HELP! Give us your opinion on refactoring prestige calculation?

It’s a contradiction. To not care about prestige, but desiring a reward to not do as much as others shooting for prestige. If one does not want prestige, then why would one want reward. At this point, ones reward is merely the self satisfaction of ones own build. It’s the idea of others gaining a reward, that instantly makes a simple build less rewarding. Because if you said you don’t like prestige, and wanted to just make a small house, look like a small house, then the result should of been the reward. Otherwise why entertain the idea that you only like a small house and claim your not worried about prestige, which only exist to gauge development in order to even attempt a small appreciation reward from the dev’s, and only if you gained footfall so the extra prestige could calculate into it. Prestige is not income or reward on it’s own merit. No one gains a reward because of high prestige, unless they 1st designed in a way to engage other players and entice them onto their property. So in other words, I do not believe you.

This alone already makes some players fear of gleam towers getting some sort of extra from the game, pointless, when no one wants to go visit a stack of blocks to begin with. They would not get footfall, thus not getting rewards. This point has nothing to do with the debate on prestige against other player takeovers on towns. It is only referencing what “reward” for building my house defines as if you break it down.

Until someone comes in with a prestige bomb, takes the mayor position and names the settlement something like “Toe Fungus Capital”.

I don’t want to come home to my buildings which I am quite proud of and be greeted with that every time!

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I think I get where you’re going with this, but it’s a poor analogy. Given that prestige is intended as a way to continue to ‘progress’ your build, then logically:

  • Prestige is tied to blocks
  • Your ability to place blocks is limited by plotted space, so at some point you must replace lower prestige blocks with higher prestige blocks (or continually plot more space, which is unsustainable for a user and undesirable for the system).
  • Consequently, anyone who is actually using prestige as a measure of progress will eventually be obliged to use blocks they didn’t want to (personally, I don’t like the look of machined metal or gem blocks, for example) in order to ‘progress’.

In that light, it doesn’t even really meet the goals of the system. A better system might be based round letting people insert blocks directly into a beacon control, consuming the block and somehow adding to a dataset on the beacon itself and calculating prestige off of that.

As a side benefits:

  • it’s about the only suggestion I’ve seen so far that actually give people a reason NOT to build ugly [insert high prestige block of choice here] towers.
  • it would be easier to include other features into the prestige calculation, like unique visits, age of build etc etc.
  • it takes blocks back out of the game.

Given that ‘cost’ in this game is almost exclusively a measure of ‘time invested’ then yes, it makes sense that prestige values should be normalised to better represent the ‘cost’ of obtaining those specific blocks, irrespective of any other changes that may or may not happen.

In-game systems with arbitrary values are often frustrating and easier to game (thought that doesn’t say that more calculated values are hard to game).

It might also be worth including the ‘base’ prestige value of blocks (and other items that confer prestige) somewhere in-game. We live in the age of the internet, where most information is only a quick search away. ‘We want people to have to explore they system and work it out for themselves’ is no longer a functional sentiment.

At present, this is not strictly true. They are free to ignore it, but at potential cost to themselves. Prestige is tied to footfall potential and warden/capital status. While these things are currently minor affordances in game, it give players ample reason to always keep prestige in mind while building. And there’s always the future to consider… what happens when if Viceroys get a portion of the planet’s sales tax etc etc?

If Prestige is intended as a measure of ‘progress’ on your build, and ‘progress’ is intended to correlate with ‘cost’, then does variety actually matter? Why is it a big enough consideration that you cite is as one of the two main problems you feel need solving with prestige?

This is more a point of curiosity and I don’t overly care. It just seems like something that is easy to game, unhelpfully obscured away in the debug tools (unavailable to PS4 users) and once you understand it ends up just being ‘yet another’ reason to use blocks you didn’t really like.

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I would suggest a system with some kind of multiplier so that bricks/decorative rock/decorative wood gave higher prestige than machined metal, when used in large quantities.

You can completely ignore prestige though. Foot fall is not the best way to make coin anyway it’s just passive. I really don’t see how it breaks the game or devalues it by existing. I do plan on making a city at some point, but I plan to have all the plots I need and all the resources for the roads saved up, so when I build it, it will be so well established i couldn’t get kicked out of mayor. Plus I would found it as a guild to further protect it since I’m sure those will be in before I get the resources lol. But hey to each his own

I know no ones likes change, but flipping the system entirely could give it a lot more flexibility, and probably avoid any particular block being the go to for high prestige points.

If every block had a standard value, then points were deducted based on varying factors.

For example:
How many machines has it been processed through… lower number = bigger minus

% of the same block used in build… higher number = bigger minus

Distance from the planet it came from… lower number = bigger minus

There could be tons of factors in an algorithm that make it vary a lot depending on the planet and the specific build… would drive a lot of variety and make each planet different to build on.

And everything capped at 0… so if you want to use low value blocks or 10000 of the same thing there isnt any penalty.

