Wait… are you saying I should have been doing my actual job all day? CRAP! 
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I’ve been having the same issue, I’ve been playing over 6 months, on over a dozen servers (all PvE private with mods), built huge castles with thousands of parts, and I’ve never seen a purge.
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What I meant, was not being a dick for the server.
But spaming foundation does not trigger your purge faster! Building is an action. One action only counts 1 time for 15minutes.
So if you build 1 T1 foundation or 1million within 15minutes, the purge bar will be the same after 15mins.
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If you use the pippi mod, you can selectively delete player’s bases and even entire clan’s bases.
If there was a suggestion here, it’d be basically: Put most of Pippi into the base game.
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At the very least if I could get a slider to control the rate of decay on purge meters I’d be content for now.
As a player with a huge base that only logs on periodically… Let me say a thing or two.
My “down time” is between patches. After a new patch hits, and I try out/acquire the content I will taper down my play time till the next patch. This usually results in me playing C.E in 2 or 3 months spats, almost exclusively. Once I flesh out the content I take a break and go back to something like Dota 2, until new content arrives.
There are two people in my guild, and we have one base, it spans the width of a river, and is 70 stories tall. It’s huge, but it’s footprint is small. It’s built in water, so it literally takes up no land space, if anything it makes a convenient bridge across the waterway.
I have played 2,165 hours of C.E. I am a literal C.E library, and I am quick and happy to help inform players with questions in chat. (Usually accurately).
Being that I have acquired “most” of what I need, I am the guy that shows up to help you with that purge. I will loot all the stuff for you, then ask where I can drop it. I do this with one of the best tools in the game. So during a purge that (you might not have had time to harvest/loot) cause of over-encumbrance, I show up with my encumbrance build and slay every creature for you, then give you 1000-2k+ hide and other resources.
If I hear you cry that you died in a dungeon and need help getting your loot back… I am one of the first people to show up. I have loot to spare, and not a lot of tasks I am busy working on. The Crom blade makes quick work of the dungeon, and you get home safe with your phats.
I am also friends with most people on the server, so in those rare events where you get in a ■■■■■■■ match that results in some stupid behaviors. (Walls). I might be the guy that gets a door put in said wall.
We are not all bad, and while some of what you are saying is true, trying to get rid of “problem” players will also get rid of not problem players. What you will really end up doing is killing off your veteran population. Which you might be fine with initially… until you are posting about how the game is dead, and there is no PvP, or “whats the point”.
There is a lot of value in having many “veterans” coming and going periodically. It means there is almost always a knowledgeable player online that can answer a weird, off the wall question that a new player might have. And that means the new player might actually stick around, rather than feeling over-whelmed.
And on PvP servers, for every troll that runs down the newbs at the starting area. It’s nice to have a old, reasonable player that can help them out. Either with resources, or with literal words of encouragement.
So, while I am willing to agree with you on your points that some people build way too much, and make roads/walls.
I disagree completely with this statement.
“That way inactive players would still be punished by attacks and suffer losses, this would make them either reduce their bases, play a reasonable amount of time (to keep their bases up and alive) or let their bases go once and for all, so the real ACTIVE players can benefit from it.”
All you will do is make ridiculous amounts of people quit, and C.E. isn’t popular enough to afford a mass exodus like that.
Imagine buying a car… but if you didn’t drive it for a week, it vanished.
Or a cheeseburger… but if you did not eat it within 30 minutes, it disappeared.
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I can sympathize with your point of view and your experience. I have more than 3000 hours in this game and I can identify with a lot of your points and see many similarities.
There are two problems, though.
This is the first problem: you paid for a car, not the parking spot at your office. The parking spot was provided to you by your company, for free, but you can lose it if you keep commuting by bus, because there are other people who would like to park.
Of course, we’re dealing with a game that has lots of servers and, even though everyone complains the map is “too small”, it’s actually quite roomy. So the situation is not that bad.
The second problem compounds the first: not everyone plays like you and I. I’ve seen examples of people who build a base with a huge footprint – 2x2 map grid tiles, for example – and then just refresh it. That just ain’t right.
I’m firmly opposed to the idea of a hard building cap or any sort of upkeep that depends on total number of building pieces. But some kind of upkeep mechanism that depends on how much you play and how much surface area you’ve paved over? I’d love to see that.
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Imagine leaving your car in the grocery store parking lot, and many other people doing this, even though you aren’t shopping there. Now, people who want to shop, can’t, or struggle to find a good spot to park, because there a lot of people parking there while not shopping.
