Well prestige still exists for bragging rights cause some people need a number to work with. As James said:
The problem with using Prestige to weight your vote is you are back to people spamming ugly towers to generate large amounts of prestige so their votes count for more than everyone else and we are back to square one.
Ok, you have a nice settlemtn, worked on it from the beginning, then 10 people join, plop down a beacon and vote you out…
Sounds fair huh?
How is that different to me working hard on my shop, reaching the number 1 spot in the settlement and giving the name I wanted. Along comes someone else and plops down a huge eyesore built with only machined copper and gleam and I get “voted out” and they become warden.
With the current system 1 person can take over a settlement of a dozen or more. With a voting system the current residents can stop that from happening.
That’s diferent since you can easily outbuild them I’m sure if you so wanted. Being outvoted you can’t do anything about…
If they ever implemented a voting system I would never ever again allow people into my settlement to prevent being voted out.
I would be very against this and see a huge problem with it. Not saying the current system is perfect, but at least I can see it happening and can start making a gleam bunker of my own…
The point is currently ONE person can disrupt everything as opposed to your example where it takes MULTIPLE people to do the same thing requiring a concerted effort to take over. Not saying it was perfect but I do think it is still a fairer system then the current setup.
And I think people would be fine to make a settlement and “never ever again allow people into my settlement to prevent being voted out”. People actually WANT that ability to protect “their” settlement so yes that should totally be how it works!
- Prestige is XP for your build.
- Prestige isn’t about beauty, it’s about cost.
First of all thank you for sharing this bit. Knowing these design constraints greatly reduces the problem space so that everyone can communicate more productively.
You then claim that players are free to totally ignore prestige, which I disagree with. Prestige decides who gets to name the settlement, so even players who focus on pure creativity and aesthetics must surrender the naming of their artwork to those playing the prestige game. Imagine if the Mona Lisa was named Trash Can Nelly because it only took 40 hours to paint; and another artist, with a worse painting, which they hung across the street from the museum, but who spent 41 hours painting it got to choose the name? Oh and the author displayed to everyone who walks by isn’t Da Vinci, it’s DeezLutz. Contrived, but that’s Boundless. That’s how many players feel.
I think devs should reconcile their view of settlements with the players’. The key misunderstanding seems to be that the devs consider settlements an emergent property of what players are doing. And players see settlements as social structures.
I started as a yes vote on this initiative but after typing my thoughts out I’m changing to a no vote. I don’t think prestige calculation is the problem. The disconnect between what devs and players think settlements are is the problem. If you solved that problem, prestige could be poorly balanced and it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Ok now I’m going to commit a forum faux pas and recommend an alternative way forward. My goal will be to preserve the devs’ desire for settlements to be an emergent property of game actions, but address the heart of the prestige complaints players have.
Proposal: Settlements no longer have names. The game can designate a settlement by observing a clumping of player plots like it already does; but there’s no way to name it.
Proposal: Make beacon names more prominent as prestige grows. If I walk into someone’s beacon and they built a 200,000 prestige castle masterpiece, I want to see the name of it displayed prominently on my screen as well as the artist’s name. Since it’s their beacon, they will always retain naming rights of their build. It would be annoying to see this popping up every time you enter another beacon, which is why the prominence should scale with prestige.
Proposal: Update the UI upon entering a settlement to act as a guide. When I walk into a settlement the game should still tell me. Since there’s no longer a settlement name to show me, it should show me the names of the top 3 beacons (and owners) instead. I should get marks on my compass pointing those top 3 out to me, until I leave the settlement. If I pull up the settlement screen I should see any participating beacon over 10k prestige, and I should be able to click it to set my waypoint to it. Prestige fuels the guide, and the guide brings players to the good builds, and the good builds generate foot fall. What a nice feedback loop!
With all those in place we have stopped the zero-sum elements of settlement PVP so the players are happy. There is still a reason for players to compete for more prestige than their neighbors so the devs are happy.
After implementing this we would probably find that the settlement guide isn’t that accurate. It leads us to gleam towers and other prestige gimmicks. Then is the time to revisit prestige calculation. Also we would probably find that players desire some sort of in-game social structure. But I’ve read that devs are working on a guild system so maybe that will address that.
Thanks for your time, I know my posts are long.
@james I couldn’t help but notice that even you voted yes to your own poll. I concur with your vote.
I don’t care what you do, so long as it doesn’t adjust pre-existing placed blocks. To do otherwise would be poopy.
Why are so many aspects of the game being consideeed for rebalance NOW, AFTER the game was released from EA and bought and paid for? I get some tweaks are needed, but you’re essentially considering messing with the very aspects of the game I enjoy most, and take advantage of. I find it hard to believe that just now you’re seeing the outcome.
Should be moving ahead with updated content. Instead, it seems the ones crying about “unfair play” are taking over the development process, and you’re thinking of backpedaling on the mechanics you laid out.
This is a terrible idea for a community-based game and would totally defeat the purpose of settlements. I and the players I play with want to live in the same settlement. We want that settlement to be the sum of our collective work taken as a whole, not just a collection of adjacent beacons. I get that you are trying to eliminate competition over wardenship, but this is an extreme example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
This is kind of my point. Players think the settlement system is one thing and devs think it’s another. Settlements are currently a bad way for players to group together. That’s why everyone wants to change it. But as long as settlements are meant by the devs to be a prestige competition they can’t give players what they want.
The solution is for the devs to make the settlement system into what they want and also give players a new system which addresses their grouping needs. Settlements can’t be both.
