Direction of this game and relationship with community

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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So I just saw, in the span of 24 hours, two threads about this topic from @Pugilist get summarily deleted, while there are still several poop-slinging threads along the lines of “this game is dead, Funcom sucks, here’s my opinion presented as a fact, and I’ll call you names if you don’t agree completely”. Let’s see if third time’s a charm and we can have a thoughtful discussion about how we feel about the state and future of this game and its community.

For starters, I agree with the basic premise of what @Pugilist was trying to say: somewhere down the line, the direction of this game changed and it changed in a way that many of us seem to consider to be for the worse. Some of these changes are only subjectively worse, but some – such as the state of the official servers, the way hacking is (not) dealt with, and the communication with the playerbase – are objectively worse.

Now, unlike @Pugilist and many others, I haven’t followed the internal composition of the dev team closely enough to correlate that with the timeline of what’s been happening with the game, so I won’t even try to speculate about that.

However, looking at the changes to the game, it’s hard to deny that this game has a problem with maintaining a clear, coherent creative vision and with following through on whatever the vision-du-jour seems to be.

I’m not sure I can agree with @Pugilist’s other premise about how this game used to cater to multiple playstyles and is now forcing players to play a certain way, but I want to bring it up anyway because it deserves a thoughtful discussion. My experience has been that the game hasn’t stopped trying to cater to multiple playstyles, but it gave up trying to make it a well-designed system of interlocking game mechanics and turned into a stew of random elements without any real challenge left.

Finally, a topic that @Pugilist didn’t touch but I wanted to bring up is the relationship with the community. This is where I’m at my most disappointed with Funcom. Promising better communication and not following through is nothing new anymore, but the attitude seems to have changed.

The update they posted made me sad, because it felt like “oh crap, they’re complaining about how we said we would talk to them, make Andy talk to them so they’ll shut up, but just rehash the stuff we already said without addressing any thorny points”.

So we get a maddening silence on all well-articulated complaints and outright deletion of some of them, but every now and then someone will pop in to post how they’re “still there” and they “still love all of us”, and it’s starting to feel almost condescending.

At any rate, this is my attempt to put some of the same stuff into words that I hope will provoke thoughtful discussion without getting the whole topic summarily deleted. That said, even the deletion would be a welcome sign of commitment to some effort at curating the community, even if it’s an effort I disagree with.

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More than ‘starting’, more than ‘almost’. I’m very disappointed in Funcom right now, so that’s as far as I’ll go on that, since too much criticism (at least if well written) seems to invoke censorship now.

What I will say is that I believe this censorship to not only illustrate how deep the gulf is becoming between company and customers, but also to be directly counterproductive. If players cannot politely criticize Funcom on the forums, then inevitably they will do so elsewhere, and with greater vehemence. Steam reviews would seem a likely place (or Microsoft/Sony). That would seem to be far worse for Funcom than complaints on the forums.

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I have to run out so just a quick note and I’ll come back later.

It’s not the first time this has happened but the most obvious.

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Like on zendesk? Like open a ticket and PM the url to your friends. Maybe zendesk needs a new form for non-bug tickets. :thinking: :adhesive_bandage:

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As much as I tend to respect Pugilist, his thread was an veiled personal attack against the leadership of the development team. And one I find kind of weird because it suggested that there was a recent change of leadership. Which, there hasn’t been. Its been the same more or less since Isle of Siptah. I will assume for the sake of argument (or until told otherwise) that he didn’t know that.

It is correct that the direction has sort of shifted, but its not because there’s a new guy in charge. After Isle of Siptah they changed course because they had the ability to. Some think its not great, some do. For me the changes in direction haven’t affected my opinion very much, the type of issues I have with the game haven’t really changed. I don’t want to go into my personal opinions of individual issues, so I’ll say that while some have been fixed, others have popped up, as it does in most games’ development cycle, I don’t see anything crazy in CE that I don’t see in other games with long development cycles. And I think that is what is happening here. CE is in a long development cycle. Like other games that continue being developed for 5+, 10+, 15+, and even 20+ years in some cases, it evolves over time and frequently doesn’t resemble what it used to be.

I will say this though. Codemage brings up a good point on consistency. Why are outright insulting threads being left up? I do believe they should be more proactive on the forums and getting rid of posts and threads that just outright insult. Either players insulting each other or players insulting Funcom and its staff. Very recently we’ve had real life threats and other nonsense that needs to go. None of that is acceptable.

They should be more proactive and get rid of such threads that are just slinging mud and not actual criticisms. There doesn’t need to be an explanation, people here are adults and know the difference. Its one thing to say, “I don’t like this, and here’s why,” and “the new leadership changed everything to sate their own egos.”

