To give our Developers a better insight about how Players feel on Official Servers about the Decay Timer i will start a poll giving all players who visit this Forum the opportunity to leave a Vote.
Short Background :
The Decay Timer is required to avoid overloading of Servers with abandoned Buildings, but also to avoid the abuse of placing Buildings to block or spread over areas.
The Decay Timer also means for Players that they will get in trouble if they are gone on vacation or long business trips or other reasons. If you do not manage to log in you will loose all your buildings. This has caused players to complain about the Decay being to short.
Even joining a Clan will not resolve the challenge as you cant leave after your vacation the clan as your buildings stay with it.
The Average Vacation Time is around 2 weeks for most, but vacation trips around 1 week.
The idea is to find a Decay time that tackles both challenges. Not demotivating players to loosing the Buildings and Playhours due to real live off times but still keeping the Servers clean.
Please vote for a Decay Time you think most suitable to tackle both challenges.
One time for all Tiers (IE current system 6days)
Each Tier has it one timer T1 5days, T2 10days, T3 15days
Each Tier has it one timer T1 5days, T2 10days, T3 15days Plus an accelerated timer when building is damaged (ie and not mantained.
Why should a player on a PVE-C or Pve server have to use t3 materials? Decay shouldn’t matter on your building choice of materials. What happens with mixed types of builds. I, for example build a “bedroom” out of whatever material is best to keep me from dying offline. But the overall build May be black ice (cuz it’s cheap to build)
I found that sandstone best for heat area and nsulated wood for cold seems best.
So I don’t like your vote because it doesn’t allow for more days with variety builds
A) if you do not want stagger timers based on tiers it forces a support of the current short timer
B) the other two options support the tier 1 material having an even shorter timer than current default
C) the option of accelerated timer if the building is damaged means that people can’t rely on the timer as randomly it will change whilst they are away from the game if their buildings take damage from a purge … and they will not know about it.
For these reasons I decline to vote… none of your vote options are things I want to support.
(BTW do not assume average vacation times are the same worldwide …it certainly isn’t what you state where I live … by law I’m entitled to a minimum of four weeks annual leave (not including public holidays, so those are additional days off). In general people go on vacation in two-three week blocks)
No offence intended but this is a poorly conceived poll.
You are railroading people into choosing something very specific or putting up with the sub standard system we currently have.
You need to include some options for longer decay timers set at the same length for all materials if you want people to vote. Or maybe make it “Are you in favour of different decay timers for different tiers? Yes or no”
The poll that already exists with over 200 voters has stated quite clearly already that 81% of voters are unhappy with the short length of decay. With 55% preferring 2 weeks or more.
Me personally, I like 10 days for all tiers.
Separate tier timers is only going to lead to problems with t2&3 skinned sandstone bases.
Very true. I don’t actually support ANY of the choices here (I guess I should have just not voted then?) but picked one of the “tiered” ones simply to show that I don’t like the current timer.
Ladies and gentlemen, you’re not happy with the options to vote. Rule number one is always offer up a solution to the options no one has provided in an alternative solution to any of those that we are holding on so your argument is not valid. PS choo choo. Lol
its a general solution, and there are some real issue with server load. if players are not longing in for weeks at a time its a lot of a load on the server to keep some one stuff that’s not playing.
The idea of tiered decay timers don’t work anyway, since it’s entirely possible to mix and match different materials and tiers in a single structure - and that should not change. Building the lower level in stone and the upper in more fungible wood is entirely thematic and mimics how people have been building in real life for millennia.
You could of course have lower tier materials contribute less to the decay timer, but then you’d just have people adding enough T3 to one end of their decay umbilical to get the full timer.
There really is no easy solution to the decay situation, and I still think the simplest would be a moderate increase in timer (I still say 10 days would be perfect).
I think the argument is that they require more effort to build. Not that I agree with this, nor do I think it would actually work in practice. Right now the system is super harsh (6 days across the board), but it’s no problem to circumvent it if you don’t mind building weird-ass highways across the map. So it mostly just gets in the way of the players who want to limit themselves to building moderately-sized realistic structures - the exploiters and megalomaniacs (the ones causing the real problems) aren’t affected anyway.
As others have said, have your poll include a:
None of the above (please elaborate on what you do want by replying with ONE suggestion per reply and other “like” it to show Funcom how popular it is)
But I do not know if you can change the poll options now that you have created it.
There have been numerous posts covering the decay issue.
One of the options that others have suggested that I find appealing is a limited use “holiday” feature … eg we get x days per year which we can block as holidays and it freezes the decay timer for the duration… limited use also means if you log in during the time the decay hold is cancelled and normal decay returns from where it was when the decay-holiday protection started…
Example: we get 30 days to use to freeze the decay timer each year. It is by clan or solo if not in a clan. You can use in one block or upto four blocks (up for debate)
So for example the clan leader/officer sets 1 nov to 21 nov as a decay protection … this is 22 days out of the holiday decay protection. Your buildings sit without decay counting down between those dates. Leaving your clan/player with 8 day decay protection to use for the rest of the year.
Now - say a clan mate logs in on the 10 November… holiday decay protection is cancelled and you are left with 17 days holiday decay protection. 8days unused and 11 days “refunded”.
Could this be coded however is the question really…and we can argue how many days is fair…
As well it would have to be extensively debated to identify all possible griefer/exploits and counter them.
One debate would be: would the buildings & thralls be vunerable to player or thrall damage during this time … I can see arguments for and against…
Another would be if a clan mate logs in during that time do you lose only the days used or the entire allocation. So in my example I put you would only use up 10 days if someone logged in at 10days into the protection time … but others would argue that people should lose the entire 22days allocated as a preventative punitive reaction to possible abuse of the system.
Another: should it Show on the buildings that it’s in decay-holiday protection?
I’m sure there are more pro’s and cons for this idea … and I’m sure that Tascha has already read them…she may not comment on all the posts but I get the distinct impression that she doesn’t miss many
Yes, that’s because you’re building organically, in a manner that seems immersive and fun to you - but you don’t build to exploit game mechanics.
For the record, I think you’re “doing it right”, I try to build in a similar manner myself. My argument is solely that this suggestion will hurt people like you (or me) who build for fun, while the hardcore players who connect everything with umbilicals won’t care a whit - and it won’t do a thing to combat server load, since one inter-connected megabase probably takes up more space & resources than ten casual players.