The Decay rate has been reduce to (6) days on Xbox platforms. Why?!? If I take a family vacation and can’t log in for 2 weeks… I lose everything I invested hours and hours, plus having to have paid for the game for that investment. Boost it back up to (15) days PLEASE!!!
I suggest to at least make it relative to the resources and time invested.
Like make 7 days the minimum, then as much player they invest time in the game the decay timer changes.
I know people who quit certain games for like a month or 2 then get back. If all progress is lost, then people will be highly discouraged to get back into the game.
If the devs are worried about server performance, maybe come up with another solution, like transform all the resources back into the player inventory in some form of chests or vaults. That would less punishing than having the player lose all their hours simply because they spent some time away from the game. That way, they’ll never come back.
2 of my friends already stopped playing because we lost everything after a 2 weeks summer vacation.
@Tascha @ Funcom_Community any considerations/help on this subject?
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This is not easy to solve. We give the players a lot of freedom with hardly any building restrictions regarding how big you can actually build which does put strain on the servers and players are rightfully concerned about performance. It’s a balancing act. We are aware that it’s not ideal and there are discussions about this topic. Nothing concrete that we could share though.
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I understand it is not easy to solve, but I totally agree on the decay timer, and you made the adjustment during summer. However, I do like the decay system. Since it removes unwanted buildings near my clans base. But it should be a balance. Currently there seems to be no difference if you build in sandstone or Black Ice / Reinforced Stone. A 4 x 4 Sandstone should have faster decay than a 30 x 30 Black Ice Pyramid.
Could it be some thing like :
Tier 1 Building (Sandstone) = 6 Days
Tier 2 Building (Insulated & Stone Brick) = 12 days (and must consist of minimum 100 Building Pieces)
Tier 3 Building (Black Ice & Reinforced Stone) = 15 Days (and must consist of minimum 100 Building Pieces)
I know that they decay system currently has some bugs, so introducing something new might not be helping ironing out the bugs. But it should be considered for the future.
You are not alone in prejudice against sandstone … but why should an ugly square block of tier 3 material have a longer decay timer than a carefully planned intricate sandstone or stonebrick structure…
and how would the timers be resolved for buildings with a mixture of building materials??
My base which is connected through foundations, ceiling tiles and stairs so is all one building has:
Stonebrick foundations and fences with a stonebrick tower
Insulated wood for walls on the workshops and house out in the water with wharf in insulated wood but sandstone tiles inside the house
All roofs in thatched material
A yog pit on sandstone
A mitra temple on aquilonian and stonebrick
A derkato and Set temple on khitai and black ice
A Ymir temple on black ice with the tier 3 reinforced stone fence foundations around it
Connections between the temples in sandstone
The only type of building tier it lacks is the tier three stone as it didn’t suit… it is down on the newbie river so only needs sandstone to resist the purge…
What timer should it be assigned ??? And would the hidden sandstone foundations under the water or inside the temple platforms have a different decay timer ???
Well in my head you have used Tier 3 materials Aquilonian, Black Ice, Khitan. And I presume you have more than 100 building pieces and it seems like it all is connected. So as of such you would have 15 days decay timer.
Currently the same decay timer is applied to all pieces as long as they are connected. And this is the clue and a mechanic that is working perfect.
What Funcom is trying to combat is all the “small” land claims with the decay system, and removing bases from players that has quit the game, as large bases produce more load on the servers. My clan’s base take 60 - 90 secconds to render.
This is a tricky topic, but I dont think players who has invested a lot of time in the game and go on vacation or even worse get stuck in a hospital for a week, only to find out your precious base is erased from the exiled lands when they come back.
I like this Idea T1 6days, T2 12days, T3 18days this would clean up a lot of the server of random stuff, and reduce server load.
We are sure of that. You built a great game so we trust you that you can solve it.
I dragged my friends to buy the game, now they left because of that. Who knows how long until I leave it too.
The point is, if it is something making you lose potential new players ( clients ) and many of the old ones, then it is something needs to be addressed quickly and with top priority too.
So if my clan is 3 people and 2 people quit the game because of that, that is a total of 66% of player loss.
One of those 2 people actually is a part of large local community of gamers, that usually influences people to try out and buy certain games. He once convinced the whole community to buy ‘For Honor’ and they did.
→ Moral of the story, this concerns your whole business, it is causing you potential loss
I also met so many nice people in the game, but now they are gone forever, simply because when they came back after awhile, there was nothing left, like they never existed in the game!!!
People need to have permanent impact on servers!!! We need to know who lived here and there!!
There are many servers and this game is paid so no fear from people with multiple accounts DOS attacks!
@Tascha please encourage the team to find a smart way to solve this, I know you can. All of you at Funcom are amazing! 
See the thing is, removing the structures of people who have quit the game is fine, and the right thing to do. But that’d happen whether the decay timer was 6 days or 15, or hell - even 60. If they have truly quit, it’ll disappear eventually. So that argument doesn’t hold. Obviously I’m not advocating for 60 days, nor even fifteen - ten would be my middle-of-the-road compromise.
Currently, the only efficient way to build is to connect everything together. It’s ugly, and breaks immersion, and adds needless stress to the server - but it’s effective: Logging into one base refreshes everything.
Personally I refuse to do it - and I suffer as a result, having to run from one base to the other in order to keep them refreshed, even though I don’t always have a lot of time to play.
Unfortunately I don’t have a golden solution to the problem - lots of half-solutions and sort-of measures, but none that can’t be easily circumvented or end up doing more harm than good. So I fully acknowledge that it’s not an easy problem at all.
The best suggestion I’ve seen is the one where you use a new kind of God Shield to temporarily boost the decay timer in an area, but I have no idea how technically viable that is (given how all connected structures share a decay timer).
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The problem with the suggestion to make the decay timer tier dependent would remove the possibility to upgrade any building you have. When you upgrade a building you only upgrade the pieces which you can see/reach, a lot of inner pieces are not upgraded. As a lot of people(myself included) build in sandstone first and then upgrade to T3 this would be a serious problem. I have said it before and I will say it again, leave the decay as is, it serves it’s purpose well(it cleans the server). And I’ll say this again also, no we do not need offline purges to clean the server, we want purges at 1/40 chance max, not at 1/1000 chance. Build a vacation system, simple, you can use it 3 times a year for a period of max 3 weeks. When it is activated and you log in you break the vacation mode and have used up your vacation. When activated your thralls/pets do not eat, do not attack, cannot be harmed, your structures do not decay and take no damage.
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