Building cap? Bring it on i say. Whatever the limit. Building actually gets better when you have restrictions, forces you to be more creative and selective. May not apply to everyone though.
After years on official servers, my patiance is running thin whenever i come across of a new highway for instance. Why do one need to build a motorway running over 7 grids? Police the building allready.
I’m a big boulder i wouldn’t mind a building cap as long as it’s a big one like atlas an ark anything smaller than that no point in playing the game anymore.
Yeah my clan of three had 6 structures
Main Base 30x50 foot print.
Fake base. 25x40 foot print and 1 noisy level 1 black smith in the middle.
2 thrall wheels on either side of map. 7x7 each.
2 small log out shacks about 5x5.
I have still feel if you afd cost to “maintain” high end stuff like pet pens altar etc, and pillar, foundations, and fence foundations it would work.
The beauty of the pillar,found,fence thing is. in pve you can go every 4 and build bigger than pvp, where you need hp and have to build founds/fences next to each other. But then DbD would have to he on, because fence stacking would cost alot.
This. Having to fill a quota of hours in a video game is going to be an instant turnoff to me. Not to mention that I consider it exploitative game design.
Can confirm. I maintain public maprooms on PvP officials and my therapist says I need therapy.
Destiny 2 tried this with their transmog system from what I’ve heard. Drops for transmog mats were on a timer rather than pure random loot tables. It did not go over well.
As much as i hate building spam, overbuilding and the decay system, the hard cap method is one of the worst solutions and one i wouldn’t support so easily.
Although this may be the most obvious solution, and perhaps even the easy one, it comes with a huge impact over most of the playerbase that has been playing for long, some of them do more than login to refresh their bases, believe it or not.
What i believe is important to note is that this topic has come many times and has multiple threads currently active speaking of the same issue, i hope we can see a smart solution soon enough.
Yeah a hard Cao punishes players who actually play. I will always rather have a cost (not to crazy hugh of course) allowing people to build up if they actually play. Asmall amount would at least require refreshers to play and gather said cost.
Remember that I also stated that there should be a “builder mode” (builder servers?) where there is no cap at all, and maybe even no stabilty rules: building cool and fine is the goal so you do that…
But in the “basic game” (multiplayer, single player: no sense) it should always be a cap.
Caps are what make your game more interesting, JJDancer put also a reasonable question about growing your radius and maybe number or total pieces as you level up (or even learning new builder talents.)
Rationalize the cap is, of course, mandatory but I will always stay in my shoes: Hard cap should be a “Must be”.
Lets say there’s a 2k piece cap, which is still pretty low by the by. You can make a small to medium sized building with that, depending on how fancy you get with it. But that’s basically all it will be. A single building, a few decorations and crafting stuff. Bye bye castles, keeps, fortresses, palaces and temples. Also no more public map rooms or bridges or staircases and whatnot. No more outposts for extended excursions either. Probably won’t be able to protect your large placeables all that well either, such as animal pens, greater wheel of pain, altars, stables, etc.
Sounds good to some of you though, right? Everybody gets to build a small to medium sized building to work from.
But here’s the catch. Take that building down and instead use the cap to spam foundation blocks in a line across the desert. It can still create quite a mess even if it’s only 2k blocks long. And that’s before considering things like alt accounts.
So a hard cap is really self defeating. Making it low enough to prevent trolling will stifle creativity and likely hamper gameplay as well. But getting it high enough to allow that freedom will not do much of anything to stop the trolling.
After thinking about this topic for a few days, I feel that this concept hard caps, maintenance, etc. is like putting punishment for all players for a few bad apples. Its almost like because people drink and drive home at night, no one should drive at night to compensate for the few who drive drunk. I am being extreme in that example, but we are trying to find ways to stop an issue of a few by hurting the many that play the game fairly.
Really comes down to it, if they are breaking the rules, they should be reported and Funcom should take care of it if they deemed they are breaking the rules.
