Like I said before, why not remove the prestige system completely ?
1 thing I must make very clear, I made my tower because I wanted it like that, not because I was trying to get the most prestige. I don’t really care about the prestige thing and people know that.
Without that prestige system my tower would have been there all the same. 
People may like builds and people may dislike builds, that will always be the case.
I agree that the current prestige system is giving a lot of exploit opportunities but I don’t want it removed not only because the devs already devoted resources for that feature but also because it do serves its purpose and solves problems. It allows notable buildings to be rewarded/recognized plus the mayor stuffs.
I also cannot think of any solution for this but to give in to @Pseudonym84’s idea of player-driven prestige system. However, this is exploitable too since popular players with lots of followers can just spam likes. This is where the current prestige system comes in. They compliment each other. If however, the devs made a solution for this problem without player input, then hands down these are not your average devs! 
Edit:
If I’m not mistaken, current prestige system is tied to the mayoral position of the settlement right? If it is, then I guess it should not be the case. Let the easily-exploitable-hard-to-balance prestige system give lesser impact (I guess builders will not like this) different perks like you’ll get percentage of tax based on your prestige since you are the reason people are going into that settlement. As for the mayoral, let it be decided by players with beacons there since they are the ones directly affected by the mayor’s decision. Similar to how we do it in real life.
I think we can all already agree on that. It’s rare you get the opportunity to shape a game the way the Boundless community is, and it’s only thanks to this rare breed of developers that listen to player input, care about what their players want, and actively get involved in the discussion. I’m perpetually tipping my hat to them.
This is indeed one downside, though no system is without flaws, and if properly married with the current proposed system it should stop one template from becoming the be all and end all.
I think for one, like @Lawrey mentioned, the system has clearly already had a lot of work put into it, so I’m not for scrapping it entirely. Nor am I for keeping faulty systems simply for that reason, but I don’t think it’s beyond saving. I think it’s actually a great idea, but it’s far from where it needs to be - if it is to remain the deciding factor of settlement naming.
I assume most players who are part of a settlement want to see their settlement grow and become a town, city - and eventually; great city. If an algorithm is to stay in play, it will unfortunately become a game of stamping out optimal templates in order to one-up neighbouring cities when vying to become the planet’s capital.
We know. You built it before the update, so you’re off the hook! Not that I’d berate anyone for chasing prestige. It’s not something I’m personally doing, but I can understand why some people would want to. It’ll only yield undesirable results at the moment due to the way the algorithm works.
This is precisely why I feel subjectivity should play a role in the prestige of a build or city.
I think the Prestige system will be Boundless’ epic fail. First of all I think there are 3 additional problems caused by the prestige system:
Open space
The biggest problem
2) you (as a dev) can not possibly value a blocktype or texture the same as I do as a player. Meaning that whatever list you come up with, the result will always cause me to choose a blocktype I may not like. You can only take whatever we as a group of people collectively feel should be the value. Yet then the result of anything that is being averaged, will also be ‘average’. All outcomes in the current prestige system have so far been demotivating me to continue spending time with it.
Dead Giants
3) Even if both two problems above this have been ‘fixed’ or solved. A build can currently theoretically have a high prestige rating without anyone - but the builder(s) - ever having visited the place. How can the planet as a whole acknowledge through a Prestige system that a build is prestigious without it’s inhabitants knowing it is there? As an example: “how come nobody ever visited my build, yet I’m ranked 2nd on the planet?”
Alternative algo
The current algo should be replaced by one that uses a different set of variables to calculate Prestige altogether. It should to my opnion at least be based off of:
How many people are active (logins/logouts) in the area based on a normalized number using (for instance) the last 7 days?
(the idea here is that prestigious buildings, like in the real world, increase value of the land, making people ‘want’ to visit or ‘settle’ near it.)
How many people actually engage or perform actions within the beacon? Think of beacon enter/exit, trading, chatting, walking, running, grappling. Any actions performed in or around the beacon can be credited to the beacon in a way.
(activity is what drives the game, so like in real life, prestigious builds generate activity in or around it.)
How many people have placed x number of blocks?
