First of all, what a read, after going through all the differing opinions I’ve come to this conclusion:
1. Transferring beacons Yes
2. Selling beacons Yes, but with a couple caveats
3. Outside the norm, exceptional cases Should be handled by the CoC and the in-game report system
4. People would like to transfer/sell beacons for the following reasons: Location, build, settlement expansion.
I’ve summed up and picked up the ideas I best liked in the thread and decided to add my own twist to it, adding my own ideas as well.
1. Prestige minimum I think builds should hold a prestige minimum in order to be sold. Make it so it’s neither nor too hard to achieve it, promoting you don’t plot empty spaced just for an easy buck. Say you wanted to sell a natural environment, you can do it, and just plop a few pieces of gleam on one end to be able to sell it. I would expand this idea on a later point.
2. Tax I think an added upkeep should be set for trying to sell beacons. I’m sure it should depend on the number of plots attached to the beacon. How it works is, the beacon has a new UI function, each weeks it solicits for a tax, it accumulates over time with each passing week, in order to create a Sell Beacon Token one needs to deposit the required coins (high density areas should be easily able to handle the costs, not throwing in numbers, as that’s something else to be discussed), if transferred, no coins needs to be deposited, and you can create the Exchange Beacon Token. Exchanging the beacon, won’t remove the tax coin from the beacon, nor would you be able to destroy it, unless you payed the tax. Making it so exchanging and then selling bypasses that norm. More norms set in place to transfer those coins to other beacons, in case you want to split the plots within more beacons are a bigger discussion I don’t want to go into this post. I’m also debating whether to add prestige & settlement rank into the mix, making it so setting near higher prestige settlements increases the weekly tax.
3. Limits on sell value Prestige brackets would limit for how much a beacon will be able to be sold, but not for how little it would be. Meaning one can transfer 1 million prestige build for nothing or even sell it for scraps, but one can’t sell a 1000 prestige beacon for 1 million coins, preventing abuse and overly competitive land claims. The higher the prestige you hold on the beacon, the biggest you can charge for each plot attached to it. Here is where prestige and the build inside it count towards the pricing of a property.
4. Beauty tip These would be an added money transfer for selling or transferring beacons, solely depending on the one receiving the beacon to give or not to give and on how much it’s going to be. Making it so “Beautiful” buildings that use low prestige elements can’t be completely hindered by the above limitation. Remember it’s completely voluntary and not required to give the tip.
5. Differentiation between beacon tokens One is for selling, the other for transferring. One incurs on monetary gain, the other incurs no monetary transaction. Also Sell tokens would have different brackets according to the prestige held in the beacon.
6. New timer buffer on plotting In order to limit extortion possibilities (not condeming it, but preventing a mess for devs to handle) make it so one someone plots, they have a time where they get first dibs on the plots right next to where the plotting happened, only ones who would be able to plot right next to them would be people with the certain permission on the beacon connected to the plot. Making it so, if you hold 300 plots, and you want to plot a big area without someone plotting right in the middle of that empty space, you can do so without someone plotting right there when you’re in the middle of finishing. The time buffer would be something small like 1 minute, so you have time to plot, but not use it to abuse other people.
Now to finish on who I think this affects and how.
1. Explorers claim beautiful landscapes and offer them to guilds.
2. Traders Invest your richest and get richer.
3. Builders Sell your beacon, containing your marvelous creations to the right owner.
4. Everyone Not sure what to spend your cubits on? Exchange for some cubits and risk it all to win it all.
5. Guilds Easily transfer ownership, making it more manageable.
In general, the pros win over the cons that might happen due to human interaction, and my ideas above should limit most cases, and outside cases can be handled by devs.