You know I read the forums a lot. I don’t read everything, and only respond to 5% maybe. But I read the “I got banned” and “things just went poof” threads and I have to wonder if people understand what a funcom ban is. You’re not banned from the game.
I know people are upset. Hell I’ve had a hard time not getting all vindictive when private servers I’ve been on closed out of host boredom. Months of building gone like a fart in a hurricane. Has made me gun shy about private servers but am back on one.
Thing is you’re not banned from the game, just the public servers. To me that is like getting banned from some over crowded dive bar with cheep drinks. You can still drink at home. You can invite buddies over to drink. You can turn your garage in to a private bar. Hell, you can join a private bar. But just because you’re banned from A bar doesn’t mean you can’t drink.
Coming on the forum and venting isn’t the best option in that situation. But then showing up at that bar you like because all your friends drink there and having the bouncer just block you from coming in with no explanation other then “email the boss”? Ya I can see that getting out of hand fast.
Now have you actually been banned, or did you get a time out? I mean the bouncer aught to at least be able to tell you if you are banned or got a time out, for how long, and what rule you broke. “Dude, some patrons complained you were blocking the jukebox last night. So the boss gave you a weeks time out to think about it”. Or " Dude, some patrons said you were drunk, obnoxious, and up in their faces all night, so you need to find some other place to drink".
So what’s the story about? Trying to get Funcom/zendesk to do the right thing by players, Email them they have been banned or been given a time out. The duration of the time out. An explanation; what rule was broken how. And a link to where to appeal. Also that starting threads about it in the forum will get them delisted and you a forum time out.
Ya, I know, but I do feel better having said it. I honestly think the way funcom does it is disrespectful of the player.
Actually, I think you’re overlooking a core issue: Conan Exiles is a survival building game. For many players who are willing to invest long-term energy and time in the game, a specific base or building often involves a great deal of effort, possibly over several months or even years. The achievement on a particular server represents everything in this game, not just playing on the official server, and now you’re banned from the official server, you can still play single player. This is also why players react so strongly once they are banned from the game or similar to the previous situation where they could not log in to the official server over the weekend.
What I’m saying might be a bit complicated, so let me give a simple analogy. Suppose I play a game, like League of Legends or CSGO, and I get banned for 30 days because of a bug or a fight with someone else. After 30 days, there’s almost no impact, as everything in my account will still exist. But from the perspective of being banned by an admin in Conan Exiles, it means: due to a bug or a dispute with other players, all your account data is directly reset, leaving you with nothing.
This is the huge contradiction and challenge that this kind of game, or Funcom in the next Dune game, faces. The building I put 1,000 or even 10,000 hours into on the official server is everything in this game. And an inadvertent bug, a dispute, or even a server operation error, directly wipes everything out. So far, I haven’t seen many people who, after investing so much effort into the official server, plan to start over. This is a big problem that has been criticized. From the perspective of the game company, your one mistake leads to a loyal player who loves this game leaving it forever.
And this contradicts the shift towards long-term operation of the game. I often communicate with our forum or the official server group of Conan players. Everyone’s attitude towards the official server is: everyone is being careful, for fear that offending the administrator or other players will lead to malicious reporting, and then my building is directly wiped out with one click. There have been many instances in history where administrators have arbitrarily removed buildings, and the end result is that this group of people has permanently quit Conan Exiles. This is very regrettable.
Of course, I’m not just venting on this forum. I’d like to offer some constructive opinions of my own: I believe the actions of the administrators should aim to avoid the destruction of the countless hours of achievements players have made on the official server. For example, if there are no building violations, the decay time of the building can be paused, displayed as a ban status. Or for non-serious violations, such as disputes, bugs, these actions should only result in a 7-day ban. The decay time on the official server is 10 days, at least in this way, it can protect the players’ achievements afterwards.
So you lose the character or just the stuff? This is a very important distinction here because of the defining of the game itself is critical to be on the same page. Losing the lore, recipes, map finds etc is completely different than just losing the building and placeables. Too many players focus on the stuff and get emotional about that but as you have said, this is a build survival game, not a SIMS game where you just play house. So in FC’s eyes the building and surviving and the dungeon crawling is the game. The stuff? Yeah no. That’s just fluff and the game is about the experiences of getting that stuff but the stuff isn’t the game. In fact, seeing how FC has defined the ToS on their official servers, they have an expectation that you need to let things decay if you aren’t actively playing in the game so that if you aren’t playing, you are making room for those that are and you can come back later.
