@AeneaGames you’re such a square 
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In reality all this does is for everyone that is building a road, to wait a little bit until people… actually build on the side of said road…
because if you become more compact then you can extend the road further, unless im missing something.
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That looks super compact now 
I started also to fill up my holes.
The one part on the left side need to wait a bit, would be curious, how much compactness it will have actual.
I am just concerned about the upper part, since there is the 2 plot buffer reservation between the Town and the part by my friend who is not connected to the town. Yes i could ask him to join this part to prevent the reservation compactness loss. But would be interesting how much it affects the own beacon, if you have someone elses settlement next to your streets without a join.
For now i don’t want to fill up that hole there, since it is a townies space for expanding his beacon. But if it turns down my compactness, i will need to fill it i guess.
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that looks like a very unholey place to visit…great job.
can also see a much smaller square up north that needs something doing with it…lazy builders (being busy filling in my own holes on boori)
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I didn’t know we could see the plotting areas from the atlas, how does that work. Nvm I figured out.
Not everyone making columns is an idiot for sure. I have made columns to reserve areas for what I want to build, and I will, with time, have enough plots to fill it all in… I had used the reservation system to protect my build from griefers who might build inside my borders… But because of this proposed compact system, I have reduced my borders, reduced my space for what I wanted, because this proposed system indirectly tells me that I am not supposed to be using the reservation system, to ‘reserve’ areas I want to plot later. smh
And that giant Voyager (or some similar-looking space ship) over Refgar started as a series of plot rows. I watch, look at it sometimes, seeing the progress, and I smile. Slowly but surely, someone is growing that area into an awesome build… if not for the reservation system, they may not have been able to do what they have done, may have had to wait until they had enough plots before they could begin plotting… and I’m pretty sure they’d have to plot somewhere else, for areas nearby have been growing.
So what shall we say then… reservations are not for reserving places I want to plot later?
Correct. The system was put in place to stop force connections from a outside source. This was a huge issue. Sometimes accidental and sometimes intentional. In fact I think was abused badly. I’ve reported several where they just completely surrounded people. I’m talking rows of about 500 or more.
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Not everyone who use Columns is an idiot, for sure.
But everyone who is an idiot, like it to abuse mechanics. 
I can understand your intension.
Especially because i faced at several places people who just are there to troll around and do annoying plotting. In my first days i had someone who plotted directly on my Garden and wanted “to build biiiiig”… that means, he just made a huge ugly square building with random blocks.
If we would had reservations at this time, i surely had have used it to defend my space.
But Reservations are not made for reserving huge areas without having the plots for it.
It was meant to save the outer boarder of an Settlement, that people are not able to connect without asking.
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Yes I was around back then, heard tales of players on Gellis that purposefully lowered the overall prestige of a town I lived in by placing negative prestige blocks around that claim… when that was countered with not letting nature blocks lowering prestige (my love of yards was happy with that change), I heard they tried to produce high prestige plots to take over the settlement and rename towns something offensive. It was a nasty war I wish never happened. Guilds helped remedy that issue my town was having, but made other issues, like dividing the town into different settlements, and I never saw that get fixed because the roads, and some places inbetween that were connecting the whole town werent plotted enough, as many spots were considered roads.
I have since this announcmeent bunched up my area, and I too am curious what the map looks like now. I dont know if all of my places are blue now. For sure my roads going out wont count, but I am ok with that. Need a way to get to my home, over the lava lake it is built on.
If that is the only purpose, can the devs make the reservation system reserve the outside borders, and not lower prestige? I think it is a better idea to let players have an option in their beacon to decide who can plot against or not, than to hurt the prestige earned by town roads.
Art programs like Gimp are good at detecting what areas are outside. Maybe such code could be used for plotting… but now that I type that out, I guess people could find a way around that by not closing off edges. Nevermind that idea then.
That is funny you mentioned Gellis. Because I was the first guy to take James there and show him what was happening. His response was this has to stop. Lol. Me and Jiivita were completely surrounded one day I went there.
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I feel your pain.
Since i am also someone who likes to build with natural blocks, i faced same problem.
Funny thing at these people who want to take over, they always chose the weakes competition, instead to go to others who like to build with high prestige blocks only.
I guess it is because, against natural builder it is easier to win that “battle”, while they not notice that they “battle” alone. I found some picturally parable: The big hard bodybuilder who pick up an 90 years old Grandma, to win over her in arm wrestling. Biiiig success nod nod
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Not all target the weak. The Gellis city I was in stood at rank #2 for the longest time. This town I was in was getting attacked by someone trying to remove our rank. So sometimes the biggest is the target, we did have #1 for a little while, before I started playing, so alot of this I only heard about.
Edit to add: From this fight, and my lack of interest in competion, I didnt even ‘want’ to care about prestige
I been able to adapt my build to fill in the holes I was reserving. I do have a few more holes to fill in, I will have to figure out where I can cut back to fill in the rest. I’m hoping that the reservations wont be removed from my yellow plots… but just in case it will happen, I am doing what I can with what I have right now to prepare for what maybe inevitable.
I will be getting more money for plots, sometime soon… but I dont have it now, and I might not have it before a new update, so I have to work with what I have.
Or the supposed biggest 
I heard once: “Hey you are in Ultima, thats a biiiig guild, so you are a biiig rich player.”
Lets say this way, Ultima had Member, yes, but litterally at this time when i got this argument for reasons, we was 2,5 active people in the Guild who tried to run a Portal Network with 50 Planets.
And rich… let me coughing… lets show a picture with keeping in mind, that footfall brings us not even the half of the costs and we pay the rest out of our own pocket:
Some People tend to fight against some supposed big player and don’t see, what they do for the community. While the last year i was more than once short before to drop all this work and just do my own thing. All of this just in reason of people who “just play the game”
And for same reason we now have this Thread and the discussion about it.
Beacon Reservations came, because player wasn’t respectful.
Beacon Reservation restrictions and punishment we get soon, because player abuse the reservations.
And we will get much more restrictions, just because people “play the game and use the opportunities”.
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I would say people abuse or exploit the “opportunities.” Certain continuous actions have led us to where we are and the system we have now.
Fundamentally I still feel all this plot stuff should be ripped out completely and many things changes in this game across the board. But, instead of fighting tooth and nail or minor situations like the “compactness patch” I will just focus on longer term change.
We have creative - now we need to merge MMO public universe and creative as much as possible so people can come and go. Hopefully rental planets will come soon. This will stop forcing people into a small few planet location. Plus with all the additional content that will be coming the game can survive. Hopefully, once more options are available and things settle we can start fixing the MMO public universe in a better fundamental ground up solution instead of patches on patches on fixes on nerfs on tweaks, etc…
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That was the cause i made Quotation marks
My problem, if i would be direct, i would hurt people with words.
But i don’t want to hurt people.
Honestly, I don’t get this.
I don’t understand how this beacon compactness makes the game better.
Will Wait And See
Might be my breaking point!
“It is what it is”
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@james
Will there be an update on the world maps?
Please, so I can see some changes I’ve done.
Thank You.
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Road networks that don’t create many contiguous 4x4 reserve plot spaces shouldn’t be showing up unless the ratio is set too tight. We’re supposed to be using the test thingie, not an example set of images produced by it, to find a good ratio for this – the set of images was sposed to just show what the output looks like, nobody should be ripping up their builds based on the example images.
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So true. I think James said don’t do anything just yet too - while the % is still being adjusted. Once they’ve settled on a #, then we can edit things to adjust. I’ve decided to wait & see too 
(beyond the plots that I did remove already lol)
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