Conan had a surge in december

And on PVE, you can level at your leisure, because a few level 20’s can protect against a purge (which is something you can see coming). On PVP, we have to get those thralls leveled asap, as we have no idea when the next raid is coming. And level 0 thralls are meat shields at best.

Its forced long-winded… And not a good one, as there is practically NO NEW content.
Will I ever bring an archer or dancer to level20? Probably not, If it needs several days for me.

If I could do that in 2 UC runs, I would already have them…

They need for the thralls are kinda different in PvP and in PvE. But my or lets say PvE players time is worth the same as PvP players.

So why should I deal with that stupid mechanic? If I could level up a thrall to level20 with 2 UC runs, I would have done that quite often…

Until Lvl10 its also quite fast at PvE. Hence why I have so many >lvl 10 and only 3 at Lvl20.

Running the same content over and over again and that only for XP, is not fun… Currently I am quite slow at leveling up, because I make New Asagarth runs to get the Chieftain armorer.

And for one quy I wrote with, this was also the reason for quitting… His time is not less worth as PvP. Why should we bother with this crap mechanic? For the spanish friend (who gave me all his loot yesterday) it was the bad horse experience in PvE and thrall leveling being to much of a work than fun.

Edit: Made an own thread about this XP setting Change the XP modifier for PvE official servers to be the same as PvP

So the increase of the player base since december are mostly PvP Player? For sure :slight_smile:

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As I play at PS4, I dont even know how you could read out such numbers… Where do you get them for PC? Steam?

https://steamcharts.com/app/440900#3m

This is PC only. There are no charts/trackers for consoles. Or none that i am aware of. But PC has more players in general on the game. Console combined may be less than PC player count, if I was a betting man.

For a thread that started with such a positive, optimistic post, you’re sure depressing the hell out of me :frowning:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you’re doing it on purpose, but it’s really depressing to see just how bad things are for PVE players.

Where to start? How about the Purge?

I’ve already written a rant on another thread, so I won’t repeat all of it, but let’s just say that it’s still a dumpster fire. A lone player like me can’t hope to trigger one without making Conan Exiles their day job, whereas a couple of newcomers who just recently started playing the game and built their sandstone base on the south bank of the newbie river got demolished by a damn Sobek Purge.

Sure, a couple of level 20 thralls would probably have helped them defend, if they had any chance of leveling those before triggering one of the hardest Purges in the game.

Okay, fine, maybe the Purge needs more work, but surely other aspects of this new update are better, right? How about thrall leveling?

Yeah, that worked out just great, with a system that randomly punishes you for using it. As if being forced to spend 2-4 times more effort on leveling thralls than PVP players wasn’t a punishment enough.

But why should I complain about leveling thralls? After all, I shouldn’t need many, except for the Purge defense, right? Not like we can use thralls for decoration anymore, what with the follower cap looming over us and not a peep from Funcom about City Life.

Oh, well, but at least we have mounts, right? Those are fun, aren’t they? Sure, they are, for the first 3-5 days they were. When the frantic joy of exploring a novelty wears off, you suddenly realize that mounted PVE combat is just that – a novelty gimmick. The really useful aspect of the mounts is their speed. They’re a great mode of transportation. Or they would be, if you weren’t forced to choose between a thrall and a mount. So now I ride my horse when I need to make a delivery to someone whose base is far from an obelisk or in those rare moments when I’m sick and tired of grinding but don’t have a good book to read.

On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t complain about mounts being a gimmick. After all, if everyone gets bored of them, maybe they’ll stop causing horrible lag spikes and server FPS drops that keep plaguing the server I play on.

So yeah, I’m glad PVP players are happy with the update, but PVE is getting the raw end of the deal, as usual.

I apologize for raining on your thread, but it’s hard to keep quiet when disappointment strikes. For a while, I managed to convince myself that PVE players weren’t second-class citizens and that Funcom wasn’t primarily pandering to PVP players, but I’ve never been very good at deliberately ignoring the evidence.

And it’s not just this last update – there’s been ample evidence over time. PVE players get thrown a DLC-shaped bone every so often, but otherwise we’re always playing second fiddle. And I would gladly give up all hopes of future DLCs if it meant Funcom would finally give us some TLC.

EDIT: Oh, and I completely forgot to grouse about my favorite topic – the added incentives against forming a clan in PVE, where a clan is already merely a tool to hang out, trigger a purge and have someone refresh your stuff. Suffice it to say that I hope I don’t go on a trip any time soon, because I don’t dare invite anyone into my clan until the culling is done.

