Comprehensive Feedback: Living Settlement System: A Bugged and Unengaging Experience, Enhancing Age of Heroes for a Deeper and More Engaging Experience

Conan Exiles PC Discussion Public Beta Client
, ,
121

Sorry I’m OCD about actual definitions.

I know what a metaphor and a euphemism is, I used one previously, did you see it?
But calling a sock a door is neither a metaphor nor a euphemism.

But it’s not.

The major part of the lively villages is the animations of thralls going about their business, none of the animations are new, are they? What it is is a feature that strings the animations together in to AI driven living thralls.
It’s interesting but pointless. Even if it worked as expected.

That is why I’d like to see some real consequences for thrall not being able to meet their needs.

But right now it’s borked, and to add insult to injury the server is heavy enough thralls are burred in foundations once again.

Would love to see those consequences added once they get the rest sorted.

Really starting to think people are confusing “cosmetic” with “ornamental”. I’d agree animated thralls are as ornamental as animated bushed or flames.

End of line.

122

Accurate use of technical jargon is important when discussing technical aspects.

Let’s say you see a new weapon in Bazaar that has the exact same functional aspects as an existing item – stats, crafting materials and time, behaves exactly the same in combat, etc. – but the 3D model is different. If you call that new look a “skin”, you are technically wrong. It’s not just a skin, it requires modelling.

But does it matter you called it a “skin”? That depends on the discussion. If you’re only discussing the impact on the gameplay, then the difference doesn’t really matter. If you’re discussing the development effort it takes to produce this “skin”, then the difference is important.

With that in mind, this bickering about whether the current implementation of the Living Settlements feature is “cosmetic” is totally pointless. If you really want to get all fancy and technical, the proper name for a feature that has little to no impact on the tertiary game loop would most likely be “chrome”, but being pedantic about it is counter-productive to the discussion.

You can expect very few players to be familiar terms such as “tertiary game loop” or “chrome”, so insisting on them when the context doesn’t warrant it will do the opposite of what you want and end up being a deterrent to clear communication.

They’re not “confusing” it. There’s at least one respectable dictionary that includes that meaning in its definition. That’s the problem with natural languages: they’re messy and ambiguous and not everyone has the exact same definition of the exact same term.

That’s why you might want to pick your battles for when they actually matter :wink:

6 Likes
123

bye, silenced and into my ignoreist forever. done with you.

124

he cant, his arrogance has no limits, its his interpretation that is good , everyone elses is a fool, hahahah. glad we have the ignore button i am no longer going to ever see his nonesense.

fools dont have arguments, his argument is “because he says so”. dont waste your time …

my dear @CodeMage you are wasting your time my friend.

1 Like
125

Question to Everyone:
@Kikigirl, @DeaconElie – I’m curious to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.

If Funcom came out and was completely transparent, openly stating that the upkeep of official servers and the quality of game content is getting tight in terms of funding, and explained that they have a set budget that gets split between everything, including servers and game development. What if they just asked the community directly:

Would you support an optional membership, say $8 per month, specifically for helping to maintain and upgrade servers, with full transparency about where the funds go?

No hidden agenda like the battle pass—just a straightforward ask to the community for support. Would anyone here actually be willing to contribute to that?

So with my suggestion post, I’ve received a wide range of feedback, and it seems to fall into a few distinct categories:

Some people want the settlement system expanded but as a visual effect only.
Others, like myself, want it to be a system with active gameplay mechanics.

Some don’t like the idea of settlements due to concerns over performance issues and believe it’s built on a weak foundation.
Others are against it because they feel it changes the gameplay too much, shifting away from what they view as a survival game.
(Which I guess depends on how each person defines what a survival game is.)
In my personal opinion, if you have a clan of NPCs, part of the survival gameplay should involve taking care of your tribe and having your tribe contribute to the survival effort.

How many people from this section—“Some don’t like the idea of settlements due to concerns over performance issues and believe it’s built on a weak foundation”—would fall into one of the other categories if server performance, or just overall performance, wasn’t in such a bad state?

Honestly, that’s what I hear about all the time—how bad the servers are and how they can’t handle new mechanics. All I think when I hear that is: Was the system so badly built that they just can’t improve it? Will we never see the big changes players have been asking for over the years because the cost or effort to fix it isn’t worth it? Instead, are we just going to keep getting new layers of paint slapped over the same issues?

I can tell you firsthand, after looking at the dev kit because I’ve learned how to mod, there’s a lot of unused stuff still left in the kit. If even half of that is still lingering around in the files, cleaning it up could help reduce the file size and maybe even improve overall performance.

