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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
I didn't read that freehold family shares the house. Freehold family only have access to the freehold and it's facilities and harvests.
One other part of those calculations should take into consideration are those who are family of a freehold, but may hold citizenship and housing in another node far away. Maybe they are in the family use the freehold for processing and harvest. But their citizenship and house is in an economic metropolis many zones away
Were explicitly told the family system can relate up to 9 characters, and that they can have access to the housing in a Freehold based on permission granting by the family head. Thus everything I described is conservative, 5 per Freehold would simply be the average.
You are correct thought that this dose not look to preclude a character also owning some Node housing. But I think such overlapping will be very minimal as people will want to avoid superflous travel like that and concentrate their wealth/items/economic activity in one area, this is what we see in nearly every game which lacks fast travel for characters or goods.
It’s just kind of disappointing that after the hype about them and many building cosmetics put on offer, freeholds aren’t actually a realistic goal to strive for unless you plan on running a full fledged guild.
10% really is absurdly low if that’s a hard cap on availability
These are guild owned structures which look to be able to be placed in the Node or out in the Baronies, I would assume that Guilds would focus on having these properties rather then gobbling up large numbers of Freeholds which would be a pain to travel between. The whole discussion so far looks to have just ignored this possibility.
I'll check on it, but I feel like last we heard, it was that GuildHalls are actually a subfunction of Freeholds.
Like, you have to have a Freehold 'plot' or spot to put it on. It might not be 'this is a regular Freehold and then you put a Guild hall on it too', it might be specifically 'this is a Freehold spot and you can take up the entire thing with a Guild Hall'.
Guess I'll edit ifwhen I find it.
EDIT: Nah I give up, it's no clearer than any other time, but we're due to ask a bunch of Freehold questions for next livestream I guess. So I guess 'no I haven't considered the existence of GuildHalls, because I didn't think they work how you seem to think they work'.
Guilds will have enough money to get both. And iirc halls are also limited, so it'd be a thing for the super guilds, while big-mid guilds will try taking whatever freeholds are leftover once the super guilds are done buying them up.
Remember that GuildHalls definitely DO one thing relative to Freeholds/Estates in their Barony: BONUSES.
Whatever those are.
I def wouldn't be thinking about 'letting randos get the bonuses from my Guild Hall' if I was one of those unscrupulous Baronesses that only cares about crushing competition.
I bet your right. The Alpha Phase 3 roadmap lists "Guild Freeholds" as a system. So already a number of the Freeholds will be taken out of the housing calculation because they are in service for the guild halls.
If the one thing satisfies your needs then aquiring more is wastefull. In a lot of games people might hoard things they don't need just for the thrill of power. But Freeholds are TAXED, while it looks like GuildHalls are not and are the more prestigious and high cost option.
Also look back at the math I did. How much of a servers population do you think is going to be in 'Mega guilds', cause I see Freeholds as having the capacity to comfortably hold 30% of Server population, aka 15k. A zerg group of a thousand players in it if evenly spread across the map would be expected to be EVERY SINGLE PLAYER in an area of 1.7 Nodes which by my estimate would contain 61 FreeHolds on top of the node housing they would control. They only start to deprive others of housing if they are taking MORE then that and I find that very unlikely.
Or at the very least you push them out of your near vicinity to the other side of the world, which makes it way harder for them to fight you as well as they could otherwise.
If I was a megaguld GL - I'd aim at buying up as many FHs around the nodes I want to control as possible. Because control of these things is what leads you to winning more.
FHs will be in the low thousands, theoretically serving x8 of that number (cause famillies and shit). But that is only theoretical, because it's not necessary to stop buying FHs if you've filled out your family relations with FHs.
Also their is no compelling economic reason to monopolize everything this way, the gathering and processing that non-guild members do in the ZOI of the guilds home node contribute to Node development irregardless of guild membership which is good for the patron guild. And the resources produced will flow IN to the Node for sale, because crafting is centered in Nodes, so the Guild will be able to buy up thouse materials without needing to be vertically integrated. Lastly the Freeholds pay taxes which contribute to node building and structures so again trying to push out little groups of players will hurt not help the node, unless a guild is actualy able to generate more total economic activity then the prior owners of a Freehold made.
