Informations about the OLD Beacon-System

[Vastar]

@Stretchious

I guess you could still potentially claim an adjacent plot higher than someone else and have water run off your plot and into theirs?

Well that´s true, maybe beacons could act like a one-way-valve, liquids can flow outwards from a beacon but not inwards (or the other way around).

[dwarvenname]

@Heurazio

But world regeneration don’t work in beacons if i remember correctly ?! if i grief a beacon with lava + water because i’m able to come over it and place them, this will not be regenereated because it’s within the beacon.

I believe the devs had noted in the past that they’ll add the option to enable/disable world regeneration within beacons. I believe this would also apply to objects like water/lava which flow into it. Either that, or they won’t be able to flow into them in the first place.

[james]

Every time I think about regen (which is actually pretty often!) - I always come to the conclusion that it has to happen consistently everywhere. So if, for example, we think that roads can some how be spared - it always breaks down. I once thought that roads with “street lights” should be spared - hence allowing players a way to connect their towns + builds. But it’s always possible to abuse any variation from the default regen rules. So I’ve concluded that if we want or need a variation it’s best to solve it another way. (For example, by having a second type of beacon (somehow) designed for protecting roads.)

[Zouls]

@james

(For example, by having a second type of beacon (somehow) designed for protecting roads.)

Yes. this. this would be great.

[Havok40k]

I… uh… literally posted exactly this idea just minutes earlier. I promise, I’m not peaking in the studios windows or anything! (At the moment…)

A different approach to beacon plot limits?

Based on the current beacon system, it is clear that optimal utilization of beacons will be very important in 1.0. Whether we are given 12 plots or 120, players may always feel as though their private space is too small, or their neighbors are too close. Players that prefer expanding outward rather than upward may find themselves placing several separated plots for a small private village and leaving unprotected wilderness between. Maybe a player just wants to reshape a hillside or path through…

[Zouls]

Cough i posted it 6 hours ago Cough

I get very competitive on my ideas!

[Havok40k]

But I was working, not reading!

[Heurazio]

Maybe a small information for all of us this is FAR OFF-TOPIC

[Vastar]

My intention when I talked about the regeneration stop wasn´t to suggest a way to allow the building of roads but rather to enable a way for the game to give you a subtle hint on the player activity in the area (which is definitely necessary in a game of this scale).
I thought about it as the B< equivalent of littering. A place that is crowded with small holes and pillars (littered) could tell you that you are at a place with a high player activity whereas a perfectly regenerated spot would tell you that you´ve found a place that has a lot less player activity an therefore was able to regenerate.

[james]

@Vastar

My intention when I talked about the regeneration stop wasn´t to suggest a way to allow the building of roads but rather to enable a way for the game to give you a subtle hint on the player activity in the area (which is definitely necessary in a game of this scale).I thought about it as the B< equivalent of littering. A place that is crowded with small holes and pillars (littered) could tell you that you are at a place with a high player activity whereas a perfectly regenerated spot would tell you that you´ve found a place that has a lot less player activity an therefore was able to regenerate.

Sure I get that.

Then the question is: do we want our cities messy and our countryside pristine?
Or: Both pristine?

The regen has 2 main purposes:

1. To inject resources into the economy.
2. To allow all players to feel like they’re exploring the world for the first time. (No caves littered with torches, no nerd poles, etc.)

If we want to let players know how busy an area is - then maybe there is a better solution somewhere else. For example, the minimap could support some SimCity style density / heatmap views.

[Clexarews]

@james

Every time I think about regen (which is actually pretty often!) - I always come to the conclusion that it has to happen consistently everywhere.

Late to this party (silly real life work and obligations and stuff!). Just wanted to give a shout out for this idea. If you make it faster near beacons it’d lead to some fairly easy exploiting of resource acquisition and no one would need to go exploring.

[lucadeltodecso]

If anything, I’ve always thought the opposite should be true, that the more visited an area is, the less likely it is to be regenerated.

That would also have the side-effect of allowing roads to be built unprotected by beacons, and as long as the road is travelled frequently enough it would not be regenerated away.

