How many tokens for an Empire/Land claim?

Discussion in 'Frontier and Player Outposts' started by Kaizimir, Oct 30, 2015.

  1. After the recent poll from Aikar (here) hopes are high again that there will be some progress on land claiming soon and preferably before the 1.9 update comes out, because the update will be more important than protecting the frontier folks.

    It was explained that we will be able to claim the land with tokens (maybe Rupees too?). There is a survey (about 7 month ago), where we can give suggestions for the claiming process. But I couldn't find any evaluation of it or hint on how much Tokens would be needed for a given piece of land.

    I am wondering, what is the gross amount of Tokens we are talking about? (I understand that there won't be fixed numbers until it comes out.)

    Considering that our public outpost roughly covers an area of 800x500 blocks I get a little nervous. If I look at my Token history, which is not that great, I doubt that I will make it very far. Of course, I also count on the active members to throw in and we might make it to a decent sum. Still it might not be enough.

    Naturally, I would prefer to cover the whole area as soon as we are able to, just to protect the residents. But from what I understand land claiming is meant to be a "challenge", for several reasons: 1) To prevent (new) players to claim land all over the place, 2) to enforce the "community" and teamwork idea, and 3) to give more meaning to Dragon Tombs, a future update that promises to yield plenty of tokens.

    To be honest, I would be quite disappointed if the amount of Tokens needed would require us to raid, say 20 Dragon Tombs or hunt down 200 minibosses on high difficulty. This is because the members and I already invested tremendous amounts of time, the outpost is around and active for 1.5 years, and we put a lot of effort in this piece of land, see the size. Community and teamwork are daily routines for us and there is no need to enforce this.

    Will we really have to work hard again just to make it grief proof? I'd rather spend my EMC time on other things related to the outpost.
    haastregt, C_McFly, xHaro_Der and 3 others like this.
  2. I am hoping it will be something like 10 tokens per block, minimum one chunk and gets a lower rate as you buy more. That seems like a very fair rate at around 2560 tokens per chunk, but we'll see.
  3. Uff, with the about 1500 chunks the outpost spans this would come to about 4 million tokens! That's too much, unless there is a discount as you mention, which I find a good idea. But how big can such a discount be?

    Independent of the numbers above, my point is: It will probably force us to slay minibosses and dragons like crazy just to get the basic protection, while in the meantime we could do so much other stuff, like supporting other projects.

    I hope staff will find a way to make it easier for public, large outposts to protect the area. Otherwise we have to decide which player builds are worth protecting and which are not.
    Bro_im_infinite, MmarkM and ThaKloned like this.
  4. I wish that initially, claiming would be free for active outposts that are over 1 year old and still active.
    If we are already established, we shouldnt have to pay to protect something thats already our property. Maybe there could be a grandfather clause for previously established outposts?
  5. I can tell you straight away that this will not be the case. The establishment claiming process is one thing, but the protection process is another and we cannot make it completely free to anyone, considering what will be included (teleports, etc). It would be different if we were springing this on players out of nowhere, but there has been a substantial amount of time to collect the resources that will be necessary. If you've been at least moderately working for the tokens that we said you'd need a long time ago, then you should be fine. I do not know the exact number we are requiring, but it won't be obscene and it will be balanced according to the size, etc.
  6. Have you considered offering tiered pricing? We seem to be almost universally interested in getting the advantage of protection as soon as possible. I also think we have mixed opinions on teleportation.

    Allowing us to do it this way would give us the ability to work our way up to teleportation if desired. I realize I might be suggesting something that would make it harder for Aikar to develop but it would also give the advantage of allowing him to continue to develop incrementally.

    Establishment could continue to be free with the advantages provided now. Protection could be something achievable by everyone with reasonable effort or by some resource pooling of a small group. Teleportation could be a capstone goal that would require token contributions from a group.

    I am sure there are things we haven't come up with that could be treated as advanced add-ons. Maybe some bling for the TP locations at Empire center, a message when entering or leaving the boundary like we have on Town Residences, an effect like linking two Empire TPs, or something utilitarian like moving a TP/Empire center .
  7. A tiered type system is an interesting idea and fits into something we have planned, but it's not what is holding back any type of coding. That's the easy part....
    TheDarkModRises likes this.
  8. Well... I admit I put that in there to make it seem more palatable in case you didn't like the idea. My main intention was to clear obstructions from the path to what most of us seem interested in in the short term while still allowing us to experience the rest in due time.
  9. My main concern about land claiming is the same thing I have about locked chests in general which is that a player could claim some land and then get bored one day and leave and never come back and have a bunch of land claimed that no one else can ever use.

