I played with this on the test server. We made two beacons. one was a single plot (my beacon) and one was a ring of 8 plots around the single plot (gorilla’s beacon). Gorilla’s beacon has more prestige than my beacon, so his settlement took the name. Next I aligned my beacon with my guild. What happened is both my beacon and his took my settlement name. I basically stole warden from him by aligning my plot to my guild, even though he has more prestige. Next Gorilla aligned his plot to a different guild, which gave him back the settlement name, so his settlement name showed at the top while standing in my plot. In the end it looks like the guild with the highest prestige gets the entire settlement name, as long as there is at least one guild in the town, and if there is no guild then the player with the highest prestige in the settlement gets the settlement name.
So basically instead of players fighting prestige wars for settlement names, we now have guilds fighting prestige wars. If a guild has more prestige and builds in your settlement, they will still take your settlement name.
Is this intended?
EDIT: As James says below, settlements operate per chunk, not per plot. After adjusting our test to be two adjacent 3x3 plot areas, I was able to have my settlement name in my plot and gorillas settlement name was in his. Thanks for the clarification!!!
People who generate footfall feed those profits back into the economy. Lets use PS hubs as an example (the business owner)… not sure if youve visted any, but they tend to have request baskets buying oort everywhere you look (job openings). Other people then gather oort, and are paid for their services (the employee).
Refusing to consider other perspectives doesnt make them irrelevant. But thats ok, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I personally dont think demanding something for nothing is ever a good approach, but hey i could be wrong too and it might work out well for ya.
All due respect, they are adding a large system that acts as a coin sink in a game with staggering economic problems, footfall as the sole coin generation mechanic seems pretty on topic.
I am aware of that relationship, I was however unaware that I was supposed to be working a part-time job instead of playing a video game. Yes, those “job creators” that obviously deserve everything catered to exactly them, can put out buy baskets that the rest of us can sell to. The entire economy is now beholden to the whims of the top %1 of the game. Again, I’m not saying that system isn’t valuable and useful, but it shouldn’t be the way that all players are forced to play.
Also, something for nothing, like getting coin because someone walked into your store, saw that your prices were insulting, and left? Like that?
Edit:
Let’s break this down.
In the above example, the PS hub is getting AT LEAST 3 handouts. They are getting footfall for the person going to their hub to do business, they are getting footfall from the person going through their hub to travel, and they are buying oort at about half it’s market value because “Guys, we add so much value to the game, sell to us for less so we can stay open.”
You forgot to add, they can put out those request baskets, in all their generosity /sarcasm, primarily because of footfall. It’s a greedy feedback loop that benefits the few major portal hubs and cities build in game. The top 1%.
People who expend X-effort, telling us, “Why don’t you expend “X” effort also?” without admitting it is no longer “X” effort, but “Y” effort, because you’d have to entice people away from already existing portal hubs, and why would anyone leave a prime area if it means giving up footfall?
Nearly everyone who argues in favor of footfall refuses to be honest about the discussion and just says, “Try harder.”
Footfall is an interesting mechanic that pays out on built things, which by definition isn’t nothing, or a hand out in any way. But i think we’re getting a little off topic here.
A single plot beacon can’t be a settlement by itself.
The settlement system operates at chunk and not plot granularity. (Hence why you don’t need to be perfectly touch plots but rather chunks.)
We have discussed switching from chunk resolution to plot resolution but this would be 4x the cost.
Testing with 1 plot beacons will generate confusing results, because the settlement system will possible be assigning the chunk to either of the beacons in the chunk (depending on a variety of factors).
If you want to test the system of guild alignment and settlement identity then I recommend doing it with real world beacon sizes.
If you want to test with 1 plot beacons - then see the known issue.
BUT the outcome should be, if 2 large guilds are in a connected settlement with a collection of additional unaligned beacons then:
Both Guilds should always be able to name their guild aligned settlements, and
The Guild with the highest prestige will be able to name the overall settlement (and potentially be the capital as before).