[Clexarews]

Right, sorry. My post didn’t make it clear at all, but this is what I’m advocating for:

I could have sworn that one of these earlier posts mentioned an idea about having regen near beacons be faster but I can’t find it. I was against that idea so I wanted to put a vote towards regen being equal in different areas ceteris paribus.

In other words, should a world exist with no players currently online or having been online for the past day or two, regen should happen at the same pace across the world and not be any faster in areas near beacons.

[Heurazio]

@james was so kind and gave me an actuall data-dump from all current (old) beacons.

@james

Yeah - let me pull this together.

But I don’t want you reading too much into the results. When people ask for old-style beacons I simple give them a rough amount. It started out as 20 - 30 blocks, then I made it 50, and now I give out 100 or 200 depending on their request. Some even asked for 400 and 1000(!??) radius.

Often the space they claimed will be unused - but I didn’t want to object because I didn’t see the need to spoil anyones fun whilst the game is in development.

As he said, i won’t go into deep detail because the sizes are only rough and he gave us what we requested even if it was far from good and evil.

At the moment we have 477 beacons on 49 Worlds.

The Top 12 Worlds changed and we see that EU Worlds are still the most crowded with ~75% of all beacons (from top 12 worlds). The remaining ~25% are on US Worlds.

You may remember the beacon overview from the beginning which starts to be very confusing so i’ve created two heatmap (i had to remove the capitol beacons).

As you can perfectly see in the first heatmap (Beacon Overlaps) most of the beacons are placed in the really center of each world while the “outlands” are nearly empty.

In the second heatmap you can find the “Player Overlaps” or the amount of players that play in this areas of the worlds.

I’m not sure about the number of colaborators for the beacons because the amounts are insane high … maybe @james can clear this up … i know for sure there have to be beacons with only 2 colaborators on civini and selta but this beacons have 10-11 according to the list you gave me.
never the less you can see in figure 2 and 3 that beacon position and colaborators in area corelate. there is no “hidden” beacon in the outlands that has an extreamly high amount of colaborators

As you can see in the new image of collaborators, the density of collaborators slightly differs from the beacon density. there are hot spots for collaborators where are no hot spots for beacons but this be neglected.

You can find the complete list of maps (for all worlds) on imgur (8192x8192)

@james: thanks again for sharing the data with us

[james]

Great post - wonderful to see the data visually.

@Heurazio

In the second heatmap you can find the “Player Overlaps” or the amount of players that play in this areas of the worlds. I’m not sure about the number of colaborators for the beacons because the amounts are insane high … maybe @james can clear this up … i know for sure there have to be beacons with only 2 colaborators on civini and selta but this beacons have 10-11 according to the list you gave me.

Yeah sorry - I made a mistake with the data I shared. I’ve now shared the correct data.

[Saint-X]

@Heurazio

In the second heatmap you can find the “Player Overlaps” or the amount of players that play in this areas of the worlds.

here is a small mistake, he get a data dumb with 1 wrong column(collaborators)

here a small tabular overview over the collaborators

258 beacons with 1 collaborators
87 beacons with 2 collaborators
16 beacons with 3 collaborators
8 beacons with 4 collaborators
8 beacons with 5 collaborators
31 beacons with 6 collaborators
2 beacons with 7 collaborators
4 beacons with 8 collaborators
3 beacons with 9 collaborators
2 beacons with 10 collaborators
1 beacon with 12 collaborators
1 beacon with 16 collaborators
1 beacon with 17 collaborators

i think Heurazio will correct his heatmap this afternoon/evening

[Heurazio]

@Saint_X

i think Heurazio will correct his heatmap this afternoon/evening

the heatmap is absolutly correct. i’ve corrected it a long time BEFORE you wrote your answer (that’s why there are lines striked out).

maybe you should read what a heatmap is (en / de)

remember that this heatmap is an aggregation about all worlds at the same time. it’s answering the theoretical question “if i pick any world randomly, where do i have the best chances to find other players ?”.

while you are right that the most collaborators on a single beacon are 17 you are totally wrong on your assumption about the worlds combined. there are in fact places (remember that the worlds are overlapping in the heat map) where more people settled. this “sweet-spots” can be found close to th center as you can see.