If they implemented a system where the settlement can’t be renamed even if the warden changes then I feel a lot of the issues are gone (I don’t care to be warden as long as it’s not being renamed since besides naming the settlement it does nothing). Of course the settlement should be able to be renamed when the old warden leaves and is not part of the settlement anymore…

Lol at notable Gleam Pillar proponents in the no vote. I see you CutFed

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One to think about:

  • baskets with no coin - negative prestige
  • shop stands with no stock - negative prestige
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Maybe (and I have skipped a lot of posts because…many) when you enter places it should have two titles? The settlement one, and then the beacon one.
At least that way as you move around a settlement you would be able to identify the individual beacons.

Prestige for:

  • base score for raw materials
  • items gathered and placed intact using Gather epic
  • number of processing steps
  • source planet tier
  • number of planets sourced
  • bonus for variety of item per plot cube - negative for “monocultures”
  • bonus for storage items with contents + variety
  • bonus for chisel/seeded - number of hits?

Ramp down gleam over time to allow owners to adjust without causing chaos.

Edit: removed duplicate point

Just boost the reward from hard to make items and leave everything else the same.

Seems like everyone’s main problem is how to determine who the Warden/Viceroy is in a settlement and therefor who gets naming rights along with the honor of having your name up on the screen.

However you assign prestige values to blocks, you’re going to have this issue. An algorithm is never going to be able to determine who has the dopest build.

I’d think these concerns would really be better suited in a conversation around settlement governmental structures. Does your settlement reward highest prestige with leadership? Or do you vote? Does your vote get scaled to how much prestige you offer the settlement? Or does everyone’s vote count the same? Seems like these kinds of laws can get created by the initial builder, and people can review them before deciding to join the settlement. Changes to the core structure can be initiated during times of dramatic swings in prestige totals or something.

Further Tangential Thoughts About Governments

This kind of thing could be expanded to create buffs that use prestige. Stuff like hunger management, experience boosts, oort shard cost reductions, tax modifiers, movement speeds, creature spawn rates, maybe even small power offerings.

These buffs would apply to the entire settlement and would get set by the leader with a visible message to everyone. Certain laws might require approval before going in to effect. Enacting these wouldn’t consume prestige, but “activate” a certain amount of it. Similar to how power works.

But that all came from the idea of Prestige as XP for your settlement. Which I know isn’t exactly what you meant.

How would voting be implemented into the game though?

There’d have to be settlement UI development. How it’s triggered would have to be balance tested. But if someone exceeds the prestige of the current Viceroy, we could get a message popup saying we have a vote to make. Everyone has a week to cast their vote between the current Viceroy and the challenger, and if it the incumbent is upheld, then so be it.

Maybe it checks again once every couple of months, and if the current Viceroy doesn’t do something to reclaim prestige, then they’ll keep getting challenged.

Of course, maybe you have an entirely different system in your settlement. Maybe you only get a vote triggered during a specific cycle, like once every two months or something. Top three prestige contributors are up, everyone votes and then it changes.

Or maybe you set up your settlement to be a dictatorship, and there is no voting. You’re just the viceroy forever. I could see rules that would allow for a coup if a challenger doubles or triples the current leader’s prestige or maybe not.

A lot of this voting stuff has more value once you have responsibilities that come along with being the leader, not just the naming rights and such.

It just seems like the core issue is how to determine who leads a settlement and what the settlement is called, so it seems like there would be more elegant solutions for that particular issue regardless of how prestige is calculated.

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I’m against both the voting and the prestige mayorship to be the only way to choose leadership tbh. I’d prefer the settlement building system to be exclusive to guilds, and the guild that built the first plot should have all of the control over naming and stuff. Of course there would be a guild leader, and they would be the mayor. Voting just seems to add a level of complication not needed for this game tbh. But it would be great if the guild owner could choose what kind of leadership system is used, like the ones you describe. There could be different leaders for different guild towns like mayor, president, dictator, king, lord, etc.

4 Likes

Beauty is subjective, but I doubt anyone finds a tower of white gleam or refined iron cramming in max prestige per plot to be beautiful.

Variation should be huge. For example, something like “once 5% of your build is a single block type you stop getting prestige for it (eg ref white gleam or ref iron). Once 20% of your build is a certain class (eg any-color refined decorative rock or any-color ref gleam or ref metals) you stop getting prestige for it. Just my opinion.

The underside of floors should also get less prestige for chiseling (not sure how you’d do that). Tbh chiseling prestige buffs is broken too; I’d say prestige buffs for ALL chiseling should max out at +10% prestige. A small amount of chiseling tends to be creative; a huge amount tends to be prestige stacking. Very few designs actually USE more than 5-10% chiseling creatively; the builds with everything chiseled tend to be prestige stacking (some exceptions of course)

Also, plants, leaves and wood get way too little prestige, this penalizes creativity. It is also dumb that some blocks lower prestige, again, this penalizes creativity and rewards stacking.

Have you ever played the browser based game “NationStates”?

I do think this game should benefit from local laws. Like, this is a wood settlement, you get nerfed (or no) prestige for non wood blocks etc. People could build as they please, but the system would reward people keeping to a theme.

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I think they should lower Gleam perstiege value, and raise gem perstiege value. It would help the gem market, which needs life support and restrict gleam abuse… While gems could be abused… who has thousands upon thousands of those sitting around…cough

I like that idea. If you wanna join my settlement, everything you build has to be certain colors or material types. :+1: :+1: