How many hours of play should be required to purchase property?

i think, currently, if you just strait up grind gold and dont spend it on anything else, you can get 60k in maybe 30 hours or so as an estimate

 

If I just grind for gold, I can probably clear 4-6k an hour from hunting, so it's not that it's impossible - however it is pretty boring to slaughter endless amounts of skeleton archers. Crafting seems more difficult to make money with, especially early on since consumables cost a fair amount (until I got to about level 35 I never had more than 1k gold). Not having a house also limits the viability of crafting - limited storage, no recall, etc.

I dont really like talking about days, weeks, or months, in terms of achievements since playstyles vary. Hours are probably the most easily comparable unit of time for discussions like these.

That being said, I think the notion that it should take 6 months of play or more to get a row lot to be absurd (unless you were only putting in a few hours a week). Considering that you can buy the same thing with money as a shortcut, I think that that long of a time to earn access to housing pushes the game quite a bit toward the pay-to-win model, which unless I'm mistaken, was something this game was seeking to avoid.

I think most commercial games - RPG's in particular - should be about 40-50 hours of main story line and then maybe 1.5 - 2.5 times that in side quests. Obviously as an MMORPG, gameplay gets drawn out. But I think there should be a good balance between time and reward. If after 40-50 hours playing a game you cant see your progress - or feel like you're still far off from a major section of the game it's a bit discouraging. Now hopefully, gameplay will be fantastic enough that the 40-50 hours were pleasurable and not a grind. However, that's not really the case currently; admittedly the game is still pre-alpha and so obviously a lot can and will change between now and release.

My opinion is that at release, if you spend a good 40-50 hours playing, you should be pretty close or already able to afford a row lot and maybe after 100-120 hours you're close to a village lot. It can go up from there, but some care needs to be taken so that new players aren't overly discouraged and so that it's not pay to win either.

 

Last night I was over in the Vale harvesting wood to make two tables. Not once did I stop at the bank or a house while gathering the resources and or when making tables to store anything. The community crafting pavilion and the public vendor right in Owls Head was convenient to make items and put them on the vendor immediately.

I was running around with cloth and Sidhe (elven) armour on. It was fun.

 

I'm a Royal Founder at the Royal Artisan level, which means no house for me unless earned in game. I use the the public pavillion as well as a few stations placed by players at their homes within Owlshead. I'm primarily an adventurer, lvl 40 and Production lvl 21, I like to do both. As un-difficult as it is to run back and forth between bank and crafting stations I remember back around release 10-12 when I had me a home. It made the game so much easier and enjoyable to have a home I could store, sort, and setup/decorate the way I found is advantageous to me. I'm looking forward to obtaining my own home, but not looking forward to the time frames folks are discussing.

I play thru Steam, and it sez my playtime in the last 2 weeks has been 38 hrs. I reality, that has been my playtime since R20 was released. I have decent armor, and a good bow, all made by me. I have a whole 4k or so of gold, and wouldn't have that if I was still purchasing arrows.

I'm sorry, but I think some of what folks think is a fair amount of playtime to obtain the gold for a home is unrealistic for the larger playerbase.

 

Problem lies not in how long it will take a complete noob to earn that amount of gold.
Problem lies in how fast some guilds of high level characters can hog the entire available Row market.
If it is so easy that a noob can buy a row deed in 60-80h then it's all gone in less than a week to all the dedicated guilds. Archage and all of that.
This is why in a limited housing scenario they cannot place all the row deeds on the NPC merchants.
If they did they will all be bought by the elite early birds who'd gladly grind to corner the market.

Between r17-r19 I managed to hand out about 50 row and village deeds bought with gold to random people I met.
If I'd been dedicated or motivated I could have quadrupled that easily even if there was a 50% markup like in r20.
So one player, 200 deeds. Think about that for a while.
Now think about what a dedicated guild could do.

Suggesting that all players "have to" be able to get housing within X time doesn't even begin to grasp the concept of limited housing.

