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Bidding is a terrible way to handle freeholds
Garrtok
Member, Alpha Two
Hi,
in my opinion bidding is and will be a horrible way to handle things.
It's an easy solution, and I get that Steven thinks "wouldn't it be cool if you can bid and trade these things etc.".
But it's a game, an MMO and you have to think about the implications.
Even in nodes etc. it's already clear that in most cases they will be ruled by large guilds. Also open pvp dungeons, fortresses etc.
Now we will have another aspect of the game that is highly locked for non super hardcore players. They (the guilds) will just collect money from their members and will win every single auction in a node and potentially sell these things.
And especially since the highest crafting tiers are locked behind freeholds, they will even get richer over time, because these guilds have the monopoly on top tier crafting.
I know that a node cannot be owned by a guild, but of course a guild can place their leader as a major. Instead of locking out other node citizens by keeping top tier crafting in freeholds, the big groups should contribute to the node itself and make the node special, good for other players and a desirable place. Top tier crafting should be shifted to node cities again!
New players will never ever have a chance to get access to such freeholds if the mechanic is handled this way.
Honestly I am thinking how intrepid can seriously think, that this is the way to go, i can barely think of a worse way to handle it.
It's okay that it's a big achievement, and you have to do something, but just putting a big price label on it feels so cheap.
What alternatives do we have?
I really hope that they will change this system.
in my opinion bidding is and will be a horrible way to handle things.
It's an easy solution, and I get that Steven thinks "wouldn't it be cool if you can bid and trade these things etc.".
But it's a game, an MMO and you have to think about the implications.
Even in nodes etc. it's already clear that in most cases they will be ruled by large guilds. Also open pvp dungeons, fortresses etc.
Now we will have another aspect of the game that is highly locked for non super hardcore players. They (the guilds) will just collect money from their members and will win every single auction in a node and potentially sell these things.
And especially since the highest crafting tiers are locked behind freeholds, they will even get richer over time, because these guilds have the monopoly on top tier crafting.
I know that a node cannot be owned by a guild, but of course a guild can place their leader as a major. Instead of locking out other node citizens by keeping top tier crafting in freeholds, the big groups should contribute to the node itself and make the node special, good for other players and a desirable place. Top tier crafting should be shifted to node cities again!
New players will never ever have a chance to get access to such freeholds if the mechanic is handled this way.
Honestly I am thinking how intrepid can seriously think, that this is the way to go, i can barely think of a worse way to handle it.
It's okay that it's a big achievement, and you have to do something, but just putting a big price label on it feels so cheap.
What alternatives do we have?
- A fixed price - first come first serve
- drop in pvx
- a questchain
- a certain contribution to the "node XP" in general
I really hope that they will change this system.
5
Comments
Why? How?
I always thought freeholds were going to be extremely limited and guilds would be the first to acquire the majority of them, I've been saying this for years, whoever thought casual players would be playing their farmville fantasy being a Master farmer/breeder just don't understand the game.
There are 3 types of Housing, only 1 out of 3 is being made as extremely rare and group focused, how is that bad?
The argument for P2W is also one of the worst an most ridiculous arguments I've been reading, because we will have LEGENDARY UNIQUE items that only 1 per server exist on an open economy with free trading.
How is RMT around freeholds an "issue" but not RMT around literal gear = Power lol people are just trying to find random reasons to complain.
In regards to the bidding system, whoever thought a casual player had Any chances to get a freehold, housing, BiS gear or anything at all in AoC before the biggest guilds never played EVE, L2, Archeage, or pretty much any MMO that Ashes takes inspiration from.
You need to be level 50 to unlock the freehold, so zero chance any casual will get there before the tryhards, and if gold is involved zero chance to get any large amount of gold before the tryhards.
So the 90% would already be left out in pretty much every scenario, however, they can still save up gold and buy one, someday.
Or they can accept what Steven has been saying for years that "not everyone will be a winner" and be happy with the other 2 types of housing.
Flying mounts, castles, legendary gear, world bosses, there are many things out of reach for players that do not want to be part of those large guilds, not only freeholds. Just like in every MMO that AoC takes inspiration from.
Archeages first month was a little hard to find space, but that was fixed fairly quickly.
What a rubbish response. Its like youre not saying what specifically is good about the bidding decision, youre just justifying it. That other MMOs do it also doesnt mean its good.
But in order to make the argument you'd have to clarify to Intrepid what the difference between the two content types is.
For a certain player type it's fine to tell someone 'just live in your instanced housing', if you need Crafting Stations rent them from the landed gentry.
It's just that a lot of people don't play fantasy MMORPGs to be serfs/peasants.
