Relax, dont be so dismissive…teehee. it sucks when its your platform…
I’ve spent quite a bit of time watching PvP (and playing it some). One thing I noticed is that PvPers change games like they change underwear…(though I can only hope it’s true with underwear). Not sure any would come to Conan even if the devs made changes. They’re always looking for the next new pvp game, not bothering with older games regardless of their quality. PVE ers and RP ers are more stable.
2 Likes
I’m not being “dismissive”, I’m just not in the mood to indulge you in a long conversation about how people are acting “dismissive” towards you 
The perfect storm.
Whereas:
-
Most people play passively and mechanically. This means that they stand in front of the screen and expect the game to do all the work, without using their imagination (ex. watching TV VS read a book), so automatically a sandbox can only be considered boring.
-
On one extreme, those who want to play PVP expect the game to give them the ability to grow fast and attack as soon as possible, while everything else, dungeons, and NPCs remain a sometimes ignored frame, apart from when it is needed for resources. These people push for more PVP mechanics.
-
At the opposite extreme there are the PVE RP players, who on the contrary reject the game mechanics, replacing them with their own mechanics (dice?) and not supporting the development of new mechanics that are not a simulation of the board game.
-
Points 2 and 3 are extremes between which there are different shades.
-
Funcom introduced Siptah trying to modify the code to improve it, without considering a devastating side effect that results in the loss of desire to play due to the instability of private servers caused by the main update: mod-apocalypse.
-
New World (I really don’t like any MMOs) offers at the exact same price, a direct solution to the first two points, and to my great surprise also partly to point 3, and offers fictitious freedom from private server instability, even if you can’t customize the game.
CE has dropped below 7K, which is a tragedy for me after spending nearly 9K hours between gameplay and modding.
Possible solutions:
- Lower the price and go for small DLCs or a model similar to Bethesda’s Creation Club
- Negotiate again with Epic to convince them to go back on the decision to block the game offered for free
- STOP, STOP the wild updates that are ruining private servers by breaking mods, giving us some peace, thanks.
1 Like
I don’t know, this is the price showed to me by steam right now
I hope Tencent wants to make money on CE, I’m fine with any transformation that keeps mods and incentives players, even microtransactions if it doesn’t let the game die.
Every large patch with big changes in the game has potential to break mods. That isn’t new but Siptah EA did break the most mods compared to any other patch is true. With mods, it is expected to deal with patches that require mods to be updated to the latest patch so servers will be down for the time being. It is the life of the mod author and server admins. Otherwise, the game will never improve since they could never patch things to improve the game.
I manage/run 3 private servers with 47 mods on each. So, I am quite familiar with mods needing updates, server being offline for days since the odds in my case all the mods are updated quickly is unlikely. I am fine with it since we getting Funcom to continue to work on the game. That is one of the cons of having mods, but the pros is having more options than the base game.
Regarding this month’s pop drop was expected with NW coming out. I barely see any of my guild mates in ESO (only 5 on yesterday for example when it should be at least 15 to 20+) thanks to NW. Any new shiny game that has a large interest will shrink games populations down a bit initially. Some will return and others will not. That is the life of these online games.
2 Likes
Wait…we’re supposed to change underwear?
Why did no-one tell me this?
Yeah, but most of us don’t sit around on these forums telling everyone how this game is incredibly bad, how everything in it sucks, how its devs suck, how its community sucks, and how everyone should go play something else.
That’s why I was asking Franszn specifically why he or she is still here. At this point, he contributes nothing positive, just slings mud and vitriol at the game, the devs, and the community. Sure, it’s a public forum, but it’s also moderated. I’m pretty sick of all the toxic bile.
EDIT: I see that the forum mods deleted the post I was replying to. Now I understand why you thought it was a general question to everyone. I’m sorry about the confusion, it was a specific reply.
2 Likes
Correcting myself here. I’m sure they wouldn’t. Devs made changes that dramatically improved pvp issues: combat in water, nerfing horses, sprint attacks and no insta-heals. All issues I heard many pvpers complain about. They were fixed, and the majority of pvpers continued to move on to whatever game was the flavor of the month.
1 Like
I’m not talking about the standard updates, I’m talking about the new team reworking the code changing it the way some feature is not more available, as for example the possibility to change the layout at runtime with custom heads, colors, etc. The code had to be reworked, but the consequences are out there, some modders have given up and some mods are no more available.
