And said this would happen. One way to fix this is by top view only if its 1 plot wide and x plots long its a road no reservations and no zone pulling.
Also mentioned the option to assign beacon as “road” would be a beter solution. Assign it and it would act as a buffer zone on it self (and in this case skip reservations as roads don’t need one) also giving the full road points to where owner(s) has settled (when connected).
Example you leave my settlement via road upon exiting zone you will see “antar main road south” no zone no reservations just road. Like we have our city’s, villages and what not IRL. Guild system helps out with it but you don’t see IRL a city expand their zone.
Would have helpt me out with my main road design at the time as it was 3 wide.
While I’m not defending people abusing the plot protection system to hold large areas, I do think it’s worth asking:
If a person plots in exactly the same way after the next patch with the protection removed, would anyone actually choose to build in between their plotted lines? I’d say most people wouldn’t, and so the very act of plotting a big spaghetti across the planet is already making it act ‘as-if’ protected?
In that light, I’m not sure that any change to the protection system will really do that much good. While I don’t like having to rely on a Dev-authority to moderate anything in game if possible (they have more important things to do), it might be the only way to stop people gaming the system like that.
Full disclosure, my main base is on Segi. I and others in my settlement were surprised to see so much of the planet plotted/reserved in a weeks time. So I am probably not unbiased.
I am not sure that just changing the plot reservation system actually does anything to prevent this. If a player has enough plots either through playing or buying them, they can still plot exactly like what was done on Segi and the result is plots with small gaps between them where most players would not want to build, or where players accidently build not realizing that the other plots are there and then get frustrated when they cannot expand.
I also wonder how this is any different from the philosophy we have been preaching that you plot what you need upfront to prevent others from plotting where you want to expand. With no insight into the intentions of the player on Segi, if what they did was plan for the future is that in and of itself wrong? If they had bought enough plots to suddenly plot 1/3 of the planet would we feel differently?
Does the plot reservation system maybe need some tweaking? Probably. But even with what has happened I still think players need to be able to prevent forced merges and have at least a small area where they can expand their build should others build near them.
I’ve been told its a planned city for quite a few people. I live on seg with Kal, and I only see them doing what we’ve been telling people to do for awhile. Is it a bit crazy to some? Sure.
Full disclosure, we considered wrapping the entire planet in iron, so these guys probably saved all the plant life on seg.
As for personal purpose, I taking advantage of this new system to protect my build from other people’s attack (force merge settlement / building urgly stuffs near my build).
To do that, I have to plot and make a whole big area reserved for me, and by the look its similar to abusing the system - despite the purpose is not.
So Its extremely hard when it come to judge any single case.
I would say, dont blame the players for abusing this system, blame the Devs for not releasing private planets for everyone to use !
I think you can flag a beacon just by standing in the plots above or below the one it occupies? When you look at your Current Beacon menu, under Places or something.
I knew it was gonna be abused from day it came out I posted about it. I say remove it replace it with a real in game GM to settle the territorial issues.
I agree with this update. I knew people would do this and posted about it long before the update went live; however it’s really not that big of a deal. People will push the limits and/or troll with any system.
That being said, the solution is just to flag these builds and move on if they become a problem.
3rd idea: minimum prestige requirement in the adjacent plots to reserve a plot (IN ADDITION TO roads not reserving plots.)
That way, someone still “can” reserve mass areas of land with 2x2 roads but ONLY IF they are actively developing said areas as evidenced by minimum prestige requirements met.
The issue with minimum prestige is you punish the new player that needs the most protection from being absorbed/merged and low prestige builds such as farms. I should not have to build with high prestige blocks in order to protect my builds from being merged.
Or…we could just let the devs sort out stuff as needed. They are the ones that can see if things are working or not and how much “abuse” is happening. Honestly, if these folks are planning a huge city and are going to start actively working on it, I am looking forward to what they build. I kind of like the idea of neighbors.
We need the opt-in/opt-out of settlement option!!!
And the protection is still good, but there will always be people abusing systems. We are playing with humans, not robots, humans tend to do weird selfish things, it’s just how humans are!
Even without the protection, if someone started to plots rows and rows with 1-2 even 5 plots in between them, I don’t think anyone would start a new settlement there…
Maybe being able to opt out of settlements is the better option? Since that was the real issue in the first place? Maybe just let people choose which settlement to belong to?
I would not disagree that and opt-in opt-out might be better. From what I remember, it was more of a programming issue than it being a bad idea. Reserved plots already exist, so I think it was easier to extend them horizontally with a trigger on the beacon then adding in a new mechanic. That is just my feeling/recollection.
I vote for this. I understand you wanted to protect players building, but i do not see much the difference by adding 2 plots row around it. This system added a bit of headache in already built city and probably in future builds.
Now we can abuse the system to use less plot like it is shown in the picture even with removing the reservation for “road” plots, they will only need a bit more plots to do so.
but certainly see some awesome ideas brewing if you can build planet wide.