I love this idea! It´s simple, efficient and easy to understand.
Definetly something @olliepurkiss and the rest of the responsible dev team should put some thought into.
This seems like a good middle way between full customization and the system we have now.
One thing to add, My idea was not to put beacons in the corners. But rather use the beacon plotters to specify where the corners should be. There wouldn’t be anything physical in the world itself.
wild = not protected by a beacon
I just thought of something. The problem is less reproducible/exploitable with fixed beacons, but still present :
What if you decide to “trap” an empty, wild space inside a 6 beacons of 11X size forming a cuboid?
imagine 6 beacons, each of size 1110, trapping an empty space : with only 60 “used” blocks, you could reserve a volume of 1000 blocks.
Now add barriers, put blocks & door so no one except you can go through those beacons, and voila : exploitable mechanism.
You can reproduce that with fixed beacons, but it’s clearly less advantageous.
We can’t fix that by adding a mandatory wild space between 2 of (our) beacons, as some may want to reproduce a custom shape with 2 or more sided beacons, like that:
111222222222333
111222222222333
111_________333
111_________333
Can’t fix that by adding a “minimum” for each direction, as those new flexibles beacons may even be used for roads, bridges and other thin, long structures.
Detecting trapped empty space might be annoying dev-side, but i don’t find any others idea.
What would be the best way to avoid this exploit?
@KuroKuma : my bad, i misunderstood ^^
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@Epherr This is absolutly gorgeous 
I hope we get this!
@KuroKuma i agree with you. the current system is far from perfect nor efficent. @olliepurkiss it might be effective but that’s all.
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You made a small mistake: 1x1x10 beacons would only form a frame so one could easily dig or jump into your “private space”.
To really enclose and reserve a “wild” volume you would have to use 6 1x10x10 beacons totaling in 600 blocks of beacon volume to reserve only 640 blocks of volume, which may sound much but really only is this:
Even if one would use all the 8192 blocks from your example he would “only” be able to enclose a volume of approximately 45200 blocks, which again, sounds like quite a lot but looks like this:
And assuming that there will be plenty of worlds with ores to mine and that world regeneration will be a quite slow process I´d say that there is no real benefit in enclosing a small chunk of the world for yourself.
Additionally he would use all of his available beacon plots for it, so he wouldn´t be able to protect any of his builds in exchanges for his small private mining field.
So I really don´t see any exploit or abuse if someone is willing to spend all/most of his beacon plots for a small enclosed space.
Still a big fan of your idea.
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Ops yeah, thanks for the fix ^^
Even so, by using a lot of our allowed blocks, or by grouping with others players, one might trap a large area. This area might even contain a public portal, another player’s beacon (and that’s what i fear will happen), the world’s spawn point of titan, or another point of interest.
The current system is also weak to this exploit, so keeping it only for this reason wont help.
I’m searching for an easy way to prevent this, but i can’t find any.
Devs could implement a sorta pathfinding where, when a beacon is created/modified, will cause all the immediate “wild” blocks next to the beacon to “search their path toward 2 fixed, distant points”, without going through any beaconed zone. And cancels the beacon if such a path isn’t found.
But (i suppose) that’d be annoying to dev, kinda costly in calculation, and still possible if a damn large organization is determined enough to trap half of a world (ok, this one is unlikely enough to be managed by report function).
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I feel that the standing beacon system is the closest we can get to a perfekt system, allowing it to reach from top to bottom, would make most players build tower like buildings. And allowing players to mark down the size of their own beaons is massivly expoitable as seen in http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/grief-prevention/ (Even though it is a very nice plugin)
It would only mean the ability to inclose smal amounts of space but it would still give a lot more than not doing it which would result in the exact same problem of effecient use that started this discussion.
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I’ve tested the traiding the last day … here are my thoughts about it.
while it works fine in general i don’t like that you can force somebody to trade. if i walk to someone and press “e” he is forced to cancel the trading window. i could imagine this can become really griefy if someone wants to build and someone else forces him to trade all the time. IMO it would be better if he has to accept the trade request before the trade itself starts (e.g. a smal request window that does not block other actions and can be ignored).
oh yes correct^^ during the tests, he annoyed me when i wanted to divide a big stack in 2 smaller stacks that i can trade one to him.