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If you want to understand the reasons of the surge, you have to take into account that there’s a group of at least six Portuguese/Brazilian streamers on Twitch that have been streaming Conan Exiles for about 20K viewers average for a couple of weeks already. That has to have some degree of influence too in any increase in numbers.

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I was only responding to why PVP is at 4x. If pve wants 4x, that’s fine. But if i was on a server where there was no real threat outside of a high level purge, then i would do it at my leisure, and enjoy the time i get to do something without a dead line. The problem lies it is tied to the player XP gain setting, thus they would have to rewrite how it logs thralling xp.

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Minus your purge comments, these were all the same concerns I had when I first joined these forums in November. I really hope they expand on the thrall system in positive ways for PvE players. Because the 100 cap with finite leveling will only go so far to be honest.

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Hell yeah, we do, but that’s just a tiny part of my whole point :slight_smile:

These multipliers are the main reason why I don’t play private servers. Yeah, there are many concerns I have with private servers: an admin might abuse their power, the server could just disappear, I might not like the mods, etc. All of these are valid concerns. But once I decided to try a few private servers, the number one thing that turned me back towards official servers was the way multipliers throw the balance out of whack.

Here are some very few examples of what I’ve seen:

  • Harvest amount multiplier is set high. Now you don’t need to wait for your fish traps to fill up in order to have enough oil, just use tons of seeds. Heck, you don’t even need oil, you’ll be drowning in coal and dry wood. And let’s not even go into the huge buildings you can construct in ridiculously short time.
  • Fuel burn time multiplier is set high. No need to burn oil anymore. I mean, sure, you can, but why do that when coal is just fine and you can save your oil for crafting other stuff.
  • Player XP kill multiplier is set high. Forget journeys, forget exploration, forget crafting, forget building, just slaughter everything that moves.
  • Stamina sprint cost multiplier is set to 0. Yes, zero. I’ve actually seen this. Stopped playing immediately. Doesn’t matter it’s not PVP, even PVE is ridiculous with unlimited sprinting.
  • Drop your inventory on death is set to false. You know how there’s a thread where people are asking for map rooms to be removed from the game? Imagine being able to teleport home any time you want, for free, just by removing bracelet.

What does this have to do with what you were saying?

It’s all about game balance. I’m not arguing these sliders shouldn’t exist. Being able to make your own private server and tweak the game any way you want is one of the big appeals of Conan Exiles. If that private server breaks the game balance, that’s fine – there are plenty of people who want to play it like that.

But that doesn’t mean Funcom doesn’t care about game balance at all. On the contrary, the team is trying really hard to balance the game and the official servers are configured to reflect that balance. And maybe I’m just too late to the party, but I’ve recently come to the realization that the balance Funcom cares about is PVP server balance.

This bears repeating: PVP balance is the balance. It’s not that “PVP balance is more important than PVE balance”. It’s that “PVP balance is the balance”.

And before anyone decides to take issue with this, let me ask you: in all the nerfs and rebalances in the whole history of Conan Exiles, how many times has Funcom nerfed or rebalanced something because PVE players were up in arms? There’s the recent example of momentum-based movement, but even that was a bipartisan complaint. I think someone once mentioned one case where it was a chiefly PVE concern that was heard and resulted in the change, but I can’t remember who said it or what the case was. PVP drives the game balance and PVE has to deal with it.

Which brings me to your point: it’s not so much that I’m saying PVE “wants 4x”. I’m saying that 4x is really “1x” and PVE got stuck with “0.25x” :wink:

The key question is why? I’m not asking why PVP needs the current 4x rates. I’m asking why PVE must have the 1/4 of current PVP rates.

And here’s where I think you failed to understand life on a PVE server. Please don’t be offended that I said that – I try to be very upfront about the fact that I don’t play PVP and that this means that some of my opinions on PVP might not be valid.

You’re completely correct that there’s no “dead line” in terms of an upcoming raid. There’s no pressure from other players.

But I think you’re wrong to dismiss a high level Purge as irrelevant. Unless you’re a solitary player with a day job and a family (i.e. a lone player who can’t spend ungodly amounts of time playing), you have to worry about the Purge. Even a clan of two, playing at a normal pace, will eventually trigger a Purge. And the way things are right now, that Purge could wipe out everything. So there’s pressure there, definitely.