@CodeMage you said

I am thinking about “New Players,” but I am also thinking about all types of players and how “New Players” eventually transition once they’ve played the game for a while. When they come to that point where they want a more challenging game experience, or if they fall into one of the other categories of players in general, it’s important to consider the full spectrum.

I feel there are three main types of players:

  1. Easy Gamers:
    These players could play with creative mode on and passive enemies that only fight back if attacked. They want the game to be stress-free and focus on the fun of building and exploration without much challenge.
  2. Casual Players:
    This is the largest group. Casual players like a bit of challenge but nothing too time-consuming. A lot of them are adults with limited time, so they want to get the most done in the little time they have to play.
  3. Hardcore/Challenge-Seeking Players (like myself):
    We play with whatever time we have, but we want a real challenge. The grind to achieve our goals is part of the satisfaction. Time isn’t a factor in how we play; in fact, we thrive on challenges, and the struggle is what makes it rewarding.

I praise Conan Exiles as one of the few games with a good amount of optional server settings that allow you to fine-tune the experience. You can adjust how long things take to craft, the length of the day and night cycle, and so much more. The only other game I know with settings that rival this is Valheim, which has added a lot as well.

Now, let’s say there are 5,000 players, and over 3,500 fall into the casual/easy categories, with the last 1,500 being players like me. If you keep those 1,500 players around by providing optional settings, they’ll keep coming back and potentially buy stuff from the shop over the course of 10 years. This is long-term revenue, something I feel isn’t considered by many companies anymore.

For instance, when Funcom made Conan Exiles, everything was a one-time buy—the DLC, the main game. They relied on that initial purchase to sustain the game for 6 years, while also maintaining official servers and balancing the player experience. But they risk losing customers by never fully solving the tougher issues players face or by making the game too easy, which can drive away the more hardcore player base.

Optional settings for the three major types of gamers keep everyone engaged and playing long-term. The server issues seem to stem from having too many players, letting clans have too many thralls, and allowing overly large builds—all on top of optimization issues. These are the real plagues of official servers.

My proposed fixes would let people have as many thralls as they want, but they’d need to go out and gather food and make drinks to keep them going. (A cook would handle the actual crafting part.) The solution for overly large builds would be an upkeep system that adds consequences for building too big, encouraging people to manage resources and space more efficiently.

I saw a reply here where someone mentioned they had 64 thralls. That’s a lot, especially on official servers, I would think! We already have categories for many game settings like General, Progression, Pet & Thralls, Day/Night, Harvest, Crafting, Building—all of these let players adjust and tailor their perfect gaming experience.

So why is it so hard to imagine “Living Settlement” being another category? You could have options like a checkbox for “Manned Workstations,” which would require thralls or the player to be physically present at workstations for them to function. This would be just one of many options under the Living Settlement system, offering players more ways to interact with their thralls and make the game feel more immersive.

1 Like
126

i will support them, but , expecting them to make changes quick, otherwise they will win 8 bucks from me but i will never open the wallet to them EVER.

as @CodeMage explained, what you ask (although is cool is unrealistic). for the reasons you said in your post.

there are finite resouces available, and the servers themselves are struggling, they first need to greatly upgrade them , to just sustain the game as it is right now (without fancy additions)

it was like this in 2019. with the hunger system in place one of its goals was to deal with thralls abandoment, and excesive ammount of them, as you had to give them food, the more you had the more food you needded to have, huge honey farms were created, and people wehre filling large ammount of thrall feeding pots, to feed your army, it ended up being shut down, i admit your idea is more complete, but it is far from being new… we did had a much simplier one in place and did not work.

why would it work now? when it failed in 2019?

even when i admited yoour idea is more “complete” it is also much more complex to execute.

127

My answer would be a resounding “no”.

The revenue stream from Conan Exiles already includes the following:

  • base game purchase
  • DLC purchases
  • monetized content (i.e. Black Lotus Bazaar)

Adding a subscription for official servers is just not justified, especially if it’s “optional”. Asking for an “optional” subscription is a business model I would expect from a small group of creatives with a Patreon, not a company that has been acquired by and folded into freaking Tencent.

They have been improving it for 7 years. And therein lies part of the problem: they’re dealing with a codebase that is 7 years old, and it’s starting to show.

Except that the server performance is not related to the size of the asset files. But even if you don’t take my word for it, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and not treat them like they’re dumb: if the server performance could have been improved by reducing the size of the asset files, they would’ve done so already, because that’s much easier to do than squeezing out new optimizations.

Frustrate a new player enough, and they won’t transition. They’ll go play something else that isn’t throwing arbitrary roadblocks in their way for no good reason.

016dacf3-ea37-4fd7-af13-bc41150976e5_550x309

“Challenge” implies something that you can overcome with some degree of skill. There is nothing challenging in having to operate your crafting stations manually because you have no thralls yet.

