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Reality: Freeholds for Guilds only
pyreal
Member, Warrior of Old
With pooled resources being the realistically only path to success the Freehold system itself is basically a guild-centric feature. (Which is fine)
But while it requires a group effort it falls wholly under one person's control.
That type of system is ripe for unscrupulous attention. I've played EVE.
If the reality is that the freehold requires a guild (or streamer fanboys) why not make it a Guild feature in earnest?
The Guild (perhaps with pop reqs) itself bids and the Guild leader assigns permissions.
But while it requires a group effort it falls wholly under one person's control.
That type of system is ripe for unscrupulous attention. I've played EVE.
If the reality is that the freehold requires a guild (or streamer fanboys) why not make it a Guild feature in earnest?
The Guild (perhaps with pop reqs) itself bids and the Guild leader assigns permissions.
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also, consider that you need to be level 50 for a fh, and not everybody in the guild will hit 50 as fast as possible, that limits the amount of fh a guild can have for the first few months until their members hit 50, giving solo players and families mre opportunities to grab a fh vs a guild.
Join my guild and pool me money so i can get a freehold. I will let you use it.
And once established they raze your node and outbid you.
It's a cycle that, once established, requires pooled resources.
facepalm
i really want to explain to you how declaring works, how obtaining the declaration item is supposed to be difficult, how theres a cooldown, and how your guild will be fragmented within different nodes and not all members of your mega guild will be able to help raze your node. in fact, chances are you might even be screwing up your own guild members by attacking an opposing guild member node to take their fh, but i dont wanna type all that. go spend some time on the wiki or ask someone else to explain it to you.
I absolutely intend to join a guild.
Not really interested in Freeholds.
I just want a thriving and long lasting game, and that requires player emotional investment, and an excellent path for that is ownership.
A lot of folks were excited for Freeholds, as it was an original game element, and that has now been placed in end-game, top tier brackets.
It was never my goal but it sucks seeing excited players gut punched.
wont see a siege till probably end of month 2 / somewhere month 3 if the wiki info is still correct as it states that nodes cant be sieged for 21 days after an upgrade in node level. which means FH holders will have 1-1.5 months of Freedom.
yea they will raze it later on but first sieges will prob end up being lvl 4-5 depending and alot harder to raze early on. all FH talk is speculation at this point till we see it ingame and how hard it is to get a FH anyway, the quest that is required could be super hard and near impossible at fresh lvl 50 for all we know
And all that talk about "freeholds will only be picked up by XYZ" convenietly ignores one thing: Someone has to be there to buy it the second it becomes available.
When Node advances to tier 3 (for which there for now doesn't seem to be an indicator that gives a headsup, right?) it would take organization XYZ first of all to learn about that; then send a level 50 proxy char equipped with enough gold who is nearby and doesn't get held up and/or plundered in PvP to immediately pick up the quest for the freehold to outbid everyone else. And assuming that this character actually manages to pick up the freehold, now that organization has to stretch its resources thinner than before to actually make all this setup worth the effort.
Sure, there are a few people out there whose sole commitment will be to Ashes, but will it be to the degree that they will be able to dominate ALL the servers and THE WHOLE freehold market at ALL times, BY ANY MEANS even if it includes RMT? If thats what you think I'd suggest giving up on MMORPGs as a genre since there seems no way in this mindset for an MMO to ever be fun again as these groups overtake these games with no countermeasure possible.
This is the kind of cornering where even top end guilds don't have any freeholds.
The biggest issue is the accounts needed. Actually doing what needs to be done isn't hard.
What are you smoking?
I never said anything about a server wide shadowy organization scheming to own every Freehold.
I'll restate:
. Wherever a Freehold is bid on, the the largest bid will be a pooled one, and they will win. 1x2 beats 1x1.
. The pooled resources will come from a Guild.
. Guilds control all Freeholds.
Seems a logical progression to me...
This will be the general rule.
A few individuals will get a one early on, but once Guilds become established there won't be any more Freeholds in non-Guild hands.
Their bidding power can't be matched by individuals or small fry Guilds.
They're already serfs if they're apart of the 1k+ zerglord guilds.
Can't argue with such logic lol.
Depends how much the individual or small fry guilds RMT
If that doesn't describe you...
It is but only if these guilds would always be there when an auction is taking place or get time to do as you described. Sure, there is a chance for that but I don't see that to be very likely, unless the bidding periods are stretched so long that anyone gets the chance to strategize and organize like you laid out. And I doubt that will be the case.
