Bidding is a terrible way to handle freeholds

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As has been pointed out in multiple threads now. You can do low tier processing in the node. I got no clue how Steven's planning on achieving that (maybe instances?), but he said so.

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I haven't played it, but you know who have? Steven. And you know what he did? Change that system. So his current vision is to not have it like AA.

Now, Steven's vision is quite wobbly at his age, so there's a pretty high chance that it'll change preeeetty soon here. Just as it has on the topic of selling freeholds before (twice already btw). I personally don't care about this particular change in the system, so I'm not yet a frog being slowly cooked, but the overall wobbliness of the vision definitely puts some things in perspective.

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It could be linked to their internal plans for the economy. Freeholds will have taxes, will have businesses, will have node points going towards the node. All of those things have to be balanced in a fairly precise matter to work with all the other systems. I'm assuming that currently their balance shows that non-instanced big freeholds is the way to go.

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And this is exactly the lens through which I've been seeing all Steven's comments of "anyone can get a freehold". This is exactly why it was super obvious to me that freeholds would be purely a guild (or at the very least a party) thing. Because I don't think Steven ever said "everyone on the server will have a freehold all at the same time".

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All that would need to happen is for guilds to outpace the 90% of players by the auction timer. If auction goes on for a week - the guilds will need to have at least a few people that are lvl50 and ahead of all the others by a week of lvling (which is super easy to do for a hardcore guild).

And they'd need only that because they'd be able to bid the lowest amount on each freehold, because there'd be no competition. So unless the auction goes on for damn months - the current system is "first come first serve".