When I fight, if I ever fight, it is usually against a clan or some other grouping vs myself as a solo. One of the single most unfun things is to tend to the Event Log like I’m an actuarial. It’s insulting and frustrating, quite honestly that an immersion breaker like a straight up log exists, yet there’s no “warning bell” or “alarm horn” for property and personnel respectively, like what’s in 30-year-old Age of Empires.
What is commonplace in any Clan I’ve opposed is that they’ll bring in a junior member to watch the base(s) and Event Log. Instead of crops, they’re tending to the easily broken placeables strewn about the place like little alarms.
As a solo, this one usually employs misdirection not unlike this.
Lure a clan to raid an annoying to get to spot that is of no real value, and while the cat’s away the mouse does play.
The ram offers more discrete/targetted damage
That could be a boon as well as hindrance.
The damage would be easier to repair, and likely less anxiety inducing. The terror aspect of the raid is diminished, but in large builds, the hole may go unnoticed for an amusement by amount of time.
I completely agree, event logs should be only for people to see in case of problems, stability issues, thrall deaths etc. not to see who did what.
But the biggest problem is in my experience that true pvp is very rare in Conan Exiles, at least on official servers, most raids happen when defender is offline, and that along with cheats and exploits are the biggest problem with pvp.
I’d gladly return to official pvp if there were actively admined premium servers(paid?) and handled in a fair way with warnings for grey zone rule breaking and a consequent ban hammer to those that deliberately broke them
At the risk of going offtopic, I want to get a rant off on this subject.
I have found that true PVP can be quite rare in just about any online game these days. Outside of shooters where the only content in the game is literally to point your mouse at someone and hold the button down. You’re not finding much. I noticed this quite a bit in MMORPGs sometime after I stopped playing Archeage.
I did a little stint in World of Warcraft with some friends a few years back. We pretty much just did PVE since they wanted to see some of the new content at the time. There was this public raid thing or whatever it was called where you could queue up and the system would take you to the target server and auto form the groups. Well the realm we went to was a PVP one. When I saw a bunch of red names, I was like, alright… we’re going to square up and see which side gets this boss…
Nope. No one attacked each other. In fact if it wasn’t for the restriction of not being able to cast buffs and heals on enemies, I’m pretty certain both sides would have healed and buffed each other. The two factions literally helped each other kill the boss. At that point I figured… ok ok… maybe its just a common courtesy for these bosses because both sides get credit. And then we’ll see a mass ball of chaotic melee.
That didn’t happen either. Everyone emoted at each other, being nice and non-confrontational before heading back to their home realms, and the locals rode off to go back to their questing. I was a bit shocked… that wouldn’t have happened in 2004. There would have been corpses everyway and hours of fighting. But not in 2016 apparently. Dunno how that is now.
Before that, I think we had a short stint in SWTOR. That game actually had some really fun PVP in it. But you couldn’t really find it out in the world. But ok, it was an old game (even at that time). So let’s try battlegrounds. Getting those to queue up was a bit annoying. It took forever. And I found out why really quick. Not many did. My friend and I started dominating but as we did so, the queues got longer as people started not queuing. So each evening we could only do like 3-4 matches before it would run dry.
And those matches weren’t great experience either. The battlefields they had were quite interesting with unique mechanics I hadn’t seen in other games. But the players themselves seemed like they were more interested in getting the match over with than actually fighting or winning. I was playing a Sniper and got a decent position in the center of one of these maps, and the way it worked is it was King of the Hill for two generators on oppositied ends of the middle of the map. You held them for points. But periodically they would overload and you had to go to the center to avoid death. Since I was sitting in the center, after a while the enemy would jump into the deathfield to respawn rather than fight. I guess because win or lose, you get ‘something’. And they’d rather do that. Was not a very fulfilling experience.
I tried PVP in Empyrion with a few friends, and I figured its a survival game… its gotta be cutthroat. Well… it wasn’t. The server admins set it up so while most of the areas were PVP. There was a few planets that were PVE. And everyone put their bases there. So raiding bases couldn’t happen. And finding people in that game can be a bit hectic (and this was before you could explore more than a single system, can’t imagine what its like now).
But even when we did find someone, and attacked their ships with ours… we frequently got called out in chat for ‘griefing’. They’re in a PVP area, mining very valuable resources, resources that don’t respawn very quickly. So we’re looking to mine up some valuable stuff, and loot or chase off people from cutting in. But that’s considered a bad thing. Like what? Is PVP just when you want to meet somewhere and duel?
