we have to be close enough to the structures in their entirety, or we might see a part of our buildings depop
Upsides:
the way it works is easy to understand
it helps you keep the buildings you play with the most, and let decay the ones you play with the less to give space to other players
it helps you refresh the timer in a few minutes if you are too busy to play for some time
Downside:
the refresh, which can be occasional, is sometimes abused by people who lost interest in the game, and refresh out of habit just in case they would decide to play again in X months
So here’s the idea.
Instead of having the decay reset right when we connect, it would start to fill a gauge.
The gauge would determine the time of decay of your buildings.
The longer you play, the fuller the gauge will be, the more time you get before a decay.
Example:
Student on holiday
I played Conan Exiles for 37 hours in 4 days, my gauge is at 4%, my building will decay in X days.
Nurse working
I played Conan Exiles for 37 hours in 3 weeks, my gauge is at 4%, my building will decay in X days.
Patient in hospital
I cannot play for 3 weeks, but I played Conan Exiles for 700 hours last month (reason why he’s in the hospital now lol), my gauge is now 100%, my building will decay in 1 month
Just like for the purges, the gauge would slowly go down the less you play. It would not be determined by the frequency of logging though, only by the time spent in game.
The game would still log you out after 10 minutes -or so- of inactivity.
It’s really not too hard to circumvent that. Now imagine not being able to log into a server because there are 40 serial refreshers hogging their server slots while idling to keep their stuff.
If you wanna force people to play actively, you’ll need an upkeep system that aligns the incentives properly. I used to be in favor of that kind of upkeep system, but now that I’m seeing what it’s like when the devs want to force players to engage with their content – as opposed to making that content more engaging – I’m not so keen on it anymore.
I don’t have to define it, the game already does it on its own when I AFK for too long for example. The camera turns around the character, then the game boots me back to the main menu for inactivity. Isn’t it the same for everyone? (o_O)
If I must describe it, it’s when the character does nothing but breathing. It’s not eating, drinking, walking… maybe there are other factors, but I don’t know them.
It is understandable. Bugs are not fun to play with. But I do hope it is a one of a time thing, and that each age will not be like this one (specially with the difficulties of connections).
That system is a general revamp idea for a game which would work properly.
But even in that case, I understand people might not like it for their own reasons (like CodeMage, though I do not understand his full message, I grasp the essential idea).
In my case, since I have never the same irl planning from a day to an other, it would work better than the current system.
If anything, decay should be upkeep based, needing the materials of the structure.
Heres my idea:
Give T1, T2 and T3 structures a maximum decay time for their tier, 48 hours per tier for example. From here, the highest decay can be refreshed with your presence is 24 hours.
To boost up to the maximum decay capacity of your tier, you’ve got to build a new bench that can only snap onto a foundation or ceiling piece. This bench has a single slot, and will gradually consume tier appropriate resources to add time onto your structure, up to the cap.
And thats the base.
We could add additional rules to it, such as more resources required per x amount of blocks in that particular structure, no timer decay while the owner/clan member is online, perhaps even an increasing material cost per cumulative hour the structure has been decaying for previously, so even vaults worth of resources will rapidly be chewed up if people only log for a few minutes to “feed” the bench over a month or so.
You just did: you said that “inactivity” in your proposal is what the game currently uses. And that makes your suggestion problematic for the reasons I described. That “inactivity” detection is beaten simply by jiggling the mouse every couple of seconds. Right now, none of us needs to use a script that would automatically do that for us, but that script would be easy to write and distribute, and that would happen as soon as your suggestion made it desirable to idle on a server overnight.
An upkeep system is a system that requires you to do something in order to maintain your presence in the virtual world. For example, having to build a “tax collector’s booth” on your property, where you have to pay taxes to keep your buildings from going poof. (That’s not what I want, that’s just an example.)
An upkeep system, by its existence, incentivizes certain activities in the game. For example, if you had that tax collector’s booth I mentioned above and the taxes were paid in gold bars, it would incentivize collecting gold.
