I think all of these changes are good for the game. I do have a clarification question.
Do touching protection zones merge the settlements? I am hoping that only actually claimed plots touching will create a merge, but want to understand your thinking.
Nope.
Settlements are only connect when evaluating claimed plots.
The protection buffer will simply disallow claiming if within (say) 2 plots. It’s a pretty simple system. The hardest part is adding a new permission for claiming with the protection buffer.
And now that you meantion plot columns would it at all be possible to let us use a beacon in our column but not actually connected to the main part as to make it so we don’t waste plots on empty land.
Love the sound of it, but my only questions are
If a player merges 2 seperate settlements owned by 2 seperate guilds, what would happen? Would they merge? If they didn’t, which settlement would the player’s portal be connected to?
Also, is there anything to stop players from ploping a beacon near an unallined settlement and essentially taking it over by making it part of their guild 's beacon?
Additionally, what about in the situation where once its released, certain towns get taken over by a different guild before the original owners get a chance to allign it to their own guilds?
On paper it all seems simple, but there’s multiple problems that I think need solving first
Terrific, I think this will go a long way towards eliminating some of the ongoing forced merge issues that continue to crop up on the forums. All players have to do is maintain a protection zone around their settlement and they can prevent merges.
Thank you for your quick response.
If there are 2 guilds that have settlements and they touch, then you would end up with 3 settlements:
The identity within the new epic settlement with the most prestige will be the Warden with naming permissions. If it was Guild Vansten, then they would also be able to name the epic settlement.
I think of this a little like: Los Angeles, which includes Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Marina del Rey.
This allows larger settlements already in the game to divide up into guilds and regions if they want.
All the places will show up on the compass and planet markers.
But importantly everyone keeps their personal identity.
Beacons will only join a guild if the owner: 1. joins the guild and 2. aligns their beacon with it.
The buffer zone would also stop touching.
Settlements are constantly re-evaluated. So the Warden can change as prestige and alignments change.
I don’t doubt that new issues and exploits will be discovered as players push the boundaries of the updated systems. This should be expected. It’s a sandbox. But hopefully we’re moving in the right direction.
Against people who consider the game as a PvP experience where they HAVE to expand and they HAVE to absorb other settlements, the guild feature itself should solve a lot of problems indeed. It can’t come out soon enough.
The prestige tweaks would also be a good thing, so would the buffer zone system.
+1 to all of that!
I would however be more concerned as to how the game will decide who owns a guild.
Currently, the Warden system makes it possible to lose the ‘ownership’ of a settlement you made.
Can someone with more Prestige take the lead position of a guild in any way? Or can we decide once and for all “this person is the guild leader until he or she gives up the role”?
I see a immediate problem with this, especially when it comes to guilds competing for the naming rights of the epic settlement… the winning guild will just name the epic settlement as their own guild - essentially making the other guild almost seem like a sub faction of their own.
It would just become :-
I can’t think of a way around that though, unless the epic settlement doesn’t exist and is just a standard settlement in it’s own right without the 2 guilds prestige added to it 
Correct this could happen. But surly it is still an improvement on the current system.
Old system:
New system:
And James has retained their identity.
A Guild is owned by the Director or Directors.
This can only be given up by the Director themselves.
This is an opt-in system that players have often requested for Settlements.
Nope.
Settlements and Settlement Titles are about Prestige.
Guilds are about roles which are controlled by the guild directors.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s most definitely an improvement on the current system and will hopefully cut down on the forced merge threads on the forums and discord! I was only concerned that the less prestigious guild would somehow have their identity diminished by being in the greater prestigious guilds epic settlement - it might be a complete non-issue though.
An extension of this, I believe the any beacons wtihn the city that are allinged to a guild should could.
So in the above example
Settlement has
Person A, aligned to Guild A, Has 50k prestige
Person B, aligned to Guild B, has 35k prestige
Person C, aligned to Guild B, has 20k prestige
Where Guild B would be able to rename the town as they have the highest total prestige, with person B being the one able to do so
This would also help reduce the likelyhood guild towns being taken over as the person would have to out prestige the entire town as opposed to 1 person. Not impossible, but harder
Yep - this is definitely a concern. But we’ve worked hard to try and minimise it.
