What % of population should be able to own land?

A couple of observations.

• In Ep1 the number of folks having a house of their own is fixed to an exact number, and that is the owners of pledges starting from Ancestor. Everyone else is renting.
• I'm not sure what is the exact serious question here. Owning a home? Or owning land? These are fundamentally two very different questions (even though the are kind of equated in Ep1).
  
• Despite the RL brainwashing that any kind of scarcity mindset (artificially created or not) is somehow value-adding, it has actually never really worked. Not even in a game.

 

1. we have no real system for renting.
2. it's about claiming Land. So I assume we are talking about deeds.
3. meh

 

I'm not sure how I can make it more clear. I want to know what percentage of the game population YOU think should be able to claim a plot of land.

*edit* If I understand the hair you are splitting, you consider people with a tax free plot owners, and people who pay taxes renters. For the purpose of my question, anybody with a deed that allows them to claim land, tax free or not.

 

While we cannot say much about the Dev+ thread referenced because of the NDA that lies on that information (And believe me, that has nothing to do with 'nobility', but a decision from Portalarium that was part of the KS pledge privileges! Many Dev+ are normal players, who just believed sufficiently in the game to give more, sometimes more than they could afford, for the creation of SotA! Also please take it from me, that several terrible suggestions have been toned down and improved for the LOW END backers more often than not in Dev+ before it became public! So try to imagine how bad things were before they went public!), please accept from me that - AFAICT anyway - the majority in said thread is fighting FOR the LOW-END backers' rights and benefits!...
The next step will be that the - hopefully better - resulting proposal will go on to the public parts of the forum for feedback from the rest of the community!

 

And I don't really care what percentage exactly! Anywhere between 15 and 50% I guess?

 

And you are posting in this thread because you don't care?
Interesting.

 

1. There are two systems of "renting", apparently you are talking about renting from individuals (other players) which is not implemented. What is in place is renting from town/village - not very explicit, though one can talk to a realtor in e.g. Ardoris. Technically the term used is "tax" but the actual procedures have all the characteristics of rent, not tax. However that is just a minor observation, not really relevant to the core issue, but in some earlier messages there were some references to modern day housing statistics, which describe a very different overall situation: Case in point:
2. Owning a deed is not the same thing as claiming land, and claiming land is not the same as owning a home. In Ep1 the game does kind of equate land owning and home owning. In real life this kind of equation has not necessarily applied for at least 2000 years (consider for example how the ancient Romans arranged their housing).

This is a very difficult question to answer, because there is just not enough information available. Land for what purpose? It's usually for filling some kind of need (growing/raising food, housing, crafting etc.) -- what alternatives exist (public gardens/greenhouses, rentable apartments, rentable workshops) or are going to exist? At what kind of schedule?

I do think that everyone should be able to own a home of some kind. That is the only thing I can offer as my personal opinion. It feels kind of absurd having a system where a majority of people would by design be living on the streets / occasionally rent a room in a tavern, despite many having enough wealth to buy several homes. It just does not feel believable, the scarcity mindset in its most insane form.

If one could rent a lasting/permanent apartment, either from a city/town/village (NPC) or an individual (PC), in reasonable terms (no possibility of eviction at a random whim, as long as the payments are in time), then the question of landowning becomes less relevant. Same thing with public/rentable gardens/greenhouses/workshops. Then I would say 10-20% of the player population owning land is fine.

If on the other hand, if owning a home is strictly tied to "owning" a piece of land, as it is in its current form, then it would have to be 100%. No ifs or buts.

Perhaps the biggest source of uncertainty is the upcoming episodes (Ep2-Ep5) - how will the landmass be expanded? What happens to existing housing? What other choices regarding housing will be implemented? Just too many uncertainties to give a definite answer.

 

Considering the number of player towns and NPC towns, I'd be pretty surprised if anyone did not have at least one home.

Does that disappoint any of you?

