Anyone who blame game development issues on Tencent is a proven ignorant on that front. That is not only a verifiable fact, but a given fact.
The foundation/building issue is a long standing one that almost all modders who made new placeables or new building pieces know the cause if they coded them themselves: The way the game “adulterated” Unreal Engine to make up for certain design decisions implicitly makes the character unable to detect surfaces that they should automatically detect when spawned, therefore, always you spawn them on view (when you log in in their relevance area, teleport in their relevance area, or move quickly so they enter relevance area and the view threshold too quickly), they will ignore buildings, and as the “navmesh” is badly used, they will sink into things. That is way is much more likely they sink into foundations than the ground, but they might sink into the ground, if the “sublevel” they are in is not the same sublevel the player character is. That is a tad worse in servers because there is a “all knowing” player (in a sense, not technically) which is dedicated server, and added to that, latency “patch ups” badly done to compensate that Unreal Engine does not give people “free networking development”, instead it gives you the tools so you make yours yourself, and Funcom did not.
That happens since day one, but at that time, thralls were simpler, characters in general were simpler. As they build up on that flawed code, it gets worse and worse, and it start to happen more frequently. Rolling back, that wont solve anything, because the problem itself is in the game since it was launched.
Limitations in the game are one of the two ways lazy work makes up for problems with systems. We should have a revamp on the system that considers the floors.
Wanna know how that should work ? Certain other games in Unreal will have another problem, which is invisible things during loading, but they do not have the problem with sinking into things. It is the same problem but dealt with in another “lazy way”. A “thing” in game has many “objects” to it. It has the figure that gives the thing color and shape. It has the overlap profile, that gives it consistency and helps with density, and weather it blocks view or movement. It also has a lot of maps for light, reflex and etc.
What CE does is build things in a certain order, that makes spawning faster (yeah, it would be way slower otherwise), but it has this problem. IF done like other games, your thralls would show up standing over a invisible thing for a while because everything “functional” is loaded before the visible part is loaded. That would the “more adequate” way to do it, but the real “best” way to do it would be to build the world, then the building objects, then its placeables, then the pawns, and then present it to you. It is what other games using UE do to avoid this problem, but it is done by a different root system of components altogether. It cant be done in CE unless everything is reworked to do it, and consider it done that way. And that is way before Age of Sorcery, or Age of War.
One of the more patch up solutions is to make the thralls “float” until things are all in their places, which is one solution I tried before I got fed up of every single update having to redo the hard edits all over again, so instead I put it into a situational mod I manually activate, so I dont need to hard edit. That is what I used to make the boat, and to get my thralls to be more helpful while I am building.
They also dont block me when they are following and ordinary thralls would stand and prevent you from going through:
But these always require a lot of work, because the underlying problem with all that is that the game itself does not include environmental controls enough for characters to “behave” in the game world. They can be as full of features as they like, if they have the “feet” but the ground does not feel solid, it does not matter how much features they have to control where the feet is, the character cant know where to put it.
A game would take a long time in foundational development and taking care of these details before it is even launched, so it starts by not having these problems happening in the first place.
Tencent, they have nothing to do with it. Tencent is a company specialized in monetization, which from everyone else, is the one most interested in a game that has tons of players, who love everything about the game and buy a ton of stuff. To them, it would be most interesting outcome to have a nice game, working well, and everyone happy.
Like in many instances, players are “HERDED” to attack certain things without thinking, so they have skewed perceptions of what happens.
Develpers, they are like any other worker in a creative/operational position. They want their work to matter. That does not mean entirely that their work mattering means their work contributing to a “perfect” game. Each dev does one thing, and they dont like their thing to be “obscure”.
While Tencent has nothing to do with it, the publisher, oddly enough in this case, Funcom itself, has to lead and supervise devs to know when to wrap up stuff, when to not “reinvent the wheel”, meaning, you dont need ot make your own stuff if there is a nice stuff in the store for 3.99 that you can adapt. You also dont need the “most powerful inventory management system known to gaming” in a game that has other things more important to care. But if you are the dev that makes ONLY the “inventory management”, you might not care that your participation is in a minor aspect of the game.
The publisher is there to intervene in those things. They are there to take the charge and control that stuff. You know what happens to movies in which the director and writer are the same, and often, the main character is played by that “individual” in those cases, for some reason.
I have said a lot of things for that effect, but let me give the honor to someone else that might be more impacting saying the same things:
and this is a consolation 
