Close Empty Official Servers, Leave few and put that resources into admin server police

Like title says i suggest to close down most of official servers, mostly empty ones (there’s a lot of them) - leave just few open, based on actual playerbase (official) plus few extra and put resources / money into admin police that will keep servers clean and hackersfree / cheatersfree.

Everyone know’s what issues official servers suffer, hackers, cheaters, undermeshers, racism, insulting, foundation spam and many more. Uncounted amout of frustration, reports and just bad reputation for game itself.

The only problem that there is with that solution is that we don’t know what kind of deal Funcom have with G-portal, how it’s based - player amout or server count? We don’t know if they can just change deal like that or maybe they are bound by contract for some longer period of time?

Join disussion and tell me what You folks think about it! :wink:

Although mathematically it makes sense to squeeze player base into servers to create true online experience, they won’t. Main reason is perception to general public. If they closed any servers , the perception would be they are shuttering the game, and panic would ensue that game is dead.

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OR…maybe they just have a long term lease for “X” amount of servers with G-Portal and do not even worry about it right now.

Doubtful. How many gaming companies have condensed servers over the last few years? They are a business, and they have made lots of money on CE, I am pretty sure public perception is not keeping them up at night.

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What sky is not falling society do you live in. I want to go there:)
again, the general players, not the fans of the game, will point and say look, servers closing.

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If you’re talking about PVP servers, then it doesn’t matter whether I agree, because I don’t play on PVP servers :stuck_out_tongue:

If you’re talking about PVE(-C) servers too, then I’m completely against it. There’s no such thing as an empty server in a game that allows you to build a huge indestructible base and then spend a few minutes a week to refresh it. Let’s get Funcom to solve that problem first, and then we can talk about consolidating servers.

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I guess if no one logged in to the server, ever, they could close it but… Everytime a server goes down for more then 10 minutes, many people flock to the forums to ask what’s going on since they don’t want their base to decay.

At this point, this is really up to the players by hosting their own servers or renting one.

I guess if no one logged in to the server, ever, they could close it but… Everytime a server goes down for more then 10 minutes, many people flock to the forums to ask what’s going on since they don’t want their base to decay.

May it sound drastic but don’t you think spending a lot of money / resources on hundreds of servers with 1-2 people is not good option for game future? It could be used to develop game more, police servers against foundation spam / cheaters. Like i said we don’t know what kid of contract they have, but it must end someday.

At this point, this is really up to the players by hosting their own servers or renting one.

Yes but I think that cripples conan developement , resources / money goes to wrong place, hundreds of empty servers just for 1-2 people or even completely empty ones like i said before.

Unfortunately, we have too many unknows and speculation.

Could they spend the money on those things or perhaps the money is already spent due to the contract, so, nothing will change if the servers are shutdown (exaggerating here: pre-pay for 1k servers up front, but only use 1).

I agree, and once it ends then perphaps the shutdowns will start and official server will be completely offline. It happens all the time.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand how a player hosting their own server, or renting one, to provide proper administrative action by removing cheats/hacks “cripples conan delevopment”, if the player chooses to leave it empty or are the only ones that play on their own server.

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I mean that contract / resources put into empty server cripples conan developement and brings bad reputation to game as there’s many complaints about cheaters / spammers etc.

We both established that we don’t know anything about the contract and how it affects development.

But, I looked at services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s AWS. Having an empty server costs nothing and closing an empty server adds no additional savings or value.

There are posts asking “why am I banned” so the complaints are getting worked on. However, a better reporting and resolution system would be ideal, would it come at the cost of shutting down servers, without more information, I would say no.

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We both established that we don’t know anything about the contract and how it affects development.

Yes, that’s what I said, we can’t know anything for sure but we can just have disscussion there. I personally think it hurts conan developement by logic, they probably thought that servers gonna be more populated but it is as it is…

But, I looked at services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s AWS. Having an empty server costs nothing and closing an empty server adds no additional savings or value.