In fact, switching to that would remove an existing challenge. Right now, one of the things new players have to learn is how to optimize their “crafting pipeline”. You can explore and harvest and gather materials while your workstations are crafting the products you need for whatever you do next. As you gain playing experience, you learn how to manage your time, what’s the best way to obtain certain resources, how much wastage you might expect if you are crafting something perishable and don’t come back on time, etc.

Your suggestion would lock that process of learning away from new players until they get thralls and learn how to use your system. It would effectively impose your system on new players as something that has higher priority than a variety of other mechanics and topics to learn.

Your proposed taxonomy of “easy”, “casual”, and “hardcore” players shows you either don’t understand this game or the general concepts of game design. I’m leaning towards a combination of both.

As several people have now pointed out to you, this game caters to a variety of interests. You are classifying those players using a one-dimensional taxonomy, instead of a multi-dimensional one. For example, a player could be “casual” on the conflict axis, “hardcore” on the building axis, and “easy” on the social axis.

Not everyone ranks their interests the same way you do and desires the exact same structure of challenges.

To put it even more bluntly, if you think that hardcore PVP players who think your proposal is going to be detrimental to their play style are somehow “easy” or “casual” players, you’re being downright insulting to them.

I also think it’s great that they allow so much customization.

However, I play on official servers, so that customization does not apply to my gameplay experience. Players like me are a sizable portion of the total playerbase and you don’t get to wave us away with “it’s optional and customizable”. Simply repeating the same argument won’t make it relevant or correct.

If you want anyone to believe that 30% of all players want to turn Conan Exiles into a city simulator at the expense of other play styles, you’ll have to provide some backing for that claim.

I would be very surprised to see that the number is that high. You wouldn’t be the first player here who is confusing “I want this” with “we want this”.

Except that’s an oversimplification. Take the whole “too many thalls” trope. When Funcom implemented the follower limit, they initially didn’t turn it on. A lot of us pestered them to turn it on, because we were so convinced that the thrall AI was the biggest problem for the server performance.

After a year of constant pestering, they finally turned it on, and guess what? It didn’t solve the performance problems. Oh, it definitely helped in some extreme cases where you had clans with 500+ followers stuck in the same base, sure. But pretty much the only visible performance improvements came from those extremes. Average servers kept having the same problems as before.

Now people are pushing the “overly large builds” trope as the source of performance problems, because they’re frustrated and they would rather cling to an oversimplification so they can blame someone.

The truth is that the problem of diagnosing performance problems in Conan Exiles has moved beyond identifying low-hanging fruit and going for it, and will require more than some armchair QA from random players.

Precisely. An upkeep system. Ideally, an upkeep system that balances all currently viable play styles and imposes the upkeep on them as equally as possible, rather than your specific upkeep system that just happens to cater to your personal preferences.

3 Likes
128

This conversation about Officials, my most recent musings on the work required and what I think about the game being in the survival genre might be of interest in reply.

In EA paying for the game itself fine, then maybe once released a sub for Officials would have been accepted. But not now.

1 Like
129

Everyone but the ones who are responsible. It blows my mind that some are so crazy about arguing and reporting for things that are in (I’m gonna say it) many cases now not their fault.

1 Like
130

Logged out because OCD was getting the better of me.

Everything was running fine on the beta server; well except for the lively village thing. Then I started logging in to thralls up to their necks in foundations. Apparently the server hit some tipping point.

131

I agree with everything you said. I feel resources are too abundant, crafting costs are too low, and enemies pose no real challenge. Everything you mentioned aligns with my own frustrations. There’s one point I never fully realized until now, and a friend mentioned this before, but I didn’t believe him until I read your post and what @CodeMage said

For me, a huge part of what makes something challenging is the time it takes to complete. I never feel like something was truly hard if I can breeze through it in an unrealistic amount of time. My friends make me compromise on this though, because if it were up to me, crafting time for a lot of things would take much, much longer.

I would reduce anything gathered by the player’s hands down to just 1 of that item. Crafting even the starter cloth would require multiple steps—twine, makeshift plant sheets—which, in turn, would need more twine and plant fiber. I like things to feel like they took time to gather, to progress, and to complete.

ConanExilesPlantFiberCloth00
Used DALL-E to make this icon for Plant Fiber Cloth.

I understand that many players don’t think this way, but for me, it’s the extended time needed for leveling, crafting, and all these other systems that makes the experience rewarding.

As for the Thralls needing to be at the station? That’s about immersion for me. Maybe because, for me, if I enjoy the game, the time it takes doesn’t matter? Also would love to see Sandbeast spawn in the sandstorm like in the video.