    I hope they put some sort of derelict policy in place for land claiming and the same thing with locked chests randomly around the frontier.
  10. That really makes sense, having a way to unclaim land if the owner(s) go derelict, but imagine the kind of work that would take. Would the whole outpost area need to be resetted so no one benefits from the buildings? Or would they just let some random person claim the land and take all that's inside (which is totally unfair, economically wise)?

    Besides, you can only claim land far away from the spawns and other outposts, so I believe it will take quite a while until this becomes a problem.

    About the chests, I think you can message someone from staff and they will unlock the chest for you after it's proven that the player is derelict.
  11. If it isnt going to be free, then why arent there other ways to earn tokens besides fighting mobs and voting? To me, it seems the main focus of Empire minecraft is shifting toward hunting monsters. If I want to do other things, like build massive creations, why isnt token payment directly related to active time spent on Emc, reguardless of the activity? That would reward people equally fo being loyal to Emc as opposed to only rewarding mob hunting. Another way to earn them could be tiering token payments with supportership, or letting people buy tokens with rupees. It seems strange to me that on an Economy server, The producers that fuel the economy will be left behind the monster hunters. Just my thoughts:)
    amadai, dresden72, Stagger77 and 7 others like this.
  12. One challenge will be that a fresh outpost that has nothing built outside of it's 300 block protection will be able to open it's TP to everyone, and us older outposts that are 2800 wide will not be able to open until we're able to cover that distance with protection. Hopefully though, with the talk of protected blocks, it might allow us to batten down the hatches enough at our unprotected areas to open doors early? It would be nice to see some additional assistance given to us older outposts that have prebuilt areas in need of protection, so that we could go public at a similar time to new outposts. Many of us had to extend to reach a guardian farm when 1.8 hit for example. I understand that this is challenging without balance issues though and I wouldn't want to cause a delay of the system just to account for it.
    C_McFly, Pab10S and Kaizimir like this.
  13. Is protection still going to be obtained by using a dragon egg? This was said to be the case a while ago and I was under the impression that people were going to be able to buy eggs with tokens.
  14. I've felt disappointed by this as well as I have built or participated in building structures spread across multiples servers with the exception of Utopia. Most bases are started around some special structure that is entirely up to luck like a dual spawner then any farms you add are bound to spread you out. As a result we usually end up with a little town as the hub where we come/go to/from Town but the actual base eventually covers hundreds or thousands of square blocks.

    I currently think what I will do when the time comes is leave what I currently have under the Outpost/common decency type protection we have now and start something new that I can plan more compactly that takes advantage of the new features, or more likely, join some other group that plans to do the same. I expect there will be a lot of room for collaboration.
  15. lol

    I agree with this, though I wouldn't expect protection to be comlpetly free. Tokens that you can only achieve through the mentioned methods make it double hard for people that prefer building: 1) Through building they extend the area that needs to be protected, and 2) they have less time to go hunting.

    Additionally, the contribution by building things is lasting longer, must be repaired after griefings and is potentially available to more players.

    I take this as a promise, though I don't know what "moderately" could mean. Otherwise I would need to understand it as an affront against the players that waited long enough for the features to be developed, patiently cleaned up the griefings and maintained their voting streak.

    It is mentioned somewhere that DT is planned to be rather decoupled from land protection, i.e. the egg is not necessary for the claim. You can also see it from the last option of Aikar's poll. Dragon Tombs comes last after Empires and land protection. But it is said that you can earn a lot of tokens from defeating the dragon.
    Pab10S likes this.
  16. Where is anything saying 300 blocks? I haven't seen that before :confused:
  17. It doesnt say the size anywhere :) Its just double uotpia res, so sounds like the smallest they'd start. It's my best guess.
  18. Don't scare me like that kev.
    kevmeup likes this.
  19. I get the impression, that the longer it takes to come out with land protection, the harder it gets to make it fair for everybody.
    Pab10S and kevmeup like this.