 

As a player without a house, do you think it would be a problem if you could "rent" a room in an inn or some other player's house? You'd not own the house but you'd still be able to place stuff in your room, store stuff in there and do mostly all the things as a houseowner. You just won't have a house to take care of. Would it still be a problem?

 

Howdy Spoon,

Yeah I have thought about it but have not come to any conclusions yet as to what I would think is the right way to handle it. That's why I didn't put anything down as to what I think would be fair, because bottom line on it is, I don't know. I can easily see both sides of this coin. Even if I did have a suggestion (and if I did, you know I would give it), I'm only one voice out of thousands of voices, and the voices will split this issue up in hundreds of ways. Do I want a home of my own, sure I do, and I believe that the largest majority of folks feel the same. Will I have a home......that's yet to be seen. I guess it will boil down to what the final prices are. That will decide if I get a home, sooner rather than later....or much later...or at all.

Howdy 4EverLost,

LOL, I was hoping no one was gonna bring up the "rent a room, or rent a lot" scenario (some of my older posts on this showed my suspicious nature on this subject). In answer to your question, again, it's a big question mark for me. I've never rented in game, and I'm not yet involved in a guild so I actually know no one in game. So, who do I trust and at this point, who have I given a reason to trust me? I have been reading posts for a long time, and there are a lots of folks on these boards that I think are very worthy of trust. I guess I just have to sort of hunt them down in game and get to know them and let them get to know me. I think, with the way things seem to be going with prices, it may be the only way, for awhile, to have a place to call my own.

 

Might also be NPC inns as options I heard somewhere? Can't remember where though.

 

You can always hunt me down, well except today that is, not in my town that is because of the accident *shivers*. I am majoria in the game and while I do not have any spare lot deeds left for anyone who would like to try out housing, I am in a player owned town and can place lots for others who would like to become a resident of the town. So whisper me anytime. *cheers*

 

I'll start with Thank You Majoria, but I gotta ask...... because of the accident *shivers* .....so now I need the story......what happened?

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...mic-player-owned-towns-to-open-pvp-run.34944/

 

Would it hurt to have a quest line for a starter home? Something that basically introduced you to the wonderful world of crafting furniture? Rough example and please bear with me I've taken my sleep meds..(lol..sorry in advance).

You meet a carpenter in let's say the Fire Lotus Tavern. He's down on his luck because he's injured his swinging arm badly and had been struggling through his projects but there is only one left to do. He hires you to help him and the reward at the very end is that you get to keep little cabin and all the furniture you helped him craft.

 

I love this idea. It would be the most motivating quest ever, giving new players a positive experience from the start. I love SotA (even in its current state with the storyline missing), and the whole housing aspect plays a big role in my enjoyment.

I am concerned that the inability of many new players to obtain housing will be an obstacle to the game's commercial success after release. Although it is possible to just buy a lot deed at a vendor in the pre-release, the plan for the released game is to make housing a rare commodity. Not everyone will be able to own property.

I like your idea as a way for all players to have a kind of housing. It could be instanced so that all players shared the same dwelling without running into one another. As long as some features of regular housing weren't implemented, backers who paid a lot for their exclusive housing would have little reason to object, especially if it turns out to be important for the game's success.

When we know more about the final post-release options for acquiring lot deeds, it will be easier to assess the situation.

 

Haha. Well I guess you got answers from others already. Darkstarr said it like 'player owned towns all 'accidentally' got turned into PVP towns. Everytime I would go home I would get the **warning, warning** you are about to enter a PVP area** so thus the joking around about 'the accident', just my warped sense of humor lol. And you are welcome. Thats my story and Im stickin to it

 

Greetings @Haz
First a tip to include a @ before a name as above that way one gets a notification.

Now the dev team had a couple of ideas about how to sell deeds back during KS.
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...orsaken-virtues-0/posts/434752?cursor=2532428

So lottery and auctions.
The benefit of a lottery system is that you could hand those out both for gold, but also for quests.
So let's say that all the mid level 30-40 one time quests start handing out a couple of lottery tickets. That means that farmers need to purchase new accounts all the time to get the 'free' tickets. Then it wouldn't be certain that you'd get a deed but at least there will be a chance for everyone which isn't hogged by the guilds.


