Put building cap in PvE

I’d love that. But that would require the effort that is comparable to reworking the whole game, so it’s extremely unlikely to happen. And even if they decided to do that, I can’t even begin to imagine what they would do with existing buildings. And even if they came up with something, where does all of that leave PVP servers? How does raiding work?

1 Like

tldr: Steer clear of subjective judgments of acceptable builds; hard capping foundations or enforcing play hours isn’t the answer, either. Natural phenomena like meteors, sandstorms, etc. could be expanded to act as a lore-friendly building upkeep system.

I have become what most people would call a refresher on an Official PVE EL server, and tend only to play for over an hour at a time when there is an update. The thing is, I really enjoy updating my buildings, looking at them, once in a while adding some decorations - even writing lorebooks - or doing 15 minutes of RP wandering around. There’s no foundation spam, no builds large enough to cause fps drop and I’m under the new hard cap of standing thralls. That said, I have 2 bases and a decorated maproom building at most obelisks.

Most people have only ever complimented me on their looks and the convenience of the maprooms, but lately one person has decided it’s selfish of me to keep up these bases because I don’t play enough.

What is ‘enough’? How many people have to say it’s selfish before it’s true? Gaming is an inherently selfish activity - we do it for our own enjoyment, nothing else. One person’s enjoyment will almost always be someone else’s outrage. We can’t rely on the reasonableness of people here.

This leads me to conclude that only clear, hard rules/mechanics for the limitation of building will ever be fair. It can’t be left to a case-by-case judgement of what is acceptable or not. I don’t think a building cap is the answer, since you could still build horrible, intrusive monstrosities within a reasonable cap. Also, I don’t agree with the argument that you should play for a certain number of hours to justify your build’s existence.

Of the suggestions offered so far, I favour the idea that the map, itself, should react against your building and it is up to you to justify its presence. A good example of this are the meteor showers in the north. I built a maproom by the frost temple, but it was bombarded by meteors to the point it wasn’t worth it to me to keep it up.

This leads me to the idea that there could be a similar effect on buildings in any region - random damage by water, sandstorm, burning, wandering marauders, thralls dying of old age - things that make the game feel brutal, but because it’s a brutal world to live in, not because the developers hate you and want to limit you.

I wouldn’t want a generic forced upkeep system, like having to put so much stone/wood into an altar each week to keep your bases from collapsing. To me, that’s just a grind. But when I first logged on to see my building collapsing to meteors, I thought ‘hey, that’s actually pretty cool’. It’s totally random, a force of nature, not something grindingly predictable.

I let that maproom sink back into mother nature, and was totally OK with it. That’s what I want the building restriction system to look like.

1 Like

Conan 2…

New servers or set the build limit in existing and say, go to this new section after (date) if you want to build more.

Glad you asked, this was a PvE topic after all but, maybe a tower defence/commander deal. I build my base as strong as I can and then you send your army in, we see the action unfold in real time.

1 Like

Is that what’s is called? I didn’t know it was a thing, thanks.

You see, you are thinking others are as considerate as you…but reality most are not. On the free shared officials, which in turn means part of my purchase of the game, land should be accessible to me. If I want to reserve that spot and keep it from another player, there should be some cost. You admit you don’t really play that often, yet you want a permanent spot on our shared resource. Again, if your build is as small as you say, your cost would be trivial. The idea would be to punish the spamming horizontal, thus just foundations and other high hp items would be figured in cost. Walls, ceilings, most placeables would have no cost. Build as vertical as the game allows, decprate until you lag yourself, but spreading out just because one can is the cancer.

1 Like

My opinion on this matter has changed after deliberation on a recent debate with codemage. I don’t consider a hard cap on building to be the answer. I have a modest size base on the pve server I play on. It does not encompass much land area but I always go nuts with decorative items and a hard cap on pieces would most likely leave my base a hollow building with a few work benches. It needs a solution other than a hard cap else funcom may as well remove all purely cosmetic items altogether. Even a max land claim area wouldn’t work as over builders would simply go up instead of out which would still affect server performance. It’s going to be extremely difficult for funcom to both engineer and balance a solution that works and absolutely impossible to do so without angering and driving away a percentage of their player base so I don’t see them doing anything with it anytime soon.

