I want to start by saying that we’ve been playing this game ever since the 1.0 release back in May 2018. We initially played on a PVP server, but quickly found that we were builders, not fighters. We therefore moved over to an official PVE server, and have remained there ever since. With well over a year on that server, it is safe to say we are very well established. We have several bases, and hundreds of pets/thralls decorating said bases, making them feel alive.
Our clan has had an ebb and flow of playing and taking a break from the game over the time we’ve been enjoying Conan Exiles, but I’ve always tried my utmost to keep our structures and thralls/pets alive. I’ve logged in and checked all of our bases at least once a week. I even managed to keep them all alive during the time when the feeding system was in place. However, now I have to break our bonds with the vast majority of our followers. After having put so much time and passion into creating and maintaining our (frankly beautiful) bases and buildings this is one hell of a slap in the face. In addition, some of these structures and followers were added by a clan member who sadly passed away last year, so keeping them alive has meant a great deal to us.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why Funcom have made the decision to impose a limit, but the reasons seem to be heavily influenced by PVP (which I don’t care one iota about). It just feels like we are being punished for our style of play, and being a long established clan. I don’t expect this to change anything, or for anyone to give a damn, but I felt like it needed to be said.
Tomorrow I will be logging into the server to wipe out around 400 followers that were painstakingly captured and clothed with custom dyed outfits over the course of over a year of playing, and I’m dreading it. Thanks a lot "Fun"com.
Private server, have 20 million thralls if you want. When your great, great, great grandchildren dust off your Conan Exiles and log in, this is what they will find.
The cap ruined our play style. We had map rooms by the obelisks, with a safe area, and water. All of the lowbie dancers were let go, and replaced by old named, that are dancing a happy retirement until Dr Kevorkian visits them too. The guards were let go. Several of them have been hit by other players purges.
Except that’s not possible in the OP’s case if they play on an Official server or on a private with an admin who doesn’t give a damn.
If players could just have a mechanism for queuing a download of a server’s game database, even with only their clan’s assets (i.e. to protect PvPers from getting their secrets sleuthed out), that would at least be something. At least then players could start up private servers of their own without losing everything.
Heck if we could do that and then have a tool to merge database from the same server back together, you could have allied clans retire from Officials to start-up their own without losing their legacies. At this point, I’d be on that in a heartbeat!
I would love something like this. Being able to backup our builds from an official server and be able to transfer them to a private server would be ideal.
I’d just move to a private server or host your own, then build a monument to your friend. There is another building game I’ve played for years and whenever someone passes, you can be assured an incredible monument will be built to remember them. It is very touching to travel past them and see.
If you hosted your own server, you could create one that was protected and forever a fixed part of the server.
Sorry the changes are taking away some of your memories.
I think even more than PvP, it is a move to reduce overall server load and improve game performance for all players. I know in PvP they spam thralls to lag out attackers, so that will be stopped, but it is also going to help a lot in populated PvE servers. On my old server, I was running into big lag issues after just a few of us players set up multiple bases with pretty decent sized packs of thralls for purge protection. I decided to remove 100 or so thralls and performance issues went away immediately.
On a new server with roughly triple the clock speed, I have no trouble now, with vastly more thralls and buildings. So in my opinion, the thrall limits will give the existing official servers quite a bit more life, before having to upgrade to more costly equipment.
Being someone that heavily protested against the thrall cap, I have to say that now the leveling system is in place I almost hope they don’t increase it. Mind you, I also protested against the leveling system…
This is exactly why I welcome the thrall cap. There are too many players like you who completely litter the landscape with massive eyesore bases everywhere, and with thralls spammed all over the map. Players who treat an online official server as if it’s their own offline map – with zero regard for other players on the server.
They’ve stated that it was to improve server performance in general, not specific to PVP or PVE. 400 followers for one clan is extremely unreasonable. If nobody had done that, they wouldn’t have to had make the cap. So it’s funny that you call them "Fun"com when you are a perfect example of why they had to implement the cap in the first place. To you, it’s all about you you you, but you forget about the other players in the server.
As others have mentioned, you’d probably be better off with a private server of your own.
You do realize that if a 10-man clan was to split up and each person used the max number of thralls that they’d have 550 thralls, right?
400, spread out across multiple structures, is not at all unreasonable for how most PvE clans operate — in fact, that sounds rather self-disciplined. For one thing, we don’t all cluster up in a single base with defenders ranked 10 deep, each person typically builds their own base because building cool structures and giving them life is the whole point of PvE. We play on public servers not to attack and compete against one another, but to have others to talk with and explore each others’ builds.
In my experience, the only PvE players who oversaturate a single area with pets and thralls are new players or 1-month-wonders who don’t yet really understand how the game/server engine works. If only orphaned pets & thralls would decay properly when the 1-monthers up and leave, that alone would cut AI numbers dramatically.
I’m playing on unofficial pvp server, it’s been 2 months since last wipe. Server struggles to load after restart, sometimes it can take up to 30 min. Server owner says that it’s just how Conan is, he changed hosting provider several times, it’s always the same. Thrall limit is just a necessary thing for performance reasons. I’m sorry but sencecianal arguments can’t change that fact.
Once again, you’ve hit the nail on the head. With all the touting of the thrall limit supposedly improving performance, I decided to reload the game and check it out. I put up a private server to keep the load light and got the band back together…5 active members with moderate builds and a handful of followers each. I myself have a total of 17 followers. I’m guesstimating less than 100 active followers overall between all 5 of us.