Your proposal incentivizes idling on the server. It’s a bad incentive.
Already did, a long time ago. That’s just my own idea for it, but it will show you what I mean in general. I wouldn’t oppose a different upkeep system, as long as its incentives weren’t badly aligned.
What’s the problem with “people who lost interest in the game and just log in to refresh ?”
I mean, it’s not like CE has a tremendous amount of players (on Officials at least).
There are periods when you just don’t want to play CE, so what ? You should lose everything because for one month you just don’t feel playing CE ?
Also, again, I don’t see what’s the problem with the players and why you’re so eager to get rid of them. Funcom is already doing a great job in that sense, by the way.
Hogging the territory without using it. Yeah, I get it if you do it for a while. Life happens. But when it’s months on end, that’s just being a dick.
What ends up happening on some PVE servers is that they turn into ghost towns. You log in, and it’s chock full of these castles and theme parks, but nobody’s playing. And when a new player logs in, they have a hard time finding a decent location to build their own home, a place that doesn’t already have someone’s huge castle looming over them. So those new players end up either picking another server, or building their own thing and then getting bored (because no one is actually playing) and turning into serial refreshers themselves.
It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen and it sucks.
People have been claiming that for years, usually when they’re butthurt over some changes or a ban. And yet the long-term trend shows a slow but steady playerbase growth.
Serial refreshers dont stay logged in to keep a slot. They log in, refresh and leave. Otherwise, they are known merely as players.
Sharing it with one other person is different then a server with 40. Lets be honest, more people refresh on dead servers then servers with more then 35/40
Instead of it simply being logged in. Tie it to Challenges. When challenges are completed on a server, they give exp plus bonuses to Battlepass exp. But you get unmodified exp to your decay gauge. Which as the OP suggested, decays over time.
The gauge can be adjusted in server settings to decay at faster or slower rates and have a higher or lower max value. Giving server owners max control.
The Challenges are some of the best metrics of activity and this would give them a use when we complete a battlepass.
I know this is going to be pointless, but let’s try anyway.
If you’re not playing, you’re not a player. If you had to stay logged in idling, without interacting with the game in any way, then you wouldn’t be “merely a player”, because you wouldn’t be playing. That behavior generally doesn’t occur these days – except in rare cases when a solo player on an official server wants to force a purge – but the proposed change would incentivize it and we would see it happen more.
TL;DR: You can put whatever spin you want on it and engage in mental gymnastics of all kinds, but if you’re idling without interacting, you’re not playing.
Sure, feel free not to call them that if you don’t believe that’s what they are. I’ll keep calling them that, since I do believe that “refreshing by logging in and idling for a minute until the decay timer is at its maximum” does not need a different name than “refreshing by logging in and idling for hours until the decay timer is at its maximum”.
I don’t play on online servers so my two cents are probably worth dung here but why not have players kill let’s say at least 10 thralls/creatures a week to ward off the decaying. For Players that are in a clan as long as at least one player/clan member is killing then all clan structures remain safe. Or something like this .players that have left the game and are not part of a clan and don’t meet the quota can rot away.
And those with 10 or 15? Or 5? No sorry if you aren’t using it, it needs to go away. You shouldn’t get to earmark your spot in a public sandbox until some mythical time that you decide to actively play again. Retreat back. Build a small tomb for your wares and hybernate there with refreshing. Give the prime real estate to those actively playing
Ok, so why on a server with say 5 people, or even 10, does it matter where a person builds, or if it remains there over time?
“Prime real estate”? So it goes back to what I say years ago in this debate, that people report bases or are angry at people who dont play enough/to their standards simply because they want to build where someone else is.
I’m gonna say no. I play on both Exiled Lands AND Siptah. Since they can’t be linked, I have to play them in spurts. I often go back and forth for a few months at a time, but I refresh both. So, I’m not so much a serial refresher as a player that has to choose where I wanna play without losing all my progress.
.players that have left the game and are not part of a clan and don’t meet the quota can rot away.