Decay system and a money making opportunity for Funcom

[CodeMage]

@pageslinger

The purge as far as I know was implemented among other reasons to deal with this

That’s what I assumed originally, too, but that’s not what Alex said about it in a dev stream from 2019:

@Multigun

The Decay system is meant to control and demolish unused buildings that players do not use. Does it work fully? Alex would argue no because of things like foundation spamming. The intent of the Purge is to give players meaningful, challenging content to create usefulness of their buildings and forts.

Alex doesn’t believe the Purge in its current capacity achieves that objective. Alex again alludes to stuff they may or may not be working on that they can’t talk about that touches the Purge and systems like the Purge. Further discussion will be left for another stream or blog post.

If you click through to the source of this quote, you’ll land in Multigun’s recap post where you can get the link to the video and listen to the question and the answer yourself.

I like to assume that they’re not lying, so that means that the purge is not a server cleanup mechanism. It might have originally had that in mind, but that’s not its purpose anymore and hasn’t been for a long time now.

This is why the suggestion to add a building upkeep system is a recurring one on these forums. Even the devs recognize that the decay system is not quite enough. Fortunately, the devs haven’t caved (yet) to the demands to put a hard cap on the number of building pieces. If they have any plans to address the “overbuilding” in the future, I really hope they design a solution more elaborate than “lol just slap a hard cap on it”.