Now after udate 167 we have beacon fuel. However current state of this system do not solve our problem at all. And there are actually two problems. Griefing and Inactive players.
Player can actually fuel a beacon at hour 1 with 24 trunks for 24 weeks (half a year) and then leave game after completing a tutorial. The problem is still there. Player will always choose the safest way to play and he will secure his beacon for maximum amount of time avaiable + Griefers can still grief easily
My suggestion is to limit beacon fuel donations and implement a cheap system.
If player’s beacon has <1000 prestige he can donate for max 1 week.
if <5000 max for 4 weeks
if >10000 for 12 weeks
and >15000 for 24 weeks
you may ask why. Well, just because those players who do not care about the game, they will leave and forget about their beacons. If player DO care about his stuff and his plots, he will spend some time on his building, make something cool. Reward players for their input, do not give them everything from the start, beacause some(i think most) will abuse it and ruin others experience. Even if not intentionally.
The prestige - fuel limit interaction is a clever way to head off new players who leave the game, but experienced players may still exploit the prestige system with refined gleam etc to allow themselves the max fuel limit.
So we might end up with giant red 8x8 squares in the middle of nowhere, still blocking builds and takin up space ;/
I’ve got an interplanetary house with rooms on four planets. That means that each room is it’s own beacon with its own prestige. In your system, some of those rooms would only allow me to fuel them for four weeks while others would allow 24 weeks. You see how this doesn’t exactly work? Someone may want a remote outpost with a portal (like I have in the lava caves of Vulpto) that doesn’t have anything built in it other than the portal and maybe some lights. This would quickly become an annoyance.
So the intention of it would be to encourage you to build those outposts into some sort of larger, more visually appealing build, and to slightly discourage just having small outposts. I have no opinions on this being a good or bad thing
However, even if you didn’t want to put the effort in to build up your outposts, you could just cover them in gleam or decorative gems or something to rocket your prestige up enough to fuel to full.
Well we could have more different beacon fuels too, so like:
with leaves maximum 1 week
with trunks maximum 4 weeks
with basic metal related beacon fuel item maximun 12 weeks
with spark related beacon fuel item maximum 26 werks
Etc, etc. Then no new players whos just came to troll can make too much grief with their mud blockers. And who already reached some levels, those will unlikely do that, but if they still decide to grief, we will be able to report.
Nothing comes without effort. And what about players for make super inter planetary house with 24 portals to 24 different planets? He also have to bump their prestige? Well, i think yes. If you expand your house to 4 planets which is quite uncommon, you should have a unique apporach to building your base.
I think this system would actually reduce amount of laggy players portals and encourage people to crate actual portal hubs. Now we have like 40-60 players online. Every player wants to have a portal, two or three. If 5k players would like to create 20k portals servers would die of lags.
Whilst the initial idea is good … I think it would be better served if the duration of beacon fuel were directly related to a players level, but I would want to see the lowest level start at about 2 weeks, so that players that only get to play infrequently (for whatever reason) are not put off having to start over each time;
Yeah, that sounds good to me. Maybe some combination of player level and prestige. And yeah, the shortest limit shouldn’t be less than 2 weeks, I’d maybe go for a month.
I also think it’s worth noting that the current numbers and values are placeholders only. Even leaves as fuel is considered placeholder. Future changes to the existing fuel-time interactions may relieve these issues without needing to code more rules and limits like prestige or player level.
Please note that the fueling system isn’t finalat all, we put the leaves/trunks in as two tiers of fuel with high values just to show what the system is like until it’s balanced.
The plan (if I recall clrrectly, i implemented the fuel system, but I’m not the designer and things can change!) is to have it so new players cannot instantly fuel a beacon to 6 months, as the basic fuel from leaves/trunks would only be able to take you to say 1 month, and to take it higher you’d need to craft higher density fuels to go to 2 month, 4 month and finally 6 months lets say, and those crafting recipes would be gated on progressing in the game with resources whilst easy to acquire probably not so abundant as leaves. Aka if you want a 6 month life buffer you have to have played the game and progressed further.
I can relate to @jasoncfinley 's plight as I also have one outpost on each planet.
What about instead a high tir skill that allows for better beacons or longer fule times.
One of these systems would still require a levle commitment from a player that somewhat proves he/she is less likly abandon there beckon or just stop playing.