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We all know when the change happened.

We all remember that first survey about monetization, and who loves to monetize their games like that.

That was the turning point in my mind. I remember seeing the exact same thing happen in a different game, a take over by a parent company owned by the same nationality, and the begininning of a decline in quality.

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I would argue that this is as much the fault of players as it is of Funcom (and that’s not unique here, it’s pretty much the fault of players in every game).

The problem has three basic root causes:

  1. It’s impossible to perfectly balance any game. Good balance is possible, but even the idea of great balance, much less perfect balance, is horribly difficult at best, and impossible at worst. But that doesn’t stop players from complaining about every little change that is a) intended to try to balance the game or b) add something new to the game, and often from complaining bitterly & without good reasoning. Even when changes are good and promote balance in a game, it’s impossible to assess the balance changes based on player complaints.

  2. Players don’t all want the same things, they disagree a lot about what they want. There is no such thing as “the community”, every game is a hodge-podge of multiple communities that want different things. If one class or spec is OP then for every person complaining about how OP it is there is another person who loves it and wants to take advantage of that OP class/spec for their own personal benefit. Even a really well balanced game gets a constant stream of complaints because there are always people who want their personal favorite to be OP at the expense of others. It’s impossible for a game company to listen to their players on the topic of game balancing because “the players” never, ever agree on what they want from the game. Pretty much the only way for a developer to know their game is balanced is if every faction of their player base is complaining the same amount. Every player wants the game to be structured and balanced according to their own personal preferences with the result being a cacophony of complaints even if the game balance is really good. It’s a no-win scenario for developers, there’s no such thing as a game that’s balanced and also gets acknowledged as being balance by their player base.

  3. Players love to min/max, even when they deny it. No matter what devs do for a game, there are always players who dig in deep, doing DPS tests or gathering data from raids & boss fights, and then they publish their results to other players for the optimum class/spec/gear for maximum performance. Once the word gets out about the new “best class/spec” some people want to use that class/spec permanently and want it to never change, so they can keep the game as easy for themselves as possible. Conversely, other people immediately start complaining about the new “best class/spec” because it’s “making the wrong things OP”, they want their own personal favorite to be at min/max’ing so they can go back to being OP in the way they used to prefer.

No matter how hard a game dev tries to cater to multiple playstyles there is (and always will be) a constant stream of complaints and vitriol. No matter how hard devs try to balance their games it’s a thankless, no-win task for the devs.

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Funcom has lost the thread, so I’ve moved on to other games, just check the forum from time to time to see if there’s any improvement in sight.

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At first glance, I would agree the game is trying to force players to play a certain way. However, after reading your points, I have reconsidered that train of thought. Only because there still multiple ways to play portions of the game, although very limited, it is not just one way.

It has been a couple of years since I have played the way I want to play. Only because the game is stacked against me for my style of play.

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I think I’m mostly concerned about the lack of communication.

We were promised transparency after the Nemedian debacle, had it for a moment, then just get blindsided with the last update. A lot of things are not being addressed, a lot of things are broken, and ignoring the people that are absofvckinglutely concerned is not going to help.

I don’t ever expect this game to be perfect, but it would be nice if the solution wasn’t trying to just sweep it under the rug.

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Funcom. Buddies. I love you.

I will never buy or sell you or be a part of anything that buys or sells you. I won’t be bought or sold, or buy or sell things I don’t believe in.

dobbler

I am here to make your dreams come true. So is CodeMage.

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Firstly, everything I say is my opinion and I respect those who look at the same information and come to different conclusions.

So, clarifications:

Game Direction: We started hearing about changes that would “Make the player the star of their own story.” This is the directed play model to which I am referring. Furthermore, zero of the changes has created this environment. Many of the changes have seemed punitive for how melee combat plays out.

Leadership: Dyeing changes, Inventory changes, Purge changes, local sync changes, etc. Brand new systems introduced as fait accompli and surprise expressed when folks did not find them a value add to the game.

Persistent game system failures: Turtles crashing servers, purges crashing servers, purge deaths resulting in a massive sync issue, thrall AI getting progressively worse, mount AI actively seeking death of the creature. Zero communication on these items.

Communication: Occasional posts claiming communication will get better followed by no change in the communication model.

This leads me to the conclusions expressed in previous posts. This is my reasoning for my position. As indicated, others may come to different conclusions, and that is fine.

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:100:

Still looking for that other game, I see no mans sky is on sale.

