Thinking of Survival, they should add the plugin Towny. For people who doesn't know Towny: Towny is a plugin for a Bukkit modded Minecraft server. The plugin itself is a manager for a Resident-Town-Nation hierarchy, as well as a block permission manager for a grid-like protection system. Each town has a mayor, while a nation has a king. They both have their own assistants to help run their respective people. Players can also purchase land from the town, as well as an optional daily tax set by the mayor. The player can allow his friends from out of town to build on his land when even his very own town's people can't build if he so wishes. The basis of protection follows under how the world is separated into chunks. For those unaware, minecraft servers are broken up into 16x16x256 sections of blocks. The 256 being the height from the bedrock floor to the clouds in the sky. The protection ignores the height and focuses on the x and z planes. The default size for grid squares is 16x16, similar to the chunk size (configurable when you start using towny). So claiming a townblock (a grid square) allows that section of land to follow your town's or the plot owner's permissions. Each town can claim up to a certain amount of townblocks, a set ratio or amount configured in the setting that is relative to the amount of players taking residence in that town. Residents themselves have a limit on how many they claim with a maximum of 8 town blocks, however the daily tax (when using alongside an economy plugin) will take a bite out of their resources. The money is tunnelled to the town's bank account that only the mayor can withdraw from, except if the town belongs to a nation. Any town belonging to a nation may be required to pay the nation a daily upkeep as well. Courtesy of: http://minevival.wikia.com/wiki/Towny_commands Personally, I think Towny is like "claims" but more friendly, and it's like build for friends who wants to have more fun (lol) but seriously, I wish they could add this.
In my opinion the current claiming system works fine. You can set alot of permissions in a claim, to let friends/other people build. There are a few towns created with the current plugin. But that is just my opninion.
I think the Towny plugin is very similar to the claim system we currently have and you can probably build a town and then share that land with your friends and such. Not all of the land has to be shared if you're unsure if they're trustworthy or not, you can just stand in the area you want shared and type the command. Anyways, if you feel strongly about this Towny plugin then I wish you the best of luck with getting it approved!
Towny limits claims to a default size of 16 by 16. It would be a pain for some builders to try and integrate that with existing builds or towns. The current system, while imperfect, is better suited to free-building survival imho.
