If this ‘prestige system’ is mostly to encourage to build large, then maybe we can try and find another way to encourage people to build beyond average size builds ?!
(I never intended to attack anybody in this thread, so if you are offended by anything I wrote please know I did not mean to do so)
No need to apologise, @SWProzee1. I’m sure @james is thankful for the feed-back, though he does seem to have his hands full with all these posts!
Hang in there @james!
I have to say that the current prestige system has many flaws, but also many pros.
I’ll just say that for me the biggest flaw the current prestige system has, it’s that it’s giving the highest prestige person in that place the Mayor position. I already know devs opinions on a player voting approach, but I still believe it should be included, not as the only way to get a Mayor, but as an important factor to be compared with other factors like prestige, etc.
I would personally love a system that not only elected a mayor, but differing managing positions. Making players strive for different positions. You’re good with managing flora or you’re the hunter of the group (that’s gonna be better designed with the guild system) but having a similar less upgraded system for a city management will be nice. Overall, having some recognition to it’s founding members will be nice.
I’m on the idea that any system in games will be open to exploitation, that’s just how some people like to play. But setting up a better system (which you already are) will make that exploitation less worth it compared to natural builders, making things that not just look cool, but end up being prestigious.
I won’t change my approach of building what I like to build how I like to build. But the biggest debate about prestige has been brought up because of the benefits it gives, I think that having a better understanding on what’s the benefits you get for having high prestige will be beneficial.
I’m against removing the prestige system, as @james said, prestige is also there to be an incentive to people to build better than they normally do. Natural builders or players liking building, will build either way. Some may jump into the prestige game. But for me the prestige is there to keep highly competitive players into pushing their minds to create the most prestigious builds. While some will keep out of the prestige game and build what their heart desires.
A “player feedback” system together with the current system could not resolve this? Could be two different scores that together defines capitals and mayors, them the percentage of influence of each score can be balanced by the devs as the game progress.
Would it make a difference to anybody if “mayor” was mostly detached from the prestige system, and instead of having a rank for the highest single player, there was instead tiers of ranks that multiple people could hold based on their builds prestige value? Example, top 10% of builds on a planet would gain the title “(x) of (your beacon name here)”. This strips the prestige system from being an all-or-nothing metric and retains the incentive to raise your builds rating. Maybe that will negate the incentive to abuse the system.
The “Mayor” of a planet could then be elected periodically (monthly, bi-yearly, w/e) from a pool of beacon owners with prestige ratings above a certain threshold or percentage, say the top 50%. In this way, an active player with an established base could potentially be chosen as mayor, and not have to worry about maintaining a high prestige for fear of being ursuped by a player abusing the prestige system.
Best part is, this would not require sweeping changes to the existing prestige system, just the addition of a mayor voting system.
After reading through all these posts, I’ve been having a think about an issue which I experienced, relating to prestige and towns, when I expanded Miner’s Bluff (something I had always planned to do, but didn’t have enough plots to do)… anyway…
I started building roads, and when I got close enough to other people’s builds in the area, they were automatically included as part of Miner’s Bluff. I even built a stupidly long road over to Boundmore’s place (at his request) so he would automatically be part of the new town. However, had he not requested it, I could have done it anyway whether he liked it or not, and he would have been part of my town. This, in itself, I see as an exploitable system. You can effectively swallow up a nearby town, or clan, or group of friends, just because you built a bigger town and a road that reaches their border. I have essentially done this exact thing (inadvertently) to 3 builds in the area (2 of which are for currently inactive players), as they were on grounds which I had always planned to use to create a town once I had the plots.
So, I think some of the issues surrounding prestige and who becomes the Mayor of the town stems from this automated collation of connected buildings. If you were to remove the automation part and replace it with an opt-in to form a town, you could decide who was the Mayor of the town at it’s initial creation. The Mayor would of course have the option to pass on their Mayoral rights, at any time, to another player of the town, if they wanted to give it up.
If you also tie this in to a suggestion by @Pseudonym84 regarding Soft Claiming Plot Reservation, as Mayor (or an assignable sub-mayor position), you could then unlock specific plots within this soft claim area for other players to build on, but only if they had opted-in to being part of the town. (adding sub-mayor positions possibly infringes too much on whatever the proposed clan system will be though).
The prestige of your builds is still an essential part as well, as your town collectively is still vying to be the capital of the world, so you’re all working together for the greater good. This could also possibly open up a dual taxation system, where residents of a town have a slightly reduced tax rate when purchasing within the town limits, whereas other visitors are still taxed at the normal rate.
