically, the way that the Warden position can go back and forth between people in a settlement is intentional, among other things to avoid having cities run by players that stopped playing entirely (or, in a parallel with other games, a guild leader that no longer plays and so the guild has to disband and reform).
Ah thanks for the info. The timers on beacons should help combat the first part. If a Warden stops playing entirely their plots will decay and guild leadership can pass to another landowner in the guild (based on prestige I suppose, to match the existing rules of the game.)
It is a very hard design goal to both have an automatic way to assign a leader and protect active leaders from coups (prestige griefing). The two seem almost at odds. I think the devs should revisit their stance on this. It seems like they built a system for ad-hoc settlement forming and it’s a form of non-combative PvP. Whereas players are expressing interest in more collaborative and definitive settlement planning.
Originally (early access) they did, but now with Gleam Club (and/or advanced beacon fuels) you can be away from the game for a very long time and still keep the beacon going, so I think extra measures have become necessary to stop settlements from stagnating with a warden / founder going AWOL.
That’s good news haven’t made a permanent house yet so good to know
I voted yes, while I consider this a valuable change and a welcome feature, just as @Pseudonym84 mentioned above, I don’t see it being it used to it’s fullest extend with the current prestige system.
It’s solving many problems, while possibly causing others (specially in those edge case scenarios mentioned further above). I guess an idea to try and make those edge cases work better, and not recurr constantly to moderation would be to introduce a protection plotter that would function as with normal plots, but with the protected plots, giving you more control on where you want to protect and where you don’t. This will simply add onto the beacon options you already proposed.
But seeing as the protection depends on prestige (I seriously can’t see a better option) I think it would generate another type of concern, where players would spend all their time looking for fast ways to boost prestige instead of buildings things they actually enjoy, so they can push their boundaries further, without the need for plots. My only solution would be to make the protection not depend on prestige but on an item, Instead of fuel, a power source (new type of craft) that extends protection based on the type of power source. This power source will be crafted like fuel (with different crafting requirements, etc) But it will basically allow nature or forest themed builds to still protect their areas, without needing to boost their prestige just for the sake of it.
I agree with this - because prestige griefing is most definitely a thing. See an opportunistic (low prestige) settlement? Claim some land and build a giant gleam basement or a huge structure filled with nothing but gleam. It doesn’t encourage people to build what they want, but build what they MUST in order to “protect” themselves (even though being a Warden has no huge benefit besides naming the city). And collobartion is certainly happening, sometimes it takes time (I played for a month before making any real in-game friends and am actually collaborating on multiple builds with people) so I like the idea of changing prestige to “elect” people or giving a certain amount of “votes” based on your prestige in the city and maybe elections can be triggered if enough people hit a certain thing on their beacon, we could use the (voting decoration - another suggestion people have come up with) and vote that way, to make is super democratic (obviously still room for griefing, but less)
Overall I like this idea, but I do think you all have raised many reasonable concerns. It seems like people who have experienced plot griefing are really for it, while those of us who haven’t been griefed seem less likely to support it, so I see both sides.
This may work, too, but for inside city walls / roads, that if a beacon expires maybe it is reserved by the warden for like, 72 hours, so that it may be built upon or beaconed by someone else as seen fit by the city. I think the expansion outwards part is just kind of sad. If you want the plots, there are ways (make an alt, buy some cubits / power level) and I get that sometimes timing is everything, so I struggle with that. I like the idea of having it any protected areas off by default so that people can still make impromptu cities and can collaborate peacefully and randomly. It will be confusing to new players, so we must take into account how to streamline it.
Great ideas y’all. I’m confident the community will come up with a great system to quell concerns and griefing in general. “Non-combative pvp” is exactly how it feels sometimes with the ‘land grab’ mentality.
One of the complaints I’ve noticed that unfortunately none of this addresses is to do with smallish settlements that use more natural blocks so therefore don’t have a huge amount of prestige and then someone comes along and builds right on their doorstep and engulfs them. Because the proposal doesn’t account for who plotted there first surely this will just exacerbate the issue.
