I don’t care for it myself, at least in the sense that it doesn’t effect my builds - though I do care about the fact that it’s shaping the worlds in what I consider an obnoxious way. That’s entirely subjective though.
@Cobbj85 - I build the things in-game I wish I could build in real life! I also don’t have health and safety breathing down my neck telling me to stop swinging from the rafters with my grappling hook.
I’ll definitely come visit you in-game. Where on Tana is your settlement? PM me the co-ordinates so we don’t flood this threat with off-topic babble.
prestige doesnt come only from prestige blocks. they come also when other people settle there (and from footfall? not sure tho) from machines and other stuff.
If a capital gets overtaken just by a block of gleam it wasnt a worthy capital anyway
Just gathered 2000 brick materials today, will be done tomorrow sooo much work but i’m not complaining because it’s totally worth it. White bricks lined with refined iron blocks. Mouthwatering visions.
A medieval build like this one could be made up mostly out of wood, stone and natural blocks, yet they count for very little as far as prestige goes. A lone builder could out do a city like this in a day or two and a few stacks of refined gleam.
I agree about putting a cap on gleam,ithink it would be pretty easy to set a cap for the number of every type of block that gives prestige in 1 chunk. Would this discourage lazy people from building monstrosities? Hard to say.
And here are the builds that would outdo the city pictured (from a distance to make 'em even less distinguishable from each other than they are up close):
But hey, at least it can still remain anonymous even up close because it doesn’t have a single block to differentiate it from any of the other dozen or so identical gleam towers made by different players that can all be seen from standing at the bottom of this one.
Edit 2: @schasm this is the sort of “building” that people are talking about in the thread. Not sure if that would appeal to your sense of aesthetics or not, but it sure doesn’t appeal to mine.
Yep I’d not seen those. I’ve seen stone towers with gleam tops and stairways to altitude cap and such but not that. Not to my taste. Though I guess if I was 8 years old still it probably would be and they can play too, so… we’ll see if they stay if a variety change/single block type cap comes in I guess!
Although if it were me I would look at the idea of knocking it down and quietly weep and mumble about stamina bars.
I think the main issue is not that they can be built (anyone should be able to build anything they want to within reason, I don’t care for 2D pixel art builds for example as I find 'em immersion-breaking, but I would fight for people’s right to build 'em and be rewarded by their efforts).
The problem I think is that the ‘gamey’ nature of the current prestige system incentivizes this type of single-block low-effort build more than it incentivizes the effort that would go into something like @Pseudonym84 posted. The effort-reward ratio is too out of balance at the moment.
And, with this sort of thing being more heavily incentivized, it’s only natural that more ‘builds’ like this will pop up daily. I don’t really have any suggestions on how to solve this problem, other than leaving prestige values as they are and adding a ‘likes’ system as a multiplier, which is also an imperfect solution but at least it would give us a way to give our support for the builds that we like the aesthetics of.
The per-chunk cap would just turn the giant gleam bricks horizontal. I suppose it would improve the ‘horizon’ issue but would take up more surface area leaving less room for other people to build, so I’d call it a wash, at best.
Might sound like a completely radical idea, but I wouldn’t be opposed to all blocks having the same Prestige value.
I think there’s an underlying problem with Prestige, in that it’s tied to settlement growth. Personally I’d have tied the size of a settlement to the number of unique players within it.
Prestige I’d couple together the amount of blocks within the beacon with a player ‘like’ ratio.
I think the problem stems more from footfall than settlement growth. Perhaps a few of those ‘towers’ are being built for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing their unnamed beacons in the Top 5 of the planet, or to steal the ability to name a settlement from one’s neighbors, but I think it’s more likely that they’re a way to boost footfall income, which provides more tangible in-game benefits.
If settlement growth was tied to the number of players, rather than prestige values, then the footfall mechanic would have to be decoupled from settlement growth as well, or solo builders would be penalized even more. Other than that I don’t see much of a problem with that idea.
Footfall is a tough one, as it usually favours large cities anyway, and more-so than that; it favours whoever built the roads. It does however give the people who run the HUB’s some funds to keep their systems running, but before the Footfall system was even in place people were running large portal HUB’s anyway, so I don’t think that’s an excuse.
Can you even walk on those large gleam… obelisks… ?
From what I’ve seen they usually plot a 3x3 plots area (or more) around the obelisk/prestige vault at ground level, and then go single-plot all the way to build height limit, so that they don’t even have to put some digging effort into boosting their footfall.
Often enough there’s either a mud hut for storage / crafting machines right next to the tower, or a single door and a hollowed out area inside the thing for the same purpose.
true if you are using for gleam accents or lighting it would be a smaller percentage of the blocks than an entire structure made almost entirely from gleam
edit: but whatever is the easiest with the highest prestige is always going to be used for the towers of pretige
I’d argue that it wouldn’t punish them any more than the current system, whereby if prestige matters (if it doesn’t, then neither my point nor yours is relevant anyway) to the builder, whereby currently you have to try an squeeze in all the high value blocks you can, even when you’d rather not have.
Not that I see it happening, I rather feel like Boundless is too invested in it’s current iteration of prestige to go that far.
sooo much work but i’m not complaining because it’s totally worth it. White bricks lined with refined iron blocks. Mouthwatering visions.
I suppose it would improve the ‘horizon’ issue but would take up more surface area leaving less room for other people to build, so I’d call it a wash, at best.