HELP! Give us your opinion on transferring and selling beacons!

Devlog
264

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.

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265

I think this is a great idea, I hope that it extends to being able to sell or give it to your alts as well as currently i would love to be able to make a bunch of stuff then parcel it out to my other characters if I can.

As others have said, there needs to be various things limiting this, i think the one I agree with the most is there really can’t be a way to hold on to a bunch of empty land without it being hard to do, you don’t want people paying RL money to buy hundreds of plots in an area and then keeping them until someone buys them, yeah it works like that IRL but i don’t think that it’s good here without it costing maybe like a rental fee or something

And I think it was confirmed it will require you to own plots of your own to replace the ones you are buying so i am happy overall

266

probably already been said, and probably already part of the initial plan.
BUT, I would only support this if a person buying, for example, 20 plots, they should have at least 20 free plots. otherwise its pay to win.

it’d be neat if we were able to select a certain number of plots within existing beacons to sell instead of having to manually unclaim and put under a separate beacon

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267

I’m not a great builder in my own eyes and i’d love to see a way to set aside an area to hire someone else to build on and have a way to reliably transfer and pay for said building/s when its complete.
Also an easier way to transfer ownership of a plot i set aside as a market plot. Right now its very clunky to do.
Renting said market plot on a daily/weekly basis because i put the time into keeping portals open sounds great also.
Many other reasons it could be bad as well though if abused. =/

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268

Nice timing since I just started a market place in my home town and was thinking of beaconing up sub-plots and giving them to others by request. This way would save a lot of hassle!

Also why not add the option to rent beacons out? I would like that too!

269

I am torn on this issue. I think the idea of players being able to build and sell cool builds is an enticing one. I even think the idea of players nabbing spots with cool scenery to sell later is interesting, but in the end I think the negatives of this idea outweigh the positives for 2 major reasons:

1) It encourages players to think about how to grief one another. I don’t think that this opens many avenues of griefing that aren’t already open, but it does get players to think about how to make beacons desirable to other players. Ideally this would be done by making beacons other players would find interesting, cool, and beautiful and that they would want to spend time in. Unfortunately it will be much easier to create beacons that are desirable because the block another player or annoy them.

2) It provides a reward structure for the above griefing. The potential for griefing already exists in the game, but currently the only pay-off is whatever satisfaction one would get from annoying another player. Usually, and to most players, that is not worth the effort. Now however, if you annoy another player enough, you could make bank. The ability to make good coin by creating beacons and builds that other players really want to just remove seems like a negative for the game over all.

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270

YES!

I am very interested in this!

As a buyer!

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271

The real problem with this is that it will encourage people to violate the CoC, Eula, or what ever else is used saying this. “Do not plot around other people’s build preventing them from expanding.” If the buying and selling of plots becomes a valid thing to do, then it either renders the hole CoC null in void, or else the devs will be seeing a flood of reports about people trying to expand, and being told by the people who have bought out all the surrounding plots, “Pay me to move, or else stay small.”

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272

I love this idea.

Now when a new planet comes outs and the “Portal Seekers” or whatever other hub company makes a new spot, I will find them, and buy all the plots around their base (except one, you know, CoC) and be filthy rich.

Yes please! Promote my evil intentions by making them pay for land which I would have never plotted anyway.

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273

Honestly, I doubt it’ll happen like that in the long run. It might happen once or twice in the beginning, sure.

But once it’s happened too many times, they’ll just start pre-organising so that when they land on a planet and make a hub, they’ve either got the plots themselves and ‘they’ can be the filthy rich ones, or they will have organised their friend people to come with plots. Either way, any benefit to people with evil intentions will be short-lived in that scenario at least.

For every person that will find a way to grief within a given system, there’s probably at least as many who are just as inventive and will find a way around that griefing.

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274

LMAO,

if you say no to question 1, how can you not see it’s a contradiction to saying " yes I want to sell my beacon" on question 3??

Literally can’t have one without the other, no matter what one thinks is behind the reasoning of question one.

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275

I agreed with you until I thought maybe they are thinking that just selling empty plots is bad but selling plots where you have built something is ok?

That is all I can come up with or I agree it does seem contradictory.

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276

Or Portal Seekers start to sell the land around their hubs right away before they even open the first portal.

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277

Yup! If they don’t do this, you can abuse it: Create a new alt, sell your plots, then delete the character and repeat.

278

Ability to transfer beacons to alts/friends/guildies should definetely be added as a QoL improvement. This would be done from “Permissions” tab, or you could make a new “Transfer” tab in beacon UI, where you’d choose who you want to transfer the ownership of the beacon to. There would also be a pop up when pressing the transfer button stating who your transfering the beacon to and that you will lose all previously had permissions in it.

