It would be better if the game was clean and didn’t get more content after that.
Do you prefer keeping all the bugs, having a terrible AI, dumb NPCs and followers, as well as new bugs and more-than-dubious balance changes being introduced every update, as well as more cosmetics that you have to buy with a little bit of free content on top; or do you prefer a clean game with no bugs that has functional enemies and decent balance, but no more additional content is being brought?
I prefer stability over novelty, I don’t want new content, I want the current content to work properly!
If there is new content, that’s cool, but it should not come at the cost of breaking the whole game every damn update 
I play other games that are officially in maintenance mode, or that simply never had any update because they were single releases, and I will take a well-polished finished product over a clunky updating one any time! Just me though I guess?
Edit: When you introduce new severe bugs every update, how dare you call them “patch notes” and not “break notes”?!
13 Likes
Why not both?
You realize that different people, with different professions, are responsible for bug fixing and creating new content.
And yes, I play other games that are single-releases, too. I still go back to Master of Orion 2 every now and then. But most of them have never clocked the thousands of hours of play time Conan Exiles has. Eventually, we’ve seen everything a game has to offer, and it goes dormant in our library, until we return to it some day.
But Funcom can’t afford our dormancy because they have running costs to cover. They need people to keep playing the game, and that requires new content to keep people interested. The small handful of hardcore fans who would keep playing without new content would hardly be enough to keep the servers online.
As an example I give you “Old School Runescape”. Some people wanted the “classic” feeling of the game, so Jagex catered for them and released an old-school version of their actively developed MMORPG. Only, it turned out the “classic” players weren’t actually satisfied with just the old-school content - they just wanted to cherry-pick the updates that had been released over the years. At one point the “Old-School” game actually got more new content releases than the “actively developed” one.
It should also be pointed out that I haven’t suffered from any major bugs for the last couple of years. I play exclusively on Single-Player, so I suspect many of the problems online players have are caused by a) crappy servers and b) crappy other players.
Why not both?
Because apparently the devs are not capable of both!
It’s just a question of priority, and making things functional and clean is higher on my priority list, than spewing out new content. Yeah I know there are different people working on different things, and quite clearly the people who are on the “bug-fixing” part are not doing a great job at all.
You can argue that new content keeps people interested to cover costs, but I’m not sure turning away a lot of other people with awful bugs and changes is helping cover costs either.
TLDR: Stability is the priority, novelty is secondary.
8 Likes
So what should Funcom do with their content developers?
a) Fire them, and hope they can hire new ones when they’ve fixed all bugs and want to get back to developing new content, or
b) Keep them, and keep paying their salaries, and just tell them not to do anything until the bugs are fixed, or
c) Retrain them to become professional bug fixers.
B and C are going to be costly, and C won’t produce immediate results, whereas A is a risk and a lost opportunity.
@Kapoteeni
It’s not up to us to give a rat’s ass about what they do with their staff. That’s their business.
All we have to care about is the state of the game. And it’s in pretty rough shape.
I don’t want new content at the expense of having a game running properly.
Look at Cyberpunk. They had a terrible launch. Terrible! It can’t be worse than that. But look at the game now. Instead of breaking their own game, they fixed it AND released new content, saving the reputation of the company that was completely eroded.
What do these guys at FUNCOM do? They break the game in a cyclical way.
Listen, I love the guys. They gave us a great game, a game that still has a lot of potential, a game no one else has come close to produce. It’s so good that even with all the screw ups it still survives and thrives. They had the courage to give us a game nobody else would. Other companies would tremble at the idea of even thinking about a game as politically incorrect as CE is. This took real balls! 
But things need to change. We need better results. We have no idea if the team is incompetent or not. We don’t know what they are forced to do. We don’t know their constraints. We don’t and can’t know any of that. All we have to go by are results, how is the game running. And that’s the only thing we should focus about. How they fix it is up to them. We shouldn’t try to judge too deeply into that. There’s a lot we don’t know.
Our role is focusing on the product.
