Thoughts about Trading / Resource Control

General
1

I’ve made this thread since I am curious about peoples opinion on resource locking and its effect on trading after release.

To start, I am semi-pro resource locking. I believe that Guilds should be able to lock down major resource areas but it shouldn’t be impossible for people to find the resources on their own. I’ve always been in favor of a light balance between the two because I find it actually creates the need for trading. When markets are actually in use and flourishing, deep connections get formed between miners, traders, and crafters.

Let me know what you guys think about resource locking and its effect on trading, I’m curious on the overall thoughts of the community!

3 Likes
2

I think I’m semi-pro for it too.

I’m not completely in favour of it because I can’t predict what the game’s dynamic will be like on release; I think you hit the nail on the head by saying it shouldn’t be impossible for people to find resources on their own, but one can go into the semantics of that very easily…

I had written a longer post but I think it would come across as being a bit antagonistic, so I’ll just stick to the above. :sweat_smile:

1 Like
3

I’m not sure about how resource locking would work, not because it doesn’t seem like an interesting concept, and something people would apply but mostly because many of the resources don’t spawn in the same locations or regions, making region locking effectively useful only for resources like gleam, trees, soil and stone.

These are the cases I find applicable, cover an area around graveyards, allowing for regen to happen inside your claim, how big your claim would need to be? Pretty huge, worth it? Debatable, a one plot of blue gleam, would require at least 26 plots to cover and allow for regeneration, if people don’t find your build interesting and approach it now and then. Trees, soil and stone, are fairly everywhere, there exists areas big enough and in large amounts, but then again, how many plots do you want to spend “protecting” them.

Now on the topic of ores, while certain areas remain plentiful, after a while they kind of dry down, making you need to look for a new spot, and returning to your first spot after four others or something, making it a cyclical rotation between mining spots. Let’s say a spot was deemed to never dry down, how high of a concentration must it have? or would resources be scattered on a 30 plot range, making it something like 110 plots to cover and tons of resources to build walls. If you’re not covering everything, then it allows for people to go around and enter your claim.

If the concern is resources running dry from people over mining it, I believe we should have another mechanism to “protect” endangered resources, either be it through new planets or having settlements have a unique feature. Protect endangered areas (graveyards and forests) This areas won’t be protected from regen and won’t be for people building grief free buildings, but they would allow for resources having enough time to regenerate. Who could enter? Anyone, having a time limit on how many times they could use the space. Once a week? Seems fair. You need more? Trade for it, everyone having a fair chance at it, won’t set the price to high IMO. Are settlement members gonna have any benefit? Maybe they could produce an accelerated regen, meaning their chances at mining it would be enhanced.

5 Likes
4

I like the unique approach you have on the topic @Dzchan94. I maybe didn’t convey what I was looking for though, which is more so the general thoughts between resource locking in games and trading. Since the final mechanisms for resources and claiming aren’t finalized in boundless. One of your thoughts I have to disagree with though, I don’t think everyone having a fair chance at resources sets the price too high matter a fact I believe it devalues products and can disrupt markets. For a boundless example, if diamonds started trading very well on an open market in a stable controlled area the guild that trades diamonds would have steady profits for a decent period of time where as in a more “fair chance” market everyone who’s looking to make a quick profit would rush to get diamonds and dump them on the market quickly devaluing the product similar to the pump and dump strategy on a stock market. Just my general opinion on markets!

3 Likes
5

That’s a very debatable topic, having someone effectively control, let’s say over 50% of a said resource, would result in a sort of oligopoly going on, where few hace access to a resource and many require it.

Let’s use the case of diamond, at the moment the most common gem, if let’s say the veterans had full control of the best spots, it would mean they would hold control of the supply of it, effectively making them the price setters for it; the small remains left for anyone else to gather, would mean a small percentage of the cake, and while offered at competitive prices would be deemed to be too low to change the market. The extra demand will need to pay high prices for or conform and change to other tools, making other gems, over time, be in the same situation. That will cause huge prices over the gem tools.

Having the possibility to mine a resource, would allow you to cover your needs, while settlement owners would hold an advantage, it wouldn’t be so big that they would be in control of setting prices for resources or controlling the supply and demand.

3 Likes
6

I don’t see a scenario where resource locking is beneficial to the locker over unbound resource mining, except in a few edge cases. Locking a regions resources prevents the regeneration of said resources, thereby putting a cap on an otherwise endless supply. Unless population density is INCREDIBLY high and a region is being constantly mined to near exhaustion, it would simply be more efficient to move to a new region for a week and allow the area to recover. It may be beneficial to place plots at ground level to reserve the wilderness below, but this does not prevent others from mining the area, nor does it keep them from interrupting the world regeneration in the area.

The best yield of resources will always result from exploration and discovery of new resources, not from hording known locations.

That being said, renting a private world server and restricting access WOULD effectively allow you to lock the resources of an entire planet down for you and your own trusted group of miners. This is the only case where it is both possible and beneficial to lock resources.

