World progression for casual players

Albireo

I am not very proficient at forums but I just jumped into this hype train a few days ago and I will be following AoC closely also hoping to participate in some beta if possible. As a full-blown adult with many responsibilities and little to no time for gaming I still enjoy casually playing MMOs. The nostalgia that it brings and the fulfillment of achieving some of the content in this online multiplayer games have always brought me more satisfaction than any console or one player game. I am fully onboard and extremely excited about many of the systems that AoC will bring and some of them are a dream as an MMO player for 15+ years. Like Steven, I also dedicated part of my youth to Lineage 2 and I see some of that reflected in this game.

What I would like to open for conversation with the community its the opinion of such a fast-paced sandpark on the casual player. The Nodes will be the cornerstone of each region and them being highly contested brings a lot of change that a casual player might not be able to keep up with. Let's create a hypothetical. I usually play if possible during a week 2 to 3 hours at night and maybe a bigger chunk of time one day of the weekend. Sometimes I might not be able to log in for a span of 4 to 5 days. How will my progression be affected if the node was sieged will I was away and I have smaller chunks of time to kinda relocate and start a new progression. I am not saying I don't want to invest the time needed to achieve something if it takes 20 hours and someone who is hardcore can do it in a day or two and it takes me two to three weeks to do it I'm fine. I don't want anything handed to me, for the game to be easier, or to have shortcuts because I am unable to put the time in. But what I see is a fast-paced changing open world that will further dampen my efforts to always try to "catch up". Maybe there are things in place to accommodate this already I am fairly new to consuming the content of what has been created already. Just wanted to see everyone else's opinion and if my point is even valid.

HazardNumberSeven

When a place is sieged they can loot the stuff inside, so you'll lose that.
If your home is destroyed you'll get all your decorations and stuff mailed to you, though! So that's good.

You should still be able to progress just fine, because sieges are rare and you have days of warning in advance (depending on node level) and a pretty long cool-down after (many days) before it can happen again, and it's also just a lot of effort.

There's so many avenues for a casual player to progress, I'm sure you can make it solo but to be safe you could always join a guild to help you along.

2-3 hours every few days should be totally fine. The world will change a lot, but I doubt it will be fast at all.

HazardNumberSeven

Just going to slap a few snippets from the wiki here before I pass out from exhaustion. It's 2am over here!

On castle sieges
"Sieges occur once a month."
"A guild that captures a castle will own that castle for a month before it is sieged again."

Node sieges
"declaration ... countdown runs for a number of days equal to the level of the Node being sieged."
" There is a cooldown between sieges, and players must wait a certain amount of time after an unsuccessful siege before a new siege can be declared. The higher the Node level, the longer the cooldown between sieges."

So even with your stated playtimes it looks like you will be more than present enough to witness, influence and even participate in all the biggest changiest content of the world.

IYI

My guess is most players who want to play solo will have to play like a rat and scurry from town to town if the current town they're inhabiting is getting raided / sieged etc. But that's just my thoughts