I've played every NMS expedition and while there have always been a problem Communication Stations, it wasn't until this latest expedition that I felt like trolling was getting worse.
On the first day of the expedition, I claimed a spot at the 2nd rendezvous system around some Runaway Mould, built a small base, and uploaded it. I slowly kept adding to the base over time, especially once I completed the expedition. So far I've had at least 8 different people build on top of it, which means I have to report their bases just so I can walk around my own. While I've had some people build close to my base, I have never had anyone literally build on the same spot, much less multiple people.
It stinks that Hello Games isn't doing a better job of making sure bases can't overlap, but it stinks even more that people take advantage of it.
I think it's unintentional, I've seen times where their servers were struggling and the game was unable to check if the spot was claimed by someone, and when it fails, the game assume the spot is free, leading to duplicate use of the same spot..
I wish the verification was more robust, but then if it would fail when there's a server downtime then nobody would be able to claim a land. You don't want to block a functionally as integral as building because of an outage..
A potential solution would be to check who first claimed the land, and the user who did it first keeps it whil the others are expropriated and need to rebuild somewhere else, but then there are edge cases to consider
The one who says they did it first with only a timestamp as the proof (maybe they set their system clock in the past to fake it), or the one who claimed it and has the proof in the servers?
Agreed. If they can't catch overlapping bases up front because of connectivity issues, some sort of cleanup process would make sense. Check the timestamps of Base Computer placement or Upload; the first one wins and the others get deleted. Parts from deleted bases show up in the Base Salvage Capsule like normal.