Guess what…there has been absolutely no noticeable improvement in the game’s performance. It takes up to 30 seconds to load my base when I log in, there’s still plenty of chop during fighting and even in situations without much action, I’m still seeing animals floating to the heavens, building pieces still don’t always snap together or snap in the wrong place ruining flow…the list goes on. Mind you, we’re all playing the game on balls-to-the-wall rigs built specifically for gaming and the server is run on a good machine. This has been and is still the only game any of us are experiencing performance issues with.
In short, as I’ve predicted in an earlier thread somewhere, nothing has changed or improved. Yet also as expected, it seems to have improved for some and not others as is the given history of these so called “improvements” to the game.
I will maintain my running theory that this game is too complex for the game engine it was built on, which makes it top heavy and prone to all sorts of anomalous behavior. I believe the problems reside deep within the game build which, in my mind, logically follows as the reason for all the performance issues and why Funcom, after all this time, can not get the game running like a top across all equipment and platforms. They’ve built a skyscraper on a wooden frame. Adding follower limits was akin to putting a Band Aid on an arterial bleed.
They did a helluva job on the horses though…I’ll give 'em that. I’ll keep tinkering with it because of the mounts until, once again, I get tired of dealing with the bugs, glitches, and sketchy performance.
There’s no need to open up with hostilities. You haven’t seen their bases, have you? You haven’t seen where they’ve put them and how they built them and what they actually look like and whether they really inconvenience anyone. So calling them eyesores is premature and unnecessarily judgmental.
You know what’s even funnier than that? People who parrot technical things without understanding them.
Yes, Funcom implemented the follower cap because followers are the most expensive actors in the game when it comes to both server and client performance. They, like NPCs and creatures, have AI, which has to be executed on the server. The next on the list would be placeables, which don’t have to be simulated on the server, but still have lighting, skeletal animation, cloth physics and all that stuff that has to be rendered and animated on the client. The last on the list are building pieces, which only have to be loaded in and out and rendered without any animations and special effects. That’s the quick perf rundown to help you understand the issue.
The follower cap was the cheapest way – in terms of development effort – to try to control the total number of actors with AI that the server has to simulate at the same time. It’s not the best way, by far, because it’s still ridiculously easy to plow through that number, but Funcom has deadlines and limited staff and this was the best they could do.
A better way would have been to limit the maximum follower density, i.e. make it so that you can’t have more than F followers in a fixed radius, preferably the rendering distance radius. That would ensure that the maximum concurrent number of AIs to simulate is always fixed: since the official servers can have at most 40 players online at the same time, the number would be 40xF. On one of the dev streams, Alex said something like “once the server has to run 600 thralls, it becomes a very different game”. So if you want to cap it at 600 concurrent followers to simulate, F would have to be 15 (40x15=600).
This explanation should be enough to lead you to the problem with the current follower cap: it only limits how many followers a clan can have, but there’s no guarantee that the server won’t have enough clans, with enough thralls clustered sufficiently close together in different spots. For example, if you have 8 clans with 5 players each, then each clan can have 90 followers, which leaves you with 720 total followers. If you have enough people running around, they can “wake up” all 720 of those followers and the server is overburdened again, despite the cap.
Now that I’ve had to regurgitate the same explanation yet again, we can look at your claim that “400 followers for one clan is extremely unreasonable”. If they’re all clustered in the same limited space, that’s going to be extremely detrimental to server performance. But we have no idea how they’re distributed, do we?
However, the situation doesn’t improve by a lot if instead of one 10-player clan with 400 followers you have 10 1-player clans with 55 followers each. And it only gets marginally better if you have 5 2-player clans with 60 followers each. And that’s just the effect the follower cap would have on this one clan, if they decided to start from scratch on another server. Now put all the other players in the mix and we can finally arrive at the conclusion that the follower cap might improve things, but it’s no silver bullet.
But let’s get back to your extremely uncharitable attitude once again. Remember when Funcom nerfed Lifeblood Spear and made it a paperweight? Who bears the ultimate responsibility for putting a severely unbalanced weapon in the game? The devs. Yet, by your logic, we should have scolded all the players that used it, because if they had only controlled themselves, Funcom wouldn’t have had to nerf the weapon. Worse, not only is it the fault of those players that Funcom had to nerf the weapon in the first place, it’s somehow the players’ fault that they nerfed it in the cheapest way possible, making it completely useless.
Funcom made this game and they made it with its flaws. They gave people the ability to build and to put down thralls and people did it. On PVE servers, building is the endgame. That’s the raison d’être for PVE server. And of course, people built. And of course, people put down thralls as decoration, not only for combat or grinding.
And of course, Funcom had to nerf that, because there were real problems caused by that. We can all agree on that.
What Funcom didn’t strictly have to do is nerf it in this way. I can understand why they did it and I can make my peace with it. I can also hope that they will add decorative thralls – no AI, no reaction to other actors, they just do fixed animations like your crafter thralls – in order to let us make our builds look alive again. You know, the over-promised and under-delivered “City Life” we’ve been hearing about
So when people come on the forums and offer their feedback about a particular nerf, you might want to exercise some empathy, put yourself in their shoes, and realize that they have been given the option to develop a perfectly legitimate playstyle which is being marginalized by these new changes. Even if their feedback isn’t the most constructive, it’s perfectly understandable that they would want to make Funcom aware of their feelings.
And there’s certainly no need to blame them for something for which Funcom was responsible in the first place.
