Bidding is a terrible way to handle freeholds

We have not received permission from Garrtok to share the quoted post.

But in order to make the argument you'd have to clarify to Intrepid what the difference between the two content types is.

For a certain player type it's fine to tell someone 'just live in your instanced housing', if you need Crafting Stations rent them from the landed gentry.

It's just that a lot of people don't play fantasy MMORPGs to be serfs/peasants.

We have not received permission from Garrtok to share the quoted post.

Just to make sure, you do realize that literally all of those will be dominated by the very guilds that would be able to outbid anyone in the current system, right?

The guilds would be the ones who can come first. The guild will be the ones farming anyone and anything in pvx. The guilds will be the first ones to do questchains (PKing others, if they have to). Guilds are the ones contributing the most.

Like Liniker said, freeholds were literally always a guild thing (or at the very least a party one). People were god damn delusional if they thought that they'd be able to get a freehold solo. The "a ton of effort" that Steven kept saying in reference to freeholds pretty much meant "you'll need to be a hardcore player who'd be high on the guild ladder". But of course people didn't think about that because they thought they were a precious special and unique flower who'll be able to get anything and everything they want.

NiKr wrote: »

We have not received permission from Garrtok to share the quoted post.

Just to make sure, you do realize that literally all of those will be dominated by the very guilds that would be able to outbid anyone in the current system, right?

The guilds would be the ones who can come first. The guild will be the ones farming anyone and anything in pvx. The guilds will be the first ones to do questchains (PKing others, if they have to). Guilds are the ones contributing the most.

Like Liniker said, freeholds were literally always a guild thing (or at the very least a party one). People were god damn delusional if they thought that they'd be able to get a freehold solo. The "a ton of effort" that Steven kept saying in reference to freeholds pretty much meant "you'll need to be a hardcore player who'd be high on the guild ladder". But of course people didn't think about that because they thought they were a precious special and unique flower who'll be able to get anything and everything they want.

There is no reason you wouldn't be able to get a Freehold solo given the original information we had.

Now I accept that I'm just delusional here, but there was no data to indicate that you wouldn't be able to get one.

That doesn't make sense as a design to me when there was another obvious and still core-appropriate way for it to happen.

I'm a periwinkle personally.

Azherae wrote: »

There is no reason you wouldn't be able to get a Freehold solo given the original information we had.

What information was that though? Maybe I missed something? We've always known that freeholds will be limited due to them being open world. Don't think Steven ever said that literally everyone would have a freehold, it was always "you have the ability to get one". And to me it's just logical to see that anything that's limited and valuable will be gobbled up by big and strong guilds. That's just how things go in games that don't have instanced "everyone gets one" design.

The only "solo" players who might've gotten a freehold outside of a bid system would've been the super hardcore people who played the game non-stop up until there were freeholds on sale. And in, like, 99% of cases those kinds of players would at the very least be in a group, which would then most likely be in a strong guild.

But even w/o that guild, a party like that would literally be able to put a good bid in the current system as well. So literally nothing changed imo. What am I missing?

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

Even if you divorce freeholds from guilds and maybe even literally prevent anyone who's in a guild from bidding on a freehold, people will just leave their guild for the period of bidding, get the freehold with their guild's money and then join back up.

You could maybe completely prevent any relation of freeholds to guilds, so that the person with a freehold could not even join a guild, but at that point you'd alienate the same amount of people as right now, because the whole game is built around being in a guild (ideally).

Freeholds being bought up by guilds was always inevitable.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

There is no reason you wouldn't be able to get a Freehold solo given the original information we had.

What information was that though? Maybe I missed something? We've always known that freeholds will be limited due to them being open world. Don't think Steven ever said that literally everyone would have a freehold, it was always "you have the ability to get one". And to me it's just logical to see that anything that's limited and valuable will be gobbled up by big and strong guilds. That's just how things go in games that don't have instanced "everyone gets one" design.

The only "solo" players who might've gotten a freehold outside of a bid system would've been the super hardcore people who played the game non-stop up until there were freeholds on sale. And in, like, 99% of cases those kinds of players would at the very least be in a group, which would then most likely be in a strong guild.

But even w/o that guild, a party like that would literally be able to put a good bid in the current system as well. So literally nothing changed imo. What am I missing?

Nothing, I guess?

It's just not the first design a person thinking about a game they enjoy will think of given everything else about Ashes.

It's the fact that there's a scale, and the scale has now gone much further to one side than another. So Freeholds were explicitly made bigger, you can't bring them close enough to form communities, and now everyone who wants to do Farming or Animal Husbandry has a 72% chance of being a serf if not in a Guild who in turn has some incalculable chance of seeing or viewing them as a Serf anyway.

Ugh I don't even feel like talking about this, but...

The sensible way was always that Freeholds in GOOD spots were hard to get, and you could strike out to a far Node and have your own much less 'good' place, and at some point there would be people who would consider that 'not worth the time or effort' because it wasn't their play style . This is the healthy way.

The Freeholds are all still subject to danger but if you're living in the outlands with your family in some node no one pays attention to, you'd get one and no one would care because they can't just steamroll your choice with their money.