Services and deals like that may be way way different.

There are posts asking “why am I banned” so the complaints are getting worked on. However, a better reporting and resolution system would be ideal, would it come at the cost of shutting down servers, without more information, I would say no.

Yes of course they get punished from time to time but like i said somewhere it’s clearly not enough, servers and playerbase is dying a lot faster then they can react with punishment. Not to mention that they can just buy new copy of game and repeat it (which obviously many do).

Im not asking You to definitelly say no or yes, we just have discussion there, maybe someone comes with better solutions.

Hope developers can shed some light on topic. @community

I think the problem here comes in trying to decide what is a dead server? If someone has spent hundreds of hours building a base and then take a few months off only refreshing is that abandoned?

If only three people currently play on a server and all are busy so each only put in a few hours of game time a week it would appear to be an abandoned server to anyone who plays when none of them are logged in.

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That’s the million dollar question right there, at least from the players’ point of view.

It’s not like there’s a consensus among the players about whether being an inactive perma-refresher is okay or not, or even where you draw the line between “I’m just taking a short break” and “I’m basically just refreshing”. And there won’t be any consensus, either, until the game itself imposes it.

As for consolidating servers, there’s something people tend to overlook, because most of them don’t work in software: when planning your capacity, you need to account not only for the average load, but also for spikes.

Hosting servers is not nearly as costly as people tend to imagine, especially when those servers have low bandwidth usage, like “dead” servers tend to have, so it’s probably not a huge drain on Funcom’s coffers. But when there’s a major update, or a free weekend, or some other kind of event promoting Conan Exiles, you see major spikes in player population:

For example, between July 2020 and August 2020, the population jumped from 11.5k to 33.8k. The number of players almost tripled. Imagine what a spike like that would do to the servers if you planned the server capacity around averages only.

This is the kind of thing you could normally solve with dynamic scaling, but you can’t do that in a persistent-world game. You could do it for games that involve matches, but not for a game like Conan Exiles. In a persistent-world game, once you add a server, removing it becomes a problem.

This is why suggestions to consolidate servers, although well-intentions, normally fall flat. Good intentions are easier to have than good solutions.

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No, just wipe servers every 3 monhs and they will become alive again.

Like others games …

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Interesting. If that was the logic, then the servers are a sunk cost, so it doesn’t matter. Taking them offline does nothing but bring complaints to the forum which in turn:


Correct. What I noted was just an example.

Everything you noted seems like alive to me. :grin:

With all due respect: No. :heart:

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or just add a maintenance cost so players can’t just keep something refreshed with 1 total hour (30 minutes during summer extension) a month.

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Interesting. If that was the logic, then the servers are a sunk cost, so it doesn’t matter. Taking them offline does nothing but bring complaints to the forum which in turn:

What if not logic is that? You think that servers are free? Even if server is empty it still takes resources to run it. They could have better deal with someone else for less server space, that’s just an example.

Brings bad reputation:
Few players on empty server is more threat to you as bad reputation vs all players currently playing on populated servers? Where’s logic in that?

It may be hussle but it’s not impossible.

Easy solution is to make simple querry that pick servers that had 0 online players for past 14 days (time to decay all buildings so no construction is lost), all player data (from sql db) transfer to another server server.

We are talking about the same thing, I said “sunk cost” not “free”.

Not getting access to the server is going to be a complaint. You brought up complaints as “bad reputation”:

Since the servers are “empty” then, only a “Few players on empty server” are complaining.

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I’m not interested in counting Funkom’s money or planning the development of the game for it, but I’ll say it as a player.
Once every 2-4 months, my friends and I start a new game session in CE. In general, we are satisfied with the settings of the official servers, although they categorically lack the variety and stricter settings. But we cannot find anything suitable, since the servers are simultaneously extremely sparsely populated and ugly built-up. Half of the map are spoiled by the claim, which renews 1-2 people once a week. It’s boring.
Make regular wipes on at least half of the official servers! Fresh servers always attract people