As for your last statement it's not entirly clear, but it sounds like you think people can own multiple Freeholds? Were explicity told that FH ownership is limited to one per account. And given the way that Family system is supposed to be tied to Freeholds it may actually be limited to one Freehold per family aka anyone in a 'landed' familiy can't bid on a 2nd Freehold. I'm more confident that Guilds will only be able to own 1 GuildHall, atleast not without spending guild perks to raise the cap. But ultimatly that is just my speculation.
Now obviously a guild could just go and make a bunch of 1 man families and try to have every member own a Freehold, but this is just pointlessly inefficient for the large guild because Freehold cost resources to develop their high level processing so it makes more sense to invest heavily into a smaller number of fully developed Freeholds atleast up to the point where you maxout the resource processing throuput and need more capacity, or travel distance becomes an issue. Again the kind of greedy 'monopolize everything just to deny it to anyone else' playstyle you think is smart behavior (because it generally was in past games I will admit) is discouraged in many many ways by the design. And I would suspect that IS will put in additional disinsentives if these are not enough.
Will Guilds position their members to own local Freeholds, YES, but so long as it in proportion to the guilds population then it's not going to result in monopolization and the shutting out of every small group that wants a FreeHold. Infact the senario I see being more common is for Guilds to invite these little groups of farm-sim casuals to settle near them and even offer to subsidize the purchase of the FreeHold in order to recruit them into an informal network of assosiates which can then be recruited to the guild proper.
Then we simply disagree on how far huge guilds will go to overwhelm their enemies.
Blown past falling sands…
No we disagree on WHAT would be an efficient way to do so. Could a Megaguild attempt to monopolize every tree in the game and constantly guard them to prevent anyone else from getting wood, Yes they COULD do that, but it would be stupid and inefficent use of guild member time. Your problem is that you can't concive of anything but the senario your portraying as being 'opimal' and just think that anyone who says otherwise is actually saying that "guilds are lazy, they won't play in optimal ways" without actually hearing the arguments being made.
Ofcourse this will all need to be tested, I don't doubt for a second people will TRY the approatch you are describing, but I think they will rapidly find it to be ineffective, and if they don't then IS will make changes so that they do find it ineffective, they have always made it clear that they think small groups should be viable.
The second gate is an auction, and gold is easily transfered so this is SUPER easy for a guild to pool it's resources on so it presents us with practically a worst case senario. I suspect because of this IS has said that some (not clear how many, but the more the better) auctions are spontaniously conducted in 'node currency', the exact nature of this stuff is not clear other then the node type dertermines how it is earned and it is non-transferable between players. This is good as it will prevent a guild fromm pooling node currency to win the auction. Still any person with stockpiled currency could partispate in the auction, So first simple recomendation, non-transferability of node currency between Nodes, this will allow only locals to partispate in these auctions.
Now backing up to the first gate a aquiring a Deed through a questline. The nature of which is unclear. My recomendation, strongly tie the quest to obtaining a high (but not nessarily top) rank in a processing proffession, atleast a level above Journeyman which is where Node processing stations max out. This narrows Freehold ownership to thouse who are activly pursuing processing proffessions AND have aquired the skills to make good economic use of the FreeHold should they get it, what should be avoided though is something like processing a large quantity of materials, as this would encourage guilds to pump rar materials through one player. Gathering skills might also be permissable as a means to finish the quest, but craft skills would be useless, and ideally adventuring level would be irrelivent as well.
Lastly the GuildHalls should be aquired by a method which dose allow guild-guild competition. We know the top guild contibuting XP to a node becomes the Nodes 'Patron Guild' and gets the privlage of placing their Guild Hall in the node iself or in a Barony. It is not clear if Guild Halls in Baronies will be able to replicate the processing ability of Freehold but I think they should. Meanwhile a GuildHall in a node should be getting access to top craft stations. This might mean that the plots of land size and buildings are very different between the two options with GuildHalls in Baronies possibly being much larger then normal FreeHolds. As Nodes level up more guildhalls can be accomodated and these should logically go to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc most contributing guilds. Each guild can choose what location to utilize provided that room is available. GuildHalls located in Barony can be given thematic names appropriate to the Node type, for example Monestary for a Divine node, WarCamp for Military and would have access to special buildings and bonuses based on this.