Footfall is a novel mechanic that rewards having built something, once. It is absolutely a handout, though. A well run shop in a good location is going to make money even if they didn’t get paid for people to walk into their store. Roads add no value to the game other than aesthetics (which the game places no value on), as there is no penalty for traveling over rough terrain, so getting paid for someone using your road is a handout. It’s not like IRL where there are maintenance costs for your road so something like a Tollway makes sense.
Portal Hubs are the one exception, I think. A well run portal hub is both expensive to run and invaluable to the community and should be supported by their use. Someone compared them to semi-public transport in another thread and I think that’s a pretty good model. That said, to use my IRL city as an example, it has a population of about 270k, and has 4 Taxi services as well as Uber/Lyft. How many more of those do you think could open and be profitable? Now, given that, how many portal hubs does a population of 1000 (being generous here) need? If that is the only meaningful way to generate new coin, it simply won’t be possible for most people to do that (or even most large groups to do that). And playing a sandbox MMO, I don’t think I should be forced to walking through 100 stores for hours trying to find the one that is buying the thing I happen to be farming if I want to participate in the economy. Either give me a way to generate money on my own (daily quests/printing machine/whatever), or add in a universal auction house so 99% of the inefficiency between buyers and sellers is removed.
Can you expand on this? What level are the first passes boosted to? How does the decay work? Is it all at once or does it take multiple passes to degrade? Does the degredation take it down to what current footfall levels are (like 40c per person for a village), or less/more?
Yeah I was gonna say, guys, test this first. It’s clear that people with infrequent visitors will receive a very nice boost… And those with many visitors get diminishing returns.
This is exactly what the people complaining wanted!
After seeing the test for this stuff I was super excited about everything… After testing a bit and seeing the coin costs for the buffs I’m alot less excited… That is a huge coin sink for guild buffs 5500c for a 5% chisel durability and build speed for a week… 15000c for 10% and 80000c for 20%? Seems to escalate pretty high there. The endeavor points by contrast seem very low for amount of playtime. If 200xp gets me 1 endeavor for my guild then in an hour of play I alone will generate about 500 to 1,000 (depending on activity) and the endeavor costs at 400, 700, and 2300 for the respective buffs, I feel like solo I could generate that amount in an afternoon of play. Hopefully the new footfall changes will buff spending power enough to compensate for that coin drain. Will be difficult to judge without a large sample though.
(edit) these are the cost values for the builder buff helix, I’m currently crafting the others to test them and see if their costs are any different.
(edit 2) just tested the grapple and run helix. At costs of 5500c, 40,000c and 160,000c per week. That’s is a very large jump in coin… Coin being one of the few things that we can actively sink but not actively replenish (as in feats and footfall being the main ways coin gets put into economy.) once you are done with feats, you have to rely on footfall to regenerate this rather large amount of coin sink. Unfortunately the cost in coins may be a solid kill for my groups ability to use the guild buffs. I’m now quite sad about this mechanic.
appears this is worse than I thought. It looks like only the beacon owner can change the faction alignment. So if we want to get someone to help out on 1 gateway, with or without the guild system we have to get the owner on to do it.
Seems easier to just add one person to your beacon, then to have someone adjust permissions on a new faction then have the owner align to the new faction… Not sure what we’re really gaining here permission wise.
Agreed. the Guild Director really needs the ability to control the beacons faction alignments DIRECTLY. If the beacon owner is still required to run the guild operations, there really isn’t a reason to use it compared to the current system
How many plots would be considered real world beacon size?
I built a place that is at least 5x5 and then connected it up to my friends guild plots. The prestige of my beacon is higher than his combined guild prestige, but I still don’t get to set a settlement name, and it even appears that my prestige is getting grouped into his guilds combined prestige in the settlements list.
I have not joined any guilds yet, and since my prestige is higher it seems like I would get to name the settlement.
The reality is those that have the main locations would need to give away those and start over from scratch to understand the challenges of trying to gain the coin, etc now that the game is matured in release. That is what some of us are focused on and why the footfall system is bad.