The guilds would be the ones who can come first. The guild will be the ones farming anyone and anything in pvx. The guilds will be the first ones to do questchains (PKing others, if they have to). Guilds are the ones contributing the most.
Like Liniker said, freeholds were literally always a guild thing (or at the very least a party one). People were god damn delusional if they thought that they'd be able to get a freehold solo. The "a ton of effort" that Steven kept saying in reference to freeholds pretty much meant "you'll need to be a hardcore player who'd be high on the guild ladder". But of course people didn't think about that because they thought they were a precious special and unique flower who'll be able to get anything and everything they want.
There is no reason you wouldn't be able to get a Freehold solo given the original information we had.
Now I accept that I'm just delusional here, but there was no data to indicate that you wouldn't be able to get one.
That doesn't make sense as a design to me when there was another obvious and still core-appropriate way for it to happen.
I'm a periwinkle personally.
Is it bad to be part of a large guild?
I like to be part of a guild and help it achieve it's goals. I get help too.
The only "solo" players who might've gotten a freehold outside of a bid system would've been the super hardcore people who played the game non-stop up until there were freeholds on sale. And in, like, 99% of cases those kinds of players would at the very least be in a group, which would then most likely be in a strong guild.
But even w/o that guild, a party like that would literally be able to put a good bid in the current system as well. So literally nothing changed imo. What am I missing?
why don't you join a guild then? instead of making a 5 people guild, join with your 5 friends to a bigger guild. everybody wants to be guild leader and get everybody to give them gear har har.
this is a PVP game. players compete against each other for the things you can acquire in the game, including freehold. not everybody is a winner.
also consider the following:
You could maybe completely prevent any relation of freeholds to guilds, so that the person with a freehold could not even join a guild, but at that point you'd alienate the same amount of people as right now, because the whole game is built around being in a guild (ideally).
Freeholds being bought up by guilds was always inevitable.
Nothing, I guess?
It's just not the first design a person thinking about a game they enjoy will think of given everything else about Ashes.
It's the fact that there's a scale, and the scale has now gone much further to one side than another. So Freeholds were explicitly made bigger, you can't bring them close enough to form communities, and now everyone who wants to do Farming or Animal Husbandry has a 72% chance of being a serf if not in a Guild who in turn has some incalculable chance of seeing or viewing them as a Serf anyway.
Ugh I don't even feel like talking about this, but...
The sensible way was always that Freeholds in GOOD spots were hard to get, and you could strike out to a far Node and have your own much less 'good' place, and at some point there would be people who would consider that 'not worth the time or effort' because it wasn't their play style. This is the healthy way.
The Freeholds are all still subject to danger but if you're living in the outlands with your family in some node no one pays attention to, you'd get one and no one would care because they can't just steamroll your choice with their money.
Do I need to explain the rest? I'm deciding if I'm a flower or a snowflake today.
If you lose the casual Farmville fantasy players this game will be a shadow of what it could be.
I've never understood why this is so hard to understand.
I'm a lifetime sub, so dedicated to this game I've been doing a regular show since 2016. The entire time (look our past interviews with Steven) I've only wanted a freehold to farm. That is my role here and a role that is being intentionally created by the development team. My life will simply not allow me to be a hardcore player. So the reality of the current situation is if I am never able to own a freehold and do things I have planned to, and been told all along I could, do I will probably end up living in Pax Dei.
Obviously this will be tested. But you now have a lot of players again considering what their future will actually be in Ashes.
And to follow on this, this is a design decision similar to the PvP oceans.
If there is a technical limitation with number of freeholds in the world itself, we haven't heard it. This is a decision that seems to say 'We have decided that this thing that many more casual players would aim for should be less available to them because it will make them more engaged with the social parts of the game'.
Except that it won't manage to do that until the game is 'dead' enough for them to do so. It's an activation energy barrier that doesn't need to exist as soon as bidding is involved. I'd normally assume that Steven just 'said something that got misinterpreted' because he's not thinking of how negative it seems, but Steven absolutely wants Freeholds to be a 'monumental achievement' which is not a thing I understood back in 2021 at least. Easily possible it was my bad.
The question is why.
Their farming system alone should solve any economic problems. Having more people with investment in your territory to rule over and protect is good for nodes and castles.
What's the point of making a system where 50 people living in an apartment in your Node don't care if the Node gets razed to the ground and might be there thinking 'oh sweet yeah burn the whole thing I might get a Freehold maybe!'
It's somehow fitting that this was so close to a 4th of July announcement.
We don't know how long the bidding period will be. We don't know how many parcels of land will be available as soon as the node levels up to stage 3. And we don't know how the bidding process/result will be designed.
