Depends on the server. I’ve seen 70 player servers run just fine. I’ve also seen them crawl a bit as well.
The larger the server the more restrictions they need on builds and thrall limits. Those that don’t do this start getting issues. One of the biggest issues larger servers have is how big their communities get. When a server has 70 people online at a given time, they don’t just have 70 total characters on the server. Depending on how active throughout the 24 hour day the server is, it can have 200, 500, or even several thousand.
As a server gets more popular, and as it gets older, even the limits and restrictions won’t help over time, which is why such servers usually wipe on occasion. The limits stave off that time, but won’t remove it entirely.
FC provided servers are exacerbated by this. Despite being 40 man servers and despite them being empty most of the day. They have several hundred players each that login every so often throughout the period of their decay cycle (serial refreshing is way way more common then people think… but I also have to point out that refreshers, on average play more than some think as well though not consistently).
But as I said in another thread, server admins/owners have to decide on a server’s priorities. This isn’t a situation of having your cake and eating it too. Over six years of development has improved but not eliminated this situation. I don’t forsee it ever being eliminated.
The situation is that they have to choose between persistence and performance. The more persistence you have, the less performance. The more performance, the less persistence.
Performance is what was listed so far. Followers and Enemy AIs degrading over time during restarts. The more persistence you desire, the faster this degrades between restarts. You can mitigate this by restarting more often. But once you hit daily restarts, this gets ridiculous. Just for the sake of reference, the server I play on has played through 3 wipe cycles with each one lasting a year, and usually only wiping because of switching maps. 96 hours between restarts for the entire year each time. That is the maximum amount of time a Conan Exile server can go before needing a restart. Even freshly wiped unmodded servers need to restart after that amount of time.
Persistence is how long you want to keep a database. Basically how long do players keep their buildings and characters. Though maybe just buildings as there is a sort of way to wipe a map of buildings and retain characters. I do not know if this has the same effect as a full wipe or not. I’ve actually never tried that myself. But the longer persistence you have, the less time between restarts and thus a more degraded performance you will have getting worse, faster, between restarts.
FC for its servers has decided on maximum persistence. Electing to never wipe unless a server is entirely unrecoverable. And I get what many are thinking. Why not change this policy? Because priority has gone to persistence over performance. For six years players have played on these servers Expecting maximum persistence. Can you tell said players that their builds they’ve spent 6 years making and grinding mats for are worth less than your enemies and followers responding how you think they should?
If I were to answer that question, I would say yes. They aren’t worth jack squat to performance for the majority of players playing on a server. But that’s my opinion.
Those who have thousands of hours devoted to a build might disagree. Especially considering they don’t actively play and pretty much login to refresh a decay timer, and have occasional sprints of time that they play to gather more mats and build something else. They don’t see the performance issues in the same way and largely aren’t bothered by them because they prefer to build and have builds rather than fighting NPCs.
Who’s correct here? Well if you’ve read up thus far you know my opinion. But I don’t run those servers. Ultimately the decision is on whomever does. Being as FC increased decay timers recently, they have decided such players need a break. So you have your answer.
FC has favored Persistence over Performance.
If you all require performance over persistence, then those servers are just not the place for you all.
