A possible solution for players who lost their 3 days of gameplay!

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
50

I was hoping that this was going to be an actual explanation of why those PVP players consider 48 hours of gameplay to be such a catastrophic loss, something that would explain why they would consider their cumulative loss in hours to be worth more than the cumulative loss in hours invested in all the lost thralls.

Instead, what I ended up reading was a giant “tu quoque” with a seasoning of false equivalence.

Ridicule is not cool, whichever direction it comes from, unless actually earned like @TheConan1 with his boasts of sexual prowess. So yeah, I agree with you that ridicule isn’t deserved in most cases when it comes to calls for nerfs.

However, ridicule was only the extreme of the reactions. The majority of the nerf calls you mention have received less ridicule than opposition. In some cases, that opposition is a knee-jerk reaction. While it’s not a correct reaction, it has been more than earned over the years of Funcom’s bad decisions inspired by those nerf requests.

But in other cases, the opposition stemmed from the absurd scope of those nerf requests and/or the overly exaggerated arguments for them.

It’s not uncommon to see an assertion that Funcom needs to nerf all X, because X is meta and ruining PVP and this game is dying because of it. When pressed, those who don’t resort to childish insults often end up revealing that it’s only a subset of X that is the problem. For example, it’s not that daggers need to be nerfed across the board, it’s that Feroxic daggers were OP.

Occasionally, it turns out that X is indeed a problem, but the proposed nerf isn’t necessarily the correct solution and there’s a less invasive, less fun-destroying way to achieve the same goal.

Truth is that the calls for nerf are diverse, but they largely share the same characteristics:

  • The request is for Funcom to apply the cheapest and most-intrusive solution to the problem, with total disregard for anyone who isn’t affected.
  • The opposition is often met with toxicity, with PVE players and their playstyle being belittled and invalidated.
  • There is little tolerance for any discussion. Questions and requests for clarification are seen as opposition, and alternative proposals are rejected out of hand. Only agreement is tolerated.

Now, let’s contrast that with this rollback situation.

Let’s see. On the one hand, we have a server misconfiguration issue that affected everyone, across all three game modes, who wasn’t lucky enough to log in within a specific time period, instantly erasing hundreds or thousands of hours of their gameplay.

On the other hand, we have – at the extreme – a massively unbalanced gameplay element that a portion of players in one game mode was faster to take advantage of and, over a period of time, use to erase the progress of a portion of players in that same game mode.

Again, that latter case is the most extreme balance problem that I can imagine.

And you’re equating them. That’s, at best, reductionism. No offense, but you can do better.

There’s no hypocrisy involved here. There’s a lack of empathy on both sides of the rollback issue. The most obvious lack of empathy comes from the minority who claims that their 48h are more important than hundreds or thousands of hours of the majority. The less obvious, but just as important, lack of empathy comes from those who tell that minority that their loss doesn’t matter.

But hypocrisy? You fabricated that.

51

To be fair, I didn’t see that stance. Nobody requested FUNCOM to not compensate those affected by the rollback.
Most arguments were in line with “sorry for your loss, but compared to the havoc this mistake caused”, etc, etc.
People understand it sucks spending hours grinding only to have it all taken away without the player having any choice or responsibility. However, it’s comparing a molehill to a mountain. It’s the lesser evil.

To be absolutely honest, I was left in shock seeing such grotesque displays of complete lack of empathy for fellow players, coming in in droves after the rollback, especially after FUNCOM handled this blunder-and you won’t see me writting this often- masterfully.

52

I’m actually equating the reactions that I saw on both. Both screaming and threatening to quit and then the reactions therein when FC placates. I agree that the reroll had to happen but what I saw here last weekend…wasn’t pretty and down right hypocritical considering how we all treated those nerf warriors that did the same thing.

And rerolling isn’t this?

Every single post about opposition to the reroll gets the standard ‘I just don’t see how anyone can compare two days of play to the hundreds if not thousands of hours collecting thralls’. How is this not dismissal of their playstyle? ‘Your experiences matter less because they have more’ is the defense here. They have a right to complain over this because they were purposely afflicted for those that had more time in.

Sort of like being made to be a selfish jerk if you question rerolling the day and a half of dedicated time because someone has to protect the hundreds of thralls that clans have amassed in years of playing one server?

No that actually is the hypocrisy I’m pointing out.

53

I’m sorry, @erjoh , but pvp uses thralls too and heavily so.
You can bet your ass some bases were left defenseless and were raided when thralls went missing. That’s the real issue, not some mtfk mats. They got lucky once and it was taken away. But they got lucky unfairly.
Sure, there’s always a noob that will complain about progress or mats or whatever, but that person isn’t right in the head or doesn’t know how to play at all. The mistake happened. It wasn’t short of catastrophic. The only way of solving it was rolling back the servers and give compensation to those who lost 3 days of playing. That’s what FUNCOM did. All the rest is utter bull, not mattering how much one philosophizes about it.

