HELP! Give us your opinion on protecting settlement identity?

[Xaviien]

@Kirinvar

I’ve got some time to think about buffer zones and I’m not convinced anymore that it would solve anything. Overlapping buffer zones next to your build are the same as someone else’s plots: unplottable and lost.

Let’s face it, buffer zones are ment for those situations where you deal with uncooperative neightbors.
If someone builds right next to you and is not willing to negotiate over plots, they won’t as well negotiate over buffer zones. It just creates a dead unusable no-man’s-land.
If you face someone who is willing to grant you permissions to build in the buffer zone, this person would most likely also have moved plots for you. The system defeats the purpose.

In my opinion it just makes things worse and life in a city much harder. Builds will decay unable to be saved because you can’t get hold of all the players whose buffer zones overlap within 4 hours. Huge no-man’s-lands everywhere.
I know it’s planned to be able to turn off the buffer zone, but let’s be honest, if it’s an opt-out-feature, most people won’t do it because they don’t know or they don’t care and considering how fragmented big cities are, buffer zones will be a constant annoyance.

I can only see very small well organized groups benefit from this, but you can already achieve the same benefits today by plotting everything in advance that you care about. Has worked really well for me so far.

In conclusion, I changed my vote in the other thread to a no to buffer zones.

@james

I think in general this is a relatively simple solution. It will increase restrictions on placing plots. But it will give players the protection of a buffer between each other with the options of removing it. It will likely make creating Settlements more complicated and harder.

If you have better or alternative ideas then please let us know below.

Do you have any suggestion for alternatives?
80% of people that bothered to vote, voted for buffers, and the poll was up for 3 months before this post was made confirming they had accepted the results of the poll and decided to move forward with the buffers.