Additionally, in doing this, you can then have neighbouring towns that share an almost immediate border, to be individual towns without one swallowing up the other (and not ending up with the planet eventually turning into one massive all-encompassing city!)
The Mayor system is a bit janky right now, but as it offers no tangible benefits it doesn’t bother me all that much.
I do like both your and @Dzchan94’s election ideas though. That could make for some fun gameplay too.
My main concern with the prestige system was exploitation, but now I’m more concerned it’ll be restricting. @james no doubt wants to jump in now and scream;
Though I can’t seem to see a solution. If the algorithm encourages variation, it discourages uniformity. If it encourages exotic materials, it discourages local materials. If it rewards chiselling, it punishes those who don’t. There’s a ying to every yang.
You could say ‘don’t build something entirely out of a single material’, though the main chamber of the Maw was made entirely of ice.
Perhaps ‘make sure at least 10% of your build is chiselled’ but what about all the pixel art in @Cookviper’s Corner? Would he have to consider chiselling his Mario?
‘Try and use 10% of the materials from another planet’, though what if the materials you want to use are all on your planet? Should you go out of your way to make 10% of your build from another world?
Unfortunately all these things also work in reverse.
That said, I don’t just want to offer more problems without any solutions. I was tempted to hop in-game and setup a bunch of sample beacons for you to look over and assess their respective prestige values, but I’ll wait until you implement the next iteration.
Man, these posts of mine have been super negative 
I think the prestige system has it’s place as far as identifying what is and isn’t a settlement and how much work has gone into an area, but I don’t think it should dictate what people should be urged to go see. I imagine a scenario where you go to a place that was named a settlement and at first, you see nothing at all. You look around and find a small hole that leads to an underground cave of… furnaces? LOL.
I think the best way to put into perspective how grand or beautiful something truly is, is by using human input. A simple voting system in this case might work. Like a place? Simply walk into the beacon area and “upvote” it in the menu. (Heart, Like, etc.)
Also, we could add a visual element by putting billboards in large (or small) settlements that show places nearby. Maybe have screenshots posted for the community to see in-game. It’d be a really cool way to direct traffic to places that aren’t necessarily “in town” or have a lot of “prestige”, but are still interesting and cool to see. I think any effort should be rewarded in some way. This could be that way.
In conclusion, I’m not saying do away with the prestige system altogether, but maybe have it work in conjunction with this system. What do you guys think?
The 50/50 combination of prestige and “likes” would seem to be a good system for capitol status, etc. As for mayors, I’d say it depends. I think the biggest problem with that whole thing right now is that you can, as others have mentioned, “Jack” other peoples’ stuff into your settlement by building close enough to it and having higher prestige.
I myself have inadvertently “Jacked” about 4-5 other peoples’ (very small, granted) builds in the course of my build around Epsilo. In my case, this is no issue, as my build is probably the best build (very incomplete as it is) in those areas of Epsilo so far. The problem comes with people jacking prestige-farm spam-blocks into big cities. Someone could probably jack Pixel Gate for instance (what is it, 1,800,000 prestige now?) in about a day by gleam-farming a gleam rich environment, building about 50 or so hidden refined gleam-spam plots under ground, then extending it to Pixel Gate. I could probably do this myself in a few days at the moment.
Because of this issue, I’d say that yes, Mayor should have some weight in voting, but it should be significantly less than half. Maybe 35% votes and 65% normal prestige? This would allow a mayor with a reasonable amount of build in a city (even if they don’t have the biggest stuff) but would also keep some famous youtuber from stealing a city mayorship with a one plot build an a boatload of votes.
Landmarks on a planet should probably be the opposite of city mayors. something like 70-80% likes and 20-30% normal prestige.
That being said, there should probably be 10 or maybe even 20 landmark “slots” per planet.
Landmark status at the moment is ridiculously big, and I love that idea.
As far as I’m aware, nobody in Boundless has even come close to making anything worth 5,000,000 prestige - though it’s certainly something I’d like to aim for on release. If a suitable prestige system is implemented.
As for what @Stretchious and @AzureHelios both mentioned concerning settlement absorption - this is indeed a problematic system, and will lead to griefing that’ll be passed off as accidental.
I did however like the fact that I built something away from Elop Portas, and when I finally attached it by road I added my build to the settlement.
The ‘simple’ solution would be to implement something along the lines of my proposed settlement buffer system, and make it so that builds have to physically connect to absorb one another. That way it would be optional based on if or not said settlement has that buffer turned on.
