I don’t care what you do, so long as it doesn’t adjust pre-existing placed blocks. To do otherwise would be poopy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
Suggestion
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?)
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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?
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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 
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Seems a bit harsh.
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you actually made me go back and read my post 
what a troll 
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Do it!! Give more prestige to machined and refined metals!! And to deco stones.
Away with the gleem! its cool but would be better with ugly prestige towers that atleast dont glow. 
First I think prestige is a good mechanic inside the game, I like how it works, giving individual prestige for your building but also adding it to your city, so you can work with others to become the capital of your world.
The idea is really good, but it has some flaws. So, I want to add a couple of ideas, Maybe they are not possible to implement at this point, but well…
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I don’t like how prestige is tied with building
For me this is the weakest point of this system. As you said is not about beauty, is about cost. So why it is tied with your building? it is always in the middle of your decisions. Why most of the roads are made of decorative stones? They(me) choose them because they are beauty or because they give more points? I did it for the second reason. And the same is for everything, why people choose to use refined stone or bricks and not just stones? Sometimes because they like it, but many times, just because they give more points.
So, I was thinking about some options to just decouple building and prestige.
The first one is to just include your storage items in the formula. So, you don’t have to build a gleam tower (or whatever the expensive material is) or don’t need to create underground prestige vaults. If it is about cost, just give points about the cost of building and chiseling, not matter the material, and then add points from all the blocks inside the beacon, no matter if they are placed or not.
The other option, perhaps is a bit harder to implement (or impossible at all) but, What about the ability to insert one block inside another? So you can play both games at the same time if you want. Build whatever you want, use the materials you want, and if you want to play prestige, just plug a decorative gem block(or whatever) to your totem and add it inside your nice placed natural wood block.
Just a couple of ideas, I don’t know if such a radical change can be implemented, but well, you were asking for ideas.
For a more realistic approach, I agree with some of the comments here, the difference between block values is huge.
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About settlements names and merging
This is a different system that relies on prestige, but is another thing, and needs different solutions. In fact there is already another thread about merging.
Honestly, before even talk about names, wardens and viceroys, I really want to see the guild system. It can be the key to make this things better …or worse.
Thank you for give us the opportunity to be part of the process.
I’ve seen someone post something like this in another thread but I think seniority needs to be factored in the calculation as well. The people who initially created the city should have a better chance of retaining warden status of their build granted they remain active. You could also put a limit on how much prestige one person that is new to a settlement can generate within a given period of time. That would help stop people with no lives from just showing up to someone’s settlement with the sole purpose of taking it over.
I agree with the post @MysticPandora made about having a way to “refine” natural blocks to have more prestige but still look exactly the same. I’ve got a small garden, if you could call it that, outside my build that i feel kind of guilty about placing because i know its technically worthless to my build prestige wise. Maybe even lowering it. But I don’t care much about prestige personally.
Refined gleam is the main problem here. Simple fix imo would be to keep the recipe the same, but lower the prestige value to just above stone or the same as stone.
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I think it’s a reasonable idea but ideally I’d like current beacon status protected. It’s post 1.0 and I’ve already had to rebuild to regain prestige from an earlier post 1.0 balance pass. I’m just over the margin of a beacon status, so if it drops again I have to redesign and rebuild or just add prestige spam to get back to my current coin per visitor. This prospect irritates me but I wouldn’t care if I had ample protected time to build prestige as I would playing naturally.
So for example if I’m at 260k prestige and a recalc forces it down to 220k, I’d like to keep the status of being at 250k prestige until I can organically get back to my prior prestige score.
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I think GM should be granted the ability to apply a multiplier to a build if it’s above board and clearly builds up the community. A sort of nod from the developers. That, and a voting system be created that weights the value of prestige per block for a build. The lower the the votes the more weight applied to a build keeping the value of block prestige to a bare minimum.
Before replying with “THIS CAN BE EXPLOITED”, remember there are no systems that can’t be exploited. There are none. There never will be. Humans find a way.
To be honest, I’m quite disappointed.
When I saw the thread, I thought ‘Oh, they acknowledge it’s a problem.’
But then the thread completely misses the point.
Rebalancing broken values should not be an option, it’s necessary.
But fixing Refined Gleam and Refined Copper, etc will not solve any problems caused by the current prestige system, it might only slow them down a bit and replace ugly gleam towers with ugly brick towers (or whatever).
Als long as you have two groups of ppl, one build for aesthetic and one build for size comparison and the prestige system gives one group the tools to screw the other over, you will keep getting threads from ppl being unhappy because they got their baby ‘stolen’.
As long as the system rewards prestige dumps like this, nothing will change.
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