Do I need to explain the rest? I'm deciding if I'm a flower or a snowflake today.

We have not received permission from Fantmx to share the quoted post.

And to follow on this, this is a design decision similar to the PvP oceans.

If there is a technical limitation with number of freeholds in the world itself, we haven't heard it. This is a decision that seems to say 'We have decided that this thing that many more casual players would aim for should be less available to them because it will make them more engaged with the social parts of the game'.

Except that it won't manage to do that until the game is 'dead' enough for them to do so. It's an activation energy barrier that doesn't need to exist as soon as bidding is involved. I'd normally assume that Steven just 'said something that got misinterpreted' because he's not thinking of how negative it seems, but Steven absolutely wants Freeholds to be a 'monumental achievement' which is not a thing I understood back in 2021 at least. Easily possible it was my bad.

The question is why.

Their farming system alone should solve any economic problems. Having more people with investment in your territory to rule over and protect is good for nodes and castles.

What's the point of making a system where 50 people living in an apartment in your Node don't care if the Node gets razed to the ground and might be there thinking 'oh sweet yeah burn the whole thing I might get a Freehold maybe!'

It's somehow fitting that this was so close to a 4th of July announcement.

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

And how exactly would you be able to outpace guild-based 16h players while you're solo? They'll be leveling faster than you and farming money faster (let alone the pooling from their party/guild).

We don't know how long the bidding period will be. We don't know how many parcels of land will be available as soon as the node levels up to stage 3. And we don't know how the bidding process/result will be designed.

What if everyone in the bidding race loses their money? Now you can wait till the later parcels start their bid races and know that several groups have already lost their money on the previous bids (obviously others will do this as well, so it's not as easy as I put it).

What if the bid timer is somewhat short and it starts as soon as someone puts up the first bid. Hell, what if the size of the bid controls the timer? Now if you're a super hardcore player with a ton of money and you managed to be the first one to put a big bid on a parcel (smth like x10 the initial price) - the timer is real short and others simple won't try to outbid you (cause there's other parcels) or just won't have the time to do so.

We still lack information about the system. Though I'm now 80% sure that Steven will go completely back on this design cause people are furious.

Azherae wrote: »

The sensible way was always that Freeholds in GOOD spots were hard to get, and you could strike out to a far Node and have your own much less 'good' place, and at some point there would be people who would consider that 'not worth the time or effort' because it wasn't their play style . This is the healthy way.

Maybe I'm just too jaded about this, but I've always seen freeholds as something that guilds will just buy out as soon as possible. Any and all of them. Freeholds always had artisanry related to them (iirc), so they always had at least some intrinsic value outside of the "my pretty house in a pretty place" lifestyle. And anything that has value will be stolen by those who have the means to do it. And guilds always have those means.

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

To be fair this isn't really a 'loss' exactly in comparison, if Steven had pitched it as it is now, he'd have got who he will keep.

Those players aren't really 'losses' in the design sense.

Remains to be seen what Intrepid will do about refunds, since I don't think they're required to give them.

I expect to see a LOT of RMT suddenly though. The number of people who will want to sell their Alpha-2 access or similar is about to go up.

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

But you see, if you have that guild and those hardcore friends, you'll have a higher chance to bid for several freeholds. And considering how big the freeholds seem to be, you could get, say, 2-3 freeholds and just split them up amongst yourselves. It would look like a small commune of people with those different tastes. Literally the same thing as it would've been if we had smaller-sized freeholds that can be placed closer together.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

The sensible way was always that Freeholds in GOOD spots were hard to get, and you could strike out to a far Node and have your own much less 'good' place, and at some point there would be people who would consider that 'not worth the time or effort' because it wasn't their play style . This is the healthy way.

Maybe I'm just too jaded about this, but I've always seen freeholds as something that guilds will just buy out as soon as possible. Any and all of them. Freeholds always had artisanry related to them (iirc), so they always had at least some intrinsic value outside of the "my pretty house in a pretty place" lifestyle. And anything that has value will be stolen by those who have the means to do it. And guilds always have those means.

This doesn't play out this way in the other games I have similar experience with.

This happens because of bad economic design. It's the same as IRL markets.

Also when I say 'hard to get' I meant time investment, possibly into the Node itself.

This is definitely a 'I don't have a Lead Economy Designer' tier decision, but explaining it would require a Lead Economy Designer, wouldn't it...

It doesn't matter if Steven goes back on it if Steven has the same wish for the type of world he wants and/or doesn't understand why this choice is suboptimal even for his own goals. Or maybe Steven's goal is explicitly to have this type of experience be the norm. I wouldn't rule it out, given his life experience as I know it.

Either way, it's not really worth the time to talk about. If the decision is fine, then things will succeed. If it isn't fine, it's 'bad enough to have brought into question if Steven intends for this game to be enjoyable to many players'. Which, frankly, he probably doesn't, or at least doesn't think in terms of 'enjoyable' in the way most people do.

Peasants and serfs irl have to be pushed really far to revolt because they only get one life, they don't have choices. In an MMORPG, quitting is easier than organizing a revolution.

This is a design principle that must be accounted for when making this game type.