Another note, let say they implement a cap. 2k per player for example, would these buildings of excess pieces just disappear? What pieces will stay and what will disappear? You will have many unhappy players on the official servers. I know private servers will shut off that feature immediately when implemented.
It would be different if they added new servers with a hard cap. Placing one on servers that players were already on and built will be a tough pill to swallow for many players (who do not voice their opinion on forums).
Lets assume there is 2,500 players on official servers, we probably see a few hundred posters on these forums, no where near the number of players who play. And this does not account many forum posters play on Consoles, Solo-play, Dedicated Servers and Modders who post on these forums. So in reality, very few people has/had input in any of these discussions that has a major impact in how they play this game. This topic alone only has 54 posts (counting this one) which a bunch are from the same posters. Only 1% of the official servers player base is commenting or even aware of this discussion.
Note this is underestimate based 1/10th of the peak players of a recent month, since there is no way to account how many players actually play the game. We could have 50,000 players or more in a month, but as you know, not everyone plays at the same time, nor play every day. So I am assuming a low number to be fair in recognizing the official server population.
Lets assume we come with an agreement here in this post. I would then make a poll and inform those official players to take part to get a true idea what people think before asking Funcom to make a change such as this.
Not really. It’s more like “There have been accidents because people drive too fast, so let’s post a speed limit.” Which is why we have speed limits in real life and we’re okay with them. There are also roads without any speed limits, like certain stretches of the famous German autobahn. In your analogy, that would be private servers without the building restrictions.
You are being extreme, because you are trying to stop the discussion. “It’s not a problem for me and I’m afraid of what Funcom might do if you keep talking, so you shouldn’t be allowed to talk about it” is just as extreme as, say, not being allowed to drive at night because a drunk driver provoked an accident at night.
Really, it’s hard not to get exasperated here, when you simply choose to ignore facts. And I’ve already pointed out the facts before, so now I’ll just do it louder and hope for a better result:
There are no rules against overbuilding. There are rules against malicious abuse of the building system. Furthermore, overbuilding is not something that lends itself to administrative approach. Not on official servers. Even if we set aside the fact that Funcom allegedly still has a substantial backlog of reports to deal with, which is why some tickets are addressed extremely slowly and late, Funcom just can’t afford to have a rule that’s pretty much “You can’t overbuild, but we won’t define it at all, we’ll just know it when we see it.”
I hope that a hard cap never gets implemented. I’m against it and I keep pushing against it in every discussion. As I’ve already stated before, a hard cap on building pieces would likely make me stop playing the game altogether – I wouldn’t even bother relocating to a private server.
In the (hopefully) unlikely event that it does get implemented, I imagine they would do something similar to the follower cap: warn people well in advance.
Let’s not pretend that Funcom is staffed entirely by incompetent amateurs who can’t realize this for themselves. All these posts about how people on the forums don’t represent the majority of the players fall somewhere between misguided and dishonest.
The forums are here to discuss things. There is no rule that says that Funcom must implement the things we talk about here, much less that they have to implement exactly what we say. They have stated on numerous occasions that they don’t just read what’s discussed on the forums and then run off to work on these ideas. Sure, they read the forums – they also read Reddit discussions and other places like that – but they also try to get data from other sources and in other ways, and they discuss things among themselves.
So please, pretty please with a cherry on top, stop trying to silence the discussion because you don’t like it. You’re free to disagree, but stop telling us our voices don’t matter.
As I’ve already pointed out to Darkzombie, there’s a difference between who is motivated enough to start a topic and who is motivated enough to keep discussing it:
Seriously, though, the forum software has a search feature. I understand it’s far from trivial to use it for research on a certain topic, but it’s still doable. Do some searching and you’ll find that:
As I keep saying, anyone and everyone is welcome to join in, at any time.
We won’t come to an agreement. That’s not how these forums work 
Heh. True. As always, love to read your responses.