I completely understand that the majority of players don’t play like that and are heavily connected to the stuff and prefer to play SIMS but at the same exact time complain about the urban sprawl and clutter on officials. If folks would let their stuff go and keep only what is actively being played with, most of the clutter goes away and the server is healthy.
The biggest issue is the amount of players playing on multiplayer servers that really should be playing in singleplayer is too high.
I’m thinking of some of the largest builds that I have done in my time playing the game and then looking at some of the things players on Funcom Provided Servers are building and I’m wondering what the heck do they mean it took them hundreds of hours to build that?
In the six years I’ve played this game, I’ve been on about a dozen or so servers and twice if not three times that many in new characters. Making a new character either because of switching servers, a server wipe, or simply wanting a change of ideas and I reroll on my own.
Looking at one of my last characters I played solo and had a build of around 4500 pieces. This character and their build took less than a week to hit 60, gather mats, build stations, harvest key Tier 3 and Tier 4 thralls, and do all my upgrades how I wish as well as level up the new sorcery. All that done in a week or two, maybe a few days over. With 1.0x harvesting and 0.5x Exp rates. Maybe 40-60 hours played tops. And this wasn’t one of my more faster grinds either. I know others are capable of much much quicker and focused plays as well.
Yet someone shows me a character and build of similar stature with hundreds of hours in. Well here’s the thing. That hundreds or thousands of hours spent on a character is misleading. Much of that is farming stuff you don’t need, wasting time looking around, and other miscellaneous stuff.
I’ve played MMORPGs and know what one does inbetween content releases. There’s the initial grind and immersion with new content. That lasts maybe a few dozen hours when its new. Then the other stuff is just neutral gameplay. Not thousands of hours of farming stone and wood for builds. If even one player did that and used all of it, it would be literally a multi-million piece building.
Even some of the largest builds players make don’t take weeks and weeks of work to do. What takes weeks and weeks or months and months is when you initially build a structure and iteratively add to it over time. But these are small quick spurts over a long time. But when you actually factor in the time of building and gathering, its relatively small percentage.
Of course then you have the refreshing where weeks and months go by of once a week logins to refresh decay happen. Sorry to say… but that doesn’t count when you factor into builds that ‘took years’ to make.
But having a piece of virtual real estate does weird things to people’s egos. You’ve had that build for x amount of time. Its yours. An emotional attachment happens that isn’t exactly inline with the actual effort that went into it. I’m sorry but even the largest mega builds in these servers are not that impressive and can be recreated in 1.0x environments relatively quickly.
The other thing to consider is the place you’ve build said structure is not yours. You share it with every other person who has played, still plays, and will play on that server. A 40 man server can have a literal database of hundreds and thousands of characters. Many which are owned by players who may not come back. But could. Many of which do play. Even on the underpopulated ones who see 3-5 players a night. I mean are they the same players every day? What people don’t realize is that a 3-5 player server could easily be a community of 100 players who play a few hours a day, or even more when you factor in refreshing.
I mean check out one of these private servers that cap out at 80+ players online at a time. You’ll notice they have discords featuring 2500-3000 members. If only 10% of those are active (its more, much more), that’s still 250+ players. But when you have a server that is up 24/7, and people access it from different times of the day and don’t always play every day. It spreads out. Your server is never as dead as you think it is.
So players really need to evaluate what the hell they are doing when they play on these servers. If your goal is to build something that you want to keep for years and years. Why the hell are you doing it on a server you can lose access to at any moment? We know from last year that one half of the Funcom Provided Servers were gutted. One half of that playerbase lost their buildings. These people didn’t get banned. They didn’t break any rules. They didn’t even get any adverse warnings. They flipped a coin and got tails when they should have got heads.
Was this wrong? Not really. It wasn’t right either. It was just a turd sandwich one half of that player base had to eat for the good of everyone. One half kept the buildings they had, the other did. Was just a fact of life like gravity. But it set a precedence. It could happen again.
So even if you play on your best behavior, follow the rules to a T. Even if you make friends with everyone on the server and no one will report you. You still have a 50/50 shot at losing it all at any given time.
Oh but you don’t think it will happen again. Yell well… for 4 and a half years, those other half thought that too.
You should not ever build something you wouldn’t be willing to lose as soon as you log off if you don’t do it in Singleplayer or at the very least control the game.db (or other map variants thereof) file that the building sits in. Everytime you log off of a server you do not directly control, you risk whatever you built, farmed, or acquired to be gone the next time you load up the game.