Personally I would prefer renting beacons, but before you start making beacons sellable/rentable, I’d much prefer you to focus on making the beacon managing more advanced, to mention couple changes: more specific permissions, ability to split your plots between beacons and adding/removing plots from one beacon to an other in the fore mentioned instance.

As for selling/renting I think instead of making it token based make a new UI tab for it in the beacon, this way people would know for certain what they were sinking their coins into, as for collecting the profit from the beacon, maybe make it so the beacon cannot be broken by the buyer for one week, if it isn’t possible to just automagically to tranfer the coins to the sellers purse.
To indicate if the beacon is for sale/rent or rented the color of the flame could change.
For making the beacon selling less intresting as a p2w tactic I liked the suggestions earlier in this thread to limit the ammount of active sales or it could also be a limit of total sales in a predetermed time period, also both of these should be account wide so it couldn’t be evaded with creation of multiple new characters.

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279

No need to worry. Already explained several posts above:

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280

To me, this seems like a contradictory argument.
“a massive land grab to happen in anticipation of selling the plots… would be horrendous”, but a massive land grab AFTER such a feature is implemented “I would thoroughly enjoy”… how can it be a bad thing before implementation, but a good thing after implementation?

There has already been people buying lots of plots for real money, and then barricading large swathes of the best/highest density resource plots such as gems and bitter beans for their own personal use, which I see as despicable, personally.

If plots can be officially sold for money, I foresee similar abuse likely increasing to the point where I will no longer want to play.

Frankly, I hope the devs consider giving greater weight to the opinions of those players who are against this guaranteed-griefing kind of system, as those who are ‘for’ it are already playing the game they were promised, and not implementing such a system will not adversely affect them, but the reverse is not true.

281

It’s pointless to plot gems and other resources directly, and if someone plotted above it to reserve them then anyone can still mine them when they regenerate.

I think people don’t really grasp how large the planets are, it would cost a massive amount to even plot a small fraction, especially if they did it to the mantel. Yes some of the nicer landscapes can be plotted, but there are always more.

282

Being able to sell beacons would allow large beautiful builds to stay alive and active as it may pass hands onto those willing to fuel it.

Plus as a builder, i would love to create homes and be able to make money that way!

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283

I absolutely love the idea of selling plots and builds. It gives good builders incentive to do so. Imagine building an in-game real estate economy! Of course, there needs to be regulation and such, and it won’t be as easy a task as most people may think, but it would be a welcome feature.

Here’s a list of things we may have to take into consideration:

  1. Beacon Permissions: We’ll need a more advanced system of control when it comes to this. Imagine building a neighborhood with cookie cutter homes and allowing people to stay in them. No permissions to build but they can still get a percentage of footfall and tax income.(if applicable) I–for one-- thinks it gives builders a real way to make money. Maybe even implement a renting system to allow builders to make some REAL coin just by building places for people live in. So many more cool ideas to expand on this but i’ll leave it there.

  2. The Acquisition of Plots for with no Intention to Build: This could lead to some really off-putting results. BUT, I feel like I don’t really have to go into detail about the issues surrounding this because it’s already an issue that’s being considered at the time. I think we need something along the lines of voting to remove a beacon in a settlement. This can somewhat be seen as a double edged sword because on the one hand, you don’t want players building giant eye soars in your settlement but you also don’t want communities having the ability to kick you out of your own spot… no matter how “ugly” it is. This could be a tough one to figure out, but i think with enough communication whether it be manually or autonomously, we could alleviate some of the frustrations that would come with neighborhoods built like this… Now there’s an idea… instead of just having a “Settlement”, maybe you could have a “Neigborhood” mechanic, where the warden can change the overall behavior of the plots connected to it… making it behave more akin to something that supports a more “Communistic”—if you will— community… further supporting the “cookie cutter” idea mentioned above…:face_with_monocle: MOVING ON

  3. Player Choice: Everyone is going to use this mechanic differently. Some will use it as a way to make money by contracting out their ability to make things that look good, others will use it to be a menace and control land that has important resources. In the end, I think continuous expansion of the universe will alleviate most of these issues for us… We need more than one planet to get diamond on; More than one planet to get amethyst on. We’ll simply need MORE SPACE. That way people who want to engage with the community can, and those who want to live on remote planets can also do that. “Only drive into town when they need something” type deal…

I could go on about this kind of stuff. I love building game mechanics. Troubleshooting potential issues that could arise because of them. Either way, I’m excited to see something like this IN-GAME. I think it would further expand the depth of the universe.

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