Privacy systems, make towns matter

I like the idea of npc shop keepers, so long as they keep to selling services that perhaps players can’t do themselves. This does two things, it keeps them from competing against player trades and it provides a gold sink to take money out of the economy to help fight inflation.

After thinking about the beacon maintenance cost, I love the idea! It provides further cost to keeping a large settlement and makes them vulnerable to attack if the cost is not paid. Eve online’s colossal battle comes to mind. It would also naturally provide a way to keep world’s from filling up with derelict cities.

I really love the idea with the beacons. It sounds much better than what I had in mind in General Discussion (simply staying on or logging on once to refill the time of that beacon). It could work well with guilds too since there’s a possibility of at least one person being on to increase the life span for their beacons. Currency could be a better option since there will be farming for that said mineral (or just leaving it to minerals is best so that way both the merchant and buyer can benefit).

Either way I love that idea!

Maybe a guild leader will have a larger beacon but they can only have 2 maybe? And then the guild beacons are larger radius than the regular beacons?

Personally I don’t really care how, as long as people will need to maintain those beacons. It sounds like a great money sink. Again, personally, I’m all for building shops, having doors to lock down a building, npc’s maintaining our shops (whilst we are out exploring for new items to sell) and paying rent to have a building in town.

They could even all be in an automated system in the game, this way we can be ensured no player will cheat on another player. We would just have to build a minimum of houses and have it declared a village/small town/city/metropolis by the game, according to which features our town would have.

Beacons are necessary to build and should not be charged. I personalty do not want to have to spend money per beacon just to play when you loose everything you build otherwise due to decaying structures and weather..