We weren’t camping spawns, we weren’t attacking lowbies. In fact the people we attacked were on the server quite a bit longer and had way better equipment then we did. Well… they ‘HAD’ better equipment. We got some nice upgrades. Imagine you’re running around in level 30 Armor in Conan and kill a few people in epic level 60 stuff and legendaries. About the same thing. I would think that anyone here would agree… that’s good PVP. Or at least I would think so.
Even when I was playing Archeage about 10 years ago, I noticed people would complain when they got PVP’d. Like I remember an altercation a friend of mine got into, he was mining some iron or stone in an area, he needed quite a bit for a crafting project he was working on. Someone else came along and started mining in the same patch as him. He warned them to leave. They told him to go ‘f’ himself. So he attacked him in PVP and kept at it till the guy left. But then the guy complained in chat about it. Like… what? He was warned to leave, and its PVP.
And I know some PVE type players (not all) will look at that last one and think “why didn’t he just share?” Well in PVE my buddy and I would. Absolutely. But in PVP, who gets access to a resource is decided in PVP. Its why you choose to play a PVP server. When you’re gathering in an area and come across a competitor, you fight, whomever wins get the resources. They do get to try and fight again or they can wait till you’re done. But at the end of the day, you’re not fighting for resources in PVP so much as the resources bring you together so you can fight. If all you want is resources, there’s PVE. But typically when you choose PVP, you’re choosing to fight.
But in recent times… this isn’t happening. Fighting people for the sake of it is more and more getting looked down upon. Many people try to find various loopholes too. Whether it be mechanical like @Frillen explained waiting for you to go offline. Or using exploits and in some case hacks and cheats.
Or in many cases technical. Such as claiming harassments, griefing, or some other thing in order to get a ‘win’ through administration. In several games, including Conan, I’ve gotten spoken to by admins for being too aggressive. Thankfully I’ve never been actioned. As I’ve learned to keep decent records of interactions in PVP as I know how salty people can get when things don’t go there way. It also helps to play on servers that have been established for a bit, as newer servers might be hit or miss on how admins handle things (admining is a skill that takes a bit of practice). But established ones tend to be around for a while because of level headedness.
But I don’t blame the game specifically. Our mechanics and such don’t cause people to make poor decisions, they make those on their own. And taking away their ability to make bad decisions and play poorly in some form will just cause them to do it in another way. That’s been my experience across a few games now.
I didn’t really include what would be considered PVP only games. And in reality I don’t really consider them ‘true’ PVP in the sense that you fight without any consequences. You really only get that inside of the survival game genre truth be told.
I’m watching all this with vigor and interest but I’ve got to disagree. Seeing your Kill/Death start to drop below parity is a consequence that has motivated many a GTA player for almost a decade. Or more granularly, the best weapons, and hit/miss percentages. All of that real time in an action game is hot motivation.
Far be it for me to compare myself to Sir Dave or speak for him, but I think one thing that unites us is that there’s something satisfying in the way we are given to fight in Conan Exiles. I myself have an aspiration that we might return to what I thought was ideal, but there’s something undeniably fun in the way we fight in this game. I am particularly fond of the sorts of fighting that occurs on a freshly-wiped official. That golden month or two is pure magic.
Yes, this game once was designed to function similar to rust. And that worked for about 6 months. Until they released orbs and other broken mechanics that destroyed the balance. Since then they tried to figure out how to balance pvp with their trial and error mentality. Funcom never had a serious roadmap for creating indepth pvp mechanics. They simply do not know what to do with pvp anymore. Every update breaks it more and more. The steep decline on pvp players could have been prevented with a team that knows what they are doing.
The current devs are not interested on pvp. Their goal is to make this game so dull and easy to play that is suitable for the masses. Now even the unexpierenced player can feel like a hero. Hack and slay yourself through Conan, get your gear and weapon from chests and npc´s you have no problem slaying. Then start building your castle. Get a fake purge that you can easily manipulate and control. Get easy thralls. Loot massive amounts of food and decorations. Never ever starve to death or gather much materials. Forget about the recipes, all you need is looting chests. Farm bosses like the crocodile in the starter area for easy access to legendary weapons. Hit and roll with any weapon, instant stamina regain. Create fake raids for pve players so any noob can feel like a hero raider.
The concept is simple but very effective. And it works, otherwhise we would have seen some price drops in the bazar already. They sacrificed pvp in the name of making as much money as possible. They are far away from making money to maintain the game. The make money to make their shareholders rich.