Doesn’t matter if its a private server running for 7 years, a Funcom Provided Server, or you’re buddy’s coop game. You will have a chance to lose everything for a variety of reasons. Why would you take that risk?
The point to playing multiplayer is to share an experience and a be apart of a community. Not get a foundation into a pretty spot first and build a masterpiece that you look at once in a while. You’re there to share a community experience and when you build it should be with that mindset.
I’m not telling anyone how to play the game here. I am pointing out that if you play a game a certain way in a game mode that is incompatible with it, you will have heart ache. And that responsibility is entirely on you and no one else.
What you build on someone else’s server belongs to them. They have direct authority over it, they own it, it is theirs and not yours. You gave them that authority and permission the moment you logged in. Your 10,000+ hours played on someone else’s server belongs to them and not you. Doesn’t matter if it is Funcom or not. You gave it freely to them upon logging in.
Conan Exiles like many survival building games are not sandboxes by default. They are swaths of sand on the beach of an ocean. Nothing you build is permanent. Eventually the tide is going to come in one way or another. If you want a sandbox, you need to put one in your own back yard.
This actually got me thinking. Server admins can actually look at clan/solo logs. And there is a rule against having useless buildings for landclaim. If a base has not been used in some time (aka serial refreshing), they can see that. Why wouldn’t that be considered abusing landclaim?
I mean just because you have basic crafting stations crammed into one building doesn’t mean its not useless if its not being used. If you’re not actively playing then you’re not actually using the area. Which in turn means the entire base is ‘useless’.
Could explain some of the so called… ‘wrongful bans’ in that regard.
Buildings are only a small part of this, but the vast majority are items of various kinds, including slaves, weapons and equipment, or various out-of-print items, such as the 127-attack Great Sword, almost every legendary slave in the game, and weapons and equipment collected from various dungeons. As far as I can tell, the surge’s slaves alone require close to 200 to 400 hours of gathering time.
Wow…yeah that is a great point and I can see the logic behind it. Now if we can get confirmation that this is the idea in a ToS update or in the pinned posted, we can stop the uncertainty and everyone knows…play the game or lose your base.
Maybe you think it’s not the weapons, the equipment, but the process of collecting him. That doesn’t mean some people don’t think highly of him, like me, I collected almost all the loot in the official uniform, do you know how much work he spent on me? More than 2,000 hours of playtime, and lots of money. Two of them are a samurai sword and a meat cleaver dropped by the spider BOSS on the island. That knife, as far as I know, I got it from a friend. Likewise, did you know that I have a friend who spent over 3,000 hours collecting all the slaves for his official uniform? Maybe you don’t know, because you don’t care if the camp overseers are painted. That’s why I’m concerned about this issue.
If you think so highly of that stuff, why are you playing on a server that could drop off at any time?
Like I said, 50% of servers were deleted and characters transferred to other servers. Those players lost much of that stuff. Do you think it will never happen again? Do you think said servers will be permanent in the years to come?
So, to solve this problem, we only play PVE, because PVE, even if it deletes files, will take away most of the valuable stuff through character transfer. And now I’ve bought 28 accounts to keep my stuff. Yes, most of them are designed to solve the original transmission limit of one signal. There are only 200 permanent slots for each account. It doesn’t really matter if he seals it or not, as long as the slaves don’t lose the important out-of-print, collectible equipment.
Either way, in a survival-building game, the outcome is important, no matter what you say here, no matter how you play. It’s also hard to change the vast majority of players who have invested a lot of energy in the official uniforms, and who like to leave the game for good when the items disappear.
The only thing you have actually lost is time and effort. Not a small thing but you still have all your content, you can rebuild.
FYI: I’d bet I’ve restarted 100 times since this game dropped. I took a long hiatus from the public server I was on and lost every thing save the clothes on my back. Back to it to keep a foot print on a public server.
Whats stopping you from playing? Rhetorical question, you’re stopping your self.
Agree
In the, oh 200 hours I have on the private server I’m on I have built and deconstructed a leveling base, my main base and no less then 6 satellite or temp bases; like a slavers tower next to a bigger village. But that is play time not build time. As in only took 15 minutes to build my “pepper box” by buccaneers bay. Although it took almost 2 and a half hours play time because of mismanagement of building materials and
You mean you play PVP and you’re worried about losing your stuff? I thought that was part of PVP, the constant worry of losing all your stuff.
