Discussion Regarding Land Claim Foundation Spam: What if we're going about it all wrong? Potential solution

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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Disclaimer: I am not on Conan enough to really understand the PVP or PVE communities. I am returning after a 3 year break. I am totally impartial to 90% of the changes implemented as I simply do not play enough. If you tell me I am wrong, I will take your word for it. I am simply putting out an idea.

I come from games like Dark Souls. I like challenging. I like a little unfairness. I like being able to die at any stage of the game. I think all tactics no matter how brutal, unfair, or annoying are perfectly valid and acceptable. In games like ESO, I love using gravity to 1 shot people in PVP even if it’s considered unfair or scummy. If I’m outnumbered, I will do anything to win. If it’s me or you, I’m gonna use everything I got to try and bring you down. That’s just how I roll in games.

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Now you know where I am coming from. Anyway, I have been reading through a few posts to catch up from my absence from the game, and it seems land claim is an issue still and most people are suggesting limiting the amount one can build.

What if the solution is just to remove land claim entirely? What if you are able to build anywhere you’d like even if it is one block away from someone else? I see games like rust where they don’t have foundation spam all over the place like Ark and Conan do. In fact, you can actually steal people’s bases by placing a door on their building. They can reverse this by breaking down the door and replacing it with their own. There’s no reason to foundation spam because it doesn’t do any good in rust. People can either build on top of it or simply ignore. What if that is the solution?

EDIT following discussion below for PVE: Now, obviously for PVE servers, this could be problematic depending on what the player-base is like. I’m curious what you think of the idea of land claim only for enclosed building where you have walls, a floor and a ceiling WITH either full shelter or mostly full shelter. That way you cannot build near a legitimate building but you can build near or on top of something like roads or stray foundations that fall outside the land-claim area defined only by player-built shelter? I dunno… seems more troll proof. Even if your roads connect to your enclosed building, your land claim area is only determined by the enclosed area with the shelter buff, so roads extending outwards past your claim are fair game.

You see, in Ark PVE servers, you have the kinds of people who will build on spawn points so you spawn in a floor and cannot play. If Conan is similar, official PVE servers might have people who intrude on your base constantly to force you out. Maybe the solution there is you cannot connect your foundation to another persons if theirs has a wall and roof all connected. If it’s a single foundation, then you are able to build on it. Just spitballing here, but that might do more to stop foundation and land claim spam.

I am not against limiting building size to the size of clan members similar to the thrall changes either, and having that be toggled on in official servers and the option to turn it off in private servers might be a good change to do in combination with the one above, as there are certainly people who build massive cities OR enormous buildings with the intent to lag out approaching players to get them off the server and ruin the experience. This is true for Ark and Conan.

What do y’all think? I personally believe this would stop the absurd land claim we see with huge roads stretching all across the maps.

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First thing that comes to mind is that you can’t damage other people’s buildings in PvE. So if your neighbor builds a wall around your house, you’re stuck in there forever (unless you die and choose to respawn in the desert, in which case everything you owned is now inside that impenetrable wall). Unfortunately, removing land claim would simply make troll-building in PvE even easier than it is now.

As for PvP, I suggested a long time ago that simply allowing trebuchets to be placed on land claim would reduce the need for spiderwebs of foundations, because you could no longer block your enemies from placing siege weapons within firing range of your base.

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Very well thought out. And I and many others have talked of something similar to rust. Upkeep cost. Which in turn is also how you own claim. We have talked of a cost to maintain the Anchors (founds, pillars attached to game map directly). That cost would be paid on a station placed in that claim. If you let cost reach 0, then build becomes community property for 24 hrs before decaying away. During that time I could place a new station and lay claim to the area. So in pvp the raids would be about stealing whole castles, not just loot, and refreshing spam would take game time, not just log time.

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This is discussed in my post, but troll building goes both ways which discourages it altogether. So if they build around you, you can build around them. Therefore, unless you want to get into a toxic trolling battle, then there’s no reason to do that. As it stands now, you have people who block off entire sections of the map and have an entire network of roads branching outward to prevent any building. So it stands to reason removing land claim and limiting building size might be a superior solution in PVE as well.

Also I’m curious what you think of the idea of land claim only for enclosed building where you have walls, a floor and a ceiling WITH either full shelter or mostly full shelter. That way you cannot build near a legitimate building but you can build near or on top of something like roads? I dunno. Seems fairly troll proof.

Edit: Even if your roads connect to your enclosed building, your land claim area is only determined by the enclosed area with the shelter buff.

