Sieges at lvl50
So we've got new info that mobs in castles will be lvl50, which means that yet another big part of the game is only reserved for late game (just as freeholds are), instead of being accessible throughout the game.
What are yalls thoughts on that? I would personally prefer if they were around 35-40, if not even slightly sooner. Having castles at lvl50 just means that all even semi-hardcore guilds are highly encouraged to only boost vertical lvls to be the first ones to get a castle, just as they are encouraged to do the same for freeholds.
In other words, even though Intrepid have been saying that they want the gameplay to matter across all levels - we now have 2 huge features locked behind max lvl. And this in turn means that the only guilds who own castles early on are max lvl guilds, which then means that any guild that's lagging even a bit behind, in terms of lvls, won't be able to siege a player-held castle, cause they're way weaker. Which means we have a yet another game-based snowball effect for strongest guilds.
I'm all for strong people being strong, but I'd prefer if they didn't have so much damn snow to make their snowballs into fucking avalanches.
Edit to add a more in-depth explanation of my perceived issue with this design:
Let's say it's 100h to lvl35 and another 125h to lvl50. Let's say hardcore guilds play 16h/d, while semi-hardcores play 8h and everyone else plays 3h.
If sieges can be started at lvl35, hardcores would be doing it on day 6. They'd spend some time farming good gear (cause you still gotta beat the mobs there and I hope those mobs are hard) and all of these hardcore guilds would also be fighting for the castles, because at this point it's a pve raid with dps checks, so the entire process might take several days for any given castle.
Let's say that in the most positive circumstances it takes a hardcore guild 4 days to get a castle. That's 64h in their time, where the only true progress they've made is got some gear at lvl35 and got the castle.
Semis would be ~2 days behind lvl35 by this point, and would've gained 8 days-worth of their time against the hardcores (64h that hardcores spent on the castle).
Now the hardcore guild with a castle need to spend a ton of their time on leveling up their castle nodes and defending their weekly tax caravans - all of which removes time from their direct vertical progress.
This means that the gap between hardcore guilds with castles (who are supposed to snowball due to the castle) and other guilds is now way more narrow.
And then lets look at a lvl50 castle siege.
It's ~14 days for hardcore guilds to get to 50 and then, say, another week to gear up properly (longer cause gear would probably be more difficult to get at this lvl). So 21 days to be ready to get the castle. It'd be difficult to measure how many hardcore guilds would be fighting for those castles at lvl50, cause some of them would instead spend money on freeholds, some might not get their hands on gear to the same extent so might not risk it, so let's say it's "on-day acquisition" of the castle.
At day 21 of the server the semi-hardcore guilds would only be at their ~170h of gameplay, which is still ~50h away from lvl50 and god-knows-how-long until they can gear up. But let's say they somehow manage to gear up in another 50h after getting lvl50. Which means ~12 days after hardcore guilds have gotten a castle.
Those 12 days mean almost 2 weeks of tax caravans and 2 castle nodes of defenses built up. So the hardcore guilds with castles would already be a few steps into their snowballing, at which point the inertia might carry them through the first siege and then the snowball is even bigger. And this is not even talking about their ability to use that initial inertia to hire mercs who'd fill up the siege slots and would prevent other guilds from joining the siege.
And I'd say this kind of layout is close to "best case scenario" for the semi-hardcore guilds. I'd expect it to be way worse if the lvl50 sieges stick around.
