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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.
Freeholds: A Worthwhile Investment?
Sengarden
Member, Alpha Two
TL;DR: If property churn is frequent enough to not piss off waiting buyers, will ownership and development of freeholds become a hectic cat and mouse game without a relatively clear return on investment? If freehold ownership and development lasts long enough to make a reliable return on investment and satisfy the effort required to purchase, will this require churn to be so infrequent that waiting buyers grow impatient and either abandon their profession or leave the game?
Hello all,
With freeholds now being quite exclusive, and also the only way to achieve the top 2 tiers of roughly 1/3 of the artisanship content in the game, it’s clear that any serious processor will need to get their hands on a freehold if they want that endgame content. No one’s going to get ahead or “make much of a living” sitting in the massive pool of other processors stuck at T3 processing.
However, freehold acquisition is only the beginning. We’ve seen the relatively extensive skill trees available for all freehold buildings. I imagine that advancing these trees by any significant degree would take a lot of time. If I had to guess, at least a couple months, especially when everyone hits 50 for the first time. If it’s easy to blast through the skill trees, why bother having them?
So we’ve got something highly valuable that’s necessary to own in order to experience the endgame of 1/3 of the artisanship professions, and that will likely take multiple months of time to get running at peak efficiency.
Now, we’ve had people defending the exclusion of this content from the majority of the player base by suggesting that there will be a lot of churn, that there will be regular opportunities for players waiting on the sidelines to get into the market. When I think of “a lot” of churn, I imagine something like 2-3 months. That argument is used in order to assuage any fears that there will be long-term lockouts on property. Any longer than 3 months stuck waiting for a refresh with enough money to purchase and I think non-owning players will lose patience.
Let’s pair up those two estimates. Personally, I don’t want to lose my investment and relocate as soon as I’ve gotten my investment making a return and an attachment to my community and place in the world developed. Because let’s face it, they’ll be very expensive, and I doubt you’d make that kind of money back in a matter of weeks alone. And while the cost of some freeholds will be less than others, that cost is directly related to the predicted return on investment, so it’s all relative.
So, if “churn” equates to roughly as much time as it would take to make back the money you spent on the property and time you spent gathering resources to build/upgrade buildings, what’s the point to freeholds other than putting an arguably unnecessary obstacle in the way of 1/3 of artisanship classes’ progression where the others have no true equivalent?
The obvious ways to try and break this issue is to either have churn take longer so freeholds are able to more reliably make a return, which would then make the issue of property being locked out more prominent, or by making the advancement of skill trees so easy, the return on investment so quick, and churn so rapid, that freehold ownership and loss will just become a hectic cat and mouse game.
What do you all think? Has anyone else thought about or been concerned by these thoughts?
Hello all,
With freeholds now being quite exclusive, and also the only way to achieve the top 2 tiers of roughly 1/3 of the artisanship content in the game, it’s clear that any serious processor will need to get their hands on a freehold if they want that endgame content. No one’s going to get ahead or “make much of a living” sitting in the massive pool of other processors stuck at T3 processing.
However, freehold acquisition is only the beginning. We’ve seen the relatively extensive skill trees available for all freehold buildings. I imagine that advancing these trees by any significant degree would take a lot of time. If I had to guess, at least a couple months, especially when everyone hits 50 for the first time. If it’s easy to blast through the skill trees, why bother having them?
So we’ve got something highly valuable that’s necessary to own in order to experience the endgame of 1/3 of the artisanship professions, and that will likely take multiple months of time to get running at peak efficiency.
Now, we’ve had people defending the exclusion of this content from the majority of the player base by suggesting that there will be a lot of churn, that there will be regular opportunities for players waiting on the sidelines to get into the market. When I think of “a lot” of churn, I imagine something like 2-3 months. That argument is used in order to assuage any fears that there will be long-term lockouts on property. Any longer than 3 months stuck waiting for a refresh with enough money to purchase and I think non-owning players will lose patience.
Let’s pair up those two estimates. Personally, I don’t want to lose my investment and relocate as soon as I’ve gotten my investment making a return and an attachment to my community and place in the world developed. Because let’s face it, they’ll be very expensive, and I doubt you’d make that kind of money back in a matter of weeks alone. And while the cost of some freeholds will be less than others, that cost is directly related to the predicted return on investment, so it’s all relative.
