I actually thought this might work out and be useful but now that I've checked it out I think it just going to make the huge issue of land claiming a bigger problem. I know people need to be able to go away for vacations and not loses everything but if you have a lot of claims you should be in a guild and so other members should be refreshing the timer for you. They really should have put a limit on claim per person this would have naturally help because that way bigger guilds could have control of more land but one person couldn't take over an entire island. I do know of two people that own an entire island and now they have 20-day protect. Currently, I've seen people with 80+ claims getting 20 days which is odd because another person is claiming he only has 4 days. This could be related to sea claims, number of members, or the system bugged which wouldn't surprise me. Either way, all the claims I've looked at have 20-day timer no matter the number of the claims. If they are going to use this system they need to make the number of claims for max protection a lot lower. I still think it would have been much smarter to put a limit on claims per person and then grant longer protection. I feel the lack of land is negatively impacting the game but that just my opinion.
Maybe they should offer players who have to live in a lawless area due to land shortage a mean to increase their timer to at least a week. In Ark, the type of structure you built increase how long it last so you had to put in some work for it or they could give us an NPC which we would pay a maintenance fee to avoid losing everything in three days. You could even make these NPC have a radius they protect so that way foundation/pillar spammers wouldn't be able to protect large amounts of land or keep cost high enough to avoid people placing tons of them. I know you can rent land but I've already seen how easily people get double-crossed since there is no protection for the renter. Maybe there should be a countdown timer if the landowner is planning to change the setting so that way the players has time to remove their stuff and maybe the evicted should get pay some gold for being evicted. The fact is the current system makes it way to easy to exploit people who've worked hard to built a base on rent land.
While I understand the need for longer protection and actually agree with the idea the current system gives way too much protection to people who've claim way too much land. It would be different if land wasn't so lowv vs demand. I know they say the number of claims affect the time but I'm not seeing it. I've seen people with 60+ claims getting 20 day protection. This is goign to make the ability to claim land even worse which i believe will cost the game a lot of players. This has been a number one issue with the game since the being because it cost nothing to spam flags. I think before makign this update they should have limited claim flags per person. This way big companies could control more land etc. With this system I think you should get max protection if you have 1-5 claims then it should decrease rapdily. The fact is if you have 30+ claims you should have a moderate size guild of people, thus it shouldn't be that hard to get on once a week