What if everyone in the bidding race loses their money? Now you can wait till the later parcels start their bid races and know that several groups have already lost their money on the previous bids (obviously others will do this as well, so it's not as easy as I put it).
What if the bid timer is somewhat short and it starts as soon as someone puts up the first bid. Hell, what if the size of the bid controls the timer? Now if you're a super hardcore player with a ton of money and you managed to be the first one to put a big bid on a parcel (smth like x10 the initial price) - the timer is real short and others simple won't try to outbid you (cause there's other parcels) or just won't have the time to do so.
We still lack information about the system. Though I'm now 80% sure that Steven will go completely back on this design cause people are furious.
Maybe I'm just too jaded about this, but I've always seen freeholds as something that guilds will just buy out as soon as possible. Any and all of them. Freeholds always had artisanry related to them (iirc), so they always had at least some intrinsic value outside of the "my pretty house in a pretty place" lifestyle. And anything that has value will be stolen by those who have the means to do it. And guilds always have those means.
To be fair this isn't really a 'loss' exactly in comparison, if Steven had pitched it as it is now, he'd have got who he will keep.
Those players aren't really 'losses' in the design sense.
Remains to be seen what Intrepid will do about refunds, since I don't think they're required to give them.
I expect to see a LOT of RMT suddenly though. The number of people who will want to sell their Alpha-2 access or similar is about to go up.
I never said I'd level solo. I have a guild. I'd level with my own 16hour crews. However, there's a difference between levelling with a crew and being forced to amalgamate skins with people with different tastes.
ok lets break that down. you are a casual player, so maybe you play a couple of hours a day. and I'm a hardcore player and play 10+ hours a day.
chances are it will take you months to level up your professions and get everything you need to start crafting the gear that everyone will want to buy. on the other hand, I can get there much, much faster than you, contribute to the economy, my guild, etc. on top of that, even if you get there, how much output will you produce a day or a week? maybe you will be able to craft one piece of gear a month and ill be crafting 10.
on top of that, I will be readily available to defend or attack in PVP. there is a node war? im there. castle siege? im there. boss? im there, etc etc.
lets imagine for a min that every freehold is owned by casuals who only play a few hours a week. since gearing up is locked behind refining, and refining is locked behind freehold, people will never (or at least not in a reasonable amount of time) will get the gear they want. now they cant clear content, they cant farm the hard places, cant do the raid bosses, etc because their gear acquisition is locked behind the time other players have to contribute to the economy. i would even say that giving freehold to FarmVille casuals is toxic and makes it so that people wont be able to gear up, and those few who manage to gear up, will dominate for a long time.
so I want to know again how casuals contribute more to the health and longevity of the game?
if you log in a couple of hours a week to play FarmVille, you're basically playing a solo game at this point. you arent doing anything that contributes to the economy. in fact, it would be more beneficial for the game if you just quit and someone else took your freehold, someone who plays more hours than you and contributes to everything
edit: oh and please don't say something like hey its a mmorpg, its not a sprint, its a marathon, enjoy the game, etc. people enjoy the game in many different ways, and if you want to play 2 hours a week and just farm, that's fine, but if I wanna rush and kill a boss before the next expansion comes out, then that's fine too, that's what some people enjoy.just don't say that super casuals contribute more to the game. all they contribute is 15 a month which can be replaced by another person paying 15 a month and contributing to the game.
This doesn't play out this way in the other games I have similar experience with.
This happens because of bad economic design. It's the same as IRL markets.
Also when I say 'hard to get' I meant time investment, possibly into the Node itself.
This is definitely a 'I don't have a Lead Economy Designer' tier decision, but explaining it would require a Lead Economy Designer, wouldn't it...
It doesn't matter if Steven goes back on it if Steven has the same wish for the type of world he wants and/or doesn't understand why this choice is suboptimal even for his own goals. Or maybe Steven's goal is explicitly to have this type of experience be the norm. I wouldn't rule it out, given his life experience as I know it.
Either way, it's not really worth the time to talk about. If the decision is fine, then things will succeed. If it isn't fine, it's 'bad enough to have brought into question if Steven intends for this game to be enjoyable to many players'. Which, frankly, he probably doesn't, or at least doesn't think in terms of 'enjoyable' in the way most people do.
Peasants and serfs irl have to be pushed really far to revolt because they only get one life, they don't have choices. In an MMORPG, quitting is easier than organizing a revolution.
This is a design principle that must be accounted for when making this game type.
Yeah. I have issues around that. I wanted to be in a military node and be a bounty hunter but most of my guild don't want to be in a military node. Thus, we would level together and then split our own way to create a home. However, now I'm not so attached to freeholds or nodes so my whole ethos has changed.
The farmville type player will play the game more than you will.
Well, maybe not in Ashes - but that is the point.