So, if “churn” equates to roughly as much time as it would take to make back the money you spent on the property and time you spent gathering resources to build/upgrade buildings, what’s the point to freeholds other than putting an arguably unnecessary obstacle in the way of 1/3 of artisanship classes’ progression where the others have no true equivalent?
The obvious ways to try and break this issue is to either have churn take longer so freeholds are able to more reliably make a return, which would then make the issue of property being locked out more prominent, or by making the advancement of skill trees so easy, the return on investment so quick, and churn so rapid, that freehold ownership and loss will just become a hectic cat and mouse game.
What do you all think? Has anyone else thought about or been concerned by these thoughts?
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Yeah, there are a lot of variables for sure. I personally love the concept of freehold ownership, and as someone who loves complex alchemy and cooking systems, it seems like I’ll need one in order to get to a satisfactory level of complexity and achievement in those professions. Just sounds highly frustrating to think that maintaining those business practices will require frequent relocation, rebuilding, and reinvestment into building-related progression trees in order to make sure “everyone” gets a fair shot by making node sieges and freehold destruction easy enough to not lose the patience of anyone who didn’t get to the finish line first.
Yep, which takes some of the shine off “exclusivity”.
That said, you’re right, @Fantmx … the shelf life is getting lost in translation for many Forum-goers.
And to be clear I am not saying I agree with that approach. I am just choosing to not turn a blind eye to the obvious.
Yes I think so. But it will be highly variable. I'm just theorizing here, like I said in my official feedback, this system and Ashes as a whole is too complex (and still too unknown) for me to reliably know wtf I'm talking about.
But I think part of why they're going with this speculative real estate market of bidding and direct sales based on perceived value of the plot is because plot values will vary. Location in regards to nearby resources and points of interest on the map will matter of course.
The real kicker is going to be the safety and stability of the area though. Freeholds will be more valuable in nodes that are perceived as not likely to lose a siege. Freeholds in nodes that don't have the protection of a known powerful guild/alliance will be viewed as more risky, so prices should be lower.
And then just general safety of the area - does the dominant guild in the area (or just the people in general) patrol their turf and deal with bandits regularly? If yes, that'll make the freehold under that kind of protection more valuable. If not, it's more risky and less valuable.
So the end result of this - person A pays 10,000 gold for a freehold in a very safe and secure area. Good investment. Person B pays 10,000 gold for a freehold in the boonies and loses it shortly thereafter in a siege. Person B shouldn't have paid 10,000 if 10,000 was the fair value of the more "safe" freehold that person A bought. Person B made a bad investment.
I mean yes, that's the current iteration of the design plan. That's not my question though, my question was whether that sounds like fun to you. This is a game, after all! And I won't lie, part of that "staying on your toes" concept does sound entertaining. Just wondering if burning through the same process of finding a home, grinding it out, leaving, finding a new home, grinding it out again, over and over again just to make any decent sort of profit with the profession skills you already worked to master would become tedious. Of course, ownership and operation of the same freehold for months on end could become tedious as well. This just puts more obstacles in the way (not necessarily a bad thing).
TBH that's a bit strange to me, as well. Some professions have a clear pathway: mining, metalworking, smithing. The "processing" aspect of metalworking is fairly obvious and makes sense. Then you have herbalism and alchemy. Alchemy is technically processing raw ingredients into potions, but what you get is a finished product, which I would define as crafting. Unless alchemy also involves the creation of magical substances for other crafting professions, I don't understand what it's doing in the processing family. Same goes for cooking, but I highly doubt that will involve making components for crafting professions. If it's a matter of requiring a processing profession to be placed between the gathering stage and the crafting stage in order for the crafting to actually be put into the crafting tree, one could argue that farming and animal husbandry are the processing professions that feed into cooking as the end-product profession, and I wouldn't be surprised if some farming and animal husbandry practices would produce alchemy reagents as well.
It also seems strange that, by Steven's claim of needing a freehold to achieve the highest two tiers of processing professions, I (for some reason) need 1.5 acres of land to mix the best potions on a couple of potion-making tables that I could theoretically fit into an apartment or in-node-house. Same goes for cooking if I own a large enough kitchen. I'm genuinely interested to see what the plans are for the four different large processing stations required for top tier alchemy and cooking. I'm having a hard time imagining what could possibly be necessary at that scale, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.