1 Like

Ever since Pippi added the ability to count building pieces. Private servers have been able to somewhat accurately (depending on which update cycle we’re in) count the number of pieces in a build and over time have been able to determine what builds ‘go too far’. That being what causes database bloat and what causes client side issues.

The solution isn’t one of upkeep. Here’s why. If you have a build causing issues, but can make the upkeep, the problem isn’t fixed.

Hard limits per player works. Its how this issue has been handled thusfar on the servers able to enforce it. Eventually Funcom will implement tools to be able to do this too. And probably do something akin to the thrall limits where it handles the situation automatically (which is the only way to reliably do it for 500 servers).

Personally I would go a bit more draconian than that. I’d have an item you craft that declares a landclaim. You may build in the landclaim to a certain amount (by server setting, could even be unlimited if they wanted). You may build a certain number of these (again a server setting). But once you’ve hit your limit, you need to take down the item to build elsewhere. Could even combine multiples of these to extend single area limits.

The item claim thingy in question is only visible to the owner and only when its being selected. It is invulnerable and can be removed through a menu. You can even demo your base attached to it through the menu if you don’t want to tear everything down.

This would do wonders to get rid of that nonsense of people running foundations everywhere. And probably allow for any limits of hard caps to be much higher.

Because lets face it, we know a 20x20 foundation base has as much impact as a 10x40 one. But a 400x1 line going on for a kilometer… I have doubts on that having similar performance hits to the server as the two above examples. And I think everyone can agree that shouldn’t be a thing.

1 Like

you would be surprised how many refreshers there really are. Upkeep, if balanced right, would have minimal effect on more regular players but make it hard for those not vested enough to go out and farm up the cost to keep that large ghost town castle refreshed. If it removed even 25% of stuff, it would help. And it would really only affect officials. My cost per foundation/pillar/fence found/large placeables would allow for pve to build big using stability gapping yet make it ultra expensive for pvp fence stacking. For pvp I would want dbd on because fence stacking is one way to slow down offlining.

Also, the station that ran this would become abandoned and could be claimed by another clan if it ran out of “fuel”. so technically you could pass on builds to others. Allowing builders to “sell” to non builders then start again somewhere else.

Depends on what you’re trying to solve. This is one of the reasons I keep saying the problem of overbuilding is so hard :slight_smile:

Different players have different problems with overbuilding, and yet most of us tend to conflate all those different problems and assume that they have one unique overarching solution.

Here are some of the different complaints people have had about overbuilding:

  • Big and/or overly complex builds can cause server performance problems.
  • Big and/or overly complex builds can cause client performance problems.
  • “Long” builds (e.g. roads, foundation webs, base “linkers”) generate land claim that prevents other players from building.
  • “Long” builds pose an offline purge hazard to anyone who decides to build in their vicinity.
  • Massive builds owned by chronic refreshers occupy space without giving anything back to the community.
  • Massive semi-finished builds, weird theme parks, and huge sandstone foundation walls are aesthetically displeasing and ruin immersion.

Please don’t take the above as a comprehensive list of problems, or as a claim that they’re all equally important to solve, or even that all of them should be solved. I’m just trying to explain that Funcom would first have to decide whether any of these are worth solving – and which ones would have priority – before even figuring out how to solve it. And I guess I’m also trying to explain that we’re not all talking about the same thing and attaching the same weight to same problems.

4 Likes

Which is probably Funcom hasn’t touched this subject. Followers was an easier fix (granted they built most of the system 2 years ago) but it was a less touchy subject and they grandfathered in old players with a hard-cap (+100) to compensate for the change. So anyone who exceeds (my clan does on 1 server) which we will have to deal / adjust for the change. Not a biggie. Follower limits appears to be fair.