The new team started work on version 2.0 of the game aka Siptah.
This is incorrect, I was a day one Early Access player. The First server I ever played on was PVE
I wanted to try the game before I went full PVP, so for about the first two weeks in January 2017 I was on a dedicated official PVE server.
note: I am not playing actively at the moment due to IRL issues. So my forum activity has also declined.
4 Likes
I understand what you mean. Just when a game makes changes, it will usually effect third-party programs, which is not the fault other the developer.
ESO breaks mods (Add-ons) all the time with their quarterly patches. The annual expansion breaks more of them than the quarterly DLCs. I know one of the modders for ESO who has to update them. Standard operating procedure. Some people think ESO does this on purpose, which is a silly thought. People rely on those add-ons to play so breaking them intentionally for no other reason but to break them, would hurt the game overall.
Siptah initial patch made many huge change, to gear, weather, building blocks, etc. which is why 90% of the mods broke. The only way a mod will not break is Funcom will not implement any new changes/features.
I plan on making a mod(s) in the future. I have every expectation that the mod will break with one of their patches. Just means I will need to fix it.
I personally wouldn’t want the game become static where they stop adding new concept/features/etc. and only work on bugs.
1 Like
Yes, when I think of the natural competition that mods do to any paid content, I honestly have some doubts, but I want to hope I’m wrong.
For sure I know that the improvement of the code is definitely something positive, I just think that maybe they could have given more importance to the side effects of some decisions.
Many say that the development process cannot take mods into account, and I can understand that, but I believe that any development process is aimed at creating a salable product, not just creating a product, and this is a mistake that many coders make, forgetting the final purpose.
What I wonder is if the FC project managers understood the importance of mods to make the game long-lived, because developing the game by making all mods unstable with each update does not seem to prove this, then I can be wrong, the fact is that for a reason or for another we had less than 7K left to play 
I don’t know about other games, but when it comes to Conan Exiles, I’m pretty sure there’s no malicious intent from Funcom towards modders. Sabotaging the modding community intentionally would be extremely counterproductive, since the vanilla game is basically a spork: tries to do several things at once and doesn’t really excel at any of them. The mods are what makes the game really shine.
And I mean that in the nicest possible way. It’s freaking impossible for a game to cater to so many different playstyles and be truly exceptional at all of them.
If I recall correctly, some of the changes were made specifically to help the modding community, and make modding easier and more robust. Sadly, I’m not a modder myself, and my favorite modder got run off the forums yet again, so I can’t just ping him to confirm it.
Whatever the reason is, I’m pretty sure microtransactions aren’t the way to set things right.
2 Likes
I don’t know, honestly, I really don’t understand why ARK and RUST are where they are and CE that is way more intriguing is almost abandoned, I can’t think of anything other than the instability due to the updates, but probably It is clear that I don’t understand players, or maybe I don’t want to accept that most players like to play without a fantastic setting like Conan’s.
As for the microtransaction, I mean mini DLCs too, anyway it is what fancom says when they declare to want to monetize but without introducing things that break the balance, where I read “no pay to win stuff”
Hallelujah! Praise be to the evil one! (I’m too tired right now to not find that funny - apologies to anyone that may be offended - please know it is not meant with any seriousness and is just a translation of droch-aon)
Thank you for posting this. I keep seeing these claims that CE originated as a PVP-only game and was then ‘ruined’ by allowing the rest of us to play - and I can’t prove otherwise, because I wasn’t even aware of the game when it released. It’s great to hear the true facts from one of the true originals
I hope the IRL issues can be resolved - best wishes.
While I am also not a modder - I can 100% confirm that an excellent and knowledgeable modder has repeatedly confirmed this to be true - usually having to explain it to yet another person complaining that ‘funcom doesn’t support modders’ (often then being argued with, or insulted for it…). If it’s really necessary, I can probably locate some quotes - but I’d honestly prefer not to have to search if I don’t have to… Of course, this doesn’t mean that the situation is perfect - some changes are just going to wind up breaking some mods. As @Sir.Henry.Vale suggests, that’s part of the price we accept for wanting to use mods - it is necessary to accept that sometimes things will go wrong, because devs cannot possibly take account of all the third party code that could be in use.