There has been talk of defending a freehold, but I can't tell if that means defending the node? I think it would be a nice second layer to a node siege if the freeholds were able to defend themselves during the the aftermath. A good enough defense (or being a small fish no one bothers to attack) means you still own a functioning freehold at the end of the looting phase of a successful node attack.
In some cases there will be collateral damage to freeholds. Low power freeholds that get destroyed because they're in the wrong node even though they were not targeted at all. I'd agree that these guys got "churned"
I'm still of the opinion that node attacks are going to be fairly rare (due to cost of the siege declaration), and successful ones even rarer.
Carpenter can make stoves. I wonder if cooking can be done on the stove. I did request cooking to be done on the stove in a house rather than an industrial sized smoke house.
For sure. And I acknowledge that there are a lot of player-driven variables here. Definitely not random, but certainly not consistent or predictable either. The point I was trying to make with the rough generalization of what "churn" might look like was to reference the arguments being made by people defending the exclusivity of the node system. I've heard people say that property will be churned through regularly due to node sieges, so therefore, no one should be worried about property being locked down for months on end without enough opportunities for new buyers to get into the market. And this may be true in some places where war is frequent and the node levels are below the metro stage where declaring and launching a siege is less costly, but I agree with you that once you get to the metropolis stage, that city (if operated well and supported by strong guilds) should not fall very often. A metropolis being successfully sieged and taken over by a neighboring node should (imo) be a massive deal.
In such case, those properties may not change hands more often than 2-3 times a year. And in that case, you've got players who want to live in that node, who've maybe developed a sense of community there, who are passionate about pursuing processing professions, and who have cash on hand to buy property waiting 4-6 months just to have a chance at bidding on a plot. And even if they do get that opportunity due to a node siege and a "wipe" of the regional terrain, they'll have to deal with no longer being in a metro of the type they wanted to live in. Only other option is to abandon your community and try to buy property in a more volatile market / risk losing your stuff before making a decent return on investment.
As for freehold defence, I agree that it should be something that players can invest in. It should be very costly, but you should be able to upgrade your walls, your gates, and if a siege is declared, even hire some NPC guards for a hefty sum to help defend your property. With how valuable the land is, I think many will choose, if they can, to keep their land and accept citizenship in whatever new territory comes about if they happen to fall under new borders.
Of course, with all this talk of freehold defence, we're also now suggesting that this "churn" concept will happen even less frequently if people always choose to defend their freehold first before bothering to get caught up in the battle back at their home node. In which case, even fewer freeholds will become available after the two hours of pillaging following a successful siege.
More than anything, I think we'll just have to see how social dynamics play out in A2. What will the priority chain be for most people between valuing their node, their freehold, their local community, their guild, etc? What will people be willing to fight, relocate, and sacrifice for, and invest in? To be determined.
Oh, I'm sure. And I'm sure they'll be able to make higher quality ones, up to a certain point. Actually, this makes me wonder whether or not you'll be required to own a tavern or other business that sells food in order to make an industrial-sized kitchen for the top two tiers of cooking. That would take up at least one building slot. But again, same as a home kitchen, that still leaves three other "processing" buildings. And the way they're described makes them sound as though they're able to be used in any context with that profession, because they all build off of each other: "each processing station will build on itself and into the other stations." Hard to say what it will entail.
I don't think you get it. YOU don't matter. A group of friends, don't matter. The guilds matters. The powerful ones, not the small ones.
Guilds will decide what happens in the world, you're just a bystander. Unless you have a position of power in a guild, you can almost consider yourself an NPC.
If a node is destroyed, that means the guild in power wasn't strong enough, but they probably have other freeholds prepared so they don't lose processing.
We as players don't matter. This is a guilds game.
The rise-and-fall nature of nodes, and the sieges players can hold on freeholds will see to this ^_^
The saving of building upgrade progress does a ton to show me that building upgrades will actually be a rich, long term endeavor achieved over several months, and that if you make the investment in a freehold, you aren’t risking your continued progress on it as you upgrade your buildings. That makes the investment much less risky than I’d originally imagined in my OP.
Thanks for the article!
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mmmn hhmmm
People keep missing this and are complaining about the fact that they might not have a Freehold. But we all will probably have access through people we know.
If you are a complete solo player without a guild or knowing people who own a Freehold, yes you will probably miss out. But that is your choice.