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Troll building is not discouraged by this at all, true troll building on PvE would like be an all out spam fest.

In a shared play space, in a game built heavily around building, you either live with megastructures or limit building statically IMO. But then how do you grandfather in older buildings? What happens to the player base when those folks who see a spot and envision a majestic castle can no longer do that?

Let’s not get it confused, end game is building in PvE and building/raiding in PvP

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Removing land claim in PvP servers sounds great. Let those who can war with eachother and tear down each others structures be able to build where ever they want.

Doesn’t really work in PvE since there is no way to destroy structures as has been pointed out by others. Funcom keeps the gameplay fairly much the same in these modes which IS a problem in and of itself because when they ‘balance’ something in PvP it can and often messes people’s games up in PvE, and when they visa-versa. It is unlikely that were are going to see vastly different things in one game mode compared to another game mode. For that reason this is really a nonstarter of an idea.

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I disagree, the idea of an alpha clan building a wall around smaller bases and tearing them apart with impunity is concerning. This is obviously still possible but it requires a bit more time and material. Removing land claim essentially means I can just build a door in front of your door or drop a dozen thralls right outside your door

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I’m afraid you don’t completely understand the troll mindset. That sort of reaction is exactly what feeds them. And even though the trolls’ victim could respond in kind, that’s probably not what most of them would want to spend their time doing.

This is an interesting idea. I don’t know how technically possible it would be to tie land claim to something more complex than foundations, but the idea itself is worth exploring further.

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It might be more possible than we realize. When it rains, it’s already made to where rain doesn’t fall in the enclosed space. I’m no coder or tech guy, but I would think all they have to do is tie the land-claim code to whatever defines an enclosed player-built space where rain cannot render with some modifications so it’s restricted to only player-built spaces rather than any space like a cave.

There’s definitely people concerned with the PVE aspect, but I think this edit to the idea might actually be more plausible to maintain balance in PVE. I’m going to add it into the main post :slight_smile:

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Perhaps you’d be more open to the edit I made after a back-and-forth with Kapoteeni:

I don’t believe any idea can be a nonstarter. “Failed” ideas are simply 1 step closer to understanding the solution. Ideas have to be criticized and challenged and modified constantly to get there.

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That is true. An alpha could definitely do that. Here’s an edit I made specifically for PVE in the main post, but maybe it’s a good one for PVP too?

Let me know what you think.

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I think it’s a complicated problem that I could offer up a half dozen “solutions” to and then immediately second guess that suggestion.

I’ve certainly done things I would consider “public works.” Accessible, generally well built map rooms out side obelisks. I’ve build bridges to allow crossing large expanses of water on horseback, large stair cases to improve navigation up a plateau. They were tremendously helpful to me, and I’d get the occasional thank you. But that doesn’t mean someone else didn’t despise them. With creative freedom comes the opportunity for abuse unfortunately. And I don’t have what I consider a reasonable answer

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You could still build those things, but they would simply have no ownership with this system in place and people could add-on to those or block them. You would have to have some amount of shelter on your bridge as an example to prevent people from building on or near it.

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I think that requiring materials to upkeep your buildings would help to minimize the problem instead of just logging to refresh. I know that its not impossible to handle this problem.

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The one and only time I logged onto Rust, the first thing I noticed was building spam of junk structures and naked people all over the beach. Not sure that’s the environment Funcom wants for its game.

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As opposed to log out shacks all over boob river? Those structures were more than likely gone next day, or someone claimed them if abandoned. So still better than permanstructures with no negative once built.

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Im only responding to the notion that rust has it solved, and my experience is they clearly do not. It was glaring right out of the gate. Why would I want to claim someone’s junk box? I agree its similar to officials here, but if we’re implying rust has it solved, then thats just not accurate.

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They have part of the solution. And I played about 2 weeks before an ocular medical reason made me cut back. Our team had a nicely built fort, but it took each member about 15 minutes each of our play time farming daily to fill the fuel to keep the claim. That alone would start to remove refreshers from CE. And that is better than nothing. I see posts about the delay in action from Zendesk. Mainly because the complaints are huge in number. And most seem to be about spamming. So even a little removal of dead bases would shrink the the response time to investigate live spam issues.

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This tied into DbD 24/7 on pvp would work wonders. People with huge bases would have to log in semi regularly to farm refresh mats. And while on the oppurtunity for actual pvp would grow.

For pve, the cost would make players at least play on server, or give up favorite areas. Again, not a end all be all solution, but a much better fix than hoping it fixes itself and players leave, and new players don’t come.

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Then suddenly a squirrel :chipmunk:
image

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