Right now, the system to deal with abandoned thralls and pets doesn’t seem to be working very well. Bases can collapse, but as long as someone from a clan logs in once every two weeks, every pet and thrall they own is left hanging out there. Sometimes, literally in mid-air.
They should implement some kind of requirement that followers are like building pieces, where a player has to be near them to “refresh”. No more dropping thralls out in the middle of the somewhere and leaving them for no reason or having a clan member quit and all the thralls they’ve placed just “lurk” out in the world making a mess.
I got mixed opinions about this. We already have to tag things enough and I understand this was initially going to be how they handled thrall refresh. I really don’t like the idea of having to tag all of my thralls in addition to my builds. Right now I got 4 thralls in the mounds that are left nearby my friend’s map room so they don’t get aggro’d on until I can rebuild an outpost I accidentally let decay. That being said, I do see the issue with people that just abandon pets and thralls randomly. I once dealt with a clan that had a horse nearby my base’s gate and they had no idea it was there. They were new and didn’t know about the thrall tracking system. I can see a need for a system to be put in place, but tagging your thralls (or feeding them so they don’t die of hunger) shouldn’t be the answer. Maybe a harsher decay rate for abandoned thralls (thralls with no owner land claim within a given radius) close to points of interest, other player land claims, and thrall encampments. Sometimes they can be an issue when hunting thralls and they interfere or kill them.
A system where the thrall inherits the decay of the largest structure within a certain radius (say 1000) would probably work. There just needs to be a better system to clean up abandoned followers because clearly people aren’t inclined to do this on their own as long as they’re not exceeding the limit.
I think the maximum follower count should also probably be adjusted based on the maximum number of active clan members (one that has logged in within the past 10 days or so).
The thrall decay timer is double the building decay timer, (in non holiday periods for PVE and PVE-C), the problem is that if anyone from the clan logs into the server before the thrall decay is over, then all the thralls refresh.
e.g. A big base decays, Joe Blow, (from the clan that built the big base), logs in a few days before the thralls are due to decay on the opposite side of the world and booyah, all that clan’s thralls anywhere in the world, now have 2 week refreshed timers.
Thralls decay timers need to work the same way as building decay timers, based on distance and maybe even have their decay times reduced /shrug
There are 50 or so on our official server at any time.
One of the bad things about PVE.
We used bring npc critters to them, worked for a while now they just are not interested in the player owned ones.
A simple fix would be decay timers on abandoned followers. Just like the buildings.
Of give us the capability to retake them from the wild.