6 Likes
I don’t know who said it, but it feels like the game is in early access.
That is pretty accurate, IMO.
They have to make a decision about core mechanics and STICK with it.
Players can’t be at the mercy of the whims of god knows who that suddenly decides to change fundamental things about the game.
People like new content, not having to relearn completely new playstyles.
Add content. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Leave combat alone. Leave thralls alone. Leave pets alone. Because each time they touch these, they come out worse. Add fun content. Make a ■■■■■■■■ new map. But leave the core mechanics of the game alone. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Fix what is. There’s plenty of it.
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Dirty rumour is that the dev team actually tried playing the game.
And in so doing, discovered they didn’t like it, and now we have this reinvention.
This update was not due to player feedback, that much was spelled out in the devstream. Not a lot of other places deciding to upend a system comes from. This one initially speculated that this was bad AI spewing suggestions, like they asked ChatGPT what sort of game makes money and then ran from there… but other drips of information imply this was entirely in house.
Does this one trust those sources?
Yes, much to this one’s chagrin.
Should anyone else trust this third hand info?
Absolutely not.
And, full agreement, this Season does very much feel like an early access Season as opposed to an update that builds on a game established for over half a decade.
Perhaps they are dry testing some ideas for Dune?
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So how about we focus on giving feedback on the game and its contents rather than trying to manage the company’s business and development strategies?
I’m sorry if your experience is different from mine, but in my experience, the game is now better than ever. They didn’t break anything, except the NPC aggro radius, which Den said can be adjusted based on feedback. But “feedback” that tells them to get rid of their dev team isn’t going to help them figure out the proper aggro range.
Too many people are producing a lot of angry white noise and mistaking it for feedback.
1 Like
Denis needs to fugging leave the game alone. He is a good person personally speaking, but he sux at decission making when it comes to overhauls. And to clear this up, I do not want anyone to get fired because we still talk about a human being that just tries to make a living for himself and his family and he is under force to come up with new stuff all the time to make money.
I get the situation but the latest update has shown that the devs are far away from the experience we as players are making in the game. And this is because most of us play this game for a long time now. We have experienced so much changes over the years that we simply learned to adapt to the game quickly in order to further play. Armor-, weapon-, thrall and pet stats. Dungeons, bosses etc pp. That is the knowlege a lot of us have and this knowlegde was build over time.
A lot of people play this game since day one. We do not need to play and try out an update to instantly see when something is wrong. That is the experience you have as a longterm player and you do not get this experience as dev when you finally deside to try to play your own game after 6 years of development.
What have they thought what happens if they try to play their own game? That they understand the mess they have created over the years by playing once? Things in this game are connected to each other and only if you have a certain experience in the game you will see the big picture. You will instantly see that if you change object 1 is has consequences to object x, y and z.
They have broken so much with the latest update and still don´t want to see the mess they have created. Its not just changing numbers its correlations that make this game work. If you nerf or change one feature of the game it has impact on other features too.
What angries me the most is that the dev´s are still in denial. They still think that changing some numbers here and there makes it all good. They ignore that people have suffered hugh amount of lose. They do not put themselfs enough into peoples shoes. 6 years of development and they do not understand that features like thralls and pets and the buildingsystem is what makes this game special. People are willing to look past a lot of problem and bugs just because they love the game enough to make it somehow work to still get a positive gaming experience. By nerfing and changing features more and more into the ground they are take away what keeps people in the game.
Dev´s should not try to make decissions for the player on how to play a game. They should not force people into a certain playstyle. They still have not understand that and its sad. Its sad when you see developer nerfing a top notch game into the ground.
9 Likes
Would you like a list of all the broke in this update?
Note: A bad setting that can be adjusted isn’t something that is broke.
And a lot of people give good feed back while builds are on test that; for the most part, seems to be ignored.
I will say the personal light I hate and wish I could turn off is a Dennis thing, he said as much.