Provided that this is what the system will be optimized for: yes. But we don't know if that is the case, but for that we will have to wait and see what this "vetting quest" will look like that Steven mentioned. I suspect it will be not a static system, the bidding process for higher tier node parcels will take longer while the ones for a parcel in a Villages ZOI will be fairly short (leaning more towards "first come first serve")
Only if that will be the sole mettric by which it will be decided who gets it, which I doubt to be the case as Steven said.
First, I think you are underestimating the organization of guilds.
My guild will know when any freehold on our server is up for sale.
Second, even if one particular guild isn't present for a sale, another guild will be. There will be actual dozens of somewhat large guilds (80+ players) on each server. Every single one of these guilds has the ability to take any freehold before someone in a guild of even 20 players.
Keep in mind, the bidding period is likely to be about a week.
Good luck with that.
I'll wait for the Alpha to see if that really applies. I suspect it will be a shorter time period for lower tiered Nodes, but even that can not be more than a suspicion.
And the whole debate about the freeholds seems centered around the assumptions that (1) the "vetting quest" that Steven mentioned will be completely irrelevant with only the biggest bank account being relevant and (2) that owning freeholds will always be a huge advantage, for the guild and the ZOI in which it is located. I don't see much reason to believe that either of these ideas actually represent the truth. But that also is just an opinion and lacking of confirmed information of Intrepid as any other opinion is.
We will see.
I don't see why they would have a different time period for a different size of node.
Keep in mind, the idea here is to provide players a non-land rush type system. They want players to have some time to pool resources and such.
At the very least, the auction time is going to be a couple of days - but that is unlikely.
3 - 5 days is quite possible.
A week is the easiest for players.
Either way, there will be plenty of time.
24 hours is more than enough time for any number of guilds to get organized to bid.
Realistically, do you see any period of time where a solo player can try and get some coing off of friends to make a bid, but a guild can't also get organizaed at the same time? Now keep in mind, I am not talking about a specific guild - just any guild that happens to be in the area.
In a perfect imaginary world where currency bidding based freehold acquisition isn't consumed by RMT, a solo player can surely save up enough money to get a parcel.
They won't get one on launch, probably not even close to launch, but after a year or so, after many sieges and acquisitions of freeholds by some other players, after the population has possibly died down a bit, after a lot of group players have got a taste of freeholds already and after this solo player has saved up a years worth of gold, they should be able to get one.
Should, I'd imagine.
Yeah, you've said you think this, but you haven't said how or why you think it.
On a server where there are 50+ guilds of 80+ people, where they all want freeholds either to use or to sell later on, where there is realistically only about 30 - 50 nodes that will even have freeholds for the first six months, there is literally no chance at all that a solo player can get a freehold off of the initial auctions.
The only chance they have is to buy one off of a player that is selling one. Doing this will be significantly more expensive than buying one in the first auction - and so is still unlikely to be achieved by a solo player.
I think you are seriously underestimating how organized a good guild is.
I did say it: Because I think that access will be more limited than just "who ever has the highest bid" and because I don't think the incentives to own a freehold will be at all times as high as people now make it out to be.
You rejected that notion, which is fine but since we are both speculating, I don't see what else there is to say about that.
The only other qualifier is the quest. This favors guilds over solo players (depending on the specifics of the quest), due to a guilds ability to easily block solo players from any specific quest update.
And yes, guilds will do this. We did it in Archeage and that was a game that didn't have much in the way of exclusivity for land.
just a heads up so people wont cry constantly in the forums next months too
major guilds will congerate close to the metro nodes nodes so any freehold away from the main population base wont be as hard to get and solo players will probaly be able to snag some the 2 small islands will probaly be prime realestate i feel since majority of players will probaly be on the 2 main continents
This is something people already know.
What would upset people as much as the freehold situation is if Intrepid came out and said "actually, mayors can take money out of the nodes funds to spend on personal things".
That would bring about as much of a change in the way people think about the game as the freehold system did.
People seem to be forgetting that vassal nodes cannot exceed their parent node. These big guilds everyone is afraid of won't have any interest in running a Village (stage 3) where freeholds first become available. Solo players and tight knit guilds will have plenty of opportunity to sow their seeds in these smaller nodes, away from the hustle and bustle of big guild politics.
I mean it's true, its no different than real life.
Join a corporation, get all of the wealth and labour one generates pushed to the top in promise of very little in return.
Suckers be suckers.