54

Yep can’t understand why I would think this is belittling or invalidating. Sorry my bad.

55

It’s true, nevertheless. Losing 3 days of work if you play pvp is nothing. There aren’t two ways about it. If you (speaking generally) can’t handle that and land on your feet, you’re playing the wrong mode. Sure, it was because of a FC blunder, not a raid, but it’s the same result.

56

So we make the new players suffer so we can keep our spoils, right?

57

No, it isn’t if you consider the damage caused if the rollback didn’t happen. Someone who values a weekend grinding more than thousands of hours of the same that would otherwise been lost for a gazillion players, isn’t right in the head. Again, that’s not belittling or invalidating. It’s a fact.

58

Now you’re being dense on purpose. New players should see this as top tier costumer service. Tomorrow it can happen to them. FUNCOM showed great character on this matter.

59

No, but to be fair, there were people whose reply was a curt “sit down and shut up”.

Rollback.

Yes, rollback is the cheapest and most-intrusive solution to this problem. It’s also the only feasible solution for this problem, unlike the vast majority of the balance problems.

The only alternative to the rollback would be to manually inspect 780 different game databases and restore the lost thralls by hand. Bear in mind that to restore them with the exact same stats and inventory (and the stats of that inventory) they had before the incident, without affecting anyone’s interim progress, would require bespoke tooling, because you can’t do that with admin console.

The difference between that and the rollback is a couple orders of magnitude greater than the difference between an overbroad nerf and a more deliberate balancing measures.

How, exactly, is that dismissal of their playstyle?

You put in 48 hours of effort into this, I put hundreds, if not thousands of hours into that. Why is it even controversial to ask what makes your 48 hours more valuable than my hundreds?

If anything, the question assumes that your single hour is just as valuable as mine, and asks you to clarify why your single hour should be valued more.

Oh, and guess what the most repeated answer to that question is? “Pfffft, who needs thralls anyway, and who cares for PVE players and their thralls.”

No, sort of like being made to be a selfish jerk because you assert that losing up to two days of dedicated time is worse than losing hundreds of hours that went into amassing those thralls. Moreso if your reason for asserting that is “because PVE players and their thralls don’t matter”.

Yeah, okay, that’s pretty much what @erjoh is talking about. And fair enough, I’ve already agreed with him that there’s no call to dismiss these complaints out of hand.

I don’t care if they’re a noob. A noob has the right to enjoy the game as much as I do.

What I object to is the claim that they not only deserve it more, they deserve it so much more that their 48 hours weigh more than my hundreds.

Yes, we choose the lesser of two evils, because there is no solution that will make both sides happy. Again, why is that even controversial?

60

In context, @CodeMage . I say this in context. It was them keeping their mats or hundreds of players basically losing their effort over months or years. And they got compensation.
Besides, I don’t believe for a second that was the most prevalent issue. Losing the fruits of unfair raids was.

Edit: also, a lot of players who lost stuff because of the rollback were completely in favor of it anyway. That was joyful to see. I am very glad FUNCOM didn’t pander to a minority of selfish creeps! :smile: It was a needed lesson in civility.

61

My post says hours, not thralls, even 20 rare Purge thralls is no easy task to accumulate.

Each purge is tough to get, and doesn’t guarantee you’ll get any fighters. To amass 20 T4 Purge fighters would take months of work. I’ve been on my server 10 months or so, and I probably only have 20 or so Purge fighters and I get the purge every other week.

Not everyone who collects thralls has crap just everywhere or just collects anything and everything :slight_smile:

62

True but these are official servers and we have folks collecting for years? No one sees this as a problem? How is thrall collection any different than megabuilds that drain server resources?

I guess I have a two fold issue.

  1. Anyone that does outlandish demanding like what we saw on Saturday is automatically put as an antagonist in my point of view and treated as such. If you threaten to quit, I am instinctively going to scrutinize your stances. That’s on me.
    2)Officials are the public sandboxes and if you have years worth of anything in them, that is an issue for the server and we are all to blame for server performance. That’s on all of us, including me as I still sit on chests full of stuff on PVP servers waiting to exit if server transfers start up again. No one has the right to camp on a public server for thousands of hours of collection and amass quantities that drag server performance down. It makes no sense that we can get a person banned for 200 witchfire torches going on at once but not 200 thralls active.

63

Yes. This game has been designed to attract people with a variety of interests and play styles. The whole freaking thrall “catalog” is pretty much designed to attract collectors. Why else would they have several named thralls with the exact same stats but different names, and RNG-gated to boot?

