About the 5:1 Active Thing - Are 8 Cottages in 103 Villages Really Enough?

Tyranthraxus

Yours truly only learned about the plans for the "50k players/server" plan because it's become a hot topic lately, in this month's Q&A thread. It raised a few questions for me, that feel like good ideas to spread the discussion of:

1) Freeholds would naturally then be the primary place-of-residence for anyone who isn't able to grab a house in-town, once Villages grow into being. Do we have to place these such-and-such distance away from the Village to begin with, to accomodate the Node's future growth into Towns+? If not, what happens to the Freeholds that are too close to the Village, Town, City, etc, once it levels up and becomes larger?

2) Maybe this is a good thing? Freeholds are where animals and crops and materials-processing will take place, so perhaps it would be of benefit to a server to force the vast majority of players claim their Freeholds as their primary residences?

3) 8 times 103 is only 824; This will be the absolute maximum of the Cottages that are buy-able by citizens, and thus is also the max number of potential "main-street mansions" ('potential' because with 5 Metropolises, that's an actual max of 40 highest-level mansions). While the pre-launch prediction is 10k active players out of 50k players/server, this number seems incredibly low; That's less than 10% of the active player base being able to grab a house in a Village, before it levels up to a Town. I know the amount of housing increases with each new level past level 3, but especially with a predicted beginning of 50k players/server taking part in the launch-game's housing market, isn't 8 Cottages per Village really, REALLY low?

4) Governments can replace/remove buildings placed by former governments - so does this include occupied apartment buildings? SHOULD apartment buildings be remove-able, without restriction? (example: Mayor 1 initiates a removal-timer for an apartment building, and the next one - Mayor 2 - can either let that timer run out, or cancel the destruction)

I know that AoC's goals include a hot housing market, but these numbers just seem very odd. They are - of course - subject to change, before launch. If there's an equation or some type of math that this was based upon, it may benefit the to-be player-base to know what this equation or math is - just to put our minds at-ease about Housing.

Cathartidae

Where did you find the '8' number? I have trouble finding specific information on the wiki
In any case that does seem alarmingly low.

I was previously under the impression freeholds were rare and expensive, but node housing was more common - maybe you're right though, in that the intent is the reverse.

I think part of the question is related to how little we know about the makeup of nodes. How much of a node is 'empty' NPC housing versus how much is able to be purchased and used by players? How big are nodes actually expected to be with respect to population?

I've been imagining a setup where essentially every building is player owned or a public service, but that may have been a mistaken view. I suppose what I'd love to see in an ideal sense is there are plenty of static buildings - enough for a significantly higher fraction, say 25-50% of the population to be able to get one if so inclined, coupled with player owned shops, with a relatively small fraction of NPC owned service buildings - such as crafting, market, churches apartments, etc. Freeholds would then be the fairly rare and luxurious private estates out elsewhere.

I did some theorycrafting based on the size of the one metro we've seen, and with it being predominantly player owned it'd be trivial to have 15-20 purchasable buildings per tier in even a moderately sized node (2-3 minutes on foot from one end to the other.) If that's not the case though, I wonder about the intended size and the makeup of NPCs to players.