These people know only how to design system and nothing about human psychology and it shows. The people that play these games are never going to do this because you ask nicely or because you scold them. In fact they might go out of their way to do the opposite just out of spite. Smart designers would have introduced a positive mechanic for tearing down one’s base or cleaning out abandoned ones, or as other said, just added a degradation mechanic.
Ultima Online solved this problem in 1997 by having any house collapse into a pile of everything stored in the house after 90 days of no activity on the account that owned the house.
I remember spending a lot of time loitering around houses marked as “in danger of collapsing” just to steal some prime real estate outside Brit.
Ah yes, solving design problems by asking players nicely.
In a traditional MMO like World of Warcraft, it’s not like you build a base in the starter zone and leave it there for a week, because imagine how many bases would be stacking up. [But] that’s kind of how our game does work because you can end up with a lot of bases.
I’m pretty sure most people dislike destroying their own stuff or alternatively, cleaning up. If you’re gonna let them have multiple bases instead of just one, what do you expect?
Just speculating but: it sounds like they only tested this with small groups, and that worked. If that’s what you’re going for, you have to set up the game to play in small groups, not as an MMO… In hindsight they might wish they had put player bases in separate instances.
An MMO (that sadly got cancelled) introduced base decay in where, if you hadn’t been in your base for a week, it started breaking down. This way, the world cleaned up itself. Was a cool idea
Makes sense in the dune world with all the sandstorms and worms too…
Uuughh, isn’t this standard in most online games that have base building? Rust, Dayz and Scum has same mechanic built in very similar ways.
Conan Exiles too
Isn’t this even made by the same company?
Yup, so they know how to fix this! Makes me wonder why they didn’t. Not enough time? Or does the base decay mechanic also have downsides that would work poorly with Dune?