Can we stop making a problem out of people’s interests in this game? You like PVP, I like to build, my “neighbor” likes to collect and trade thralls and pets.

Oh, we’re back to using performance as a crutch?

I’ll tell you how it’s different: a bunch of us kept asking Funcom to add a follower limit because we were convinced that the AI was the biggest drain on server performance. I was one of the loudest voices there. Then Funcom added the follower limit and it didn’t solve the performance problems.

Come to think of it, it’s no different in that aspect. Right now we have people asking for a building limit “because megabuilds” and there’s no proof that the size of the build per se is the cause of performance problems.

Long story short, players suck at diagnosing server performance problems. Even players who have lots of experience with software development suck at diagnosing server performance problems when the only tools they have are their eyes and their conjectures. Diagnosing performance problems is non-trivial work that requires access and tools and information we don’t have.

Who says you can’t? Have you ever reported someone for putting 200 thralls in a pattern that you suspected would cause server performance problems? I mean, if someone actually clustered 200 thralls in a space where a player coming into rendering distance could “wake up” their AI all at once, then maybe they should be reported for that.

64

I think erjoh is making great points about the controversy of ToC issues; not invalidating or validating the choice to rollback though.

I’ll add on to erjoh’s assessment of why those crying foul at the rollback is an issue, mostly, for PVP.

If you happen to be on a server where there is the delight of an actual war this especially matters:

Every choice counts. Every slam of a pickaxe, queue of armor, scout of a base, note of words spoken. You have to organize yourself well and make it so your time counts. Much of it can influence the outcome of battles. Time is money, friends.

So, based on status quo, most believed a rollback wouldn’t happen and that’s even if you knew about current affairs.

As a result, the usual schedule went on. Meaning raids. If you happened to scout the hidden location of an enemy and hit it during those 2 days it not only means all your preparations were for naught as they move and you have to re-scout again.

Anyone who does thorough scouting knows how time intensive it is.

Triumphs of taking down a server alpha were erased. And the Alpha could take what they learned and use it against their opponents.

Some of these battles may have been a 48 hour ride, but perhaps weeks if not months in the making for some (if you’re lucky, again, to be on a server like that).

I’m not even talking about the discovery of exploiters which now could move either… That has its own caveats and impacts.

All this to say that as a PVPer who engages in this play mode and understands the intricacies of time and choice, I get WHY people are upset.

However, it still pales in comparison to what others have lost in much, much, much greater numbers.

I agree with the rollback. It was unfortunately the least impactful way to correct the error.

It still sucks.

65

Yep. I think the rollback was just. There could have been more surgical ways of dealing with it (since the follower tab in the menu suggests a way we can get all the thrall details from a one db and transition it to another) but in a do or die situation it will do.

And therefore their time on the server is limited and done when that alpha retaliates against an offense that technically was from a different timeline.

Because 1) it wasn’t sufficient enough and 2) it’s in a bubble mixed in with all sorts of other things like god bubbles, T3 alter lights, torches, and pretty much all other variable placeables that I include in the “build” section. I dont’ consider foundations or any of the stagnant aspects an issue because FC has flat out said they aren’t.

All I can tell you is what I experience. When a clan with massive amounts of thralls and or lights log in, my performance sucks and I start rubberbanding. I take FC at their word that the stagnant building items don’t have significance and the dynamic stuff can be used to stop people in their tracks and is enforceable on so that is where I get the thrall # in one area (which I don’t know a single person that spreads them outside of the confines of their base).

And now watch the defensiveness come up from this because I agree with you and I bet FC would as well for enforcement. The idea hasn’t gotten much traction but I bet real money as the reports come in about clans and performance issues it will get ugly fast. This would PVE and PVE-C servers because PVP don’t do thralls. Regardless what Marco is saying. The benefit of the defense doesn’t warrant the time expended for PVP to be functionally viable. At most it’s a 5 minute delay assuming you just don’t run around them because their AI is just that bad.

66

I agree, the official server rules and their enforcement are a mess. However, that’s really tangential to this discussion.

If we’re really talking about performance, then I’ve already explained my objections to using it in this context. If we’re talking about how performance is treated in Funcom’s official server rules, then that’s a whole different can of worms.

Even without understanding the intricacies of PVP the way you do, I also understand why people are upset.

I just don’t agree with those who are asking Funcom to roll back the rollback and I don’t think it’s hypocrisy to point out their lack of perspective to them.

And I definitely disagree with the latest trope that some PVP players are pushing about how PVE players are at fault for collecting thralls. I’ve now witnessed a considerable number of these attacks on PVE players, with diverse reasons for invalidation of their playstyle, ranging from “go back to playing with your dolls” to “you don’t need any thralls except those that are easily obtained” to “you don’t need any thralls anyway” to “having thralls is a performance problem”.