I like the idea of it being a separate machine than beacons (this would also help with UI clutter). If it used some sort of fuel (different from beacon fuel) it could also be a sink for some resources that are currently under-used in recipes, or as a coin sink if the developers feel that the game needs one to curb inflation.
If it was implemented as a second machine/prop/whatever, it could also be used as a source for beacon-based atmospheric protection, which was, as I recall, something that the developers were looking into at some point.
I don’t know if the protection buffer needs to be uncoupled from prestige however. If we combine this new machine idea with @toastkid’s idea above, for the ‘protection zones’ to be a pool of reservation plots to be set manually, then the number of reservation plots available can still depend on prestige.
There are problems with the current prestige system, as pointed out by @Pseudonym84, and the whole prestige system seems to be in need of a balancing pass (particularly for people that like creating natural-looking builds).
I am fully in agreement that we are at a point where some changes to the prestige values of blocks are needed (even if to simply make all player-placed blocks have the same value, as was suggested in one of Pseudo’s posts in his topic linked above, tho I think doing this would bring other problems and the ugly single-plot towers would just be of random materials instead of refined gleam).
However, if the prestige system will remain as a meaningful mechanic rather than as a bragging rights statistic, as seems to be the direction that the development team wants to go, then separating the protection system (and perhaps other systems) from prestige would be akin to treating the symptoms instead of curing the disease.
Abso-freakin-lutely!!!
Natural builds always look better than refined monstrosities.
The game is currently tuned for block spammers, not creative artists.
@jesshyland I see you in the no vote. As a dev I am curious as to what your opinion is.
I think it would be nice to have it as a Turn on Turn off protection thing. Cities trying to expand and they can’t do anything or the player doesn’t want to be consumed by a city but doesn’t have the plots things like that
YES, especially if it is has enable/disable properties. I think this would greatly add to gameplay and be an interesting dynamic for lower leveled characters. Thanks for asking!
That’s how I understood the game worked before I bought it. I heard the beacon system and I thought it was based on a power source that expanded depending on the fuel you used.
It depends on what kind of buffer you mean. Currently you can’t buffer against people connecting to your settlement. This fix isn’t about people building and/or claiming next to you, that I think is just something you have to live with in a game like this. What this solves is settlements or plots connecting to your settlement and taking them over, changing the warden and the name. Someone can still build where you wanted to build in the future or build something ugly next to you, but they can’t claim some plots, drop a few thousand high-prestige blocks, and take over your settlement. Nor can a large settlement snake out and absorb nearby smaller settlements.
EDIT: Also, is buffer by beacon or by settlement? I think it needs to be by settlement, so once you have a beacon that is in a given settlement you can build within that settlement’s buffer and the warden can turn off or grant permissions for the entire settlement. Otherwise it will be nearly impossible for settlements composed of many players to expand and/or add new players. If this is by beacon, change my “yes” vote to a “no”
Before heading into making changes, It’s worth saying that the thing you’re fixing might not be the actual problem.
The suggested changes seem to fix the issue of people building right next to another build. This appears to be a genuine issue for people who want to be able to enforce a natural area around their build. These same people are also tend to be frustrated when people come in and chop trees or dig earth nearby and ruin their pristine building site, which this does not protect against and as such is only a partial fix for the difficulties that this group experience.
I would say given the remit that settlement merging will be handled by other systems, a larger (entirely unsubstantiated) portion of the players voicing their frustration about people plotting nearby are doing so from the position that they ideally wanted to build into that space at some point in the future, but didn’t or couldn’t plot it at the time. This solution doesn’t really do anything to prevent this scenario, as another player can still place plots on the border of the protected area, throw down some high prestige blocks and actually prevent expansion into multiple plots with just a single plot/beacon (assuming that this will act as a radius protection area).
I would say that the potential negatives this system could introduce such as (un)intentionally engulfing another player’s build with your protection area do out-weight the benefits gained from implementing it as it stands. Especially when there is already a system in place in the game, right now: Plot what you want before you start.
If I understood the original post correctly, it is by beacon and in order to form settlements you need to disable the thing entirely. 
I think this would be a great change, but an essential feature that has to be included with this is the option for us to give beacon permissions to “Everyone” and not only specific friends.