Back to you. Instead of looking for a guild if you are not that a social player I'd rather advice looking for a town (POT). POTs will want people using them as a base of operations. They usually have pledgers with land by their nature.
So just by frequenting them snd hang around you can get access to all the benefits without having to have great luck or huge piles of gold.
But I'm biased here, I have a town where we are looking for non-deed players to share our town. I've also said that nice people can always come and crash in my basement if they want. It might just be a village lot but those things are huge so one should easily be able to shared and personal space.
There will be public spaces etc.
right now there are more POTs than players to live in them so it's a buyers market...

 

On the basis that Deeds/Housing is actually being sold on the store, the value ingame should reflect the value outside of game.

Just need to look into how many hours of making money or grinding gameplay $100 is equal to. The easier it is to make gold in SotA the higher the price should be.

Big question mark over how much 1 hour of grinding should be worth in terms of $...... I would say it should be $3-$4

So $100/3 = 33.33 hours

Then how much gold can be created per hour of grinding (bugs/exploits excluded) I would say around 2k

So 2,000 * 33.33 = 66,660 gold for a row house.

I would say the current price of a row lot deed in game feels in the right kind of area.

 

The deed prices seem fair to me, but the community doesn't.

I can't lie. I had a few tears of frustration as I carefully and slowly ground up my 3-4k gold an hour for three nights in a row as much as I could only to watch the row houses in Ardoris disappear overnight because large groups of people ran the obsidian tower treasure room over and over again obsessively, then dashed to Ardoris and bought up property in order to "speculate" and then re-sell it later. That seemed really harsh, especially when you figure a large number of those players had titles that clearly stated they'd started this release with land deeds in the bank, they already had housing, they were only doing it based on greed, not need. In all honesty, as a lower pledge member, I'm not liking a lot of the greed-based "I'm going to buy up this and this and this and this and GET FILTHY RICH AT LAUNCH" attitudes. I'm feeling a very strong rift between real-life economic classes in this game. In the long run, it won't take much more of this to basically nudge any non-property owning player out of the game entirely, with a community that's turned into nothing but a bunch of land speculation sharks.

 

Howdy @majoria70 ,

Ahhh, thought that might be what you were speaking of.

I heard about the outcome, but heard it was caused not by accident, but because Darkstarr was found, in PaxLair, in the company of a young lady of some note. Her father took offense to their "meeting". Rumor has it that the young Noble Woman, not wanting to be the cause of injury to her father, (it was simple flirtation according to the rumor), rebuffed DarkStarr in the company of his minions who became incest. One thing lead to another, words were exchanged, weapons were readied and there was rioting in the streets. As Darkstarr was walking away, it is said, that he was heard speaking of a lesson in humility that needed to be taught.

Howdy @Spoon,

Thanks for the tip about the @. Appreciate it.

Maybe I've been looking at this incorrectly, maybe I need to do as you suggested, become involved in the town/city aspect instead of the guild aspect, in order to locate a place to put down roots. Thank you for the link, I hadn't read that since it was put out years ago (strange that we are talking about SotA and talking years ago, lol).

 

@Rebelweasel
Be assured, this will not happen at Launch.
There will be game mechanics in place to prevent this bahavior.

 

@Rebelweasel

1
This was a wipe release so a lot of players show up first week, then test everything for some days then don't play at all until next release.
The timer for lots to revert to claimable is 14 days.
That means that from release +16 days row lots in Ardoris will start popping back.
This has been true for every release since R12 something.
So I've always been able to claim Ardoris lots in every release regardless if they were all claimed early on. Including the release where gems could be bought for 2k then refined and sold for 4k in the same town. So everyone had plenty of gold.
2
There are plenty of row lots to claim in POTs.
If you want one you can easily talk to any governor.
I'd be happy to give you a row lot space in Graff until Ardoris lots start opening up again.