I’d ague this point but you are sort of right. I watched the age of war dev video and there were a few times I thought “that’s not going to go well”.
3 Likes
That’s what I do, mostly. I talk about how the game feels, changes I like, changes I don’t, possible ideas, etc.
I can’t take you seriously after this claim, I’m sorry.
You can live your own fantasy, but don’t drag me into it, please.
The game is at it’s worse state since I started playing a few years back.
I’m post Siptah, so I bought a game that was pretty damn good at the time. The ps4 was starting to have a hard time dealing with it, so I bought a ps5 when nobody could find one specifically to play this game. It ran the game beautifully. Now?
I don’t mind about the stamina change, although I don’t see it as an improvement. Harder purges? Great. All the rest I could do without.
1 Like
Very well said, @Winthor .
The devs crap on what makes this game unique and make it more similar with other games. Big mistake.
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At low level it’s a pain, but you get past it at stamina regeneration speed.
My biggest disappointment is… well they put this out half baked, but hard release dates so…
How soft an “Age of WAR” update made Conan. You know I’ve been griping about this warm fuzzy version of Conan since it hit test.
Hard release dates are terrible for players and devs, @DeaconElie .
They are imposed from above.
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I told the same thing when we just got the data from the test client and was met with disbelief, now, when it hit live, everyone can see it for themselves!
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“Fixing the AI” in my view needs much more than just the aggro range, because mobs are extremely dumb in this game 
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Because it never left the early access stage. 70% of the original content is cut.
The original team moved to make Dune and Conan… Conan can F*** off apparently, old bugs came with new ones, even the running sound is ticking around the pink texture world, with the same npc’s on the same places for 5 years!
But hey! You can have a good pickaxe and a cake 
1 Like
It’s called communication and it’s not happening. It needs to happen. They need to listen to what the community has to say. Laugh at the horrible ideas. Then tell us about it. Tell us about them. Better to never shut up then stay silent leaving us all to theorize.
I agree with a lot being said here and I have my own opinions of what is going on behind the scenes but that’s not the pressing issue. This game is in a dire situation on more fronts than one.
Problem1:
The bazaar isn’t making the money they had hoped it would as a result less resources are being put back into the game resulting in declining quality.
Cause: Bazaar items are not of a large enough varity nor are they remotely close to the value they are priced.
Advisable Solution: Add a full second page worth of purchase items and at minimum half the current $ to crom coin ratio. (so if $9.99 gets you 1200 crom coins then the price should change to $4.99 for 1200)
Problem2:
AI aggro range, reaction time, pathing and base stats are negligable at best.
Cause:
Most like due misinturpertation of player feedback and a desire for the player to be the “Hero”
Advised Solution:
Revert AI to AoS stats, increase AI reaction time, and make AI more situationally aware (ie dodge, side step, and retreat if they get less than 50 percent health). As for aggro, revert back to previous aggro range however implement a line of sight requirement to the target. (if they can’t see they won’t aggro.) And lastly increase the base starting stamina of characters by 15 percent and HP by 30 percent. By lvl 60 this will make players significantly strong than the average AI.
Problem3:
The combat system is messed up
Cause:
Since Update 2.6 (roughly) the combat system has seen at least some form of tweeking in every update.
Advisable Solution:
Stop changing it. If you haven’t got it right by now you never will. Your time is better spent fixing bugs and content mechanics
Problem4:
The religion system is out of date and no longer serves its purpose.
Cause:
The religion system was intended to be the staple of this game that set it apart from all other games in the genre. However apart from adding a few other religion options the system has gone utterly neglected despite many attempts by forum posters to have it vastly upgraded and updated.
Advised Solution:
Devote a significant dev cycle to overhaul and bolster the system to not only be the staple of the game once again but to make integral common gameplay.
This is just to name a few but as an honorable mention…
Change the weapon and armor to be more stat build friendly not everyone likes to fight face to face. Some like to fight from a distance and others like to be sneaky and silent. So for every melee meta there should be an equivalent ranged meta.
5 Likes