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To note, this one has only the faintest inklings of the inner workings of Funcom, nothing close to an authoritative stance. Further, this one cannot explain why they have even the small understanding they do have, because that would be a violation of trust. So this one’s positions on that must be considered anecdote or speculation.

However, the trend, the concept, the idea that someone may decide, rather than working to improve the product for the customer, they instead want to leave their mark on it… That’s something that has hit many franchises across many media.
Comics are low hanging fruit because it’s easy to see that Frank Miller, Grant Morrison, and other celebrity authors run rough shot over any property they are given control in. It’s not a Batman or X-Men story, it’s a Miller or Morrison story involving those characters. Both very talented authors, but both with strong particulars that established characters will be sacrificed on the altar of.
But it’s not confined to graphic novels, we see it all over.

How does this loop back to this game…
We can see directions that it is going in, directions that diverge from previous directions. Some people got on a train headed to Vienna and are now waking up in Istanbul.
Istanbul isn’t bad. But if you bought a ticket for Vienna, it’s possibly not what you want.

What we can verify is what we see in Devstreams.
If we are going to give any dignity at all to those at the helm, we must assume that the statements made in Devstreams are sincere, at least at the moment they are made.
This gives us information to work with on what the design philosophy is. We cannot know why it is. Whether someone has been slain and replaced with a pod person manufactured by Tencent, or someone with more creative influence was devoured by C’thulhu and now someone else is able to run rampant. This is unknown, for most, unknowable.

Communication is key.
If we base our understanding of the direction the game is going in from the official communication we glean a few things that have definitely set of anger within the community.
First and foremost, if we are going to take the high road with the benefit of as many doubts as possible we can package many of the execution problems with Age of War under the underestimated time to bake category.
But what is an execution problem verses what is a vision problem?
There is a habit in this game, of releasing features piecemeal. A change is made that seems nonsensical until a year or so later when something else changes that builds off that. What seems like a vision problem is revealed to be an extremely slow moving execution problem.
We can circle like snarling jackals over the last bit of meat as to whether the decision to push out these half finished features is a vision problem or an execution problem.
This one personally considers that choice to be indicative of design philosophy, but is making effort to not just run with that and instead hold up words given in official release.

Those words have indicated something of a dismissal of customer concerns. Features are touted as being something no one asked for. That’s a decision. That shows where the vision for development is. Someone with authority decided that.
Now, we have a couple choices, most boil down to either note that this development team no longer desires this one’s commerce and knock dust of the place from this one’s feet… Or voice dissatisfaction and allow the business an opportunity to correct course to something this one finds worthy of their lucre.
If only this one were alone in finding recent changes largely negative.

Now, there are also juicy little reports from those who dive deeper into the arcane formulae that create the game, noting some other changes. This one finds those fascinating. But as this one lacks the capacity to delve there themselves at the moment. Something something devkit not updated…

Which wheels us to the other issue. Has there been a change not in what is done, but how it is done?
That is such a delightfully spicy topic. This one must seek out a chilled aloe drink to consume much regarding it.

But let’s hold off on the helms from the tinsmith for a moment.
July is not a month that Funcom accomplishes much in. Let’s not mince it. Let’s not moan it. Fellesferie is a thing and has been for years. Expecting good lines of communication during this period is like throwing a tantrum because the tide came in and washed away one’s sand castle. We know what to expect. Regardless of whether it’s annoying or not, let’s try to keep at least a calls once a month relationship with reality.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use our tongues and fingers to colloquially eviscerate any captains or harbour masters who scuttle boats by mistiming their mooring.

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To put it bluntly on my PoV. I’m bored with the game right now. It’s been 5 years now into the game and enjoying and delving into the game aspects. Enjoying each aspect that is interesting and items that are coming out…but these past 3-4 months leave me with nothing to look forward to.

People talked about FOMO being the beginning of the end but for me it’s this specialized and exclusive events that give you catered recipes. Mix that with one of the events was absurdly grindy (Sacred Hunt) and I got capital T tired of it. And no I don’t trust that these events will rotate. Sorry but I don’t. Not when you pulled away from battlepasses abruptly. Not when you have projects in mid-completion for years now (pets) .

I really hope that this 6 months is used to completely wow us with large and exciting changes but as of right now…I’m debating whether to body vault and call it quits on all the servers I’m involved in with active bases.

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don’t count on it >.<

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These topics making me so freaking happy!
Yes we have opinions, yes we argue and sometimes pointlessly loud, but we are all the same… Players who love this game. Yet when i see you supporting each other i feel blessed that i met you.
It’s nice what you do for brother @Pugilist and i totally support the cause, well done brothers and sisters!