For example - the original plan was to calling these sub-settlements “districts” so that the difference would be clear. But I championed against this because I believed that players would be frustrated to lose their “settlement” label when becoming a “district”. Their identity would have changed.
So we reworked it so that everything would be a settlement.
The Guild Directors control the guild and act as the collective owner of the prestige for their members.
So in this example, it’s the director of Guild B who would name the settlement.
Excited for this update. I think most of it will solve alot of existing problems… specially the plot protection and the gleam tower issue. Is there a date on when the update is going to go live?
Looks good! I really hope you scale prestige better. Most of my medieval town is Wood, Planks, Stone and Ice. Some don’t even give Prestige afaik. Really hard to build up prestige without having to build some hidden prestige places, which I don’t really wanna do much of.
This seems mostly good. Prestige changes are a slam dunk. The complexity of the whole settlement system is going way up with guilds and buffers so I think there should be one more pass to attempt to simplify the concepts. We don’t just need something that’s functionally correct, we need something that’s easy to teach as well. I think false reports will still be elevated since the behavior is non-obvious. Predicting plot interactions is easy on graph paper and hard in the voxel world.
Also can you take a glance at quests related to land ownership? How does the viceroy quest work if a guild identity is the viceroy? How do joining a settlement quests work if every settlement is buffered? Both these quests already confuse players so this is a good time to take another look at them.
That’s all my top level concerns. Going to get into the weeds on simplifying settlement system for the rest of this post.
The most obvious simplification I see is to remove the concept of settlement name. Currently players and devs disagree on settlement definition. Players want ownership and devs want emergent grouping. Guilds give players exactly the control they wanted. This frees up settlements to work how the devs wanted. However settlements still require a name, which misleads players into thinking settlements are something to own. Really they are just something you’re in, like a region or a planet.
I think in all cases players will want to see the guild’s name wherever they see settlement name now. At the top of the screen (a13o’s Guild - Foresta Dellanen - Gellis), and in the overlay when first entering. Settlements are useful constructs for organizing UI screens and encouraging friendly prestige battles but they don’t need a name to do either of those things. Devs have a million things they could add to incentivize the behavior they want to see inside settlements without confusing players by asking us to name them.
How does this permission interact with the new Guild System?
Can a beacon owner of a guild aligned beacon choose to allow plotting in the buffer zone for all guild members? Or is it only possible to allow plotting in the buffer zone on a per person level?
I dunno. I still think the Guild system sounds too convoluted. I like to kill creatures, build, make refined items, etc. I don’t like tower defense games.
I know you folks are trying to figure out a way to make things better, but I think this is going to result in more rage-quitting and unhappy noobs. At this point, this is turning into a strategy & defense game, and not a fun MMO sandbox.
I think this is why other games make guilds/clubs/etc a separate entity from the main gameplay, so that people can come together in peace and make awesome clubs, dojos, etc. For some reason, you folks don’t seem to want to allow this. You’re trying to combine personal beacon builds with settlements with guilds with factions…and allow trolls to muck it all up.
The simple solution would be to remove the code that allows someone other than the beacon owner to rename their settlement, unless their beacon goes out. I 100% agree with this statement:
No one is going to be happy if someone else can come along with machined gold blocks, build a tower, then rename a settlement/guild to “You Suck Purple Monkey Butt”. I’ve invested a ton of time & some $$$ into this game, I love to play it, I can’t wait to stream it, but I am not going to if 90% of my time will have to go towards Guild/settlement/beacon defense. Who wants to watch that? 
Some new QoL improvements would go a long way: the hunter monster that you folks have been showing us, farming, fishing, more creatures & drops, more machines, more decor, an item-to-coin incinerator machine, etc.
I guess we’ll just have to see how this all plays out. I’m not looking forward to the Guild system, as it has been presented so far.
I say I have to agree. I have seen Settlements and Cities renamed because of trolls.
I have also been planning to make a nice personal beacon, but if it is going to get engulfed by troll guilds then I’ll hold off 
I would love to see the farming, fishing update stuff, the new blocks, etc.