True on my example of banning driving at night was an over-reach but speed limits is another bad example as well since we know majority of drivers break that rule every day. Speed limit in my city is 25 miles excluding expressways 50 on the most part. Sure you can get a ticket but how many people continuously break the speed limit. Putting a hard cap is a pretty solid response. Like a car can not exceed the speed limit no matter what (computer software tracking speed to match the max speed of the road). I actually can see that happening one day with driverless car systems.
Malicious abuse of the system is against the rules then Funcom should take care of those issues. That really all these complaints end up being about, abuse / rule breaking. Yes, the easy way is to make an in-game mechanic to take care of the issue but could hinder players who followed the rules.
Thanks for replies. CodeMage. As always, very thoughtful responses. 
Note, I probably should never write something first thing in the morning since my first thought may not be the best thought. (i.e. banning driving at night).
Yep, that’s a much better analogy
I see I’m not expressing myself clearly. No, malicious abuse of the building system is not the same as overbuilding. If it were, then I would be able to finally shut up about this and just point people to Zendesk.
I’ll try to spend some time later today on some of the servers I know, take some screenshots, and show you what I mean.
Thanks for not taking it personally.
Sure since I only seen on abusive build and that was 2019 to 2020 before it went poof. Although, most liked it so it was not really an issue on the official PvE-C server. My friend thought the road was part of the game initially since it was very nicely built and stretched the map. Since I played on single player before I got my feet wet on the official server, I realized it was not supposedly to be there.
I never complained about it though, since we all used it, the map rooms that they placed.
Added note, having a civil discussion is never to get upset about.
Its an issue on every server pretty much… sadly as long as no one wants to put a cap on building pieces and the developers dont seem interested I dont see anything happening… I wish you the best of luck though
You cant have it both ways… haha you cant get mad at the excessive building then say I dont want a cap on the building… but it matters little as I said the developers dont even comment on it as an issue aside from report it… but reports go without answer as mine has sat there for over 5 months with obelisks and dungeons being blocked…
basically I see this being an issue all the way to the games closing… but again best of luck… keep suggesting ideas… maybe one day they will implement something
Funny you say that…but you do realize cars are capped…most can’t even reach the highest number on speedometer. Hell, even Nascar has restricted plate stuff. Because human nature is to go too far, then blame someone else.
And as @CodeMage stated, neither he nor I want a hard cap. We would prefer there be a gas tank that needs filling every once in a while to make it costly to keep driving…err I mean building.
With that said, I revert back to charge for Foundations, pillars and fence foundations.
In theory PVE could build 1/7th the cost as pvp.
Example.
PVP need HP, so to build a 10x10x3 base, at minimum one would need 108 foundations.
36 outlined foundations, 3 high. You can still get sealed top based off stability rules.
A pve player could do the same with 4 foundations and 12 pillars.
4 corners are foundation, then 12 pillars in certain area (4 spots 3 high) and have the same base foot print.
that is 16/108…or about 1/7th.
I am not in favor of a hard cap either unless it is truly a reasonable number.
Yes cars are capped, but the cap is way above most speed limits. You can easily drive 80+ miles per hour where at best the speed limit is 65. Of course, living in a region where speed limits are 50, 55 and sometimes 65 (out of state), its way easy to break the limit. I am not knowledge if there is a place with a higher speed limit in the USA anyway. I can’t comment on other countries limits (plus I would need to convert it from kilometers to miles for me to understand). Yes, I know approximately 1.6 kilometers = 1 mile, but does not mean when I see 90 kilometers speed limit I would understand what that truly means either without calculating it on the side.
I will discount the roads being at 25 speed limit.
No building cap!
Crazy idea probably not the first to think of this.
Leave the map free and clear of all player builds.
Have the player earn a “base” feat that transports the player to a build area outside of the map, like the dungeons (or even another server, once the server transfer is implemented, and this server holds nothing but bases).
Basically, go to the world, gather, fight, loot, etc…etc…transport (like the maproom) to your base and build whatever you want. Invite other players or keep it open for all to see.
[Insert technical jargon and other development stuff that I don’t know about that make this impossible, but, I can dream]