Adapt Valheim's Building-Requirement to solve the neverending pillarspam

[Arkolucious]

Hey all - i have seen enough servers, where people just waste their time to ruin other players fun with pillar and foundation spamming. It makes the map look unattractive and abused and it adds nothing to the gameplay experience. The simple solution without bothering every single time the wildcard support for an excessive spammer is to adapt a crucial part of Valheims building system: The workbench*

 

This building allows you only to place building parts in a certain radius - just like your very first foundation/pillar in Ark. *You can call it differently or make it look different, since there is already a workbench in Ark - obiously. May be it can be called a corepiece/landclaim or me be it is a simple Flag as symbol that represents your ownership of this area.

 

However:

Those pieces and their buildingradius are limited in numbers and can not be exceeded - depending on your progress in the game. Let's imagine they are 6 in total in endgame. So you can stretch the area of their influence later on by upgrading them or simply place another Core/landclaimpiece to extend the reach of your constructionarea. The idea behind is to  preserve the player's freedom of choice to have multiple bases wherever he wants them to be. But he will not be longer able to spam entire beaches or bioms with cheap pillars, since he can split is base from each other only 6 times in total.

So you have to make decissions - put them all together for a gigantic megabase and a tiny one somewhere else. Or split them to have multiple mediocre/large bases...whatever you have in mind.

 

The benefit would be that spamming just to annoy other players would become impossible or at least reduced to a great extend....and a beautiful sideeffect: If players move on and leave their bob-bases in the beginner areas or raided bases behind....it is more likley they will take their landclaim piece with them and deconstruct abbandoned bases to make room for other players.

 

Two problems killed with one adaption. The Corepiece should be invulnerable or has exact the ammount of hp of all building pieces it houses (so killing it would take too long to make it the primary target in PVP).

 

Any comments about this? What do you think - any problems with that idea in ARK i have not considered?

 

 

Greetings

 

 

Edited November 1, 2023 by Arkolucious

[Legitarkplayer23]

As someone who loves official pve I really wish it was like this. The pillar spam is so sad.

[yarnevk]

Limited claim flags was tried in ATLAS all that happened is huge tribes split so they could continue with overclaiming.  And the flag code was buggy so of course big tribes kept the exploits to themselves and did not report them.

Edited November 2, 2023 by yarnevk

[Arkolucious]

Did not know about Atlas - but you made some valid points. A new problem, that needs to be solved to make it work. What have been the conditions in ATLAS exactly? How many flags could one player use - the same amount as a tribe/clan? May be it is possible to devide those numbers to make this even less likely.

So i imagine it could be like this:

a large Tribe 100 Members splits into a lot of 3-man Tribes and therefore can let us say spam about 32x6 pillars (1 team keeps the flag for the mainbase).

So we need some benefits that are soo good for not doing that, that people will not do something like that...or some barriers that will prevent it.

 

my thoughts (may be you have some ideas of your own):

what it should be:

- each player wants to have a personal safe zone arround his home. Not just to have an unwelcome neighbour close by just 3 feet away, but also to avoid that they build easy ramps to get into their fenced areas.

- i think it is okay to say that small houses/outposts  should have a noticeable smaller privacy/area bubble compared to a larger base.

 

what people probably do :

- solists just annoy others with pillarspam to prevent them from claiming at all.

- a Megatribe probably wants to have an adequate base representing their power.

- megatribes usually build larger bases, a lot, a lot of defenses and collect a lot of dinosaurs, store a lot of ressources.

- technologies on higher tier are necessary for that or they will not stay in power.

- although they may intenionally split to avoid landclaim limits, they want to stay in contact and play with their fake neighbours, that are actually part of their clan.

- spaming an area is usually used in an easy, effective way... quick placement of cheap parts, that will do the job: increase the buildingradius by a massive ammount with just 1 Object.

 

So we have here some spots, where you can try to do a sugery.

What if a single landclaimflag does NOT give you immediatly an at least medium sized area to build in. If that stays actually very tiny (may be 3x3 foundations) So that would increase massivly the required density of pillars to claim entire areas. Even splitting a huge clan would not be good enough to do so.

So a landclaim requires you to build close to your landclaimobject/flag. From there on, the new building pieces  will increase the buildingradius by - lets say 2-foundations-squares - not much - it stays tight. So the expanse of the actual claimed area is done by : building a real house or at least some kind of fortification wall - something real, not just pillars with huge gaps between. There is still an invisible total limit to the area conected to the landclaimflag - but this does not unlock simply by placing the flag.

This idea is not flawless...it is just a possible direction. It would also limit how bases are build - a negative point.

 

2nd Thought

When i think about another way - privacy/area bubbles connected to the size of your base within the theoretically maximum bubble of the claimed land:

I think value can be an important element. If people build bases instead of just pillars or let us say 1 foundation+1wall+pillar on the top to pretend some kind of base: value.

If the Landflag also counts the value of the objects within its radius, it might be a useful tool to decide if it is a real base or just spamming going on. Value could be estimated by number of buildingpieces, workbenches and stored ressources & dinosaurs in its radius - everything what is usually missing when somebody goes for a pillar spam. If the value is basically non presesnt - there will be no areaclaim bubble and the building pieces decays after 12 Hours  and will give a really minor landclaim of lets say 2x2. So building a dinosaurtrap is still possible, but they will get lost quickly.

With this system it would not matter, if a megatribe splits up. They cannot break the conditions of landclaim, if they are not building real stuff. You claim something? You build on it to expand it or it will decay quickly. Of course this would require several levels of value to be reached before an areabubble extension takes place.

 

Just an idea for a direction...

 

 

 

I

 

 

 

Edited November 2, 2023 by Arkolucious

[Blackmage2015]

Something of this sort would be great addition to the game would just have to be optimized for better gameplay and not limit creativity to great