The more I think about it, the more worried I become, if for no other reason than I’ve spent a fair amount of money on this game. I may be being paranoid but, first a few folks whined about footfall, which is now broken and probably being considered for reworking. Then a few folks complained about settlements and names being taken over, and now bufferzones are being considered. Then people cried about prestige and gleam (again settlemts being taken over), now that’s being considered for change.
I’m noticing a frightening trend, that a few complainers are able to shape the game into some sort of snowflake simulator. Making the devs (for some reason) second guess their choices. I find it hard to believe that people bumping up to other settlements, taking settlements over, hoarding prestige, and taking advantage of footfall, wasn’t something that was already happening pre-release, and also that the devs weren’t aware this would happen (assuming it wasn’t actually intended even, though I doubt that.)
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just feeling grumpy.
Perhaps this is where one problem lies, as Prestige is tied to the naming of a settlement, which is an aesthetic element players like me want to hold onto.
You can ignore game systems, and still enjoy the game - I certainly won’t argue with that - though going forward if you plan to tie anymore tangible benefits to the Prestige system, know that it becomes harder and harder to ignore.
Right behind this.
Why?
On the topic of prestige, i feel that gleam and natural blocks need adjustment. After all, gleam itself is the same as placing a stone or dirt block right? Mine + place…
If natural but placed blocks could have even 1 or 2 points, the time to put them together and the space they take would make mud towers unlikely.
I think gleam should follow the same progression as stone with raw - refined - deco(lanterns). Glowing lamella being rarer than wax you could argue for higher lantern score.
Machining metals I think is fine as is; wouldn’t mind getting machined and refined variants of coal some day!
Perhaps before release people never paid it much heed since it wasn’t permanent anyway and would be wiped?
Now that release has happened and we are in a permanent setting people now care about it more? Not to mention more people would theoretically be playing now it is released and available to the public and there are more people that DO care about these issues than the initial group of pre-release players?
Demographics do change pre and post release.
I disagree with the cost point:
I think time investment makes a ton of sense, but what’s missing from this definition of prestige is the amount of time spent actually placing, designing, chiseling, etc the blocks. And that can be a huge time investment (regardless of the type of blocks you’ve used)!
Furthermore, because footfall is coupled with prestige; people who utilize “low effort” blocks (but, generally, aesthetically pleasing ones) feel pretty dismayed when the build they put tremendous effort into generates a very minimal reward.
Decouple footfall from prestige (somewhat), by having multiple categories of prestige. Footfall levels would be determined based on whichever category is the highest. This allows players to invest in whatever type of build they’re interested in, and still be rewarded for it.
Warden/Viceroy would be calculated as some sum or average of all of the categories (to make it less of a point race, and encourage some extra challenge there by balancing different types of builds within a settlement).
Prestige categories:
Worth: The sum of the base prestige values of all blocks in the beacon (after normalization).
Aesthetic: Something like the number of (added) blocks in the beacon, adjusted by the modifiers we have today (variety, exotic colors, chiseled blocks, etc).
Also, other prestige categories that might be interesting, but I’m less sure about:
Commerce: Based on the # of shop stands, request baskets, signs in the beacon - and adjusted by the amount of trade they see over time (rolling average? all time?)
Connection: Based on the # of portals in the beacon, and/or their blinksec distances, adjusted by unique worlds (maybe?)
How would the system be able to quantify “Time invested” into the build?
Won’t sitting AFK in your base add to this? or aimlessly adding and removing blocks add to this to make it abuseable?
Yeah, sorry, I cut that quote out of the post, as it was a bit misleading - that was more of an aspirational meta goal of the idea. I don’t think it’s feasible to quantify that (in a way that people won’t be able to easily game)
Was trying to say that, I think, the main thing people want is to be rewarded for their time spent working on a build—and this is consistent across all types of builds!
And by working on a build, I mean all the effort you’ve placed towards it (collecting, crafting, planning it out in magica voxel, building, trading, etc); not just time spent physically inside the beacon
One thing that always bothered me is scale between least and most valuable blocks. Now it’s something like 35, I’d love to see that cut down to something like 10-15, i.e. building everything with most valuable block compared to building everything with the least valuable block would make final prestige only 10-15 times larger. It would make it much more “ignorable”, if you build big build you won’t mind that much what blocks you are using, you’ll eventually hit high enough prestige for what you invested in time and effort.
The thing with some blocks having 35 times larger prestige is that with reasonable grind you can get 1000s of those, and if you play only for prestige than anybody actually thinking through his build will stand no chance.
One more thing, I know there is falloff for using the same block many times, currently I think it’s really low, it should be much much more aggressive, so much that after having 1000s of the same block you get to the lowest prestige block base value, after that it is just worthless to add that same block to the build.
With those two changes players would still be able to play just for prestige if they like so, but it would be much less profitable game (i.e. harder to trick the system, but still possible if you are only focused on that).
I haven’t read all the posts, sorry if I’m only repeating something that is already said 
I would really really love if you thought out this really hard and thoroughly, even though I don’t like the prestige game, realize that there are players who have invested 100s of hours to play the prestige game, I don’t think it’s fair to dilly-dally with decisions about how it’s going forward. What I’m trying to say is try to make this as solid as possible, nobody likes to see his effort dumped with a patch, and since it will happen try to make it final big change, you should have enough data and experience now to see what would be the best option, and when you decide stick to it. Especially if there is gonna be more game mechanics tied to prestige.
I’m not saying you are taking this lightly and I always have faith in you, just putting some candid love out there 
Seems a bit harsh.