Personal claims need to be weakened

[MagicManICT]

you can't change permissions for white, they always reset to off...

Are you sure about this? Went and checked and they can be changed.

[ImAwesome]

maybe it was a glitch then, I retract my statement since I have a few things that keep resetting on me...

[mvgulik]

Went and checked and they can be changed.

Yep, same here.

[SacreDoom]

You can have permissions on white kin. It'd be completely unnecessary to even show the option if this wasn't the case.

[AnnaC]

Ridiculous.

[ImAwesome]

lol I saw that yesterday, claim stake is on other side of a huge lake...and by huge I mean about half a grid on the minimap

some people are just crazy

[AnnaC]

Um, no. That one is atleast 4 minimap grids long. I went by there today too, and it's been expanded a bit to the west (maybe 10-20 tiles). http://imgur.com/a/b82B7#0 (album shows two different sites)

This stuff is bullshit, and breaks the game. There is basically no way to get rid of that claim now; even if you could revoke it it would require millions of authority, which would require tons of banners or dozens of statues; which is several days or more of legitimate economic work. In the meantime the alt that controls the claim just sleeps with curios and expands more. The only counter to this gameplay is to do the same; farm alts just for claims and landgrab before idiots like this already do it.

Atleast raider groups play legitimately and just kill you.

The fact that this world is so new and there is already all this crappy landgrabbing going on, is even worse. Personal claims were bad enough before the curio system and alts, because they never decayed; now it's just downright a broken mechanic abused like everything else.

[ImAwesome]

you have a weird minimap, thats only about half a grid section on mine...and I'm guessing that means you're close to me

[AnnaC]

Sorry for the double post, but I suppose I have a responsibility to post suggestions as possible solutions instead of just ranting about what is broken, and I wanted to give it its own post.

First of all, I think ideally that property and land claims should consist of more than just LP requirements. Economic aspects should be much more prevalent in determining a claim's influence, especially now since with curios an LP sink is really not a mitigating factor for checking expansion. But this sort of system is a large change and would need much more consideration so I won't focus on that at the moment. Also the "issue" with alts is not really something that can be considered as moderating the usage of alt characters and accounts is essentially impossible.


1. Increase the cost of Yeomanry.
This would help slow down the usage of farming alts to manage claims, but not by too much. The downsides to legitimate newbies needing some basic protection for their drying rabbit furs would not make this an ideal change either, as it would merely delay the problems, and cause more grievances for legitimate players than needed.

2. Increase the cost of expanding personal claims
I think this would be useful overral as it would slow down the expansion of alt claims, and it wouldn't too drastically harm newbies and legitimate players, as claiming land should be a significant investment anyway (and you can always manage your land more efficiently). The downside is that it does only slow the expansion of personal claims, as I said before LP sinks by themselves do not effectively check growth in a natural way anymore. If it was set up more exponential rather than linear, it could make the investment of overly large claims that much more of a investment, which might be a decent enough factor in managing expansion (although exponential might be too extreme I don't know, someone better with maths and formulas would have to give input).

3. Lower Authority Cost to revoke personal claims
I don't really like this idea, although I think authority cost should be lowered somewhat, if its too low a large village could easily swallow up claims around it (and although this thread is ranting about personal claims, I think Villages can expand long distances a little too easy as well - Echo in w5 comes to mind, with corridors that were SGs away from the actual city site). So this is an option but has other factors to consider as far as balance.

4. Have a maximum claim size.
I think this would be a good concept although there are philosophical problems, and gameplay precedent problems with it. There isn't really any caps on anything in the game, so why would there be one on personal claims? But I think personal claims, being one of the few things that are static in the world (something I complained about even back in world 3), for the relatively low investment to establish they should be more restricted. Also what would be considered a reasonable cap would be greatly debated I assume. I figure a cap at 100x100, or 10,000 square meters, would be a reasonable maximum cap for this. Although you could do something like idols/banners, and make it so the initial totem stake has a maximum size, but you could add another stake and build off that; of course that would require changes to the claim system.

I personally think a cap should be put in place, as often times I'll see large personal claims used in the realm of what a village should really influence. But I think option 2 might be the easiest to implement with the current system, and that could potentially help out a lot without too much unforseen side effects.


As far as my idea about adding more economic factors to claim expansion, my general idea was to have a cap on claim size that would be modified by economic values of structures, dwellings, crops, etc. within a radius of a claim. As this economic value increases, so does the potential to expand your claim. This would force hearthings to actually invest and improve upon the land they assert claim over. This has cultural precendent as often if there were no claims of ownership, someone improving on property could have a claim to its ownership. Also in the old LP system, where you gained LP by performing tasks, it was more likely (and implied) that much of your LP gain was through improving your potential property, and such just having the LP sink for personal claim expansion worked fine. However with the curio system to gain LP, this is not the case.

TL;DR: with curio system, having simply an LP sink for claim expansion is no longer sufficient, and more factors or restrictions need to be placed on personal claims.

you have a weird minimap, thats only about half a grid section on mine...and I'm guessing that means you're close to me

No. You don't know what a "grid" is. Ender's minimap grids are all the same size: 1 map tile, or 100x100 gameworld tiles. If you are near the village Deep Blue Lake, then yes you are near me at the moment.

[MagicManICT]

I know this doesn't "fix" the problem, but it'd "fix" people trying to build giant LP banks.

Grind up four alts for yeomanry, drop a claim on each side. They can't expand that claim anymore. If they're doing it just to claim a resource node, they're not going to fuss over it much. If they're trying to make a bank, they'll have to move it else where.

As far as LP banks go, there have been suggestions about what to do about them. Increasing the cost of Yeomanry isn't one of the solutions. Claims should be easy for new players to set up. (Has already been suggested and thoroughly shot down.)

I like #3. I can think of some drawbacks to it, though. A village shouldn't be able to easily come in and just revoke another player's claim. I could be put on some sort of inverse logarithmic curve, though. (Think I got that right. Cost of Auth/tile starts high, gets cheaper as # tiles heads towards infinity.)

#4: Yeah, you bring up the best counter-argument. In w3 I hermited and had a claim of about 60x60 - 80x80 all personally claimed. I wasn't interested in trading so didn't even bother with a village claim. (Almost had this big in w4, too, but it ended too fast.)