While it is nice that you are considerate, most PvE players are NOT considerate when it comes to building. For instance, there is somebody who built on a small island in Vanir territory. We were already on the mainland just north of the island. Another group came in and asked if it was OK to build by us. We said sure. Then, another person built on that island. Cool, not a problem. But then, after spamming that island full of structures, they came over and found a spot to build right between where we and the 2nd group built. Not a large area, they can’t even finish the building because it won’t let them put walls on some of the corners, because of our structures. They also built on the other side of our structures.
Why do this? Nobody is on the south side of the lake. Why not build over there? This is obvious aggressive behavior. There are other areas to build. Even in Vanir territory by the water, where nobody is around.
Many PvE players are just rude when it comes to how and where they build.
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PVE Server 3972 has a player(stretch of the word) that’ logs on within the week, runs round and ports to obelisks that he has sandblocked in and then logs off. New Asagarth is a lag fest so is the Black Galleon as he built giant bases all around as close as he can. The second jungle obelisk he has just build 2 giant walls just to be annoying. I started building in the volcano so he built a wall to block the big bridge, he also blocked the tunnel from the Savannah area to the north. Please Funcom implement some sort of way out for us under siege PVE players.
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I like Codemage’s “footprint” idea. Bigger footprint = More penalty. Be really lenient with it so that it really only hampers the wall spammers and or multiple huge base clans that take over obelisks.
I currently have a troll on my server building a sandstone road from resource to resource to block everything he can find… out of spit from an argument he had with another player. One argument = months of trolling.
Lame.
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Yes, that is the problem that haunts most PvE servers. Lets face it, it is too easy maintain structures in this game. Now Im not saying this should be any different, we all have obligations outside the game and wanna keep our progress, that is fair.
The problem comes when its still trivial maintain way too many structures, massive structures when they dont even dedicate enough. The server I play for example, there is a player that pretty much quit the game over a year ago and he still refresh all his structures, which are many and massive!
This is a sandbox game shared with many others, but Funcom designed it so it doesnt punish players for claiming too much. The more a player own the more the game should challenge them, and currently one can claim the whole map with sandstone foundations and keep it all by logging once a week for 10 seconds. How is this right??
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Never had this problems… 2k hours at official PvE server (this is also a reason, I dont post the PvE server # in public - trolls also read the forums).
Maybe you play on a crap PvE server with trolls on it…
And on the PvE server I play, there is another clan which has only 3 public maprooms (volcano, set-city and near Frost temple) and this clan only logins to refresh this 3.
I never even saw 1 guy from the clan online. But they refresh it at least 2-3 times/week.
PS.: This weekend the peak was ~15 players. Every week someone starts new…
It’s not that a PVE server is crap or it isn’t, and you can choose to avoid crappy ones. It’s that you can pick a perfectly normal PVE server with an excellent community and play there for months, and then a troll shows up and makes it a nightmare for everyone and you can’t do anything about it.
I’ve had that happen to me twice. And even though this third server I’m on hasn’t had any griefers like that, it’s had plenty of assholery and drama. Right now, it’s pretty crappy, because there are several new clans building stuff in areas like Godsclaw and Terrace of the Tenders, accidentally nuking resource nodes and NPC spawns and not giving a shit about it.
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I am on board for this. This alievates a lot of different troll methods. Spamming defense vaults/sandstone to avoid trebs. chaining bases by threading sandstone throughout the map. How it would figure it out would be interesting, as what would constitue horizontal space. A foundation toouching the “ground”, ceiling tiles extended out 4 spots for a support pillar,etc.
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Definitely a non-trivial problem, but I don’t feel like it’s intractable. At this point, though, it’s just a daydream…
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Hahahahaha!
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A cheeseburger in front of me for 30 mins?
And I don’t eat it?
I can’t even imagine this 
Maybe need to merge this into @Zeb ‘s food thread 
Seriously though I think a lot of starting players know nothing about decay timers and the repair hammer. I think a lot of starting players go crazy building stuff without ever knowing that it will decay.
Lots on the PvE official I’m on where they have main base on one timer and then an animal pen or whatever a little too far away with its own timer.
Then no doubt frustration when they come back and stuff is gone. You could lose players right there.
I don’t recall what happens when you first start. Is there something about decay timers and the repair hammer to view the timers?
There should be. Not sure how to present this in game though.
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Oh for sure - hate this when it happens. It freaks me out when they are quite close. If they are super active a purge can come and path through my base on the way to theirs.
They were called the warriors. And the line from the movie kept going through my head as I waited for their base to decay 
“Warriors…Come out to play…”
On the other side of this, I’ve been the active one and a purge destroyed a neighbour’s base as the purge was headed to me. That was funny 
I for one are grateful you log in to refresh your builds, they assist other players greatly
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I have had the opposite problem but maybe the servers I have played on had purge meter turned up somehow. I played for a day and only had a small sandstone base and I got annihilated.