Of course, I’m not arguing that 4x XP multiplier is the solution for that. The correct solution is to FIX. THE DAMN. PURGE. BUGS!!! :stuck_out_tongue:

And while we’re there, it would be nice if they addressed all these other concerns I mentioned in my rant. Because being a second-class citizen gets old after a while…

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these are all valid concerns. Most of these I think are what breaks CE economy on all officials.

Harvest amount multiplier–This needs to be fine tuned. ON official PVP, it is way to easy to go from nothing to 100 T3 foundations. And if a server is dead, one can literally have 1000’s of foundation daily.

Fuel burn time multiplier --this one does not effect me so much, but yes it seems like one good run of coal lasts foever.

Player XP kill multiplier is set high–Agreed. And i cheese this when i hit servers day 1 to level solo, no help in less than 8 hours. I think levels should be unlocked at 60 anyways, and have recipes be the driving force of leveling…but that is another debate all together.

Drop your inventory on death is set to false–I really wish they would look at this on PVP. It balances heavily to the first point you make about harvesting. IF one clan has chests of legendaries and armor, then losing stuff is insignificant. New clans wanting to enjoy the game and have some non personal fun basically have to win every early fight or they are toast without armor and weapons. I have suggested to make at minimum weapons on wheel and armor you are wearing not loot-able and stays on death. The counter would be to lower durability to force players to repair more often. Again affecting harvest rate, as now i have a reason to have excess repair mats.

I envision Conan officials as territorial control wars, but right now it is resource wars. Those that have 20 vaults of stuff have no real loss in short wars, and those that don’t want to play 7 days a week, 8 hours a day don’t want long wars.

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For PVE, the amount that can be harvested takes from the possibly of trading and creating commerce. Thus PVE is really a bunch of solo players who like to socialize and play with friends( nothing wrong with that), and would not be negatively effectd if server was dying off player wise.

There was a recent Firespark video that was talking about XP sliders and how Thrall Xp was tied to a slider he basically wasn’t expecting and decided to make a video to educate server admins.

My guess is if there is an actual difference between PvE and PvP configurations, this may simply be an unintended consequence rather than game design.

My next question would be why is there even a difference in server configuration other than the PvP on and off settings?

Disclaimer: this is all based on pure speculation

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From my understanding, PVP has higher XP gain and harvest amounts on official because from day 1 PVP players are at risk of losing everything to higher leveled players. They can be raided and be killed the minute they hit noob river. For PVE, the only real threat to losing stuff is purge or dying in combat. Both are more predictable and can be planned around (purge takes time to build up and activate, and if you are running a dungeon, bed rolls and leaving anything you don’t want to lose in chests.) .

Yeah, this mirror’s my sentiments from another thread about the leveling system. The thrall XP rates (and the fact that we have a 30%+ chance of any thrall getting wrecked by an arbitrary perk “reward”) only makes sense if it takes a sane amount of time to level them. There are plenty of posts from folks who seem amenable to the current advancement rate on PvP which would tend to indicate that’s what the player base finds bearable — one, perhaps two evenings of gaming.

So yeah, I don’t find it fun when I have to spend most of a week grinding away on a single thrall.

Except that grinding thrall levels is the antithesis of fun. Clearing Unnamed City, Frost Temple, Xel-Ha, Warmaker’s, and Wine Cellar repeatedly for hours on end instead of doing all the [apparently boring (if you ask some)] PvE things that have made me play this game virtually to the exclusion of all others for almost 2 years isn’t my idea of a leisurely time.

It’s work.

I already have my fill of work between 8am and 5pm. :stuck_out_tongue:

I know of maybe 2 players on my server who have even gotten a single thrall to 20 let alone “a few”. Incidentally, given my experiences at the dozen or so Berserker / Sobek purges I’ve been to, that would be a few dead level 20 thralls if that’s what a player put their faith in. Action economy ends up trumping a few targets with high hp and a +50% damage buff.

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I find this hard to understand. It takes roughly 1 hour on PVP. so 4 times based on PVE levels would be 4 hours. And once you have it to level 20, outside of maybe a bad Volcano trip/purge, that thralls is permanent. Is it harder yes. but at the same time, on PVE the thralls are 90% more permanent. Imagine leveling 16 thralls in 16 hours only to have them offline gassed? That sucks.

Again, i could care less either way. But to me, having to level a thrall on pve (if i was inclined to play that style) would be something i did as i saw fit. the purge is the only wild card. And just because one thinks it is tedious to level thralls, others may find it fun, and actually like the fact it is not inst’leveled like pvp. Now for the Eff U on perks, i agree no matter the time involved. That i can understand screws PVE even more.