Ideally there would be multiple Mayor options;
Or something like that. I’ll write up something more concise when I’m not typing from my phone at 5:20 
It doesn’t need to be so concise as long as I’m reading it at 5:20 in the morning on my phone… 
Wow, and with this topic I only wanted a nerf to machine prestige values!
In a full vote system there will be friend/payed vote/follower exploit.
In a full algorithm value system there will be rubbish fast build maximum value exploiters.
In a mixed system there will be some whose will build a high value rubbish then asking their friends/followers and paying for votes.
You can reward popularity or effort, or both, still will be people whose turn it into manipulation and min-maxing! Of course always search for the best solution, but you cant find a perfect one. Its especially true for build voting, cause its subjective that who likes which build.
Anyway, the settlement-swallowing is really an issue, not just because there will be people who connect to settlements and builds to ‘claim’ them, but because people will build roads to other settlements, just because they want a road between and not to make the two into one! While soft claiming (making a plot unplottable to anyone but its still a wild land, so anyone can build on it and it will regenerate too) and settlement border plots (same as soft claiming but the settlements will automatically soft claim every plot around them, maybe starting at hamlets with 1 plot border, and ending at great city with 5) looks like a good solution, it makes hard to connect settlements with roads, and dont solve the problem if you will still connect roads between them. Maybe every plot need a certain value before it is connected to any settlements? Or need to determine how great plot-chunks (so how wide, long, even high) are needed between settlements to connect them?
Hi, I’m new and I’m gonna just insert myself into this conversation like I’ve been here all along!
I suspect many that people who aren’t “builders” by nature – or don’t yet know they are – don’t make mud-boxes because they love mud-boxes, but because they’re faced with a bare expanse of land and they blank out and don’t know what to do with it. So maybe you could make the prestige system include (in addition to the current criteria) some sort of rotating ‘prompt’, like writers often have. Things like:
Make it so you get some number of bonus points for fitting the criteria. Then make prestige tie into a weekly leaderboard and rotate the prompt every so often. Give winners a special plaque tile to display or something – don’t make them mayor, which I too think should have different motivations and selection methods. But give them “prestige” in the sense of visible bragging rights.
Maybe this is straying too far from your original intent. And it could lead to many smallish temporary builds. But if they’re made by players who wouldn’t otherwise be active at all, is that a problem?
We keep our utubers locked up when we are not using them… right @Scratchnwiff?!
@Pseudonym84 still hasn’t let @DanBeforeTime out of his room and it’s been weeks. It might seem harsh but it keeps them from banding together and taking over.
Hello? Is ANYONE there? You can have the mayorship, I just want food. Hello???
I will bring you some bread and milk … soonish
Okay, I’ve had some time to think on this, and here’s my new proposal for the likes system;
Each player is given three ‘praises’, ‘commendations’ ‘likes’ or whatever you want to name them per week; 3/3 (they do not accumulate) - and players can spend them on whatever build they like, and they will be awarded small amounts of experience for doing so.
Then enter daily or weekly objectives that require things such as;
‘Praise a players build on Vulpto.’
‘Praise a players build on Munteen.’
And so on…
The award for completing these objectives will be a more significant amount of experience, and will also count toward it’s own feat.
This would incentivise travelling, as well as liking builds other than the ones within your own settlement. It’d also detract from spending them on your friends builds.
Add this system in conjunction with the proposed Prestige algorithm as a modifier.
I like that 
Even if it’s not part of prestige system, it would be nice feature to include for those who like exploring, as much as prestige would motivate players to build that would not build otherwise, I think this can also be applied to exploring
(Just thinking out loud - which is probably a dangerous thing to do.)
The following mirrors @Pseudonym84’s suggestion… as I was already thinking about a slightly alternative implementation.
Every day when you enter the game you get a number of Heart credits equal to your level. The higher your level the more Heart capital you have to invest. (Hearts are a placeholder for a suitable thematic treatment.) Your hearts don’t accumulate and can’t be rolled over.
You can then spend your Hearts on bumping a beacon. You can spend all your hearts on a single beacon or spread them around.
These bumps are incorporated into the Prestige rating of a beacon and hence settlement. It’s a way of saying “thank you” or “great work” or whatever you want for spreading a little love.
Players would know their daily bump totals, but nothing about who bumped them.
Technicalities:
You can obviously only bump beacons you’re not a member of. Need to protect against players leaving a beacon, bumping, then rejoining, blah.
Should not allow players to bump other Beacons in their own Settlement. As this would allow neighbours to bump each other to increase their Settlement prestige. (Unless Beacon bumping prestige is not included in Settlement prestige, but this seems excessively complicated.)
Should you be able to bump a Settlement instead of a beacon.