As has been discussed in the past. If players maintain their builds under a total of X amounts, extend their decay timer significantly. This would encourage smaller more efficient builds and help retain non obstructive player activiity via casual gamers. Servers would feel and look more alive, without being too bloated by large bases. As far as PvP goes, more players = more prey.
I don’t mean you build 100x tiny bases and have no decay timer.
I mean if all of your places/decor combined stays under a certain amount greatly extend the decay timer. Perhaps by twice.
The bases can still decay, but at a slower rate. The goal here is to retain casual players without overburdening the server or taking up too much prime building space.
It is my genuine belief that the decay timer and how unfriendly it is toward the casual gamer is a severe limiter on Conan Exiles and it’s potential growth.
Current timer is 2 weeks and requires little effort to hit that cap.
I fail to see how having more structures around the map that are owned by players who don’t even log in once every two weeks would make the game more alive.
I agree, 2 weeks for official servers is very reasonable. I tend to play only on the weekends so in essence I could pop on once a week (granted with Battle Pass I log in a bit more frequent these days), and cover my base and do my activities.
You have to remember, Official servers tend to have hundreds of players popping in and out of them. So, it will need some type of way of cleaning up old clutter. Having 3 or 4 weeks of retention would be a bit much since usually when people quit the server or game, they do not clean up after themselves.
If you want longer try private servers. Some like my servers (3001 Ways to Die) have no decay, so its very casual but I do clean up the server for players who left 2+ months (level 30 or below) or 4+ months (for higher levels.) Each private server has their own set of rules of retention.
If you don’t log in at least for a couple of minutes every 2 weeks, then I don’t care how small your build is, you’re not a “casual player”, you’re a serial refresher. You’ve roped off a small section of the sandbox and you’re not letting other kids play in that roped-off section, but you’re not using it either.
Even when the max decay is 1 week, it’s still just a couple of minutes per week. That’s all you need.
You can disagree with the facts all you want, but they remain facts. If you’re not playing at least a couple of minutes every 2 weeks, you are – factually – someone who denies server resources to other players without using them yourself.
Sure, you can disagree with whether that constitutes “casual play” or not. I’m not going to quibble with you about your definition of that, because it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that official servers are a limited, shared resource, and it’s in almost everyone’s interest to make them available and enjoyable to as many players as possible. Catering to your demands – and the minority who shares them – would go against that. The situation with serial refreshers is already problematic, and your proposal would make that situation worse.
Like it or not, official servers are the baseline that tries to cater to the majority and the common denominator. A lot of people grow dissatisfied with that, because they want the game to be different in the aspect they like the most. Some want harsher survival, some want serious RP, some want to build without restrictions, some want building to be restricted, and so on. For all of them, there are alternatives out there, in the form of private servers, co-op, and single-player mode.