5 Likes
7

I’ve been considering this very topic for gem based reasons. At the moment, the way that distribution works for gems that spawn in “high altitude” conditions would be way too easy to lock down as a large group of people.

Only an incredibly small percentage of Nasharil’s terrain is occupied by the correct type of mountains for spawning sapphires, and those mountains can easily be plotted around, or even through in most cases, and since the amount of places that sapphires spawn is so small, they will continue to only be found in those same locked locations (I use small relative to total world size and with thought of guild sizes in the future being in the hundreds)

Even though it may not be beneficial to anyone by doing so, this runs the risk of eventually depleting the resource as a whole if it cannot find new locations to spawn in, and the action will still likely be done, regardless of true benefit to the player/players performing said lock-down. Players will always push games to the limit, and it would be prudent to expect some unassuming player will just plot right over the gems and be okay with them never spawning again.

I think the only valid solution to this is to have a MAJORITY of a planet’s terrain be suitable for generation of gems in some regard, give us a reason to search the whole planet for them not just find the 10 floating mountains that fit the distribution pattern

3 Likes
8

I would vote for no resource locking at all. With a hundred plus worlds I feel there will be more than enough places to find diamonds or whatever.
The thought of effectively paying tribute to someone to mine somthing I can no longer find in the wild because all the locations that contain said item have been locked down would be very frustrating. And thats what would happen espeshaly with gems. Just my 3 cents though. :slight_smile:

6 Likes
9

I agree with you completely @Jeffrotheswell , that kind of behavior would only push me harder to just chill on my own server forever and just do some recruiting and trading in the live server

3 Likes
10

I’ve seen this mentioned here and there, but is there a dev statement about this? (I understand that a resource that’s constantly mined in a certain area will continuously spawn in lower amounts?)

I thought the idea of the locking was that stuff in the reserved plots could have their permissions changed? So that for example under all my plots I could make it so that nobody could mine there; but that was just me making an assumption of course, it’s just what I would infer from what I know.

2 Likes
11

I’ve never seen anything about reserved plot resource locking personally, I believe the intention of reserved plots is just that no one can build or beacon within them, preventing griefing by closing in a player completely. If this has come up, I’d love to see the discussion about it as well

1 Like
12

Reserved plots are only to prevent others griefing you and blocking you in by beaconing the area all around you, they don’t lock down resources in any way. You can still mine and build on a someone else’s protected (reserved) plot … you just can’t place a beacon on it.

3 Likes
13

I don’t know if it has come up or not.

Like I said, I basically presumed it might one day be done like that, but I really don’t know if the current system would change or not. I know from experience that it currently works as you describe.

If to control a resource you had to claim the plot, then that would be, in my eyes, a waste of time and plots. “Here are these gems I’ll never mine and that you’ll never mine either” kind of thing seems rather silly! How else would you be able to lock resources?

2 Likes
14

Only way I can think of it being done, is if a large group or guild essentially plots a giant sized box, from mantle to the top of the the world and builds a wall around it all. Arduous task, but possible with enough people I guess.

4 Likes
15

Imagine a Nasharil floating mountain, all you need to do is plot around it in a box, maybe a few dozen plots, build solid walls on every outside edge, add a portal behind a door only you can open, open it for you and your buddies once a day, boom. Locked sapphires.

16

Surely this is something we could do now if we wanted? But I don’t think anybody has done it…? There doesn’t have to be a system for doing that.

1 Like
17

It is possible but no one wants to be that individual in the testing version, and also for the low-altitude gems you would need a lot more people. I can do it on a Nasharil mountain to prove it if you like?

18

There’s currently 12 worlds. Upon live I believe the plan is for there to be 50 worlds and rentable private worlds hooked up to the main universe. I honestly don’t see how resource locking will be feasible, per @Havok40k’s argument. Maybe if you stumble upon a rich area of a cave but it’s late at night so you put down a campfire and logout so you can grab the resources tomorrow. That, I’d understand, but wouldn’t call “locking” per se but more of “reserving”. Locking has a connotation of keeping indefinitely so others can’t get to it and that would be a massive plot waste imo.

5 Likes
19

I didn’t mean that I needed evidence. What I meant was that if we’re discussing this topic, it makes sense (to me) to think that the discussion is centered around a system that was designed specifically for locking resources.

If there is no system for it, then any notions about locking resources from other people will be purely social; like you say, in the current environment especially, with a small base population, nobody wants to be “that guy” who’s a sleezy person.

If no system is made for it, but people start doing it on release, then we will all know who these people are, and probably just generally avoid those people if they’re being petty about it…

2 Likes
20

What if you had the option for allowing specific plots in your beacon regenerate as they would naturally? This would allow you to lock down your favorite mining location, to only the people in your guild or friends, and since there are “infinite” planets someone can just go find a different spot to setup if they want to mine that resource? or be able to make profit from owning a high resource mine. If you didn’t want to play or can’t get access to these location, you can always just travel to a different planet and mine the resources there.

This would however require the additional functionality of editing your beacon on a plot by plot bases, which could be difficult to implement.

2 Likes