Maybe I’m jaded, but when I see a common trend of PVP players attacking PVE players over the same thing at the exact moment where they stand to gain something from those attacks, I get a bit stubborn and start “scrutinizing their stances”.

67


Sorry it was the best one I could find to stay light hearted. Giphy is sort of mean most of the time.

68

Okay, I’ve been telling people that’s not feasible, but let me explain why.

Yes, you can grab the backup of the game database before the thrall decay snafu. Let’s call that one the pre-snafu database. And you can also look at the event log in the post-snafu game database.

With that, you might be able to come up with a query (or a script) that will give you the diff. Let’s suppose that you can. I’m not sure, but let’s assume for the sake of discussion that there actually exists a way to solve this non-trivial problem.

Now that would give you a list of thralls (and their inventories and stats and gear) to “resurrect”. Where do you put them? In their original locations? What if the player built something there while you were off working on this solution? What if the player’s stuff is gone from there (e.g. wiped by the alpha) and some other player built their stuff there? What if the player has been adding followers to compensate for this fiasco and now resurrecting the lost ones puts the clan over the hard limit and the system starts killing off the excess followers at random?

When I say “this shіt is hard”, I’m really not trying to exaggerate :smiley:

“It wasn’t sufficient” is a reasonable-sounding guess, but it’s a guess. We’ll never know. The only way we could know would be to grab the database from one of the officials, put it on a test server of equivalent capacity, get an equivalent number of players to play “like normal” on it, and then experiment with different thrall populations. Something along these lines:

  • Killed all but 100 in each clan. Still performs like shіt.
  • Killed all but 50 in each clan. Slight improvement.
  • Killed all but 30 in each clan. Noticeable improvement.
  • Conclusion: 30 should be the limit.

As for it being mixed with all sorts of other factors, that’s exactly my point. I’ve already made the mistake of assuming I know enough about performance based only on my observations of the black box this game is. I was proven wrong and I’ve learned my lesson. Now I’m trying to get others to do the same :wink:

Your experience and my experience and every other player’s experience is a starting point. The game remains a black box and reasoning about it is tricky.

Okay, that’s a start. What happens then? Does your performance keep sucking until they log off? Or until they move out of the render range? Or does it get better a couple of seconds later? Don’t take this as an attack or criticism. Those are just some questions that someone who’s actively trying to diagnose this stuff would have to ask. I’m mentioning them to explain why “having 200 thralls is a performance problem” is not a thing anyone here can use to justify suggesting measures to deal with that.

I’m not saying that merely having 200 thralls isn’t causing any performance problems. I’m saying that it might or might not be, and if it is, we don’t have enough knowledge or insight to suggest how to deal with that.

Oh, and that mention of the lights? That’s precisely why I keep saying this stuff is hard. There’s no good reason I can think of why the lights would have any special effects on the server. On the other hand, sending the information about a big number of placeables to the client could make the server lag while it’s doing it, but that would be true for any kind of placeable, not just the lights. I guess using torches is the easiest way of accomplishing that, so that’s why people talk about the lights so much. And it has the added “benefit” of lagging your client, too.

Sorry, this has gone way off the original topic, but it’s actually more interesting (to me) than the whole squabble about whether rollbacks were okay and whose play time matters more.

No doubt people would flip their shіt if someone said “Hey, we should start reporting people for having too many thralls and hopefully Funcom bans them.”

I do agree with you that if you can get people banned for clustering 200 torches in a certain pattern, regardless of whether they did it maliciously or just because they don’t give a shіt about anyone else, then you should be able to get them banned for clustering 200 AIs in a pattern that produces similar effects.

That doesn’t mean I agree with how Funcom is handling any of that in their enforcement of the rules.

While I do have respect for your experience in PVP, I also have to be skeptical, because people have claimed some weird things about thralls over time.

Case in point: there was a thread asking to nerf horses’ health, of all things, partly because of the issues with the AI. The reason I’m bringing that up is that, if it’s true, it highlights just how far PVP players will go to gain an advantage.

69

They’re frustrated and angry man. I would be too if I’d been playing this weekend… Although usually as clan leader I would have probably told everyone to hold off until we knew what was happening and bv’d. If the rollback didn’t happen the most damage would be on the base, if it did then we’d just pickup where we left off.

I’d be mad that the mistake happened and prompted a rollback. At the same time I feel so bad for the person who made the change too. It was a mistake, mistakes happen and they’re human.

As so many have pointed out this is probably a mistake born of burn out or stress. I would tend to lean on that. In addition to their pledge to do better, this needs to include supports for their employees.

Appreciate the some. Those some do not see beyond their minimized scope.

Kill boxes are still effective if done properly but run the risk of aforementioned performance issues.

It really depends on the playstyle and size of your clan and space. That will often dictate your thrall count.