I fully support this system. When I came in here I was ready to say no way, but every issue I had thought up you had a fix for already.
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I believe one of the things they said was the ability to turn off the protection completely.
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Sorry, I shouldn’t have voted.
Or give permissions for the people to use the buffer plots. If you have a group of people building a city you can give each other buffer plot permissions and still build a settlement if I am reading the description correctly.
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Yes because I can see this taking organized and themed cities to a whole new level.
Road beacons with enough prestige would automatically protect house plots without the need to plot out every single bit.
Villiagers would have a chance to save expired builds that they want to keep in the city before random outsiders snap them. (Ofc shelves can be looted, but that’s not what you are eager to keep in the city.)
Meaning the expired plots would return automatically to the villiagers and not becoming wild for everyone.
But for less unorganized and more open cities like Therka Market or Aquatopia this could make things a whole lot more difficult with a lot of wasted plots where multiple protection zones overlap and you have to contact and convince everyone involved to allow you to plot there.
The number of overlapping protection zones kinda depends on my next question.
Q. Would protection zones penetrate claimed plots?
Lets say blue is a road with protection turned off and green is very prestigious build with at least 2 plots of protection zone (red) would it look like A or B?
I think you can see the potential problems with A, complicating the process of building on the other side of the road.
A bit of a more extreme example:
Allowing protection zones to flow over or penetrate claimed plots could create a whole lot of problems including situations in cites where whole squares can become unplottable.
On the other hand: If protection zones don’t penetrate claimed plots, a simple road with protection turned off can solve a lot of the “neighbors unintentionally blocking each other in an open city” problems while still allowing the neighbors the have their protection zones turned on to secure their expansion to the outside.
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I would definitely love this idea. Some guy quite literally plotted in front of my door when the previous plot expired. This could have easily prevented that.
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Auto-correct… keeping it real since '99
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@james This is why you’re the boss. Perfect idea, not needing any adjustments! Thank you James.
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Sounds great
We kinda pretty much came up with it, but that polish is just right.
For guilds as well
Could you make the protected area work sort of like empire boundaries in the civilization games?
Where they move out from a person’s build but don’t over lap?
The person who built there first gets priority over the protection buffer, so those who were there first get say on that area without needing approval from other later comers?
But then if that builder does expand towards someone and use the reserved zone, then their boundary does not over lap another’s protection areas if already protected? Like a hard buffer, not soft buffer
Providing a way for prestige to protect said area around build for expansion, but will not cause overlap or potential claim issues for the buffer zones? Basically giving first come first serve mentality to the buffers. ? @james
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im not sure if i like that 
but i can understand that there is need to do something.
but please make the perimeter at all only appear with 10k or something prestige.
lots of new ppl plot somewhere due the tutorial and then move on, dont knowing what they are doing and figure out a week later that they have land somehwere xD
also without a minimum prestige we will see ppl take 1 plot claims to “reserve” a big area with only using 1/9 of the plots that where neccesary
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Overall I don’t agree with this because you are just submitting to complaints and trying to fix something you all created with Prestige, Footfall, and other things that drive people to take plots right beside other ones.
The issue you have is you created game mechanics where people are wanting to build next to each other. This does not solve that, only increases the issue now between people. You should create dynamics that make it more beneficial to build away from each other versus right beside.
Instead of you having two people fighting over space in a 4 block area now it will be the same two people fighting over 8 blocks or whatever. Nothing has CHANGED in design. You’re just using more space for the same problem.
People should be seeing that the problem didn’t go away and be voting against this, not for it.
This will create more issues between players especially because you are linking the buffer to prestige. Now people will spam prestige even more so they have these huge buffer zones. I can easily go in and throw down a plot, put up a prestige vault and block people even more because I now get MORE plots than I am actually paying for.
I can see prestige builders moving into an area and taking over it EVEN FASTER because they spam prestige and now have a huge area even though they didn’t plot it.
Another thing is now I have to even have more friends on my list if I want to let people build next time me which cuts down on footfall, etc.
Where does the buffer end? Can someone that is a huge prestige builder now get a buffer of 1000 plots? At least before people had to pay for plots or grind them if they wanted huge buffers. Now people get free “buffer” plots for just grinding a bunch of simple prestige… easy.
So are you giving people their money back that bought plots for space because you are now giving people “buffer” plots for free?
Just a bad idea overall and solves nothing.
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Also @james with my note above, to answer the question of if prestige should be used.
What if with that hard buffer you also don’t base the perimeter buffer on prestige, what if when the beacon reaches say 10k or 20k prestige you get a flat protection buffer.
3 or more plots in radius?
Not sure what the right radius would be, but that would solve the issue of fake prestige building.
More prestige would not mean more radius of buffer.
@Kirinvar Thank you for providing a mapped reference. I think you made some great points all around.
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thats why i also voted no, i wonder who is voting yes on that.
please think mindfull on this, at all iit will not solve the problems at all, just shift them into bigger sizes.
ppl then will complain about being walled in by protection, and ppl will start spam more ugly gleam towers
the system as it is now is maybe not the best, but this would be even more worse…
ppl would just claim / protect bigger areas, more problems will arise etc.
actually there is no real solution to this problem, and there will never be
.
ppl will allways complain about others being nearby, building in a style they dont like etc.
thats just how it is…
please dont waste development time in such things :> give us more content instead, specially on the mid game phase (content that does not let level 20 people with iron weapon feel like they need to farm stuff from t5 worlds)
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Some of these later replies do make me look at this differently. And i agree, this could end up causing more problems and confusion on how the system works in the long run. Going to change my vote to no.
I voted yes initially because in a perfect world where people actually know how to communicate and are willing to do so, it makes sense. Unfortunately that is not the world we live in 
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Some sort of offline messaging system (mailbox or otherwise) would do more to resolve legitimate, reasonable, non-griefing land disputes than this system.
As it stands right now, if your neighbor lives in a different time zone than you, there’s little chance of ever even seeing them, let alone opening up communications to sort out land disputes, and if one (or both) of the parties doesn’t visit the forums regularly (or at all) then it is literally impossible to go the civilized route of resolving those issues.
This then leaves the people involved in those disputes frustrated, leading to the several recent posts complaining of this sort of stuff on the forums, giving the dev team the impression (based on faulty player input) that the problem is with the plotting system rather than the lack of options for communication.
Perhaps they should give priority to an offline messaging system before resorting to the buffer system to see if that would hit closer to the heart of the problem, along with a review and rebalancing of prestige values of blocks (I think most people would agree that is badly needed).
I still think it would be a nice feature but it ‘protects’ the (often small) lone beacon builds more than it does cities and settlements. If I understand it correctly, it would be a circuitous way of having a two-way authorization process for beacon absorption into settlements, but I don’t think it would do much (or anything) for city owners that want to have their unplanned expansions without having to spend plots to reserve area beforehand (which is a common trend of complaints recently).
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Yea i think the offline messaging could definitely help. You’ll still run into that stubborn person every now and then but if you reach out and avoid being rude about it a lot of people will probably be willing to accommodate you.
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