Buildings, will be a harder fix, not matter what system you place. Especially for clans. Someone mentioned 5k is too much (I think in another thread) and I already shown a structure which isn’t that big was 7k+. (Granted if I built it as a squares instead of circles - roughly the same size, it would be at least 2k+ less pieces)

Limiting the pieces may resolve one issue, but you will limit the artistic approach to building. A square = roughly 2 wedges in size. So when making anything with wedges, you are increasing the number of pieces you use normally or shrinking the size of the structure if you use the same number of pieces as a square only piece structure.

1 Like

Thanks to Pippi’s bluboard - I can get accurate counts of buildings, structures and such on my private servers. They will count placeables so take that into account and doors/gates in this case.

Below is my testing area on my Exiled Lands Server - off the map.

Which has these stats:

image

And stretches an entire zone block (heatmap picture below)

image

So essence, a property with less than 3k building pieces, can stretch this far out, have some walls, doors, windows and floor pieces, pillars, etc. and not be a single line of foundations but 7 foundations wide (excluding gaps for the stairs [2 foundations wide]) in most places (shorter in areas with sets without wedge foundations in the set)

Granted they are majority square foundations which why it could go as far as it did.
I just wanted to show that limiting the number of blocks may not always stop the spam either.
And a much smaller property (post earlier in the thread, barely takes any room on the server can be x 2.5 more blocks (7k+). And all this depends on how you build. Below is the heat map from my palace build. Please note the official server, the road was half as long. The clan hall on the official server was at the other half of the road which my road and the clan hall (built by the clan leader) were not connected. Currently slow in the process of recreating the build somewhat on my server.

image

It all depends how people build and allow access to areas. Limiting people too much may drive many players away from the game.

Granted, some spam / blocking issues should be addressed.

If you are wondering, the one dot in the lake is a fishing net and a crab trap. The pieces will show as a dot which is bigger than the actual size of the piece. Same with the road looks way bigger than it really is.

4 Likes

Are anchors foundations and pillars? if so it seems Pippi has done some of the work identifying what I deem should have cost to upkeep. something like 20 silver or 5 gold or 1 Alchemist base for every 100 founds/pillars placed.

I believe so. I will confirm by testing later and/or research it.

1 Like

Funcom advertised build your empire, dominate. What do you do when you built your first base with a clan of 10? Everyone wants to build. So everyone wants a big glorious build of their own. If Funcom really wanted a build limit, why would they make new huge crafting stations that didn’t even fit in any of my original base builds before I tore them down because of a thrall limit. I’ve had a hard time with the thrall limit being introduced and now almost 2 years later they are rolling it out. A build limit would be that last straw for me. Brownie2007, if you play on console… “we” the PC crowd don’t care. Consoles are the reason we are in this mess. Funcom did designed this game to the console generation and it will be there downfall.

1 Like

I am not sure what buildingActors are. I had 2 pillars and 1 ceiling piece as a test.

image

Another structure (round building) with 37 placeables, 114 foundations, a number of stairs (18) leading to the foundations plus 6 gates, 48 walls, 12 pillars, 30 crenulations and 114 ceiling pieces on the foundations. 342 bulding pieces is correct. The Anchors is off by 2.

I believe the anchors would be counting the pieces that “anchor” the ground. So the pillars were on the foundations did not count as anchors.

image

2 Likes

Wild guess, maybe this a number (building score) used (amongst others) to calculate the purge attack or purge spawn location?

Could be. My testing area is not in a purge spot (no purges ever hit there) but had BuildingActors 77. I am waiting for Joshtech to respond to my query. Although the main two numbers give you enough useful information about the structure. Placeable is the only number not included it appears which is fine.

1 Like

In your second example, you have a building with 37 placeables, and your building actor count is 38. It seems that your whole building with all of its interconnected building pieces is considered 1 actor and each placeable is its own actor, which makes sense.

2 Likes

That makes sense. I did not count my testing area which is one connected piece with a bunch of placeable signs and braziers to test that theory.