Considering it took me well over an hour just to level Beast-Tamer Frida from 15 to 16 at Frost Temple…?
Well, you said it best, “I find this hard to understand.”

At least we can agree on that. :slight_smile:

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Why I and 3 of my friends bought game. Thralls + thrall leveling system is interesting, as well the building bases and character development. A lot of stuff to do in game and combat is nice. Archers seem useless or archery in general. I don’t use horses because you can drag thrills and overall horses suck in combat, seem useless unless going to see a friend and need to get there ASAP. Game has promise but needs more content, but has a rpg feel which is nice.

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I’m not disagreeing with you here, but I think you might have misunderstood this part of my post. All those examples were from private servers. They were my way of showing how server settings affect game balance and often break it completely. I don’t actually know how many of these are different for PVP as compared to PVE and what they’re set to. I only know about the XP multiplier.

I have yet to see an official PVE server with a market economy.

Yes. That’s one of the things that bug me and why I keep complaining that clans on PVE are only used for chat, triggering purges and having someone refresh your stuff when you’re on a vacation.

Once you’ve done exploring, PVE boils down to Minecraft and Pokemon. Except that good Minecraft servers allow you to have at least one protected build and that Pokemon allows you to have your thralls fight other people’s thralls. Conan Exiles PVE lacks dynamics.

PVE-C seemed like a good compromise in theory, but in practice every PVE-C server I’ve been to is basically PVE, but you can spar with your friends during PVP hours. And now that we have battle standards, PVE-C is essentially obsolete.

Sure, PVE-C is supposed to have conflict, but it seems that people don’t actually engage in conflict without a reason and there’s no reason to do so on a PVE-C server. (Although I’m tempted to put this to a test by creating a character on a different PVE-C server, not participating in chat and just attacking anyone I run into.)

I really wish we had a type of server where rules are like PVP, but there’s a kind of a claim flag (or whatever you want to call it) that makes buildings in a certain radius immune to damage as long as it has fuel and the fuel cost goes up exponentially the more area you try to cover.

That’s exactly why I’m asking. Every time someone asks that, the answer is something like this:

That doesn’t actually explain why there’s a difference between PVP and PVE.

Let me explain with concrete numbers. Killing a Silent Legion Warrior gives you 19080 XP on PVE. With a 4x multiplier, this turns into 76320 XP on PVP. The question we’re asking is not why PVP players need 76320 XP, but why PVE players should get only 19080 XP.

The standard explanation – “PVP players need more XP because they are at more risk” – doesn’t explain why PVE should get less XP.

Let’s pretend I work from 9 am to 5 pm. My typical commute is close to an hour, so let’s pretend I should be home by 6 pm. I’ll spend some time with my kid and missus, so let’s pretend that’s only an hour and I start playing by 7 pm. If I want to get a reasonable amount of sleep, I really should go to bed by midnight. That’s 5 hours of play, with all these assumptions. (I don’t really get 5 hours of play, but let’s pretend I do.) Leveling one thrall will consume most of that time.

At some point, even the most stoic player will say “screw this”.

It does, but nobody’s arguing that you should have to level those 16 thralls in 64 hours instead of 16 :slight_smile:

Fair enough. There are people who think I’m crazy when I pull a stone mining session and come back with 110k stone and vice versa, I don’t understand people who build giant sandstone castles before level 60 :wink:

But it still doesn’t explain the difference between PVE and PVP settings. I seriously doubt that the dev team sat down and said “yeah, let’s pick this particular group of people who enjoys this particular flavor of tedium as opposed to all others, and cater to them” :laughing:

Not to mention that people who want more grind can always, you know, make a private server with lower multipliers :stuck_out_tongue:


At the end of this discussion, I feel like I actually have a theory about why PVE is hobbled down in comparison to PVP. It’s a very cynical, jaded theory, but it seems to explain things.

Think about how long it takes Funcom to release new content. On a PVP server, that time will pass in an endless cycle of conflict. But on a PVE server? Players would breeze through the new content and all the grind in no time and then what?

This is what I was complaining about when I said PVE servers lack dynamics. I love building, it’s the main reason I still play Conan Exiles, but I can’t just build indefinitely on an official server. The time I have between finishing one build and coming up with another is spent on grinding the new content.

I really do wish there was a middle ground, though. Right now there are only two extremes: the Kumbaya PVE(-C) sandbox and the all-or-nothing PVP mosh pit. I’d love to have some real conflict with real risks, but total war is not my thing.