I may very well be wrong but isn’t all that accessed through the admin panel? So single player, coop, host a server?
Look I’m sitting on an Atlantean Sword that I got from a raid 2 years ago. Also I have 4 freezers full of undead pets so I get what you are saying but at the same time…meh. They can all go up in a cloud of smoke and I would still play the game because I understand the stuff isn’t important. The reward of the hours spent on the game isn’t the digital crap that will all go up in smoke eventually since no game is eternal. It’s the memories you have in that game. The only time I got miffed over it all was the time that there was a bomb dupe at the same time they were going to close off the server transfers so I was in a rush to consolidate my stores from several servers and lost 50% of my collection because everyone had enough explosives to literally wipe players off the map and you just can’t defend against that in strategies if you aren’t online all the time. But after a while I smiled because I just thought of that clan that did it and their expressions when they saw the Smaug level amount of treasures they stumbled on. I went and visited their base afterwards and they tried to hide 5 vaults in water that weren’t there before…it was just funny considering I knew they were going to get hit that night by the alpha and so all that treasure would be gone before they could actually appreciate it. That is the take away that is worth the hours and hours of time. The memories. The loot? just 1’s and 0’s that will go away.
This is the part that you’re missing…
If you indeed read the official server guidelines… while the rules themselves aren’t super clear… the message however is crystal clear…
You simply cannot read the guidelines and not get the impression that a build requiring thousands of hours is simply not something that is welcomed on official servers… It’s just not…
Now I can understand people having bases from before these rules took effect… but even then if they read that, the immediate thought should be… “Damn… I should downsize and make room for others, because this is not the place to build a giant palace…”
The main issue that I see is that even in the rare cases where people actually read these rules… they will disagree with them and think that they’re unreasonable and keep doing what they’re doing until they actually get banned and that’s when they wake up…
So far I’ve seen only a tiny handful of people who actually took them seriously and put the effort in to downsize and make their base compatible with the building guidelines.
So coming back to your statement… if building something indeed took you thousands of hours to build… then that already almost certainly qualifies it to be wiped on an official server…
To be precise, most of the complaints we see aren’t even bans, they’re temporary suspensions. It’s easier and shorter to just say “ban”, but Funcom makes an important distinction: temporary suspensions cannot be appealed.
Mind, I don’t agree with their policy, but it exists, and it’s important to make that distinction.
They definitely should give players information about why they were suspended or banned. The only thing I disagree with is that they should e-mail those players proactively.
The reason I disagree is that they don’t have your e-mail. They don’t magically get it when you buy their game. And I want that to stay that way. I’ve given my e-mail to enough companies who insist that they need it when they don’t. I don’t want to add Funcom to the list of those companies. I don’t want to have to create a Funcom account when I buy one of their games and have them spam me with some random shіt that I can turn off when I get sick of it, only to have them start sending it again out of the blue a year or two later.
Ideally, a pop-up that tells you that you can’t log in because you’re banned or suspended should come with a link that you can use to look at the explanation. At the very minimum, it should come with a link to Zendesk and an instruction to open a “why was I suspended” ticket – a ticket type that used to exist, but was removed.
I dare say that players who can play for thousands of hours are definitely not for architecture, the vast majority are for various rare slaves and weapons. Collecting all of them requires only a dozen boxes to fit them. For example, as far as I know, the longest playing player and the wealthiest player only have 800 building materials at home. Just a matchbox, not many boxes, maybe less than a hundred. But inside are a dazzling array of treasures. Including 400 hours of Red Dragon Torch, 127 damage Crome Sword, 69 piercing Lie Giant Sword, Holy Master, and more.
It should be said that each has its own gameplay, which is also one of Conan’s game charms. PVP players do not pay attention to materials. To be honest, all kinds of materials in this game are freely swiped through various bugs, but for PVE players, various precious treasures are also the charm of this game. I dare say that few people in Conan know more than me. For example, how to obtain the Frost Giant in Septa, and how to meet the boss of Long Wonder. For this reason, I have counted all the weapons that can be dropped, all the slaves that can be caught, whether they are on the map or from surge,purge
Speak for yourself. I have thousands of hours and I absolutely loathe the RNG grind for “rare” collectible crap that will be nerfed into uselessness down the road.
I will correct my viewpoint, at least in the PVE community I have been in contact with, this is the way my friends who have been playing with Conan for a few years. PVP is not applicable.