(more people working on the same build requires an idea, communication, a sense of direction, leadership. Add a %-multiplier to this variable)
Which blocktypes have been used in the beacon?
(current system)
Without this, I am sure Prestige will be something I will begin to eventually hate, ignore or hack.
Don’t hate it, not worth hating it.
Just ignore then, that is what I do.
HACK ??? NO NO NO, stop that BAD endymion !!!
And please DEVS, don’t automatically make the player who has the most prestige point the Mayor.
A Mayor should be chosen by the players.
Just my 2 cents.
The absolute value of each beacon isn’t interesting because they’re all different sizes, rather the ratio of prestige per beacon plot. Bigger beacons are likely to have more prestige because they have more real estate to score. So the examples you’ve given aren’t fair comparisons. We would need to normalise their points per plot - and then look at the different builds scores.
I’m genuinely interested to know what these are for the builds you’ve listed. I would also like some feedback on improving the system we’ve implemented. I’m not ready to dump it in the bin yet.
On the example of the @SWProzee1’s gleam tower (for me) this should be losing some points because it lacks variation. I would need to look more closely at it’s accumulated scoring to see where it’s over-scoring.
I think this is an interesting case.
Firstly there should be many many ways to get a maximum score for a single plot.
Secondly the game should also attempt to evaluate variation across the entire beacon. So if the player stamps out the same template from one plot across the entire beacon I would argue it then deserves a penalty.
Because some players lack a driver when playing a sandbox game. They ask themselves why should they bother building something big or complex? They just build boxes out of mud. Job done. Where as others set themselves a creative target and go after it. (See all the amazing builds in the game!)
So the Prestige is an attempt to encourage players to value their builds and keep working on them. The Prestige score is a driver, rather than the creativity that drives others.
Players will know about the builds because the Settlements with the highest Prestige show up as Locations on remote planets (and on maps in the future).
Perhaps it’s interesting to maybe suggest splitting the planet up into smaller sections for calculating ‘rank’ then?
If I’d see that I’m ranked 405th mudhouse on the planet, I would not be interested in upgrading the mudhouse so much. If I saw that I was ranked 10th in my ‘sector’ though… Upgrade the view of one’s rank as he ranks up so that he keeps having realistic and achievable goals?
We kind of already do this by showing you the rank of your beacon within a Settlement. This attempts to give you a local comparison and incentive. It’s not the grouping you’re suggesting - but it is a more meaningful comparison.
Scratch out all tied political benefits of prestige. If I build something beautiful, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to be the mayor. On the other hand, if I want to be a mayor, I don’t necessarily want a luxurious house. As suggested before, make it decided by voting system by the settlers.
Prestige can be re-purposed as either lower tax or acquisition of a percentage of settlement’s total tax collection based on player’s prestige points. I believe this is enough reason for me to aim for decent prestige for my builds.
@endymion’s alternative algo is really a game changer that encourages a more natural progression of a settlement which is hardly exploitable. I hope you consider some (if not all) of those ideas 
That section of the Cuttlecombs is 183 plots, and has less prestige than the single plot I posted. However likely it maybe that bigger builds have more prestige, this has not been my experience, nor do I believe it should be. It would be the case if all blocks were equal, but at the moment they are not.[quote=“james, post:26, topic:8534”]
We would need to normalise their points per plot - and then look at the different builds scores.
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Even for testing purposes, I personally dislike the idea that we’re judging builds on a plot by plot basis. I’d rather have a system that based the prestige value on the build as a whole, not what players do with each individual plot.
…and as mentioned by @endymion;
The current system is trying to calculate prestige based simply on what’s built within a plot or build, not on how things are placed in relation to one another - which colours work better together, how the lighting effects the build, how accessible the build is, the build against the backdrop of the surrounding area or how different shapes were used to make certain patterns.
All these things will still be done under any system you create, though they won’t be incentivised.
I’ve given you the Cuttlecombs plots, and I can hop in-game and get your the bathhouse plots too, but I’m unable to get the others for you, seeing as they’re not my builds.
