I registered for beta and forum because of what I read here on this topic.
My reaction is, "Are you totally off the wall nuts to think this reasonable in any sense!" This entirely a "bait and switch," and unacceptable and unreasonable.
People have built up and invested in their crystal lighthouse because of what it does. Regardless of benefit, there are people that do not take advantage of it and people who do should not be penalized because of that.
Having said that, there is a huge difference based on ability to play, working versus retired, and also a huge difference based on size of map.
If this idea was implement for 10 chests, with say a 40% chance in any visit until the 10 are reached, that would give everyone the opportunity to benefit the equivalent of 100 visits in terms of goods from 10 chests. At the same time also have goods for visits as it is, but cut it in half. The break even would be for a player with 200 cities opened on their map and the benefit to players with very large maps would be reduced, so say 300 cities the net benefit would be the same as 250 cities before. Any reduction is in usefulness is stinky, but this is in a range of reasonable.
This would also encourage people to visit their fellowship and at least some of their map and it would fit in with time restraints of working people. The ratio of goods for visiting say 25 out of 200 versus 200 out of 200 would be that now instead of just 25 they would get equivalent to 112.5 visits, so instead of an 8 fold difference, there is an under 2 fold difference.
3 chests, equivalent to 30 visits when you've been say visiting 300 is a reduction of benefit to only 10% of what it was. People who chose this AW over others are being drastically penalized.
My suggestion would mean they would still get 83% of what they were getting.
People who only visit their fellowship would get 4.5 times more benefit.
My guess is that a lot of people would reduce the amount of their map with what I've suggested because it is a lot of work for half the resources.
I completely agree that people who invest time into their game deserve everything they get.
And that seems to be part of the problem. I know quite a few players who do visiting on that scale and if they want to put in so much extra effort, why should they not get significant rewards? They richly deserve it.