Conan Exiles is in my opinion one of the best games out there. It’s like Valheim in multiplayer. It’s versatile, it’s brutal, it’s kept me engaged for thousands of hours and tho I sometimes take longer breaks from it, I’ve always returned to it and gotten myself hopelessly addicted again. This is why getting permanently banned from it for building is probably one of the best things that has happened to my life in a while. I had become an old, wrinkled veteran anyways and it was definitely a high time for me to move on, but for the sake of the future generations of exiles, I would like to suggest just one improvement to the game: Hire actual humans to moderate it or shut down the moderation system completely. By now most players have figured how it works and it’s become way too easy to exploit it to get pretty much anyone you want banned from the game. Let me just tell you an example of how a player might feel wronged after indulging in Conan Exiles and its moderation system, and I do hope you won’t feel an urge to get defensive and ignore or shut down my feedback, because I honestly just want to give my last piece of constructive criticism regarding this game.
Lets take an imaginary player A (which totally isn’t me by the way!) who enjoys the game despite the many cheaters in it, strives to survive and after long hours invested in the game even starts thriving in it. He loves the game, buys all dlc’s, battlepasses, some bazaar content. He’s a force to be reckoned with on the pvp servers and thus has a lot of enemies there too. His enemies naturally want him gone, but they can’t figure out any legit way to do it, and really, they can’t even figure a cheaty way to do it. However, they know the game has an insanely vague building policy and a only a gullible bot system moderating it, inable to use any kind of human judgement. Our experienced player A of course knows this too so he has a very minimalist base (basically just a crafting room inside a cave protected by several gates) due to getting banned twice before already for just normally playing this sandbox game without intending to grief anyone. This doesn’t matter though, because the bot based system just notes that “ok 5 incoming reports targeting this same clan => automatic ban and remove building ID’s”. Bye bye player A and don’t bother complaining, because the bot will simply respond with an automatic reply stating something like blabla exploiting the building system yadayada blocking game content. All player A can do is sit in quiet bafflement about why he got banned over having a completely normal small base that blocked at most a couple of plant fiber bushes. Try to appeal the ban he figures. However, because this process is also likely ran solely by bots, player A’s clan mates (who have always played in the same clan with player A and have the exact same ban cases on their previous record) get unbanned while player A is not favoured by the bots’ RNG and is told off because blablabla too many infractions committed.
After this is it a wonder player A feels like Funcom hates its own playerbase? If player A was a spiteful person, I’d be expect him to go through official servers, where literally on every server someone has a base on the same cave where he had it, and mass report all of those clans. Because by this logic it seems like those dozens of buildable caves in this game are just there to bait Exiles into getting themselves banned.
I simply wish that you would contemplate on this system you’ve implemented and its lackluster ability to pass down fair judgement. Of course I don’t have access to your company’s statistical data, but I would be extremely surprised if this moderation system did anything but harm to the game and to your company’s image and purse, especially on the long run. I’m sure there are players who simply shrug, buy a new copy of the game and keep playing, especially if they didn’t bother wasting money on any of the dlc content, but then here are surely also those who don’t take kindly to being wronged and feeling hated by the developers, and simply walk away from the game and all future games of the same developer.