For what it’s worth, my experience of mods in CE (as a fairly heavy user) has been excellent - if something goes wrong, they rarely stay broken for long unless the modder chooses to stop updating (their free choice, and another risk we users accept). And Funcom’s support of them also seems excellent - I’m sure it’s not unique, but CE is the first game I’ve played that integrates mods directly into the game launcher and main menu. And I’ve not seen another game where the devs have taken the time in a major update to also change the way certain underlying aspects work specifically to make it easy for modders and less likely to break in future.
I actually did some modding for a different game, spent many hours working on and testing what I’d put together. Unfortunately, although that game’s devs did offer a certain amount of basic info for modders, every major update they released automatically broke all mods, requiring them to be updated or rebuilt from the ground up. (To be fair, that game doesn’t have the same rule of ‘enforced updates’ that CE has, so it did remain possible for players to continue using the old mods with the old version of the game - but, that only helps the players using mods, it does nothing for the modders doing the work - whereas Funcom genuinely seems to be trying to help both.)
Aaand clearly my work week must have finished, because this has turned into yet another long post…
4 Likes
Unfortunately, whenever there is a criticism to FC, there are factions that start arguing about opinions.
There is the coder who talks about the purely technical side, the player, the admin, the modder, and sometimes even some developer, etc. all points of view.
The fact is that if we talk it is because there is a basic problem, which continues to get worse and at the end of the day only FC can solve it.
So, if the problem continues to worsen, the only responsibility lies with who can decide, not who, like us, can only talk and complain.
Some modders have given up, this is a fact, and they have given up because modding is not a job, and people cannot stand there in front of the PC to update mods on every update because the devs have decided to change the core, it is simply unthinkable.
FC and the modders who want to approve the choices of FC can say what they want, opinion again, but the facts say that the only real help is to change this behavior, otherwise, they only help those who can stand in front of the PC whenever need.
Whatever the reasons that no one but the development team managers knows, the facts are these, mods that cannot be updated have a short life, which makes the servers unstable, and in some cases, it happened that a wipe was needed .
FC knows it, and it doesn’t change, and the players leave, while the official server are almost empty, because people want to play in modded servers!
Maybe there are other reasons, but surely this is one of them.
Thankfully UE4 is an open engine, so I didn’t waste the roughly 7K hours dedicated to the Devkit (plus the playing time), I’m sorry for the Conan franchise, because I liked it a lot.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see this as a fact. What is this ‘basic problem’ that you mean? If you mean the fact that sometimes updates break some mods, that’s just a fact of using mods with any game. I can’t think of a single game that can go through significant updates and changes without having some impact on fan-created third-party software. And I see no evidence that it ‘continues to get worse’ - on the contrary, from what I’ve seen mods break less frequently, require updating less frequently (unless the modder wants to add or change stuff) and interact better with each other. Or have I misunderstood what you mean by the basic problem?
As for modders quitting - yes, some certainly have quit over the years for many reasons - some because they felt Funcom offered insufficient help, some because they disliked the direction Funcom was taking the game, rather a lot because toxic players made unreasonable demands and insults, etc etc.
For some, yes. They chose to stop supporting their mod because they did not wish to continue working on it. I understand that feeling (I explained a similar situation in my own modding experience for another game). But it is also not Funcom’s responsibility to stop updating the game so that all existing mods continue to work in perpetuity (although, again, I point out that part of the point of some of the changes they have made was to make it less likely that future updates would break mods). In fact, if updates stopped coming, far more players would likely leave either in anger over unfixed bugs or promised features that never arrived, or because they have ‘played the game’ and ‘it’s boring without new stuff’.
It’s also worth noting that many new modders and new mods get added all the time, and many of the best mods continue to be updated whenever necessary (which, as noted, is less often than it was previously).
Responsibility does indeed lie with Funcom. But the substance of the debate is not ‘who’s got the control’, but rather whether the problem exists in the way you consider it, or whether Funcom has actually made considerable changes specifically to achieve the exact goals you feel they are ignoring. And I doubt either side of the debate can be convinced by the other. I’m glad you feel you got value out of the time you put into the devkit, and I’m sorry that you feel you no longer like the game. Hopefully you will find something that fills the gap for you. And hopefully you feel you ‘got your money’s worth’; however frustrating and hollow that can feel.
1 Like