First, please read the wiki:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Processing_stationsMy first question to you all is, do you think processing stations should be "instanced" per player, so to speak, or not?
For example, if a processing station is instanced, player A can enter the fuel and the materials and simply wait the amount of hours or days before the goods are done. Meanwhile, player B that has access to the very same station can do the same simultaneously with player A. This is what most people are used to in other games with public forges and such in cities. Usually in those games we are talking about seconds or minutes only though, not hours and days. Edit: Parallel processing, as CROW3 calls it.
If the stations are
not instanced, player B has to wait the amount of hours or days before they can load in their own materials and start getting them processed.
For Freeholds, I am very much assuming that stations are not instanced. This means that even if there are 8-9 people in the family, they have to wait until the station is done (or halt it prematurely) before they can process any more or different raw materials. In other words, there is a max output capacity per freehold that cannot be exceeded no matter how many players are feeding it materials.
We obviously don't know how hard it will be to keep a processing station working full time. Maybe 8-9 people are required to feed and tend to all the stations available on a freehold. Maybe even more. Organized groups that all agree on what to process and can properly share the profits will excel, if that's the case.
But what about processing stations in nodes?
If we assume that it's true we can do processing up to Journeyman level in a node, that has to mean processing stations exist in nodes. If those stations aren't instanced, players will have to camp the stations to even hope to get a free slot. That seems really bad. So I guess they have to be instanced per player? Possibly limited to citizens only, and possibly even limited in numbers below that.
If novice and journeyman tier processing stations have unlimited slots in nodes, I guess those materials are going to be fairly plentiful. We know lower tier goods are needed to make higher tier goods, so that would make sense to some degree.
A balancing factor could be that the in-node workstations require the player to be present at all times while the goods are processing, but I hope that isn't the case. That just makes for boring gameplay that players will try to bot or script.
Tying it into scarcity
If my assumption is correct and freehold processing stations aren't instanced per player, then giving more people access to the freehold (like guild mates) doesn't really help the main issue of gating content behind them because they will be too scarce and sought after.
That's going to be very important as you get to very late game processed materials that are required. Because some of these things might have days to process within a station, but if you have spent the time and done the work to advance that processing station you could cut that down considerably, perhaps even greater than 50 percent; and that's going to have a significant impact on your ability to either control markets or to create goods
It takes days for the late game stuff, and everyone have to agree on what to make. Unless Intrepid decides to make it really hard to feed the processing stations, and really double down on requiring a group effort to feed them with any sense of efficiency, the rich and powerful will want to get as many freeholds they can. If a single person with a lot of play time can reasonably feed the processing stations, it will exacerbate the problem.
Guild Halls
If guild halls have processing stations, then if they are not instanced they are really no better than a freehold, and won't help alleviate the gating of content since we can only have around 45 GHs on a server. If they are instanced, and guild members can do parallel grand-master processing per member, then they are overpowered.
I think we need an article or dev stream on Guild Halls before we speculate too much though.