As for ways to improve the current system, you know my thoughts already. I’ve never been for ‘binning’ your system, but I’m adamant that player input is the missing ingredient.
Then don’t forget to look inside too
Ah I see. Don’t you think that when people love this game they would build large things anyway ? I see the same in Minecraft, people who love it will build large things, and Minecraft does not have a prestige system.
And one cannot avoid mud-houses, even if you score mud blocks -100 inside a beacon, people who make mud-houses probably don’t care.
I resent that! The Cuttlecombs is mostly mud, growth and (your) sponge! I don’t think a player should be discouraged for any one block being used - it stifles creativity. This isn’t their intention though. They’ve already mentioned they want to work around this.
I know I just replied to you already, but something @SWProzee1 just said got me thinking;
Minecraft… no blocks in Minecraft were chiseled, ever. You could theoretically build something like this in Boundless;
And yet if you were to collect all those blocks together, and rearrange them within those plots into a mess, then chisel a few, the result would technically be more ‘prestigious’.
It’s just another case for player input.
The Prestige system doesn’t judge builds on a plot by plot basis. But I was attempting to get a better comparison between the examples you’d brought up.
Can we leave this to the side? The Prestige system doesn’t attempt to do this. No one claims it does. It never will. The layout of the blocks isn’t considered.
But for the record the system does take into account airblocks as a ratio of blocks across the build exactly to allow players to have larger open areas.
I’m not opposed to player input. But we don’t want a system that can be easily abused by unfriendly players.
This appears to miss the point. Yes - people who love building will build with or without the system. But one of the reasons the system has been implemented was to encourage the players who aren’t naturally building.
?? This appears to miss the point. It has nothing to do with materials. Players can use whatever they want.
For me this is a perverse point. Obviously that build is stunning. And you would imagine that whoever created it would have put as much love and care into sculpting blocks and finding the perfect tints, etc. So they would have scored more in the Prestige system.
But yes, absolutely, if they chose not to sculpt any blocks (and strangely) limit there own creativity, and another player placed the same blocks with sculpting then they would score more.
I know @Pseudonym84, that is why I am not fan of a prestige system at all.
There are too many situations where a prestige system cannot handle the score correctly as all builds are different.
It is not my concern that mud-houses appear on planets.
I have been running a Minecraft server for almost 5 years now and what I see is that people who build mud-houses and don’t care about the builds are the players that don’t stick around to play the game.
In that case those mud-houses will be cleaned up by regeneration if fuel of the beacon runs out here in Boundless.
We cannot force players to ‘build nice things only’. All players are different.
I don’t think the intent of the current prestige system is to force player but to incentivise them instead. However, if it stayed to be tied to any political benefits, then it is indeed forcing the player if they want those benefits in which I see, should not be related to my building skills or home preferences.
I’ll drop it. They were just my thoughts on how I feel the prestige system should work.
I don’t see how it would be easy to abuse a player input system. Sure, you could get your friends to up-vote your build, and all their friends, or all your followers, but if it was put alongside the algorithm you’re working on, it would be easy to spot the frauds.
@luke-turbulenz also mentioned that;
To get around this you simple do not show who has voted for your build. That way you can offer someone a gift for a vote, but you still won’t know if or not they actually used their vote. That would stop people from ‘buying’ votes.
I also already suggested not allowing friends or guild members to vote on your builds as another alternative.
Hence;
I think you misread what I said.
I’m sorry if it came across that way, and I generally do make some rather (what I consider humorous) but cynical posts. I apologise!
My point here still stands though I hope, that an absolute mess, pile of rubble scattered across the ground over a matter of days, could potentially be more prestigious than the screenshot I posted, for some arbitrary reasons;
‘ahh, this one looks like a replica of King’s Landing… but look over here! Among this rubble there’s a handful of chiseled blocks and some refined gleam! This has my vote!’
It wasn’t necessarily a case against the chisel, more-so a case against computers deciding prestige - but alas. I seem to have misplaced my concerns. You’re right in saying I’ve been missing the point - the proposed system was never meant to calculate aesthetic beauty, and in that case I’ll put this to rest.
Sorry for any misunderstandings!
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.
