Players blocking off resource hot spots could potentially ruin the game

[majorvex]

It seems to be part of the game mechanic & allowed. This is a sandbox. To quote James:

@james

1. I see very little difference between a player plotting a mountain to build a base versus plotting a mountain to reserve the gems inside. Both restrict other players from accessing to the blocks + resources within the beacon.
2. I’ve just explored a location on Serpensarindi that contains many plots underground and I was easily able to get inside the plots. (So it’s not even currently limiting access.)
3. They’ve plotted a tiny fraction of the world. There are many many other locations that contain gems ores on the planet. They’re a long way from monopolising the resource.
4. The issue with the red gleam was that it was only found in a tiny number of locations on the world. This was never deliberate, but rather a side effect of a particular biome only appearing very infrequently. So in this case it was possible to monopolise a resource / block. The point of learning was that we needed to make sure future worlds couldn’t be easily monopolised. (Red gleam was part of a prefab that was instanced rarely, but the graves with the yellow gleam were very common.)
5. We (the developers) need to make sure that everyone can continue to find resources.
6. But there is an argument that there is an economy in the game and we should leave the economy to work. If a resource is scarce its price goes up. If a resource is monopolised its price goes up. But if demand contracts then the price falls. We have already seen this in other resources.For example, what will happen to the price of the spooky seeds once the event completes? There is zero supply at this point. The price will gradually increase. Should we instantly spawn more spooky seeds when new players complain that they can’t afford them or find them? Or is this a benefit for the players who collected the seeds during the event?
7. Assuming that there remains many other locations that can be mined for resources, then I see no problem with a player claiming a portion of the world for mining (or building). If we were ever to get to the point where a resource was somehow unavailable, when by design it was supposed to be available, unlike the Spooky seeds, then we would introduce a new world. This is already part of the design and implementation. New worlds are generated based on concurrent population, beacon coverage, and some other heuristics.
8. There are many many plotting pattens that could be considered antisocial:

• attempting to plot the entire world at the top of the world.
• attempting to plot the entire world at sea level.
• attempting to build a wall across an entire world.
• attempting to block access to a particular resource.
• etcShould the game ban all of these? They seem to be extremely challenging to even realise.

Now - that all said…

IMO this is unexplored territory. We can’t predict exactly what players will do, will enjoy, will hate. It’s a universal shared voxel sandbox MMO with many autonomous entities running around and interacting. We tried to put in systems (beacons, regen, redistribution, etc) to keep the game fair. I’m sure we’ll need to keep iterating as we learn more about what players do in the game and how they push its boundaries.