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So, personal pet peeve her.

Please ignore body language. Folks often expect me to defend my body language and I flatly refuse. My words and my actions, I am responsible for. My body language? Nope. I dislike Andy’s lack of engagement in the game. I dislike his presentation of new features in the livestreams. I dislike that he and the devs appear to not know how to play the game out of admin mode.

But his body language? Free pass. It means nothing to me.

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To be fair, it’s hard to criticize the problems with direction without someone interpreting that as an attack on those who are responsible for that direction. It’s even trickier when that responsibility is diluted and unclear.

Quite right. That’s why I personally stop at saying that I have problems with the direction and the lack of vision, and don’t cross the line into speculating about the people involved and their motives. I have my own opinions and theories, but those don’t matter. What matters is to communicate clearly about what we dislike and to, hopefully, see some change.

I agree with your analysis, but my point is that it’s still the job and responsibility of the game designers to design the game. I’m not going to go as far as to say it should be their vocation, too, but it’s certainly their job :wink:

As a game designer, you decide how much to heed the players’ feedback and how to incorporate it. As a game designer, you should strive to keep your game mechanics coherent and balanced. That’s part of what a game designer should do.

What we have, instead, is a bunch of systems being repeatedly changed and revamped without ever finishing any of that work before moving on to another revamp and change. As a result, there are many game elements that are obsolete and weird and their state can only be understood if you know the history of the game (but that doesn’t make the situation any better).

Yeah, well, this is why I mentioned vocation earlier in this post. It’s certainly thankless if you expect to win a popularity contest with your playerbase :wink:

That dissonance between what they say and what we get is at the heart of my discontent. I like the idea of making the player the star of their own story, that’s a big part of what attracts me to this game. But a lot of the changes we get don’t support that concept.

Not to mention that I don’t feel like a “star” of any story when the game is a weird mix of “too easy” and “too hard”. The “too easy” aspect comes from making progression obsolete through weird decisions (e.g. ludicrously short wheel of pain thrall breaking times). The “too hard” aspect comes from having to grind through mindless chores (e.g. due to RNG).

When the execution problems consistently get in the way of realizing a coherent vision, they become vision problems. :man_shrugging:

A perfect example of a feature that goes contrary to the idea of being a star in your own story. Time-limited events are fine by me, but getting exclusive recipes from them is not how you gain agency in your own story, it’s how you get railroaded into someone else’s idea of how you should play.

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There isn’t many games which had so much potential, but sadly the people at FC try to do everything in their power to make the situation worse.

How many people reported the broken thrall and pet feeder boxes? Croms_Faithful , erjoh and me did it, we tried to get an answer from Andy… but nothing :man_shrugging:

Same with the pet rebalancing.

Kikigirl knows i was trying to give advice to guys that got their base destroyed on PvE(C) servers. Someone placed a “beautiful chest” near their lovely homes.
I simply wanted to offer some solutions to not have that happen again, but my comments got silenced, and when i simply asked WHY?…
I got banned for like 2 weeks because i “wouldn’t listen to staff feedback”…

All of us are grown adults (at least i hope so), so i don’t want to say we aren’t responsible for our behavior. But s lot of the “toxicity” is caused by FC themselves in my opinion.

Sure you can’t please everyone, but the numbers speak for themselves.

And what’s really strange, instead of fixing/rebalancing the things i‘ve mentioned… they waste time on inventory UI, the dye bench, give us a tavern in the age of WAR.

Nevermind hacking, bugs and exploits… and half baked, unfinished content. (Fatalities, the tavern, the new purge)

I have still fun playing with @LostBrythunian and @stelagel but i‘m mostly building at the moment.
But of course i‘m building something in the water currently and i drowned a bunch of times already… because i fell through the foundations and to the ground of that lake as well…
And there was only one other person online when that happened. The performance of G-portals official servers is just awful.

As a company they should end the contract and get a new server host, doubt that would cause more players to leave than to stick with that calamity of a server host.

And a lot of FC defenders try to argue about the removal of hyper armor or the lobotomized empty void of nothingness of a so called “AI”, these changes where made for “immersion” sake.

How immersive is it to fall through fountains?
Or to have tavern patrons floating in the air?
Or have knocked out thralls falling through the mesh?

Blocks and dolls…you nailed that one btw @LostBrythunian , really nailed it.

When @stelagel and me did a purge it was great fun, we had s good laugh when we died to server lagg and half of our buildings didn’t load back in.

You can find a lot of nice people in this community, and point and laugh at the disaster.
But thought out, functional high quality gameplay isn’t to be found here.
Not in the current state.

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