 

At this point there are 47 NPC towns and 168 POTs, totalling 215 towns (used here as a generic term that covers villages, towns and cities). (source: SotA Suburbia)
SotA backer extended statistics show the current total backer count to be almost 60000. How many of them are going to actually play, and how many more will come, I don't know, so I'll just use that number as a ballpark estimate.
That would mean that the existing number of cities would need to support about 280 inhabitants on average.
One of the biggest cities, the city of Ardoris, has 188 lots. How many actual inhabitants that translates to, I don't know, but most likely less than 280.
Some large POTs (like Rats' Nest) will provide housing for more folks than Ardoris, but most (almost all) of them much less. The same applies to NPC towns.

Edit - elaboration and typo fix

 

I think these threads raise an important current assumption among many about SotA:

You will need a house to truly enjoy the game.

Along with the limited housing, my naive assumption during the KS was that you wouldn't need a house to enjoy the game. In most of the games I play, housing isn't even available or a real issue. It is my opinion, and perhaps others don't agree, that the overemphasis on housing right now is generated by the lack of development in other promised features and the rise of POT's.

And so I think the best way to solve this issue is to make SotA a game where people don't see housing as so essential. But perhaps that ship has sailed.

 

I think if you are an MMO fan, you might feel a house is necessary, but there are fans who only want to pursue the story, and would not necessarily want one.
However, you don't mention how many you think ought to be able to claim land.

 

Impossible equation.

Meta server scales the population so there is no upper limit of players on the server. If the game has only 50,000 players there will be a lot more people owning land than 50,000,000

 

Both sides of the equation are fuzzy. Portalarium can add more plots of land to keep the ratio wherever they want it. What do you think the ratio should be?

 

I quoted a number, because Sir Frank has been repeatedly berating posters for posting but not giving a number... I do care about other things in this thread!

 

I know you realize that my current frustration is that SotA is only appealing to MMO fans. The solo player experience was supposed to be just as much a part of the fun.

I think the current system of limited housing is what was promised and what they should stick with. I mean design decisions have to matter at some point with this game, don't they?

 

I agree with this. The way the add-on store has been designed, the feature emphasis on housing/decorating/etc, the advantages of having a house over relying on a bank for storage, and so many other things have demonstrated that in this game, having a house is "winning". Is it the only way to win? Of course not... but it is naive to say it is not one way to "win". I know that Port has mainly focused on housing as a revenue source for them (and that is reasonable) BUT if you're going to say that succeeding in this game is about how much you own, then there has to be a pathway for everyone to feel like they have done well in that regard. Does that mean everyone needs to have a gigantic castle with ornate gardens? No, of course not... but everyone should be able to get a slice of the pie/a place to call home/a way to display your snowball box/a place to grow your fruit of immortality/ etc if they work hard and really want to have it. Could there be a safe, assured, longterm rental situation that would fulfill these needs? Yes, but it is not designed yet.

The game in its current form, without a proper rental system and more robust housing privileges, I would say 100% of the people who are willing to work for it (or have the real money to buy it) should be able to claim a lot. Keep the NPC/PRT lots limited and exclusive (as they were promised), but let everyone else have a path for somewhere to live. If that is a rented room, a specialized row deed for in a POT, or an instanced room rented in an NPC town that only they can see is up to Port to decide. But there should be someplace they can call home.

 

I am very much on the single player side, myself.
However, I did post this thread for a reason, which will eventually become apparent.

I don't have the confidence to say design decisions have to matter.
Most everything important to me 3 years ago has been put on indefinite hold, or discarded entirely.

And, to keep myself on topic, I feel at this point the more land owners the better. Perhaps up to 100%.

 

Slippery slope at best.

What if the game gets a large influx then a sudden drop? Now there's a bulk of houses not in use. I don't think they will be adding lots all that quickly.

To answer your question though. IMO, some form of housing should be possible for everyone.

 

My bad.
Classic case of a missunderstanding.

 

I've always had in my mind 10-20% as those were the kind of numbers Richard talked about during the KS and afterwards. If there has been a fundamental change in philosophy or direction, then maybe another number 1-100% makes sense. However, I don't see how that gets reconciled with the original design. I could see someone who pledged at a high level for what they thought would be a very rare resource being upset if that resource become something everyone could obtain.

So to answer, it's hard for me to give a number other than the 10-20% range not knowing more information.

Unseen