Claim Stability Changes Are Coming
Notice: For this blog post, we are looking for feedback and are not planning to implement these changes anytime soon.
We will also give two weeks' notice before it gets pushed out.
Today we wanted to discuss some upcoming changes we have planned for Claim Stability, how it will affect players and how you can help us with it.
For quite a while, it has been clear that the stability system is not achieving its intended goal, and our goal is to correct this in the future.
The purpose of claim stability is to discourage claims from being used in unintended ways, which includes things like:
Creating "swiss cheese" or "spider web" claims to save on tiles (this creates confusing messy boundaries)
Create claim snakes which extend from your claim to either protect against encroaching claims, or to use them in an offensive way to disrupt or grief neighbouring claims.
Currently, these things are both possible in the game and show up often. We would like to hopefully address these issues by updating the claim stability system to improve incentives, while also making some accompanying balance changes to ensure that non-malicious claims can be accommodated with no negative impact.
We recognize that many players have set up their claims in-game based on the current balance, and it could be disastrous for us to simply update this on short notice. Therefore we are rolling out a preview soon which will allow you to see what your current claim's stability will be under the new system, and we will give ample notice before making any changes to the live game's claim maintenance costs or stability.
For now, we are looking for your feedback on these values to get an idea if they are just right or need some small tweaks. You can submit feedback to BitCraft Support.
Along with improving overall stability, we’re planning to make a few additional updates:
Significantly increasing the minimum distance for how close another player can start a settlement to yours (this should reduce the concerns about defensive snaking)
Adding a maximum distance that you can claim tiles from your settlement totem (this is intended to prevent offensive griefing, and should only affect claims which are extending chunks away from their totem).
Smoothing out the cost per tile so that adding a single tile doesn't create a massive jump in supply cost
Rebalancing the maintenance costs so that filling in the holes in your claim will be equal or cheaper than it was when you had holes in it.
For a few technical details for those who want to understand the system better and give us feedback or share examples in the game, we've now exposed the raw stability value under the hood in the UI. This value is a number between 2-6, which represents the total number of neighbors divided by the total number of tiles on your claim. An infinite claim would have every tile surrounded by 6 neighbors creating an upper bound of 6, and an infinitely long snake would have a value of ~2. For reference, the starting claim size and shape when placed provides a stability value of 5.75. The larger and more contiguous the claim, the higher the value will be; the thinner and holier the claim, the lower the value will be. For now, we have picked a stability value of 5.70, below which the cost will start to increase above x1, reaching around x3 by 5.50. Previously, the cost wouldn't begin increasing above x1, until around 4.6 (which, in practice could include some very extreme amounts of the stuff we are trying to curb). This is change will be included in an update going out this week.
We have evaluated many existing player claims copied over to our staging server to arrive at this number, measuring the stability these claims get to by simply filling in holes, how many tiles this takes, and how much it would have raised the cost. Our next step is to go to a larger sample and hear from you all.
We'd specifically like to know if:
Making your claim stable (5.70+) proves difficult or impossible and what your claim looks like in context. What stability did you start at, what can you get to, what is your limitation?
There is a problematic claim you are aware of, what stability value does it have?
Please let us know by submitting feedback to BitCraft Support.