When you announced Isle of Siptah, one of the big new features that you spent a fair amount of verbiage talking up was the new Dynamic Building Damage system (DBD). Originally, your stated plan was to convert all official PvP servers to a sort of hybrid configuration with fixed raid hours during the weekend and DBD on the rest of the time. At the last minute, you changed course and decided not to enable DBD or (mostly) change the official raid hours. Your last statement on the matter was that you’d keep an eye on private server usage of the DBD system and make decisions in the future.
How is that going? Have you come to any conclusions yet?
That’s sort of a loaded question, as I can tell you that it’s not going well for one major reason. DBD is fundamentally bugged in a way that makes it very difficult to use in a sense that’s compatible with the intended purpose of this feature. What is this bug? Put simply, after a server restart, DBD protection is lost by all players/clans on that server and is not regained until a clan/player logs on to the server and goes through the cooldown again. Additionally, if the server goes through a period where raid hours are on, the same thing happens. All players and clans lose DBD raid protection and you must log back in and go through cooldown again to get raid protection back once raid hours end.
For a private server to continue to use DBD in its bugged state, the server admin has to restart the server on a regular schedule and then all players have to log-in as soon as possible so that they can get their protection back until the next restart (or scheduled raid time). This situation basically moots the whole point of the DBD system, which is to allow players to not be slaved to a raid schedule and to make offline raiding much less common.
Now, I know that several tickets have already been filed against this feature, and presumably some got the “we’ll pass this along to the team” response and some did not. However, it’s been nearly three months since Siptah went into early access and there has been no communication of any substance at all on this specific topic.
What’s I’d like really like to see from Funcom is concrete communication on the status of this feature. Do you plan to fix it? Do you have any idea when that might be? Where does this feature rate with respect to other ongoing issues that you’re working on addressing. Do you have any idea why this behavior is occurring? Let’s recall, your initial plan was to roll this feature out to all of your PvP servers and you only changed your mind on that a few days before rollout was supposed to occur. Clearly you believe (or believed) that there’s demand for this feature.
So please, Funcom, what’s the status of the Dynamic Building Damage feature? I (and others) would very much like to know.
Wow, this is now one of my top 10 OP posts. Concise and not chastising the devs but actually showing real questions that should be answered for those that had hope in DBD. Good job @helium3.
I’m going to pile on with my previous bug report…
It would be really nice if Funcom could get us some communication at this point. Since they yanked DBD from officials right at launch of Siptah, and basically said they were going to leave it up to private servers to test it out, I feel they could do us the respect of letting us know where they sit with it. People in general don’t like to put out hours of work into limbo with no lead on where something is going… and that includes players.
Dynamic Building Damage System can be abused and exploited easily on pvp server, so it will not be enable on officials servers.
Account 1 : main base, farm, craft, … and log out 30 minutes before raid time.
Account 2 : log in during raid time, farm, raid, etc … put lot in a chest somewhere for account 1 to get oit back later.
Never be raided anymore
Your base can be walled too with T1, and you can not destroy anthing because he will be log out during raid time.
The raid time was to be 24/7, with DBD turned off Friday and Saturdays during the current 6 hour window to allow for chances to clean out your last stated issue of spam build blocking. This would have worked imo, as now while online trying to farm, i may have to defend. Even if i log off and they get 30 minutes of offlining done, they also interrupted my economy because my farm time was cut do my personal limited time to play. So raiding now would have 2 purposes, get loot, and also minimize enemy farming rates. And guess what, if one can’t farm, they would then raid and loot actually becomes important. Right now PVP servers are more about raiding to be d…ks, as farming the 18 hours gives you WAAAAAYYYY more loot than bombing for it.
Since in number 1 we learned the intended time is 24/7, anytime you log in, you can be raided. So the farmer would have to babysit base, instead of the current 18 hour free farm mode, where you can body vault your important stuff as is. Now that free 18 hours is not there, so while out farming the body vaulted stuff is free game somewhere.
Be raided more, because now people will want to jump on opportunities when you are online. Which is what the PVP servers should be Right now they are 18 hour farm sessions, body vault and log in under another account, or if anything your farmer body vaults, and your raiders log in during 6 hour window to offline those that don’t abuse the body vault issue.
I would rather have the chance to defend and attack my enemies with a 24/7 server, than to HAVE TO LOG IN 7 days a week for 6 hours a day if i want any pvp combat with consequences.
This answers a question i had for someone running a private. I was hoping it didn’t affect it, because there may have been a band aid until Funcom addresses this (or states it is not going to get fixed).
I also believe it is basically where that “timer” is stored. It must be stored somewhere where server resets deletes info or resets data. So it needs to be set up like decay rates, as that is unaffected by server resets, or even damage times. Hope someone smarter than me at Funcom can figure it out. It literally should be tied to the thrall decay timestamp, as that is also working with the 14 day decay after clans log in.
Also another important fact is on Community Server The Dynamic Building Damage System Toggle is 100% not working, as enabling or disabling it doesn’t do anything, everyone’s stuff is immune from damage regardless if you’re online or not.
Still waiting on an fix for this. Because a lot of people on my server came back into the game specifically because they heard about this new setting.
Hi Codemage,
You do not need family sharing.
Account 2 is a real paid account, cost only 20 EUR or USD with special offer. With the name of your wife for example.
Disabling family sharing does not solve the issue of multiples accounts … !
We have it working on our server just fine… save for what I put in my bug report. The only thing hosing it up on my server is a server restart. Someone can log in, log out, and after an hour (what I set the server for), they become immune. If they log back in, their immunity goes away. 100% not working is inaccurate, at least for what’s been happening on our server.
That aside, agreed it’s bugged and needs fixing.
I think that repeating all the discussions about the different variations of this feature (we already did discuss this at the time) are obsolete until it is fully functional and can be actually tested.
This testing will need some time, as well as the discussing of the outcomes.
So please finalize this feature!? Offline raiding discourages many players!
