"Zone of influence"

ArchivedUser

So I've just been thinking about something...

As the node ranks up, the zone of influence increases. As the zone of influence increases, more freeholds can be built.

But!

What if a zone rank decreases, and so its zone of influence, what happens to the freeholds that are placed at the border? Do they get destroyed, do they stay, do they lose citizenship?

I apologize if this has been asked and/or answered before, but this just struck my mind.

ArchivedUser

Your freeholds become vulnerable to attack if its parent node falls in a siege. It will be destroyed if the node delevels below stage 3. Your belongings will be retained and can be placed again later.

Source: Livestream Q&A 7-18-2017

ArchivedUser

Thanks for the source. So it makes sense why it is preferred to get a house or apartment in a city instead of a freehold.

ArchivedUser

You can also lose those as they delevel. If say a node goes from level 5 to 4, all the housing that was added when the node progressed from 4 to 5 is lost. That is why it is going to be important to get into housing as soon as possible to make sure your stuff doesn't go poof. Realize, deleveling a node is NOT going to be an every day event, especially after the server starts to see level 5 and its first level 6 metropolis appear. Those will be epic battles that will hopefully have the bugs worked out by the time it hits live. I am sure we are going to have opportunities during alpha and beta to play with sieges to make sure mechanics are working correctly. Citizens of a node are not able to self-initiate a siege to prevent exploits by keeping the city on cooldown. So to even get close enough to a large city to start the siege mechanic is going to take a large, determined group heading in the direction of the city. Which is going to get noticed by the many, many residents required to maintain a city of that size, who will most likely boil out of the gates like ants to protect what is theirs.

ArchivedUser

++cant wait for the thousends of freeholds everywhere u look and go or the flames because almost noone is abel to get a free spot++

ArchivedUser

Can't wait for thousands of freeholds everywhere you look too, because that means that plenty of people are active and playing, since maintaining a freehold through payment of taxes is going to be a thing. Since the ZOI has to be at least level 3 for people to place static freehold housing, that means people are active in that area. Since the housing is account capped and not alt capped, every freehold you see is an active paying account. Is absolutely everyone going to drop a freehold? No. But you can bet the developers are looking at making the world big enough for people to have some choice in the matter, especially since it has been confirmed that placement will have different bonuses based on surrounding terrain types. The great thing about having people who have worked on games that had problems with in game housing in the past is they know what mistakes to avoid. Since you have some SWG veterans on staff, don't expect to see the urban sprawl you had around cities that was a problem for that game and so on.

ArchivedUser

Lets say ~10% of active players want a freehold(there are most likely more people who want a freehold).
And there are 10000 player online at a time since thats what they said will be the size theyre looking for.
That means there are about 30000-40000 active players because not everyone will play at the same time. So we could expect ~3000 freeholds, which is a really huge number in my opinion. If one would place 3000 freeholds within World of Warcraft which has a pretty big map, u would still find at least one freehold behind every hill.. And wow doesnt have mulitiple layers for seasons in its world+ ~twice the money(for vanilla) so i expect the aoc world to be smaller.
I havnt played SWG myself, but i think u cant really use it for comperation purpose because it seems to be a really big but otherwise mostly empty place without player housing, unlike aoc which has a detailed landscape+stuff going on.

But maybe im wrong and with software aviable today they can build indepth landscape at least 15-25 times more cost efficient in comparison to 2004? They dont need to create their own engine after all?

ArchivedUser

Why would you think that they would allow 30000-40000 active player accounts on a server with the cap being 10000? While they may allow a small amount of overbooking like the airlines, it would never be in the range of those numbers. There isn't one mega-server where everyone gets instanced by some vague system like ESO tried to do. The cap limit is how many active ACCOUNTS can be registered to that server. Since you can only play on one server (confirmed with a probably from Steven) You are not going to have 8 freeholds on 8 different servers, instead may have 8 alts on one server. All that can use the single freehold you can place. The ability for them to create more servers is a couple hour deal as opposed to the old WOW style of having to add physical resources to the server farm which limited their response time to population increases since they are going with GoogleCloud. As OCE 1 reaches 10k cap OCE 2 will open up for business. They have stated that moving characters from one server to another is going to be a difficult and expensive process for the player to discourage such actions.
SWG had its own unique problems with player housing in that it allowed every single character to own 10 houses (size reduced the number, but still was alot). That is every character not account. You could place a house anywhere outside of a 1km ring outside NPC city hubs. They also had a player run city mechanic, and collideable harvesters and factory structures that players could place. The end result being is you had rings of dead structures surrounding cities that weren't actively being used by people that you still had to deal with when taking missions.
Why don't we wait and see what they come up with. Over the next 6 months leading up to persistent alpha we will get a better idea of how the game world size and terrain is going to look. Kinda a moot point to get panty twisted that there is going to be a gold rush on freeholds or a game breaking problem with placement with only the limited information we have so far.

ArchivedUser

Not every player plays every day and even if some do, they dont play 24 hours every day. If you aim for ~10000 online player population per server which steven said himself in one of the streams, you need about 3-4 times the amount of active players to maintain this number on average.
With 10000 active players, u will probably have pretty empty servers out of peak time. Which i hope wont happen, because im usualy online at weird times..
The initial gold rush for freeholds and city housing will happen for sure, haha
But it doesnt matter much because u will be abel to delevel nodes and destroy freeholds later on. Placement isnt a huge problem either, they just need to disabel a small area around mayor paths and other points of interest.