Well, in my testing I made a single isolated beacon using one of my alts that never had any other beacons in my settlement. This beacon is also walled on all sides except for a door.
The question here appears to be the: when does a visit ‘count’ for the purposes of generating footfall? If it’s supposed to be more than once in seven days per character, then it is likely that some bug was introduced in recent patches.
My working hypothesis is that (assuming the ‘cooldown’ between footfall-generating visits is 48 hours and not 24 hours), then each time the test characters are stepping in daily to test if they’re over this cooldown period yet, the clock is resetting to 48 hours.
All test-visits have been over 24 hours apart (usually 24 hours 30 minutes, give or take). One test character (that has another beacon in the area) generated footfall only immediately after the patch on tuesday, and the second test character (that has no permissions anywhere on the settlement, nor any beacons) generated footfall immediately after the patch, then again two days after that, and then never again so far.
Another possibility is that the code that recognizes if the character has permissions or not is bugged in such a way that if a character has a beacon elsewhere in the settlement, then that character is not triggering footfall generation anywhere else in that settlement, as if every beacon was their own.
The whole thing was set up to understand exactly how much time had to pass before the same character would generate footfall again (since people in the forums would say either 24 or 48 hours).
For the last two weeks at least (that was when the test beacon and methodology was originally set up), it has been significantly longer than 48 hours, and in fact the only thing that seemed to trigger footfall generation to count again for the test characters was the server being reset for last tuesday’s patch.
as I say, the footfall is per-mayor per-settlement. not per-beacon per-settlement.
if player A has two beacons X and Y in the same settlement S, and player B has permissions on X but not on Y, then whether player B generates footfall for player A depends on which beacon he enters first basicly.
assume player B hasnt played in over a day so definitely no cooldowns are applicable, and player B enters beacon X, it will not provide footfall for player A (permissions fail) but 24hr cooldown will still begin for the (player B, player A, settlement S) tuple, so even if player B walks over to beacon Y now, he will not generate footfall for player A even if he has no permissions, because the cooldown is still in effect.
if player B had first walked into beacon Y instead, then he would have generated footfall for player A
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the bug I would say, is actually that player B can generate footfall “at all” (by walking into beacon Y first) since player B does have permissions on a beacon owned by player A in the settlement, just not the one he happens to have walked into first.
If I have two characters in my account (let’s call 'em Bill and Bob) and each has their own beacon in my settlement, does that mean that only Bill or Bob can get footfall when some random person walks thru my settlement?
Now for the practical terms of my testing: Its an underground area, my crafter character owns the main beacon (and is also warden at the moment) but my forge character created the beacon I’m using to test, off one of the hallways in my base.
I’m having a friend walk into my forge-alt beacon with two characters once every 24 hours + a few minutes while I’m logged in my forge character, checking the forge character’s beacon as they do so. I suppose if the footfall triggers for any beacon in my account, rather than on a per-character basis, then my friend might be giving footfall to my crafter’s beacon instead of my forger’s.
The friend has no permissions in either of my beacons, but one of their two characters has their own beacon elsewhere in the settlement.
it is all character based, not account based, you can generate footfall in your alt’s beacons if they have no permissions (again, feels weird to me that you can…)
Of course, you should set up your own in house testing to confirm, rather than taking my word for it, but I’m 100% sure that one of my friends characters generated footfall in my test beacon only once, immediately after tuesday’s patch, and never again since, and by your own account it should be every 24 hours, so it’s absolutely not working as it should.
I’m absolutely positive that there are no permission conflicts and no other beacons belonging to my forge character anywhere else in the settlement. I’d be happy to PM you coordinates for my settlement if you’d rather confirm that in game before investigating further.
That does seem to be a bit of it. Still think there is something else. Cause it magically happened all at once right after a patch. Putting the puzzle together would be leaning towards a patch issue.
Wouldnt there be logs on the beacon that could confirm that?
But more importantly, i thought i was being clever setting up a hub with 4 beacons from seperate alts in a square in middle… thinking 4 times the footfall. They all share permissions… did i just make it so i have to go to 4 seperate places to collect the same amount i would be getting with 1?
nothing has changed, whatsoever with footfall or its configuration in the last patch, or the last several patches. The last change I can see in any code or data to do with footfall or its config etc is from May.
From what I’m reading, absolutely nothing about footfall has changed which is a good thing.
However, reality is telling a different story… I’m going to test a few other things to see if I can figure out what exactly is causing this glitch where some players literally can’t generate footfall on certain beacons. My lava bridge beacon that used to generate 500+ coins per day dropped to about 80 (likely due to whatever glitch Wolfpack and I discovered) BUT today I check it and it’s at 1200’ish coins in the box which is about where it should be for a couple days of footfall… I had stopped checking it for maybe 2 or 3 days.
At this point it’s not even about the coins, it’s the principle I just want to help fix the problem or glitch. If nothing has changed with the code, either something in the last patch nudged a decimal out of place or some other mysterious problem with a seemingly unrelated piece of code is making players invisible to beacons.
Thanks for the replies, it answers all the questions I was trying to test in the first place!
Well I do know for a fact there has been changes. 2 patches after launch footfall was cut in half. And now it feels like it was cut in half again. It wasn’t a change in number of players. I figured the first cut was on purpose because even I would agree it was too much.
Well, I never had tested it before two weeks ago, so all I can say for certain is that it is NOT 24 hours right now, and if it was supposed to be, then certainly that would count as it being broken. So it seems like it’s been broken for quite a while
24 days eh? Well… I hope that will get changed to the intended 24 hours.
On the bright side, it seems from my testing that the cooldown gets cleared for all characters whenever the world with the beacon goes offline, and with the frequent patching I don’t think it ever got to 24 days yet.
Another second interesting finding then is that aberrant second footfall generation after 48 hours with one of the test characters. So, something in the code somewhere may be clearing the cooldown earlier than it should, which might generate way too much once it gets properly set to 24 hours if people figure out how to abuse it. Might be worth a look.
Unless someone walking on the ‘reserved’ surface above an underground beacon generated footfall and I didn’t notice, but that seems unlikely.
I’d be happy to PM you coordinates for my settlement if you’d rather confirm that in game before investigating further.
I just want to help fix the problem or glitch. If nothing has changed with the code, either something in the last patch nudged a decimal out of place or some other mysterious problem with a seemingly unrelated piece of code is making players invisible to beacons.