1 Like
132

What Funcom could’ve done is offer a subscription that gives a better ratio of Crom coins at a lower price (think the €50purchase ratio) but at a €10 pricetag with additional unlocks the longer you’re subscribed. There’s some games pulling similar shenanigans, to pull in people into their microtransaction stuff that don’t want to plop down a full game’s worth of money at once.

I know i generally wouldn’t mind putting down €10 a month, but it gets you very little in Conan to buy even €30 worth at once. It’s the one game i have by far sank the most into, and yet there isn’t all that much to show for it if i don’t count the DLCs.
But, that just boils down to me repeating my dislike of the pricing points on things even though not all of it is equally as bad.

I will say though, i haven’t done all Battlepasses due to time constraints and lack of time to game in general but it really wasn’t a bad deal when comparing to many other live service/MMO(lite)s.

133

Or could craftingstations work a little bit like wheel of pain.

When crafter thrall and food are both present, you get bonuses. If one of them is missing you get very basic item (maybe even with negative buffs). This way station would work in early game and would get better in late game?

And food could be stored in Thrall pot. And only active crafters would use it? Give some use to pot. And no unnecessary clutter in craftingstation’s inventory.

Better the food better the bonuses?

This could even go further. Bars would not spawn higher tier thralls without alcohol?

134

I get that. What I’ve been trying to explain to you is that you keep overlooking a very important part of that sentence:

For many of the rest of us, it’s not the time, it’s the skill. We’re totally fine if it takes time to get the skill, but they’re not the same thing.

And we don’t want someone else’s preferences imposed on us, or to be called “casuals” because we have different preferences.

Like I said, ask the hardcore PVP players if they consider themselves “casuals” just because they don’t agree that crafting should take much longer for no other reason than to make you feel like it’s worth doing. Ask them if they don’t seek challenge in this game.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t about the feelings. It’s about game design. You’re trying to do a game designer’s work, and I’m saying you’re not doing it well, because you don’t understand the players.

You don’t take into account that different players might seek different kinds of challenges. Instead, you rank them all according to your preferred kind of gameplay.

And that wouldn’t be too bad if you were designing a new game, without any players. But you’re proposing a change to a 7-year old game, with a well-established player base.

This is a much better idea for crafting stations. Keep the thrall-less crafting stations working just like now, but make the thalls’ bonuses affected by food. Or by the thralls’ hunger/thirst/rest status, or whatever.

Mind, I still think that it would be hard to implement this without sсrewing up the server performance, and I still think that the hardcore PVP players (which I’m not myself) would not like the effect this would have on their play style, but it’s better than requiring the early-stage player to be present at the crafting station.

3 Likes
136

i still love the game, so with the right promises i will be willing to give a chance, but that is just me.

do hope they are listening and delay and modify and fix the lively settlement system, it is an absolute disaster as it is right now on beta, and i fear it is going to be far worse on busy official servers.

137

I understand that skill takes time to develop, but when I think about Conan Exiles, I can’t think of anything in the game that truly requires skill. Everything I’ve encountered in the game was never necessarily hard—just took some patience and time to slowly whittle down an enemy’s health. It feels more like a test of endurance rather than actual skill-based challenges, but maybe it’s because I have never played on a PvP server. I love PvP, but I have never been on a live server for it.

1 Like
138

you got a point there. this game stops being challening after level 10 XD

but if they make anything challenging you will find people complaining that it is too hard. (sadly)

age of balance could come in handy, and make some things challenging (it does not mean grindy) but difficult.

in EA hiennas and spider were very dangerous. everything is now… easy easy…

1 Like
139

Pre-fuсking-cisely! :clap:

The PVE side of the game has been watered down by all the revamps and changes. PVE combat never required a lot of skill, but there were some ups and downs. The non-combat aspects of PVE used to require more skill and learning than they do nowadays, but I don’t wanna go into a history lesson.

As for the PVP side, there are always complaints about the meta. Those will never go away, because Funcom seems incapable of designing multiple metas. Instead, they change one meta for another, so one group stops complaining and another one starts. However, a much more important complaint from the PVP side is that there’s no need for in-game skill when everyone prefers to either hack you, offline you, or spam-report you.

I would love to see some real skill-based challenges in the game, but there’s a buttload of stuff to fix to make that happen.

3 Likes
140

Naa not hardly. Ya it’s funcomed, but other then the oddness of what thrall is doing the work, it doesn’t break any other part of the game :laughing:

141

more downs than ups lol!.

@codemage have you played beta ? do hope you can experience it, and see how bad this can go on officials!

thag did showed some interesting mechanics, new to be honest. all we had in the past was HP spounges in the game, not exactly a challenge really but thag did quite a few things right, i was hopping to see them revamp the others encounters to make it more isnsteresting.

3 Likes